497 - The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy

The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy
By Roger Finke and Rodney Stark
New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1992. 339 pp. $22.95.

Time was when American social scientists, to the degree they ever relaxed their pose of disinterested inquiry, cooperated cordially with mainline Protestant denominations. The same moral idealism that fueled the social gospel of the early twentieth century also inspired the sociologists, economists, and social workers of the Progressive Era. In fact, when the American Economic Association was founded in 1886, its founder, Richard T. Ely, claimed that the organization's purpose was to promote love to one's neighbor, just as Christ taught in the Sermon on the Mount. This guiding principle established a link between the social sciences and the mainline churches that would last well into the 1940s.

After a lengthy hiatus in relations between the churches and social sciences, another tie between sociology and American Protestantism seems to be emerging, if this book by Roger Finke, a sociologist at Purdue University, and Rodney Stark, Professor of Sociology and Comparative Religion at the University of Washington, is any indication

498 - The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy

Though, in the case of The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in our Religious Economy, it may be sociology serving not the mainline churches but evangelicalism.

As a piece of academic writing about the history of American religion, this book is ambitious but not immodest in its aims. The authors'purpose is merely to explain the "churching of America," how the United States moved from only 17 percent of the population actively involved in organized religion in 1776 to a society where, by 1980, 62 percent of the people could be classified as churched. To accomplish this, Finke and Stark use the standard tools of the trade-census data and social scientific surveys. They pay particular attention to Methodists, Baptists, and Roman Catholics, the communions that, in the nineteenth century, experienced the greatest growth but, in two cases out of three, have not fared as well in recent times. Yet the book reads much better than the dry-as-dust prose that characterizes much social science. Not only do the authors avoid jargon but they use a wide range of historical materials and interact with scholars outside their discipline. Above all, the book is interesting because it tells a compelling story, breathing life into statistics and adding bite to interpretive models.

The Churching of America, however, is more than a historically informed sociological account of religion in America. For this reason, it will be of interest to pastors and church members as well as academics. The authors believe they have found general principles of church growth and church decline. Churches grow (in the United States, at least) when their organizational structures are democratic and when their ministers are not genteel professionals but regular folk. Churches also grow for theological reasons: when the message proclaimed by ministers concerns salvation from sin and eternal damnation. Such other worldly considerations are not irrational, according to the authors, but are in fact quite reasonable. According to rational choice theory, the more a religion costs-the more it demands from adherents-the more valuable it will be. Hence, evangelicalism and conservative communions, like pre-Vatican II Catholicism, grew because they were more accessible to and demanded more from the laity. Conversely, mainline churches declined the more their faith and practice resembled the surrounding culture. According to Finke and Stark, mainline church leaders during the 1920s and since have not figured out that people go to church "in search of salvation, not social service."

While the authors seek to be impartial, mainline readers will no doubt suspect this book of special pleading on behalf of evangelicals. After all, almost all of the book's conclusions about growth and decline vindicate evangelical practice and echo conservative critiques of the mainline. Even in their analysis of Roman Catholicism, the authors find evidence of revivalist techniques that explain Catholic success. The anomaly of a hierarchical and sacramental church practicing

499 - The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy

low-church and democratic methods should be a reminder that some conservative communions, such as confessional and Anabaptist churches, have not grown, even though they demand much from adherents. More attention to these exceptions would have been helpful.

Nevertheless, ever since 1972, when Dean Kelley wrote Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, social scientists have been almost unanimous in forecasting a dire future for the mainline. While mainstream Protestants may be tempted to dismiss these conclusions and to avoid the genuine predicament they face, evangelicals confront an even greater temptation from this literature. For rather than attributing their success to the God in whom they put their trust, evangelicals may succumb to the hubris of simply trusting their own efforts.

Darryl G. Hart
Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals
Wheaton College
Wheaton, IL