The Latest Update on America's Religious Decline

The latest Pew Research Center update on America's religious decline appeared last week - ironically just in time for World Mission Sunday! What seems so striking about this latest study is both the fact of the decline of Christianity in the United States and the rapidity of that process, both of which suggest a significant transformation of American society and its political culture - significantly transformed from the way American religiosity was widely seen just a decade or two ago as different from the secularization so evident elsewhere.

According to this latest study, 65% of American adults describe themselves as Christians - down 12% from a decade ago. Simultaneously, the religiously unaffiliated are now 26% - up from 17% a decade ago. The Christian decline applies to both Protestantism and Catholicism. Protestants are now 43% - down from 51% a decade ago. Catholics are now 20% - down from 23%. The data also show that rates of church attendance are declining, just like rates of religious affiliation - something significant enough to be noticeable in our weekly attendance statistics. The Pew Study suggests that this reflects not so much Christians attending Church less often as fewer Christians as a share of the American population.

Meanwhile only 22% of Millennials attend weekly services, while another 22% say they never attend.

Particularly ominous is the news that 47% of American Hispanics now describe themselves as Catholics - down from 57% a decade ago. Meanwhile the religiously unaffiliated share of Hispanics is now 23% - up from 15% a decade ago.

Also the religious gender gap, while still real, has diminished, and the share of women who identify as Christians has dropped from 80% to 69%. 

Geographically, the pattern holds in all four regions of the U.S. In the Northeast, Catholics have dropped from 36% to 27%. In the South, Protestants have declined from 64% to 53%. Politically, "nones" and infrequent churchgoers are growing in both political parties, although more evidently so in the Democratic party. Among white Democrats, fewer than half claim to be Christians, more than 40% are "nones," and just 30% regularly attend religious services. Of course, Blacks and Hispanics - key Democratic constituencies - remain more likely to identify as Christians, although they too seem less so.

However sobering, such statistics are really not so surprising. Much more research needs to be done to explain these phenomena in fuller detail. Even so, to paraphrase Marx, having understood the phenomenon, the task now is to change it.

(Photo: Pew Study Cover Photo Sungjin Ahn photography/Getty Images)

A Much Merited New York Statue

The Church in the United States commemorates Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini as the patron saint of immigrants. Born in Italy in 1850, Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini became the founder of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart. Pope Leo XIII asked her to go to America to minister to the waves of Italians then immigrating to the US. So, accompanied by six sisters, she came to New York in 1889. She established schools, orphanages, and hospitals. All told, she made 23 Atlantic crossings in 35 years and established 67 houses. She became a naturalized American citizen in 1909. She died in Chicago on December 22, 1917. Her body is venerated in a shrine in Manhattan's Washington Heights. She was canonized by Pope Pius XII in 1946 and named patroness of immigrants in 1950.

But in 2019 she became embroiled in an unexpected - but so very New York - controversy.

New York City has some 150 statues of historic public figures, only five of whom, however, are women.  To remedy this perceived imbalance, a She Built NYC commission conducted a survey last year, to identify female figures to honor with statues for their contributions to New York City’s history. Of the 320 women who were nominated in the 2018 survey, Mother Cabrini received the most support of all, but when final selections were announced for the first set of seven statues she was not included.

Italian-American New Yorkers reasonably recognized this as an affront. On October 6, more than 1000 people marched in Brooklyn in protest. The march was led by Brooklyn's Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio and Monsignor David Cassato, the director of the Brooklyn diocese’s Italian apostolate. At Mass after the march, Bishop DiMarzio lauded the saint and said her statue would honor the memory of immigrants and remind New Yorkers of their responsibility to one another.

The controversy continued until Columbus Day, when as people were assembling to march in the day's great Italian-American parade, New York's Italian-American Governor Andrew Cuomo rectified this injustice and announced "we are going to build a statue to Mother Cabrini.” Cuomo called Mother Cabrini "a great New Yorker, a great Italian-American immigrant,” who “came to this city and she helped scores of immigrants who came to New York. She opened dozens of institutions, academic institutions, health care institutions.” And he committed the state to work on the project together with local Italian-American groups and Bishop DiMarzio. 

Mother Cabrini's statue, when finally erected, will be a fitting civic honor to a great immigrant to this country and a reminder to the rest of us - immigrants and descendants of immigrants - of our duty to honor the memory of past immigrants and to support contemporary refugees and immigrants everywhere, especially in this terrible time  when a detestable and odious anti-immigrant (and thus ultimately anti-American) ideology has established itself at the very pinnacle of political power in our country

The 2020 Democratic Debates (Round 4)

Another debate! And, instead of winnowing the field, the debate stage has actually grown, even as the billionaire vanity candidate made his first formal appearance on the debate stage! And, as the debates have grown larger and longer, the audience has inevitably declined - from a high of some 18+ million back in June to something like 9+ million last night. How much more of this can the candidates take? How much more can the country take? And, of course, Cory Booker's pathetic appeal to remember the real enemy and not try to destroy each other fell on deaf ears, as most of the candidates joined in ganging up on the apparent new front-runner Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Given the concurrent impeachment inquiry in Washington and the media's obsession with that subject, it was no surprise that the debate began there and went 20 minutes before moving on. It was Andrew Yang who best stated the obvious - that impeachment would not likely result either in removing Trump or in solving the problems that got him elected in the first place. Unfortunately, impeachment then yielded to another repetition of the how to pay for "Medicare for All" debate. If there is one issue on which it should be easy for Democrats to present a united front it should be opposing the Republicans' repeated efforts to deny people health care coverage. Instead they fight each other repeatedly over the arcane details of different plans and let journalists do their customary thing of highlighting Republican talking points about taxing the middle class.

As it should, given recent events, foreign policy got a lot of on-stage energy. Both Buttigieg (more combative than in past debates) and Klobuchar distinguished themselves in that field. While the nuances of alliances and Middle Eastern power balances may be too complex for the debate stage, the horror Trump has recently unleashed in Syria seems sufficiently understandable to all.

In the end, the debate highlighted Warren's front-runner status and further diminished Biden's claim to that honorific. Meanwhile Pete Buttigieg had his best night - tackling Tulsi Gabbard on foreign policy, Beto O'Rourke on guns, and (most important for him) pointedly challenging challenging Elizabeth Warren.

A Love To Live For

This past Sunday in Rome the Church celebrated the canonization of Saint John Henry Newman (1801-1890), the famous English convert to Catholicism via the Anglican Oxford Movement, the movement which also gave us Francis Baker, Augustine Hewit, and Clarence Walworth here in the United States.

Newman, whose life spanned almost all of the 19th century, never visited the United States, but Isaac Hecker visited him several times in England. After Hecker's death, Cardinal Newman wrote to Hewit: "I have ever felt that there was this sort of unity in our lives - that we had both begun a work of the same kind, he in America and I in England, and I know how zealous he was in promoting it."

Both men had much earlier set out on a journey - Newman from a respected position in the Established Church, Hecker from a somewhat unchurched background - and both had finally found a home. Once there, both understood in the depths of their hearts what a treasure they had found, that their journey was done, and that they really were at home, the home God had made for them in his Church.

Karl Marx famously called religion "the heart of a heartless world." and both Newman and Hecker found in the Church not just an answer to their questions but a powerfully beating heart overflowing with a love to live for. both shared a common priestly calling, captivated by the abiding presence and action of the Holy Spirit, and a ministry expressed in prayer, preaching, and writing, devoted to guiding others - especially others like themselves - to find the same home, and so spread Christ's kingdom to every human heart.

Zealous, big-hearted men themselves, the home they cherished was bog as well - big enough to open its doors to be shared with everyone else, everyone still on life's seemingly so treacherous road. That road may be much more crowded and treacherous today, in a much changed society which seems to resist finding any real  home and would rather risk perpetual disappointment and dissatisfaction. 

All the more reason, then, to recall Hecker's hope that a common home and shared love can overcome the conflicts and hatreds that divide our society. All the more need, then, to emulate the heroic virtue of these two great men of the Church, so that all may finally find a home, where the noise of our increasingly heartless world is hushed by the angelic hymn in Neman's famous poem published in Hecker's magazine The Catholic World in 1865:

Praise to the holiest in the height

And int he depths be praise

In all his words most wonderful

Most sure in all his ways.

(Photo: Image of Saint John Henry Newman displayed at Saint Peter's Basilica during his Canonization, October 13, 2019.) 

Succession Season Finale

With the second season's finale of HBO's acclaimed series Succession, we inevitably circle back to the obvious question: What is it about these terribly rich - and just plain terrible - people that so mesmerizes us? Of course, the series is so well plotted, the characters so well crafted, the settings so exotic, the acting so good, that there are many obvious reasons to like the show, in spite of the metastatic moral disaster it portrays. 

And, while it may well be true that - except for the fact that they have more money - the rich aren't all that different from the rest of us, the fact remains that the reasons that they have more money and the extent of personal and social mischief that their money frees them to do definitely do make them - and the evil they do - interesting in a much more than ordinary way. 

Then, of course, they are a family, and everyone, whether he or she likes it or not, is (or at least has been) connected to a family, and so can relate to a greater or lesser extent to some of the familial dynamics that dominate the show. There is no escaping family, even when family members routinely let each other down, which is both the privilege and the pathology of Succession's Roy children, each of whom has been bullied and manipulated by their odious father, whose wealth has made all four of them odious bullies and manipulators in turn. True, while father Logan is always odious, each of his heirs has some less obnoxious qualities, which make them at times comic characters and even sometimes sympathetic characters. 

For example, despite his despicable drug habits, it is hard at times not to feel for Kendall. After all, the whole series started with him set to be the successor only to be betrayed by his father - sort of setting the tome for everything to come. So, when the family and hired guns gather on their luxury yacht somewhere in the Mediterranean to await Logan's decision of whom to throw overboard, it is hard not to feel at least a twinge of sadness for Kendall when it becomes clear he will be the one (as we might have guessed he would be from the conclusion of the previous episode). Indeed the whole pathos of Kendall's story is summed up in the final conversation between father and son when, after accepting his fate (after a whole season of sol-destroying submission to his father's tyranny), Kendall pathetically asks his father for a final affirmation - that he could have done the job - and is cruelly turned down. That Kendall steps up in the end (with documentary help from cousin Greg)  seems to confirm one's intuition that, for all his corruption, Kendall may yet find an escape - not the physical escape Naomi offered him on the boat but an inner - dare one almost say moral - escape from his father and all his works and pomps.

And then there are the seemingly interchangeable and apparently expendable hangers-on, the "extended family," as it were, also bullied and terrorized at times but apparently addicted to the thrill of being even in the shadow of so much money and so seemingly committed to the continuation of the business venture that could just as well be called the Roy crime-family syndicate. Their subservience is a testament to the widespread human condition which Adam Smith famously diagnosed as the "disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition." (To the extent that we all suffer some of that syndrome, that too undoubtedly accounts for some of our fascination with this show.)

And, of course, the rich repay our fascination with their appalling sense of entitlement. Sunday's NY Times Book Review recalled a story about FDR's Labor Secretary Frances Perkins yelling over the phone at the head of General Motors: "You don't deserve to be counted among decent men! ... You have betrayed the men who work for you." To that, he is supposed to have responded: "You can't talk that way to me! I'm worth $70 million." Worth many more millions than that, all the Roys - old and young, male and female - share that same smug sense of entitlement - whether closing an amusement park for a private birthday party, covering up manslaughter, or thumbing their nose at Congress.

Perhaps the paradox of Succession is how it exploits our fascination with the rich while undercutting that fascination by highlighting the moral wickedness of wealth and the moral damage it does - not just to those unjustly deprived of it but to those who unjustly possess it an cannot free themselves from it