A literal reading of scripture and faith in an interventionist God strengthen church attendance. According to a new academic study of what drives a mainline Protestant church to die out or succeed, preaching these two theological precepts makes all the difference.
The forthcoming article, entitled “Theology Matters,” confirms a truth universally acknowledged, or reasonably intuited anyway. The Christ-optional, Gospel-as-metaphor, liberal-progressive mainline Protestantism borne of our secular age keeps so loose a lock on wandering souls that they wander away—choosing boozy brunch, perhaps, over pew-sitting.
The authors, Drs. David Haskell, Kevin Flatt and Stephanie Burgoyne, used five years’ data gathered from 2,255 attendees of Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian and United Church of Canada parishes across the province of Ontario. (The United Church of Canada boasts an ongoing, unsurprising self-parody in an atheist minister no one seems to have ginned up the nerve to defrock.)
Approximately half of the authors’ subjects belong to growing parishes within these three mainline denominations, the other half to shrinking ones. Their most striking survey result finds churchgoers at shrinking parishes more doctrinally committed than their ministers. Ministers of shrinking churches are the least likely group to profess faith in the resurrection or in the power of prayer:
Preaching what the authors call conservative theology—”Protestant Christian beliefs based on a more literal interpretation of the Bible and greater openness to the idea that God intervenes in the world”—necessarily drives devotion, they find. The rewards of a defined faith keep congregants coming back.
“Conservative Protestant doctrine is strongly linked to personal happiness,” they find, citing prior research. “Just as a clear map helps us get where we’re going faster, groups with a clear, unified mission or purpose tend to outcompete groups with ‘foggy’ or wide ranging mission and purpose.” In matters of the soul, certainty sells.
If evangelicalism in the form of a friendly smile and a “Hey neighbor, have you heard the good news?” gets them through the door, it’s doctrine—more than just a sense community—that keeps them inside. The authors find that an emphasis on “youth programming” (picture a down-to-earth Up With People) does drive a church’s growth independent of doctrine. But their analysis follows that “the doctrinal conservatism of the growing church clergy and congregants fuels such innovative strategies as contemporary worship and youth programming.” Believing that it’s their faithful mission to the spread the word makes kid-friendly ministry a must.
The inherent controversy stems from a conflict with accepted but counterintuitive findings that theology makes no difference to church attendance. While cultural shifts drive down churchgoing broadly, evangelicals manage to boost attendance by advertising. Or so goes the conventional story, one that Haskell et al manage to tear down.
“Wider cultural changes can impact demand for religion,” Haskell allowed. But, he added, the growth of theologically conservative congregations despite a cultural trend away from religion demands a deeper, doctrinal explanation.
Protestantism was once the cultural backbone of the English-speaking worlds old and new. Puritans of old softened into the Congregationalists of today; Anglicans and Episcopalians have all but nominally let go of a catholic and apostolic aesthetic and tumbled into a social liberalism indistinguishable from the lefty Lutherans’; and the Unitarians lost their Emersonian edge long ago.
The number of Americans who identify with the faith the Founders has sharply declined in recent years, according to a Pew study of 2015. Catholics, meanwhile, are doing fine.
Catholic communities in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, as a minority, have maintained a level of cultural dissonance the Mainline lacks. They, like theologically conservative Protestants, keep up healthy parishes because of this cultural dissonance, said University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox.
“Having some degree of tension with the broader culture is connected to religious vitality,” Wilcox said, adding that divergent practices forge a deeper identity—and citing the example of Catholic kids waiting till midnight to hit the burger joint on a Friday. But, “if it’s completely counter-cultural, [a faith tradition] can have difficulty surviving [and] thriving in its host culture,” Wilcox added.
In interviews with progressive clergy, Haskell found they too drilled down to this question of culture dissonance. In their interviews, “The dominant theme was that pressures and changes in society had caused demand for religion to drop,” Haskell noted. But, as churchgoers’ surveys attest, “The supply side of the equation is more important.”
These findings are so striking, although a statement of the obvious, because they show firmly what so many know to be true but may choose to ignore: that faith in God remains a psychic need. And it’s a need theological coasting in a diluted faith tradition, spirituality-lite, fails to meet.
