Tradition on the Rise

There’s a seismic shift happening with our youth, and I don’t think we yet understand it. We saw a part of it with the shifting to the right of our young men during the past election. Perhaps relatedly¹, we’re seeing patterns emerge of young people shifting towards more traditional churches. Not conservative churches, as we’ve seen that conservative Evangelical churches are the fastest declining in the country,² but traditional churches, specifically including the Latin Mass Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox.

There are many opinions about why this happening. Too many in fact and I want to see actual evidence.

After meeting with our own Presiding Bishop yesterday, and his indirect acknowledgement that we are not a church that is benefiting from this trend as we are a tradition in steep decline,³ what struck me about what he said is that our church is struggling with a complete lack of capacity on every level. From the smallest entities to the largest we are barely getting by and lack the resource–volunteer, paid, financial, spiritual, material–to adequately minister to our people. Much of this, I’m assuming, has to do with our eroding social contract with our culture.

In 18th and 19th Century America it was assumed that all of society was to form Christians, while the church, specifically the Protestant church, was to offer Sunday worship, religious services, and pastoral care and counselling. Sunday school, which started as a way to teach the poor literacy on their days off, moved to Common Education that continued to include strong religious elements. The bible and Christianity was taught in schools throughout much of the 19th century. The volunteer society, from the Bible Society to the YMCA, was the social and formational wing of the church. However, as the volunteer society retracted, and our cultural entities withdrew from religious formation, the church was left as a shell of its former self. Its social and formation wing removed, it became a practice of Sunday piety alone, without the volunteers or resources to shape, form, and grow.

Or, that is to say, this happened to the mainline Protestant church. Catholics and more recently Orthodox churches were always subcultures within America and never a part of the dominant culture. Nor were they ever as focused on loose individualism inherent in both Protestant spirituality and the American ethos.⁴ As a result, in their protectionism, they never lost sight of their need to maintain their unique social and formation elements, leaving them particularly prepared to offer something different to our contemporary culture and its spiritually hungry youth.

1. I have seen no studies on correlation. ↩︎
2. https://www.amazon.com/Great-Dechurching-Leaving-Going-Bring/dp/0310147433/ ↩︎
3. We are traditional in form only and not in substance. It tends to be Baby Boomers that seek more progressive churches like ours. Some of this is second half of life spirituality, but some of it is generational identity issues. ↩︎
4. More on this in the future. ↩︎