Another problem that preceded Donald Trump and will survive him
Church membership declined by over a third between the 1940s and 2018 according to Gallup. Now it may seem strange for a Seventh Day Agnostic such as myself to see that as a problem, but it is important to realize that religion is not just about faith, it is also about what you do with it. Thus you may not like the theology but find the adjoining morality quite good. I addressed this in a piece some time ago:
As Americans increasingly grow less interested in religion, moral and ethical matters are also losing their longtime home.
Consider, for example, the role that religions have played in our civil rights and peace movements. Did one have to become a Baptist to follow Martin Luther King? Of course not.
The Quakers have a nice way of expressing it. One of their meetings, for example, explains, “Friends are people of strong religious views, but they are quite clear that these views must be tested by the way in which they are expressed in action… Friends are encouraged to seek for truth in all the opportunities that life presents to them. They are further encouraged to seek new light from whatever source it may arise.”
I went to a Quaker high school and attended meetings every Thursday for six years. Only once can I recall a confrontation on theological matters, and that was quickly eased by a “weighty” Quaker elder who explained that a meeting was not the place for such debates.
Later, I was introduced to existentialism - the notion, it has been said, that “faith don’t pay the cable” and the view that “even a condemned man has a choice of how to approach the gallows.” I came to realize that the Quakers had beat Jean Paul Sartre by several centuries in the realization that it is what one does and not what one believes that makes the real difference in life. In fact, the meeting that ran our school came out against slavery back in the 17th century.
So I was somewhat prepared for what I found as a journalist and community activist in 1960s DC - namely religious leaders who translated their varied beliefs into common action and left faith on the back seat.
I was, for example, pushed into starting a community newspaper in an ethnically mixed neighborhood east of the Capitol by a minister trained by Saul Alinsky and who even got me a grant from a local Lutheran Church to get going. Neither the minister nor the church questioned my faith because it was clear we were all on the same track..
By the time the 1960s were over, I had worked with about a dozen preachers, most of whom would seem strikingly odd to many today. None of these ministers ever questioned my faith or lectured me on theirs.
They ranged from the head of the Revolutionary Church of What’s Happening Now to past and present Catholic priests. Meanwhile in the larger capital, we had two Catholic priests in Congress, one as Assistant Secretary of Housing, and one elected to the DC school board.
One of the assets these preachers had were basement meeting rooms in their churches. Among the scores of times I found myself in such rooms, we pressed anti-war protests, started the DC Statehood Party, began a mixed ethnicity pre-school, and upped the eventually successful battle against freeways in DC. And you didn’t have to recite a creed before the meetings began.
When I try to figure out why this seems a bit strange today, one reason has been the huge influence of evangelical churches on the definition of religion, especially in the media.
Based on its present principle of following the noise rather than the news, the media gives disproportionate attention to distorted evangelicals while hardly paying any attention to someone like Rev. William Barber, reviving the Poor People’s Campaign. I sometimes wonder whether Martin Luther King would have gathered today’s media’s attention.
In any case, the decline of church membership has reduced the power and presence of moral gatherings and values and made it much easier for someone like Donald Trump to endlessly blow his horn. Among the possible solutions would be for churches to become more friendly to activists as they were in the 1960s and for there to be non-religious meeting places elsewhere to discuss current moral issues.
