Closing a church
On small-town worship spaces, Walmart, and the inevitable evolution of something that looks like faith
Ryan Burge, a political scence professor at Eastern Illinois University, has written a poignant reflection on a turning point in his other job. On weekends, he has served as the pastor of a small American Baptist church in a nearby town.
■ But, as has been the case across nearly the entire religious landscape in America, attendance has been in chronic decline. And in Burge's case, the community has shrunk enough to have forced the church to close.
■ American culture faces a real tension, not fully understood: We've effectively crushed material want, achieving a massive level of measurable prosperity entirely unimaginable to generations that came before us. But we've done next to nothing to achieve progress towards addressing immaterial wants.
■ Therein lies a crushing problem: You can go to Walmart and satisfy practically every material need you have -- filling shopping carts full of goods that are safer, more dependable, and more advanced than anything found in the past, for a fraction of what comparable goods cost anyone in real terms (like hours worked) in the past.
■ Yet at seemingly everywhere turn, more symptoms of inadequacy in the quest to deliver on non-material needs: "Deaths of despair", a "loneliness epidemic", political and cultural figures elevated to god-like status while their biggest fans choose labels like "spiritual but not religious".
■ Religion may not be the tonic for those non-material wants, but it would take a radical departure from human nature for us to have somehow evolved past the age-old appetite for something serving up behavior, belief, and belonging -- the three characteristics of organized religion. These particularly matter in their relation to big questions about meaning and morality, and big life events like birth, marriage, and death.
■ One of the two likeliest outcomes is that organized religions will learn to adapt to changing expectations (and, probably, learning to shed some of the flaws that have discouraged or turned away so many former adherents). The other is that new forms of cultural and philosophical groups will emerge to occupy some of that social space once dominated by churches. There are already examples of people who, to varying degrees of seriousness and earnestness, have adopted Harry Potter, the Jedi from Star Wars, and the Big Lebowski as the inspirations for organizing philosophies of life.
■ A vacuum of this type cannot last forever; human nature compels people to search for big answers to important questions. And individuals cannot "belong" on their own, so the attraction to some form of group behavior is inevitable. The matters in question may be transcendent, but the changes (whether existing institutions will evolve or be replaced by others) will be made by people.
