The Decline of Religion

Last year, Gallup revealed that for the first time in the nation’s history, most Americans belong to no religious congregation. This transition represents a pivotal moment in a long and familiar history: The United States is becoming less religious, and its many religious communities in decline are the clearest sign of this cultural transformation.

Many people on the left welcome the decline in religious affiliation in the US. They point out that religion is often “co-opted into supporting the status quo of poor and politically subjugated groups,” as Megan Rogers and Mary Ellen Konieczny write. The followers of the so-called Prosperity Gospel they charge poverty to be blasphemous but the shepherds corrupt some megachurches line their pockets at the expense of working-class parishioners, so it’s easy to get the point. Yet the decline in religious affiliation has also had profound drawbacks for the left: It contributes to a lack of community structures that often render the left unable to organize people around specific causes and campaigning.

Historically, religious congregations have been a vital locus of leftist political organizing. After the successes of the civil rights movement, led by pastors and other religious voices, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. has organized religious leaders around a radical agenda for economic justice. Before that, the movement Social gospel in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was instrumental in galvanizing support for legislation that led to the eight-hour workday, abolished child labor and created better factory conditions. The leaders of the movement Social gospelincluding Rev. Washington Gladden and Rev. Mark A. Matthews, were not only authors and lecturers, they were also congregational leaders, actively organizing their local communities in support of social reform.

Current religious leaders, such as the Rev. Dr. William Barber II of the Poor People’s Campaign, have attempted to revive the religious left, developing an “anti-racist, anti-poverty, pro-justice and pro-work” religious movement. But, due to declining congregational membership among American center-lefts, these voices and their communities cannot exert the influence of their forebears on the left. Social gospel. According to one study published on Journal for the Scientific Study of Religionn, there are currently three times as many conservative Christian churches as liberal ones. Religious affiliation is declining across the political spectrum, but leftist forms of Christianity are losing their grip on the populace faster than conservative evangelical ones. As a result, Pew reports that Americans on the center-left are more likely to be religiously unaffiliated than those on the right.

Because of these changes in the American religious landscape, the left has lost access to religious congregations, community structures still effectively used by conservatives to organize people around a right-wing agenda. Political scientists are increasingly stressing the centrality of what Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird call “social constraint” in politics. White and Laird point out that political behavior often reflects the influence of a community, which is able to exert “social pressure” to reward or sanction its members. Right-wing evangelical Christians have these communities, where individuals receive regular encouragement and social pressure to vote and organize for Christian Nationalist Republicans. The scarcity of parallel religious communities on the left represents a relative organizational weakness.

The de-institutionalization of politics

This competitive disadvantage would be minimized if religiously unaffiliated Americans joined alternative polities, but for the most part this does not happen. Tens of millions of Americans remain outside communities of any kind, consequently struggling with chronic loneliness, and the communities that non-members join are often lacking a clear political identity.

In their historic report «How We Gather», Harvard Divinity School Ministry Innovation Fellows Angie Thurston and Casper ter Kuile – with whom, full disclosure, I cofounded an organization dedicated to fostering an alternative spiritual community rooted in social justice principles called The Nearness – identify places like Crossfit where non-practitioners can meet many of the needs that have historically been met by religious institutions, such as the need for community or structures for personal growth and accountability. While these places address a number of deep-seated human needs, they often fail to serve as engines of political change, housing people with a wide variety of political viewpoints and making no effort to organize them towards political goals. Georgia Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was the owner of a Crossfit-affiliated gym and a proud Crossfit athlete—Crossfit is not a bastion of left-wing politics.

To reverse their competitive disadvantages, the left must unite and grow its political communities. Many on the left participate in local chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which have a clear track record of bringing about political change and cultivating close relationships among members, hosting social events along with canvasses, rallies, and meetings. In addition to representing communities, these groups fill many needs historically served by religious institutions by providing a framework of values, structures of moral accountability, and meaning. How he said a woman atAtlantic after joining the DSA branch in Denver, “I found a purpose”.

While the left should continue to unite and open chapters, they should also recognize that the growth of these groups has slowed and should consider whether some people might be more interested in different types of left communities. DSA membership is no longer increasing at the rate it did after Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign or in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the long-standing goal of 100,000 DSA members remains far off. Existing political groups may serve the needs of some on the left, but new communities are likely to be needed to expand the left’s organizational reach.

An audience for these new communities could consist of the approx ninety million of believing but non-practicing Americans, most of whom are politically center-left. According to research by the Fetzer Institute, spirituality remains intimately linked to this audience’s approach to ethics and politics, with 68% of citizens stating that “spirituality guides the way they act in the world”, even on issues social. Spirituality is a major determinant of the political behavior of millions of Americans that the left should hope to persuade and organize, yet many leftists ignore the role spirituality might play in political organizing, dismissing it as gullibility. In doing so, these leftists perpetuate a class division whereby a more secular educated class fails to connect with a working class more spiritual.

Gallup in June of 2022 he detected that 81% of Americans believe in God, clarifying that the United States is not so much undergoing a process of rapid secularization as experiencing the deinstitutionalization of spiritual life. Fewer people are attending church, but they are not necessarily becoming less believers, nor are they necessarily less interested in spiritual community. Old forms of community are fading, but many Americans are hungry for new ways. As a high school teacher in Colorado told me in an interview, “I feel like spirituality is kind of a solo adventure, and what I’m looking for and hoping for is to share that.” There is tremendous opportunity in the emergence of new spiritual communities to cater to the needs of non-practitioners. And this opportunity pertains to the left, since center-left Americans are more likely to be religiously unaffiliated than those on the right.

Of course, there is a deep historical connection between socialism and atheism, and many leftists definitely don’t identify as believers. As the left attempts to promote communities, it should naturally focus its attention on developing sections, unions and political campaigns. However, if the left in the United States is to achieve its political goals and build on the successes of the predecessors of the Social Gospel, it will also have to create political communities that cater to new players. The decline of religious affiliation in the United States has produced millions of Americans who are lonely and hungry for community, and the left should try to organize them.

*Alec Gewirtz is a writer, lives in New York City and co-founder of The Nearness. He has a degree in religion from Princeton University. This article is out on JacobinMag. The translation is by the editorial staff.