Religion is Alive but Not Well in the U.S.

Organised religion in the United States is in deep trauble. Since the mid-1960s, every set of figures on the leading churches, Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox,” has shown the sammie pattern: either a standstill or a decline in church membership, church attendance, contributions, circulation of church publications, and a sharply increased number of clergymen who are leaving their profession.

In many parts of the country, especially among young people, occultism, astrology, witchcraft and even Devil-worship are gaining influence. Statistics show that the decline in interest in the so-called “established’’ churches has been most marked among the 21-29 age group.

For a great number of Americans, the churches are thought of in terms of the 1950s, the era of President Eisenhower, who said: “I don’t care what you believe in, but believe in something’’. But this was also the Joe McCarthy” era, the era when the churches were thought of as a bulwark against “godless, atheistic Communism’’, when “kill a Commie for Christ’’ was not at all a Sick-joke phrase.

What the statistics can reveal only indirectly is the obvious polarisation going on within the memberships of the established’’ churches; the emergence of radical groups of both clergy and laymen who identify with the poor and oppressed in American society, who are joining the force fighting for peace — while reactionaries, many of whom are in top church positions, tie themselves and their churches even more closely to imperialism.

It is hard to pin down when this began to change, but it was certainly inlarge part due to the great Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s and will always be symbolised for millions of Americans by the figure of the late Dr Martin Luther King. The civil rights upsurge of oppressed Black Americans was a “moment of truth’’* for the churches, and following close upon it was the movement against the U.S. imperialist war in Vietnam. In this period, many clergy and laymen for the first time became aware of racism, war, poverty and class oppression in the U.S., as well as the antidemocratic structures of their own churches. In fact, many found that their churches were irrelevant to their central concerns,* that the churches either did not deal with a whole series of vital questions, or, if they did, were on the wrong side. This may help to explain what can be seen happening to the churches today.