Why Is Church Attendance Falling?

Major universities, media companies, and elite institutions are heavily secular, they say, and control the culture. Which is it? Is skepticism or faith on the ascendancy in the world today? The answer is: Yes. The enemies are both right. Skepticism, fear, and anger toward traditional religion are growing in power and influence. But at the same time, robust, orthodox belief in the traditional faith is growing as well. The non-churchgoing population in the United States and Europe is steadily increasing. The number of Americans answering no religious preference to poll questions has skyrocketed, having doubled or even tripled in the last decade. A century ago most United States universities shifted from a formally Christian foundation to an overtly secular one. As a result, those with traditional beliefs have little foothold in any of the institutions of cultural power. But even as more and more people identify themselves as having no religious preference, certain churches with supposedly obsolete beliefs in a infallible Bible and miracles are growing in the United States and exploding in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Even in much of Europe, there is some growth in church attendance. And despite the secularism of most universities and colleges, religious faith is growing in some corners of academia. It is estimated that ten to fifteen percent of all the teachers and professors of philosophy in the country are orthodox Christians, up from less than one percent just thirty years ago. Prominent academic Stanly Fish may have had an eye on that trend when he reported, "When Jacques Derrida died [in November 2004] I was called by a reporter who wanted to know what would succeed high theory and the triumvirate of race, gender, and cl as the center of intellectual energy in the academy. I answered like a shot: Religion." In short, the world is polarizing over religion. It is getting both more religious and less religious at the same time. There was once a confident belief that secular Europe countries were the harbingers for the rest of the world. Religion, it was thought, would thin out from its more robust, super-naturalistic forms or die out altogether. But the theory that technological advancement brings inevitable secularization is now being scrapped or radically rethought. Even Europe may not face secular future, with Christianity growing modestly and Islam growing exponentially.