irreversible decline of mainline churches

That mainline churches have been on a consistent and predictable rate of decline since the 1950s when attendance was at its peak is as much a truism as the idea that fish need water to breathe. The question is why this is so. Mark Roberts addresses the issue from a branding perspective. However, I am not sure that branding gets at the core issues.

Doug Chaplin responds:

In one sense, all the disputes of the Anglican Communion have taught us is to be a bit more honest about how divided we are. But if Anglicanism (the "Anglican brand") fails, it will be because the Anglican Church has become too full of people who really dont believe that mere Anglicanism is really a good or adequate way of being a mere Christian, and are busy sticking Big Macs in KFC buckets, and then calling it chicken.

Note that the language is not of branding from Doug""s terms. It is an issue of cost versus reward. That position has far stabler sea legs to answer the problem of religious decline. John Hobbins suggests that the answer is a lack of essentials that would make one "brand" distinct from another. That is, if all traditions look the same, there is no reason for, lets say, a ""seeker"" to engage in a concerted cost/reward analysis in terms of the religious value of a congregation since everything basically looks the same. Both perspectives are basically correct, but there are deeper issues that create the conditions of cost/reward and distinctiveness of branding. That is to say, if we focus our attention on brand consistency and essentials, we miss the conditions that underlie these issues.

The issue of branding is really a side issue to what is happening under the surface. It has to do with two primary things: religions that have lower tension with social norms tend to decline at a more consistent pace. The other is that the less tension a religious group has with social norms, the rate of population replacement decreases. Benton Johnson (1963) followed Stark & Bainbridge (1985) argue the first, and Greeley & Hout (2001, 2006) have argued the second contra scholars like Chaves (1989).

Neither position has been convincingly refuted to date, but only upheld. Branding seems to be like putting lipstick on a pig. The issue is not as much luring people to your religious marketplace, but in keeping them there. Sure a brand might get them in the door as slick marketing from GM or Coke might do for someone to buy the product. But how do you then maintain brand loyalty if you are not placing demands on people to maintain it? The higher the cost, the more salient a reward is. The more value a reward is for someone, the more they are willing to give to attain it. Thats why the axiom of "believe with us or go to hell" has arguably worked in all religions for all time.

The reason that brands will not work and that now retroactively applying what are no doubt long lost essentials for many traditions will fail is that each of the religious groups in question have already reduced their tension with the normative, secular society and have done so in order to bolster the class status of those still in the pews. So Hobbins is correct, there are no real essentials to mainline churches since all have developed at a rather consistent rate (note that Roberts focuses on the USA, but this applies to other pluralistic societies as well). But this is as a result of class mobility and normalization with society external to the religion and to date, there is no evidence that this is reversible. From Niebuhrs argument in The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929) to now, this pattern has only been repeated and is predictable. It is also what leads to various forms of sectarian behavior by those who want to pull back from the religion in order to reinvigorate tensions that have been lost. Getting back to ""the essentials"" is precisely how sects form and the cost/reward of religious participation once again ratchets up only to relax as people move up the social class ladder.

Note that I am focusing primarily on free-market religious economies since this is obviously different in places like Spain where the Catholic church has a monopoly of sorts and the religious marketplace is more regulated. As David Martin (1978) has argued, the religious type and its involvement with specific political types correlate with the intensity a religion will have to either concede to a political structure, or rebel against it. Nevertheless, the question is not if this is what is happening. Rather, the question is: how do churches adapt to these irreversible social conditions and maintain some consistency of ecclesiastical identity in exceedingly religiously pluralistic environments?

I agree with Hobbins that this sounds a bit pessimistic. But sometimes the truth is not rosy is it.

Related posts:

1. us religion: post-secular, more secular, post-christian?