Is This the End of Religion?

Churches and synagogues are closing. Fewer people attend weekly services than in the past.  Is this the end of religion? Or is something else happening?

The following is a text version of this blog.

What’s happening with religion? Is it falling apart? Is it becoming more conservative? Is it becoming more progressive? Particularly in the United States, institutional religion seems to be floundering.  But institutional religion has been in crisis in many parts of the world for decades. In the US, approximately twice as many churches close each year than open.  But it’s not just Christians who are closing houses of worship.  Jews wonder about their future and Muslims question their future as immigrant families assimilate into Western cultures.  Yes, American Buddhism is growing.  But people from Asian Buddhist traditions aren’t sure how to understand this emerging American form of Buddhism.  What’s going on with religion today?

There is a decline in the number of people who regularly participate in religious services in the US.  This decline has been tracked since the 1970s.  Some people point to Evangelical Christian megachurches and suggest that people now attend these huge theaters.  But even the megachurches overall are showing a decline.

Yes, there have been scandals of sex abuse, particularly pedophilia, financial scandals, abusive clergy, and many other kinds of scandals.  While these have impacted people and led them to distrust religion, I don’t think these are the root cause for the failure of religion.  Instead, we need to look more broadly.

If we’re honest, almost every dimension of public life is in some kind of crisis.  Governments around the world are not functioning as they should.  We’ve seen a rise in populist groups and authoritarian leaders.  Economic systems seem to be disconnected from reality as world economies grow while ordinary people struggle to pay for their basic needs.  Countless people are uprooted from their homes as political, economic, and climate refugees.  We alternate between being in dread of the looming climate crisis to burying our heads in the sand to ignore it.  Many things in the world seem to be falling apart.  Religion is falling apart along with it.  You may view that as good or you may view it as bad.  I view it as reality.

About fifteen years ago, Phyliss Tickle, a sociologist and commentator on religion, published her book, The Great Emergence.  She noted that every 500 years, there is a great shift in society and culture, including religion.  The term “axial age” describes this kind of shift.  Tickle describes the shifts as they occurred in Christian history, but the shifts were not just about religion.  Like today, society was changing in ways that couldn’t be understood as it happened.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, it was unclear what the future held for the people of Europe. They had been used to having an empire to hold them together.  Gregory the Great, the Pope, helped to fill the void by unifying worship and developing the calendar we still use.  He encouraged people to bring their regional customs into Christianity while attempting to build unity.  This was part of the first shift in an axial age that impacted religion.

Five hundred years later, Eastern and Western Christianity broke from each other in what’s known as the Great Schism. What came to be regional Orthodox churches were no longer united with Rome.  This marked the second shift.

Then came the Protestant Reformation, marked by Martin Luther posting 95 grievances on the cathedral door.  That led to Christianity we’ve known for the last five hundred years.

Today, we are in another shift.  It’s important to realize that at each shift in the past, there was great social upheaval like there is today.  People had very rigid beliefs like today.  People were not open to dialogue but wanted their perspectives to win out, just like today. 

Where will it go?  We just don’t know.  Tickle described the process happening in Christianity as similar to being at a giant rummage sale with people picking and choosing what to keep and what to discard.  When I talk to Jewish friends, I hear similar kinds of issues as debates continue about what it means to be Jewish.  What will be saved and what will be lost isn’t something we can know at this point in time.

What we know based on history is that in a hundred years or so, assuming humanity is still around, there will be people who identify with the great religious traditions in some way. Some will copy the past.  But most will organize something new that makes sense for their time in history, just as happened in previous transitions.

For us, it will be a bumpy ride.  It’s important for us to stay grounded in what nourishes us and to allow what isn’t essential to fall by the wayside.  Becoming rigid about beliefs and practices will only lead to more frustrations and emotional pain.  Transitions are never easy when we go through them.  But after the fact, they make sense to us.