I have begun digesting the new report just issued by The Pew Forum On Religion & Public Life titled Faith in Flux: Changes in Religious Affiliation in the U.S.

This survey is a follow up to their U.S. Religious Landscape Survey and involved recontacting about 2800 of the participants in the first survey.

The report has already gotten a lot of coverage in the mainstream media news (e.g. Louisville Courier-Journal), op-ed (e.g. New York Times), the blogosphere (e.g. Vivificat! and Kruse Kronicle) and of course the Presbyterian Outlook.

There is a lot of interesting information in this survey and I am still chewing on it but I would suggest reading the Executive Summary if you are interested or care about church membership trends today and in the future.  I am hoping to crunch some of the numbers myself and make some more detailed comments in the future.  But the way my life has been going I decided to post a preliminary article about two particular items that particularly struck me.

(Two technical details:  1) The survey give a confidence of +0.6%.  2) My main focus will be on comparing affiliated with unaffiliated so I will frequently give a range for the data in the affiliated group without breaking out individual categories.)

1)  What keeps people in the church?
As I have been reading the report I found myself asking an alternate question “How do we keep people in the church?”  If the report focuses on what makes people change then how do we turn that around to keep people in relationship with the Covenant Community.

One of the statistics that has gotten a lot of coverage, with some justification, is that “Most people who change their religion leave their childhood faith before age 24.”  (It quantifies what many of us know from experience.) But there are a number of related findings that expand on this:

• Those individuals who are now unaffiliated were much less likely to have attended worship weekly as a teenager than those who are still affiliated — For those that are still affiliated it is in the 60-70% range that they attended weekly, for the unaffiliated 44% of those raised Catholic attended weekly as a teenager and 29% of those raised Protestant.
• For those raised Protestant there is a notable difference between the unaffiliated and those still affiliated on whether they attended Sunday School — 51% for the former and about 65% for the latter.  No difference seen for those raised Catholic
• Youth group attendance was also important for Protestants with 55% of those “still in childhood faith” having attended youth group, 47% who have switched to another Protestant faith, and 36% of the unaffiliated.  Again, for those raised Catholic there was very little variation between the affiliated and unaffiliated.

My conclusion — This stuff matters.  This is why we have Sunday School and Youth Group.  This is why families need to attend the education hour as well as the worship service.  It is why the Youth Group is not just for outreach but for the church kids as well.  This is why we do college/campus ministry.  It is not to “indoctrinate” but to “strengthen.”  For those that were raised Protestant and are now unaffiliated 18% said they had a “very strong faith” as a child and 12% said they had it as a teen.  This compares with 35-41% of the affiliated who had it as a child and 32-40% who had it as a teen.

Now the terminology in the next part may annoy orthodox Reformed readers, but this is the language of the culture and how the survey reports it.

When looking at reasons for switching one of the interesting questions is what brought those who were raised unaffiliated into the church.  The survey found that of those raised unaffiliated 46% were still unaffiliated, 22% were now affiliated with Evangelical Protestant churches, 13% with Mainline Protestant churches, 9% with “other” faiths, 6% Catholic, and 4% Historically Black Protestant Churches.  I must admit that I see this as a bright spot — I was really surprised that 54% of those raised without religious affiliation found one as an adult.

What were reasons that an unaffiliated “first became part of a religious group?” The top three answers

51% Spiritual needs not being met
46% Found a religion they liked more (I’ll leave the interpretation of an unaffiliated finding a religion they liked more as an exercise for the reader.)
23% Married someone from a particular faith

What got them to join?  Top five answers

74% Enjoy the religious services and style of worship
55% Felt called by God (another surprise for me, and a pleasant one that a majority did feel God’s call.  More on that in a minute.)
29% Attracted by a particular minister or pastor  (it is not a specifically listed answer for changing affiliation because a pastor left)
29% Asked to join by a member of the religion (and this is something we all should pay attention to)
25% Married someone from the religion

Lots to chew on there.  If this is what gets the “unchurched” to come and stay how can we be more effective in our outreach.

2)  Words have meanings
OK, it is another “words have meanings” rant.  But as I was reading the Executive Summary this really started grating on my nerves.  Your mileage may vary.

I should say two things in their defense first:  If you study the survey questions there is no problem there.  The questions are as precise and well worded as you would expect from this organization.  Second, if they worded it the way I want them to do in the narrative, it would be more precise but the vocabulary would be limited and would not read nearly as well, so I know why they did it.

That being said, consider the first paragraph of the Executive Summary:

Americans change religious affiliation early and often. In total, about
half of American adults have changed religious affiliation at least
once during their lives. Most people who change their religion leave
their childhood faith before age 24, and many of those who change
religion do so more than once. These are among the key findings of a
new survey conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion
& Public Life. The survey documents the fluidity of religious
affiliation in the U.S. and describes in detail the patterns and
reasons for change.

As you can see in this paragraph, and happens throughout the narrative portion, the words “religious affiliation,” “religion,” and  “faith” are used pretty much interchangeably.  Throughout the report when they use any of these words they always seem to mean “religious affiliation.”  The question then is whether they actually investigated whether someone’s personal belief system corresponded to the church they attended.  This is like their earlier survey that found that 6% of atheists believe in a personal god.

This probably struck a nerve because of my personal faith journey.  I call myself a “life-long Presbyterian” even though I was a member of a Methodist church for a few years.  My wife was raised both Methodist and Presbyterian and when we moved to a new community we felt that God was calling us to help a Methodist church plant.  However, even though I was a member of a Methodist church my ingrained thinking in terms of Presbyterian polity frustrated the District Superintendent, I annoyed the pastor and a candidate for the ministry with my confessional theology, I was personally troubled by the lack of a regular prayer of confession, and I’m sure I entertained one of the most senior pastors in the Conference as he watched all this transpire.  And we firmly believe that God got us out of there before my Presbyterian tendencies would have lead to a major conflict with a new pastor.  I will leave it to another time to ask if I was being theologically honest or religiously faithful to have been in that situation, but the bottom line is that I considered myself a Presbyterian in a Methodist environment.

And I know that I am not the only one.  I know of multiple Presbyterians that now serve, or have served, in Methodist churches in ordained and non-ordained capacities.  We have had Methodist ministers attend my current Presbyterian church.  For a survey such as this how is that classified?

So, bringing it back to the survey, in my case my “religion” and “faith,” while evolving over the years as it is normal to do, has remained denominationally stable.  But my affiliation, like 28% of the still-affiliated Protestants in the survey, has changed twice.  (49% have changed once.)

Now I do realize that individuals are more likely to be on the other end of the theological “firmness” spectrum, particularly in the Protestant denominations.  In this post-modern age specifics of confessional beliefs and church government will matter little to many of the “people in the pews.”  After all, 85% of those switching within Protestant denominations listed “Enjoy the religious services and style of worship” as one of the reasons for joining their religion and I am willing to bet that only a very small portion of those mean that they found a church that follows the regulative principle of worship or has Exclusive Psalmody.  Individuals don’t even think of it as changing religions, only changing congregations, because the theological lines are blurring in peoples’ thinking and congregations’ exposition.

What I am expressing here may be a subtle distinction, but as I read through the questions and methodology what this survey measures is not truly a persons religious faith, but their religious affiliation, their church membership.  As has been mentioned many times before what does church membership really mean in this post-modern or post-Christian period?  That is my musing.

Don’t hold your breath, but as I worked though the Amendment 08-B voting numbers I was surprised by the “churn” in the PC(USA) membership and I am working on that and some other related numbers that I hope to correlate with this survey in a later post.  We’ll see if I can actually find time amid all the GA news to make that happen.  So until next time…