160 - Vanishing Boundaries: The Religion of Mainline Protestant Baby Boomers

Vanishing Boundaries: The Religion of Mainline Protestant Baby Boomers
By Dean R. Hoge
Westminster/John Knox, 1994, 254 pp., $17.99.

Financed by the Lilly Endowment this important study examines churched and unchurched baby boomers, assesses the reasons for mainline church decline, and suggests implications for a mainline response. The study surveys five hundred boomer Presbyterian confirmands with follow-up, in-depth interviews of a selected group of forty. These confirmands were born between 1947 and 1956, age 33 to 42 in 1989, the year of the interviews. While the sample is broadlv representative of the Presbyterian Church by region, church size, and congregation, the authors report a slight conservative bias due to the difficulty of locating some geographically mobile boomers. The sample is also "preponderantly upper middle class" with percentages of the sample at double the national norm in college education and in managerial, professional, and technical occupations. A sample of pre-Boomers-born 1937 through 1946, aged 43 to 52 at the time of the study-is also included for comparative purposes.

Because the study does not discover sufficient differences, between the boomers and pre-boomers as aggregates to account for the boomer drop-out rate, the focus must be on subgroups within the boomers instead. Thus, the authors develop an eight-fold typology that includes four churched types: fundamentalists (6% of the sample), Presbyterians (29%), other mainline (10%), and other churched (7%); and four unchurched types: unchurched attender (10%), unchurched member (9%), uninvolved but religious (21 %), and nonreligious (8 %).

An analysis of these eight types and of experiences during youth and adulthood lead the authors to develop a two-step view of influences in which "earlier life experiences [such as high school, countercultural experiences, and college] were pertinent mainly in that they produced the respon-

161 - Vanishing Boundaries: The Religion of Mainline Protestant Baby Boomers

dents' religious views," and these in turn were "crucial for church involvement." Thus, experiences affect beliefs, which then affect religious participation.

On mainline church decline, the authors' "main point is that we believe the dominant explanation ... is a combination of the gradual weakening of mainline churches, changes in American culture, and the churches' policy of openness to change." Among the cultural changes they assess the rising level of education-not college education alone-pluralism, privatism, and individualism. The "gradual weakening of mainline churches" and "the churches' policy of openness to change" are the major institutional church factors in mainline church decline. These two factors represent an appreciative application of Dean M. Kelley's thesis in Why Conservative Churches Are Growing. In Kelley's model, mainline churches have been "weak" churches, suggesting, for example, that such churches do not generate commitment through compelling meanings that make demands on people. In contrast, fundamentalist churches are "strong" churches who can make such demands.

The result of the teaching of these weak churches is what Hoge. Johnson, and Luidens characterize as "lay liberalism": "lay" because it is not shaped by formal systems of liberal or post-orthodox theological thought-for example, process, feminist, or liberationist-and "liberal" because "its defining feature is a rejection of the orthodox teaching that Christianity is the only true religion." This lay liberalism and an inordinate openness to change figured powerfully in mainline church decline.

In a chapter on implications, the authors suggest an approach that builds "churches without authority." This approach begins with boomers where they are. The authors believe that "individual ministries and churches, learning from successes elsewhere and adapting them to their own particular settings, hold out the greatest promise for the future of the mainline churches."

This book is significant work and deserves the closest attention. My main concern is the same as my critique of Kelley's thesis, that is, it focuses too much on "beliefs" and "meanings" and not enough on practices-seeing causation from the former to the latter-on the one hand, and identifies "strong" churches too much with conservative meanings, on the other. What fails to get adequate attention are the emerging practices of contemporary life that do generate profound theological views and deepen commitment. Closely related are the emerging indigenous practices of an electronic culture that have received only the most tentative attention by mainline churches, a rich direction for action and study. At the end of the book, the authors turn to a market model, a lethal direction. What is needed instead is an indigenous one that searches out the emerging practices of boomers and others where commitment is formed. This is the point of challenge for both the disciplines of theology and the social sciences.

Tex Sample
Saint Paul School of Theology
Kansas City, MO