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Spiritual kinship trumps personal seclusion
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November 1, 2020Statistics on religiosity are enigmatic. Many say religiosity means more than mere “religious affiliation.” Or does it?
The Pew Research Center (PRC) conducts the most reliable surveys on religiosity. Its questions measure religiosity according to levels of belief in divinity, prayer life, spiritual peace, church attendance, and how religion is important to values, decisions, and milestones.
According to a 2018-2019 religious landscape poll, the United States was still overwhelmingly Christian at 71 percent. Non-Christian faiths (Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, New Age) comprised just 6 percent of religious believers. The remaining 23 percent were branded “nones,” or religiously unaffiliated. In the latest PRC poll, nones were estimated a little higher at 26 percent and Christians dropped to 65 percent.
Nones are agnostics, atheists, and “nothing in particular.” They are mostly Millennials and Gen-Xers, aged 25-50, who might believe vaguely in a transcendent God or Power but don’t practice spirituality nor seek a deep personal relationship with a divine being or force.
Over the last decade, nones increased by 9 percentage points and Christians decreased by 12 points. Alarm bells should be ringing in evangelizing ears. Should the trend line continue, it would mean that within six or seven decades, nones will beget more nones and zero out the religious population in America.
When we drill deep down, we can find many scapegoats for the rapid decline in American religiosity. Among these are terrible catechesis, Hollywood, divorce, pornography, secularized schools, cultural Marxism, and clerical sexual abuse. Each has helped drive religion further out of mainstream culture.
However, maintaining religiosity boils down to something even more basic.
At heart, religiosity rests and grows on a real, regular relationship with the divine. Above all, it means bowing in humility as dependent creatures of a Creator. We “affiliate” (from Latin filius/filia, meaning “son”/“daughter”) religiously, because we see ourselves in a dependent relationship with God our Father. As Catholic believers, as sons and daughters of the same Father, we are spiritual kindred.
Hence, the greatest factors diminishing religiosity in American society are those that encourage extreme personal isolation or a false sense of independence. Given that 2020 is well-defined by forced social distancing, draconian market lockdowns, and state welfare crowding out personal charity, these forms of spiritual malady are more omnipresent than ever.
How do we re-nourish a deeper religious affiliation in the truest sense of the word? We need look no further than where religiosity is rising: small-town Christian communities; missionary regions in South America, Asia, and Africa; and, oddly enough, in prisons and hospitals where ministers proactively build genuine personal relationships with criminals and the sick. They treat those they encounter as true fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, of the same Heavenly Father.
This “affiliation” is not to be taken for granted anymore in an American society where the nuclear family is under full attack, marriages do not form or quickly rupture, and where individuals are isolated by myriad forms of digital heroine. Not even the American market system can help if divinity is snuffed out of personal relationships. As such, economic exchanges are reduced to utilitarian and, ultimately, transactional relationships that cannot help but diminish religiosity.
In conclusion, Pope Francis’s latest social encyclical, Fratelli Tutti (“All Brothers”), comes at a time when extreme isolation and emaciated human charity is ripping apart the delicate fabric of religiosity. Echoing St. Francis of Assisi (“Let us all, brothers, consider the Good Shepherd, who bore the suffering of the Cross to save His sheep”), the Holy Father urges all humanity to return to the bread and butter of lasting religious affiliation: our interdependent kinship in Christ.
MICHAEL SEVERANCE directs external relations for the Acton Institute’s Rome office, where he oversees the think tank’s academic outreach at pontifical universities and seminaries. He is a frequent contributor in Italian and English to media outlets on religious affairs, economic thought, and moral virtue.
