The Internet Is Not Killing Religion, Religion is Killing Religion

[cbayer]

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/culture/7777/the_internet_is_not_killing_religion__religion_is_killing_religion/

April 11, 2014

Instead of asking why people aren’t religiously affiliated anymore, we might ask why they ever were.

By ELIZABETH DRESCHER
Elizabeth Drescher is the author of the forthcoming book Choosing Our Religion: The Spiritual Lives of America’s None (Oxford University Press). She teaches religion at Santa Clara University, and lives online at www.elizabethdrescher.com and @edrescherphd on Twitter.


Image courtesy flickr user Daniel Lobo

In the first decade of the seventeenth century in England, with the break with the Roman Catholic Church fully encoded into law and a bevy of scholars working to complete a new translation of the Bible under the sponsorship of the Protestant King James the VI of Scotland, a Lancaster minister, William Harrison, complained that “for one person which we have in the church to hear divine service, sermons and catechism, every piper (there be many in the parish) should at the same instant have many hundred on the greens.”

The comparative success of the piper over the preacher in gathering locals was possible even though church attendance at the time was a matter of law, punishable by fines, public shaming, and even imprisonment.

“Pipers are Killing Religion,” the town crier might well have declared, offering data on the correlation between the number of pipers in a village and the number of butts in local church pews.

Across the pond in the American colonies, religion was not faring much better. In his masterful reconstruction of American religious history, Awash in a Sea of Faith (from which the previous anecdote is drawn), Jon Butler reports that Christianity was “in crisis” in the New World:

Pennsylvania aside, the Restoration colonies of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and North and South Carolina exhibited extraordinary spiritual discord and sectarianism as well as a remarkable but all too familiar indifference to things spiritual. In America’s first European century, then, traditionally thought of as exclusively Puritan, Christian practice not only proved insecure but showed dangerous signs of declining rather than rising.

more at link

[Warpy]

1. As I keep pointing out, the hand wringing might be premature

The WWII generation despaired over the irreligious Boomers fifty years ago but only a few of us stayed that way. Most people were dragged back to church when they had kids and the kids wanted to do the youth group things with their friends. Church gradually became a part of their lives, a source of social support they hadn't needed when they were 20 and the world was wide open to them.

Oh, most of my friends don't buy a word of it, they go to meet and greet and that has become very important to them.

So it will likely be for the Millennials. Let's hope we can leave them something better than tithe sucking mega churches headed by pompadoured frauds. That's what need to die on the vine, that and the televangelism that grew up with them.

[cbayer]

3. She makes a great case for this being a period of "normalization"

with the pendulum swinging back towards center.

I do think many of those currently leaving their religious institutions will return to something, but it will look and sound much different.

And that's a good thing for us (meaning liberal/progressive democrats).

So many people live in communities where the church provides the only social structure. But if they don't pay attention to the needs and wants of the community they face the risk of being replaced by a different kind of social structure.

I don't think it's so much about us leaving something better for them as it is helping and supporting them as they build something better for themselves.

[Warpy]

7. The mainstream churches might have a better chance now

Millennial Fever is abating. Without a bunch of zeroes coming up on the calendar, it's a lot harder to sell that End Times/Rapture hogwash. With the economy in shambles and a handful of billionaires robbing us all blind, it's hard as hell to try to preach prosperity theology in a glitzy megachurch. In addition, all the charismatic old lions who made televangelism what it is have been convicted of fraud, retired, or died off and their heirs lack the old man's charisma and only want his empire to be a cash cow.

But yes, even mainstream churches will have to adapt or they, too, will die out.

[cbayer]

8. The U/U's seem to be ahead of the curve in many ways.

They are taking a decidedly different approach than the megachurches, emphasizing inclusiveness, tolerance and support for all different ways of experiencing the world.

I hope you are very correct about where the megachurches are going.

On a road trip last year, I still saw a lot of them. But I also saw a lot that had clearly been abandoned and many that were only partially built with no evidence that there was anything going on.

[qazplm]

2. I think the internet is helping

to make religion less prevalent because it exposes more and more people to others who think, act, dress, speak differently.

It's a lot easier to be religious when everyone else you know around you is also religious. When you have folks of all types you interact with, you are going to be more prone to be willing both to question and to think differently.

It's the difference between being a non-practicing Christian and a practicing Christian to someone who becomes "spiritual" or agnostic or even atheist. I highly doubt the people talked about in that article made that second jump, they simply stopped being practicing Christians, i.e. being heavily involved in going to church.

[cbayer]

4. I think people tend to populate sites that are full of people that

think, act, dress and speak just like they do.

If anything, I think it may even impair one's exposure to diversity. Avoiding anything that makes you uncomfortable can be done with a single key stroke.

I think you are absolutely right though about the group this article is talking about. It will be interesting to see how this evolves.

[Warren Stupidity]

12. for example the religion forum on DU.

*oh wait*

[trotsky]

10. I agree, it absolutely is helping.

People are able to track down the information they want - something that used to be much more difficult, if not impossible.

There is so much material available online that answers questions I had as a child - or at least would have let me know that I wasn't alone in asking them.

[jwirr]

5. And religion has been killing religion since Jerry Falwell and his conservative rwers started

preaching hate in the late 70s. At first it looked like a victory and they have come close to taking over our government totally but their time is up. The American people are smartening up. This is not what the churches of the past have taught and it is self destructive to anything it touches.

[cbayer]

6. Agree with you - their time is up.

This leaves the republicans in a really awkward position, which is just fine with me.

The religious right is still going to exist, but I predict that their influence is going to wane and want pretty rapidly.

[thucythucy]

9. Lenny Bruce: "People are leaving the church

and finding God."

[Warren Stupidity]

11. Well as long as we agree that religion is dying, I don't care who or what killed it.

[kwassa]

13. but it keeps coming back to life, over and over again.

This Salon article doesn't touch upon the religious revivals that had a great influence in American history, such as the Second Great Awakening, which largely brought about a variety of huge social reforms in the US, including abolition of slavery, and the women's suffrage movement.