249 - Lay Liberalism Among Baby Boomers

Lay Liberalism Among Baby Boomers
By Donald A. Luidens, Dean R. Hoge, and Benton Johnson

Since the mid-1970s, it has been clear that the principal factor in mainline Protestant membership loss was the nonparticipation of the Baby Boom generation-those born in the years following World War II. Memberships declined, not so much because adult parishioners were leaving but because the rolls were not being replenished by new members from among the churches' own offspring. That this was the case is very clear; why it was so is much less obvious-although explanatory theories abound.

To assess some of these explanations, the authors interviewed five hundred Baby Boomers who had been confirmed in twenty-three Presbyterian churches throughout the United States. ¹ The Presbyterian communion was chosen as representative of mainline denominations

"More than eighty percent of all churched parents with children living at home have them enrolled in Sunday school. "

(which include the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church, the Reformed Church in America, and others), and the twenty-three congregations represent the denomination in size of congregation, urban-rural-suburban mix, and regional and racial compositions. Names were randomly selected from the congregations' 1960s

Donald Luidens, Dean Hoge, and Benton Johnson are professors of sociology at Hope College, Catholic University, and the University of Oregon (recently retired) respectively.
¹ Our findings are more fully described in Vanishing Boundaries: The Religion of Mainline Protestant Baby Boomers (Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), by the same authors.

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records of those making confession of faith .² Church members helped us locate them. We found almost three-quarters of the people we had sampled, and three-quarters of these responded to an extensive telephone survey. We followed up the calls with personal Interviews of forty respondents.

PATTERNS OF CHURCH INVOLVMENT

We found great variation among our Baby Boomers in matters of church involvement. While ninety-two percent describe themselves as religious, only sixty-two percent claim to be church members and just forty-seven percent attend church worship at least twice a month. On the basis of membership and attendance, we divided our respondents between "churched" and "unchurched" groups: Churched respondents (fifty-two percent) are members who attended at least six times during the previous year; the balance (forty-eight percent) are unchurched.

Among those who are churched, we found that more than half (twenty-nine percent of the total) are still members of Presbyterian congregations. An additional ten percent are currently active members of other mainline churches. Smaller groups of churched Boomers are fundamentalist (six percent), and Baptist, Catholic, or other Christian (seven percent).

"Church involvement is widely perceived as a matter of personal choice. It is not an obligation of faithfulness. "

We asked our respondents a series of questions about the Bible, the divinity of Jesus, and life after death. Nine out of ten current Presbyterians and every fundamentalist supported traditional answers to these items; more than eight out of ten of the other churched Boomers concurred. Virtually everyone among the Presbyterians and fundamentalists pray to God, and over ninety percent of the others do so. More than eighty percent of all churched parents with children living at home have them enrolled in Sunday school. By many measures, all of our churched Boomers are conventional Christians. However, there are some significant differences in their emphases.

As their description suggests, fundamentalist churchgoers maintain the most traditional beliefs and practices. Ninety-one percent affirm that "the Bible is God's Word and all it says is true"; only a quarter of the other churched Boomers hold this inerrantist position. Similarly, every fundamentalist believes "in a divine judgment after death where some sail be rewarded and others punished." Fewer than two-thirds of the other

² Baby Boomers, born between 1947 and 1956, were usually confirmed at age 13 or 14; this meant that the 1960s rolls would yield the best list of Baby Boom confirmands. Everyone in our Boomer sample was 33 to 42 years old at the time of the interview.

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churched Boomers feel this way. Moreover, in matters of church practice, fundamentalists are the most regular. Virtually every fundamentalist prays daily, while only half of the Presbyterians and other mainliners do so. Ninety-one percent of the fundamentalists attend worship services weekly; barely a third of the current Presbyterians attend that regularly. In sum, one of the reasons for mainline decline has been the departure of some of its number to non-mainline denominations. In the case of the six percent who became more fundamentalist, this departure has meant the loss of the mainline's most traditional members.

We must turn to the unchurched to understand more about the mainline's membership declines. This group includes eight percent who see themselves as not at all religious. These "secularists" consistently reject the beliefs and practices of Christianity. None attends church or participates in church-related programs; most have harbored strong doubts about religion since their adolescence, and they generally hold organized religion in very low esteem. There is little reason to believe that they will ever return to the fold. Just as a small portion of the mainline's decline is attributable to the most traditional Boomers leaving for more fundamentalist churches, so another portion is related to the most secular leaving the church entirely.

"This reluctance to insist on absolute standards of faithful participation is part of a larger pattern of beliefs that we detected among our Baby Boomers. "

The balance of the unchurched (forty percent of the total) can be divided into two sets: those who are marginally involved in the church (some attend regularly while not joining; others are members who rarely attend) and those who have no involvement in the church, yet consider themselves religious. Each group yields its unique hues to the picture of membership decline.

Those who attend regularly but who have not joined-about ten percent of the total-are Christians in transition. Half have been divorced; also, more than three-quarters have changed residence in the last five years, and a similar number live farther than a hundred miles from their hometowns. On other matters of faith and family background, however, these non-member attenders are very much like Boomers currently involved in Presbyterian and other mainline churches. During our face-to-face interviews, it became clear that future church membership is a strong possibility for many in this group once their lives "settle down." In the meantime, they are outside the rolls.

People who retain their memberships while not participating (nine percent) are another unique group. For them, the church is an identity anchor. They are the least likely to have moved recently and to live far from home (two-thirds live within twenty miles of their hometown

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church). They are not inclined to switch denominations-, eighty-five percent retain membership in their original Presbyterian congregations. Despite this non-involvement, church continues to serve a family formation function for many nonattending members: Eight out of ten have had children baptized in church, and four out of ten currently send their children to Sunday school. When pressed, these respondents say they maintain their memberships for a variety of identity-related issues -especially preserving ties with their family backgrounds and communities. While they rarely attend worship, they see no reason to pull back their official memberships.

Although we did not check with the congregations in which this group claims membership, it is very likely that many have been formally removed from church rolls-or at least placed on inactive status-thereby contributing to the overall membership decline. Certainly they are perceived in the congregation as dead wood.

The notion that one can be a faithful believer while not being formally affiliated with a church is an especially strong tenet among the twenty-one percent of our Baby Boomers who are unaffiliated but consider themselves religious. Ninety-five percent feel that "a person can be a good Christian or Jew [even] if he or she doesn't attend a church or synagogue." The strength of this position provides an important clue to the recent membership declines. Church involvement is widely perceived as a matter of personal choice. It is not an obligation of faithfulness. That this attitude should prevail among unchurched Boomers is instructive, but perhaps of greater significance is the fact that this position is generally held among the churched, as well. Eighty percent of active Presbyterians and seventy-two percent of other mainline participants agree. Even among the fundamentalists this position is held by forty-five percent of the Boomers.

LAY LIBERALISM

This reluctance to insist on absolute standards of faithful participation is part of a larger pattern of beliefs that we detected among our Baby Boomers. We have labeled this pattern "lay liberalism." It is an "almost theology" that is held by more than half of our Baby Boomers. While lay liberalism is especially found among the unchurched Boomers, it is also very evident among the churched. We are convinced that a clearer understanding of lay liberalism is critical if the mainline is to make inroads into the Baby Boom generation. What follows is a reconstruction of lay liberalism from our surveys and interviews.

We have used the term "lay" because this set of theological affirmations is an amalgam of attitudes and perspectives held by non-professional believers rather than a fully developed system of beliefs expounded by specialists. It does not strictly conform to any of the prevailing systematic theologies. It evokes no resonances with process, feminist, liberation, or contextual theology. Indeed, when we asked our respondents about these more formal articulations of contemporary Christian-

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ity, we were generally greeted with incomprehension. Lay liberals have pieced together their beliefs in the manner of all folk religions.

Lay liberalism is "liberal" in its stress on acceptance of differences, its tolerance of uncertainty, its strong commitment to individualism, and its generally liberal position on social and moral issues. The defining quality of lay liberalism is its wide-open tolerance of diversity in matters of belief and practice. In a sense, it is more a methodology-one which assumes the validity of diversity-than an ideology. Lay liberals have come to terms with the multiple, often conflicting, cultural messages they receive in this world; they accept that variety in truth claims is inevitable.

While they are clear about their own beliefs (as we have seen, they tend to be conventional Christians), lay liberals are reluctant to make claims of ultimate authority for Christianity. Few would agree that salvation is only through Jesus Christ or that Christ is the only source of absolute truth. Rather, they maintain that other faith traditions are equal claimants to truth insights and that it would be inappropriate for Christians to challenge those alternative visions. In effect, they argue that their own Christianity is an accident of birth; had they been born to Muslim or Buddhist families, they would have been Muslims or Buddhists. Conse-

"Lay liberalism is 'liberal' in its stress on acceptance of differences, its tolerance of uncertainty, its strong commitment to individualism, and its generally liberal position on social and moral issues. "

quently, it would be presumptuous of them to stand on their accidental birthright and make claims on others' faith. Many Boomers go so far as to say that they would be content if their children adopted non-Western religions "as long as they are happy" and as long as they are moral citizens.

Evangelism and mission outreach are condoned by lay liberals to the extent that they involve education or service to the less fortunate. "Go teach" and "go heal" are acceptable battle cries. But lay liberals are resistant to "go preach"; evangelism and mission programs are not acceptable if they involve efforts to persuade others that their faiths are inadequate. As a result, lay liberalism is ill-equipped to marshal crusaders for conversion among the unbelieving or for revival among the unchurched.

Strong undercurrents of relativism and privatism are embedded in lay liberalism. Truth is only partially apprehensible. One's personal beliefs are only appropriate relative to one's own life and social context and should not be binding on others. This produces a strongly privatized faith; Bellah's "Sheilaism" is rampant among lay liberals. The measure of one's faith is a personal measure, and, while collective expressions of faith may

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be useful from time to time, they are not essential. For lay liberals, therefore, one denomination is almost as good as another-when and if it is needed. Indeed, churched lay liberals who are in Presbyterian and mainline camps place little importance on historic denominational boundaries, and they move freely within this broad spectrum.

Not surprisingly, given these echoes of universalism and relativism, lay liberals struggle with issues of religious authority. In the footsteps of historic Protestantism, they give little credence to the pronouncements of the institutional church or to religious tradition. Moreover, in the wake of nineteenth-century challenges to biblical literalism, the Reformation's allegiance to sola scriptura holds little sway with lay liberals. Finally, since they were raised in an era that questioned many other institutional sources of authority, religious leaders and moral entrepreneurs are also suspect. For many lay liberals, the basis for religious authority narrows to personal experience, which becomes the touchstone of their religious and moral affirmations.

While a sizeable majority of the unchurched are lay liberals, this perspective is also widely held among those who are churched, including active Presbyterians and other mainliners. We estimate that well over half of our Baby Boomers could be classified as lay liberals. By contrast, only

"Many Boomers go so far as to say that they would be content if their children adopted non-Western religions, 'as long as they are happy' and as long as they are moral citizens. "

about twenty to twenty-five percent could be considered "conservative" and another eight percent "secularist." The balance would be moderates who have not joined one or another ideological camp.

Lay liberalism, with its highly individualized faith and its wide-open acceptance of cultural variety, has been a pragmatic response to the challenges of modernity. By personalizing Christianity and relativizing the truth, the veracity of other religious interpretations is not questioned. Individual experience-with all of its variety and with no claims on universal application-is exalted. As a result, lay liberalism successfully bridges some of the gulfs that otherwise feed religious separatism in our pluralist age.

However, while lay liberalism may be a creative response to modern pluralism, our findings are not an unqualified affirmation of this perspective. Lay liberalism is very shifting sand on which to build a religious community. It has no inherent loyalty factor upon which institutions can depend for sustained support. Rather, it promotes an ethos in which church involvement is strictly optional, and the option is to be exercised solely at the discretion of the individual. As a result lay liberals become religious consumers, seeking the religious services that meet their personal wants. They engage in the church to the extent that these needs can

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be accommodated, and they move along when the needs no longer exist or when the church no longer responds effectively.

For some Baby Boomers, this consumer's attitude has meant that they participate as long as their children need religious education, as long as they are going through times of personal trial or uncertainty, as long as they need spiritual uplift and succor, or as long as they need community identity and social affiliation. Indeed, we found that these four religious commodities are the strongest factors drawing Boomers into the church. Congregations that offer these products effectively have been most able to attract Baby Boomers. Even then, their involvement is a tenuous one; when the commodity is no longer needed, or if it is poorly produced, Boomers will shop elsewhere.

"[I]n the wake of nineteenth-century challenges to biblical literalism, the Reformation's allegiance to sola scriptura holds little sway with lay liberals. "

While membership declines in the mainline can be explained, in part, by the disaffection of some conservatives who have joined other Christian groups, most former mainliners left the church entirely. A few are in transitional phases of their lives and may return someday. Another small group has become secularist and is effectively lost to the church. However, the largest group of unchurched Boomers are lay liberals who see little reason to express their Christian faith through church involvement. Attracting them back into the church will be a difficult task. A further challenge for the mainline is that a significant segment of current members are also lay liberals, and these may easily follow their peers out the church doors.

The story of the mainline's decline is largely the story of the growth of lay liberalism among Baby Boomers-both in and outside the church. The story of the next generation will be how the mainline comes to terms with it.