I'm not sure where I first came across it in its best articulated form, but a pattern of things I read a few years ago discussed in detail the decline in religious affiliation around the world. People aren't necessarily becoming atheists across the board, but there is a global tendency (with pockets of higher and lower movement) towards unaffiliated spirituality - "spiritual but not religious" or SBNR. This has been best described, with respect to the demographics and surveys, as the "rise of the nones." I have to be careful using this term in conversation - much less so in print - because the first thought people have is "nuns." Unfortunately, the increase is in those with no affiliation and not in the population of our religious orders (though, blessings to my dear friends in religious life and one friend who is about to embark on that journey!).
Personally, I find this troubling because my life is full of the blessings of a strongly organized religion/church. The Catholic Church is riddled with inconsistency and flaw, just as any human organization is, but we are guided and inspired by a God who created us, became one of us, and dwells with us still. I find incredible grace through my Church, and I wish that grace were present in more people's lives.
I've seen two serious roots to this trend in our generation that I find seriously troubling, so I want to reflect on each of them for a while here.
First, there is a serious identity crisis within religion that is not especially helpful to those who are searching. Many Christian denominations - and trust me, there's a heckuva lot of them - have forsaken any kind of uniformity, or shared practice, worship, and belief, across their members and communities. In our present day, the conventional wisdom is that watering down identity is more attractive than defining it. Groups feel that if they drop exclusivity or strict demands, they will attract more people. And this has turned a lot of the scene into a numbers game, with pastors of any denomination just seeking to put butts in the seats and get dollars into those baskets.
To a degree, I don't want to blame them - I can't imagine the desperate emotion that rushes in when attendance falls and your community's vitality is threatened. I don't want to deride leaders who are making faithful efforts to strengthen bonds in their communities. They sit in the midst of the storm, and only those in the middle of it know the whole picture and how to confront it.
On the flip side, I worry that those who still want to embrace affiliation to a community are joining groups with nothing specific in common. Maybe this is wrong, but I envision megachurches and some other denominations as inflated LifeTeen services for people of all ages - lots of good feelings and energy but little of substance to form you and inform you so that your faith can uphold you in times of joy and despair.
I find great strength in knowing my faith rests upon not Jesus Christ and the Scriptures as well as a 2000-year tradition of transmitting the faith through generations, under the guidance of apostolic bishops (those commissioned by Christ) and their successors plus the Holy Spirit. Our Church has produced incredible theology, philosophy, and wisdom, and I can't help but utilize it to inform my mind and form my heart. It's awesome.
Secondly, our generation seriously undervalues the significance of community. Teens and young adults strive to have a maximum number of friends, to hook up with a maximum number of people sexually, to sit back and wait for lots of invitations from others to pour in and choose what to go out and do tonight, to know everyone and everything. Apologies if this doesn't apply to you or summarize what you see - there's just tendencies toward these things that cloud relationship building.
Just as we seem less likely to seek careers that will stretch seamlessly from college to retirement, it seems we're less likely to seek lasting friendships. I studied abroad in London for a semester in college - at the University of Notre Dame in London, a classroom building and university-leased flats that amounted to a boarding school for 125+ college students. Many of my fellow students ended bringing the dorm parties and campus social lifestyle with them because, finally, they found a community. Unfortunately, it was founded shakily on loud, fast, hard partying, but it was the result of their social worlds being limited to a finite number of people. They actually went out repeatedly with the same people, building relationships over time rather than social-butterflying from circle to circle. I could not believe how strongly they took to community. It was simply something they had never attempted until their social parameters were bracketed.
People are desiring, or perhaps content with having, short-lived friendships that work short-term because those friends like to go to the same places or want to have the same kind of nights out. Props to those who have looked for and found people with common values and principles, who've built ties with friends on foundations of both fun and seriousness. Real, strong friendship comes not in the dark, crowded loudness of the bar - it can start and exist and grow there - but really grows and cements when you can laugh and cry together in the light and the solitude.
So, too, there is an analog with faith. People prefer the shallow, the independent, the low-commitment, low-pressure route. The appeal now rests with autonomy; many who are searching for something see organized religion as inhibiting their individualism.
I don't need someone to tell me what to think.
I don't need to sit in church for an hour every weekend.
Well, aside from overlooking the logic of learning from past generations, and the ways we mis-prioritize our time, these resistances neglect the value of community: coming together with people who share your values and principles, being held to a standard of living and acting and commitment, giving yourself to something bigger than you and receiving back in turn, building friendships based on a common rhythm (just like the friends you made in school, Scouts, sports, work, etc.), and on and on and on!
Trying to articulate the value of community in Christ screams of the age-old problem of "if I have to tell you, you don't know." It's painful trying in futility to wriggle my way to clarity in explanation. Let me use this analogy, then, to push to the finish line...
Sports fans. You don't go to an empty stadium and root on your own; you join with thousands of others as something bigger than yourself. It's more fun to invite friends over and have some beers than watch a game on TV alone. You wear the colors and logos to symbolize your passion and commitment to your team or city. You read articles online to learn more about the important people and the strategy. You talk to other fans to compare insights and emotions. You mourn the inactivity of the offseason, medicating yourself with preview stories and following the transactions wires...
Religion gives us all this: fellowship, socializing, outward expression, intellectual stimulation, solidarity, emotion, substance. Community.
To bring it home, I hand you over to the great Fr. James Martin, SJ, whose wisdom came to me via a passage from one of his books that a friend gave to me:
Overall, being spiritual and being religious are both part of being in relationship with God. Neither can be fully realized without the other. Religion without spirituality can become a dry list of dogmatic statements divorced from the life of the spirit. This is what Jesus warned against. Spirituality without religion can become a self-centered complacency divorced from the wisdom of a community. That's what I'm warning against.
-from The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything
