Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite
Professor, Chicago Theological Seminary

Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite

Former president of Chicago Theological Seminary (1998-2008), Thistlethwaite is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

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The U.S. is Post-Denominational

It is clear from this Pew study that the old denominational affiliations no longer apply. The religious landscape in the U.S. is best described these days as “post-denominational.” Post-denominational means that it is far less important whether you are Methodist or Baptist, or even Catholic, than where you fall along the continuum of fundamentalist to evangelical to progressive (liberal) to secular or unaligned. While some faiths or denominations generally are more evangelical or more liberal, each tradition has a wide spectrum within it. If you are a liberal Christian in a conservative Protestant denomination, you may have more in common with a Reformed Jew than with the Christians in your own denomination.

The shift in religious affiliation, or away from religious affiliation, has the most correlation, in my view, with that range of religious cultural assumptions than with any specific doctrine. And when people move from one affiliation to another, they are choosing a better cultural fit.

The losses in American Catholicism are dramatic. “Catholicism has experienced the greatest net losses as a result of affiliation changes. While nearly one-in-three Americans (31%) were raised in the Catholic faith, today fewer than one-in-four (24%) describe themselves as Catholic.” I believe that a great many Catholics left the church over the clergy sexual abuse scandals, though there are certainly other reasons as well, many of them cultural. Many Catholics I know who have become Protestant have done so because they are seeking a less authoritarian faith and more autonomy in their own beliefs.

This major decline in Catholicism has been less visible because of the large number of Catholic immigrants who have increased their ranks even as traditional Catholics have moved out. This also explains the current social advocacy of many U.S. Catholic leaders on immigration and what is called “the new sanctuary movement.” I regard this as a good trend because it has enabled the U.S. Catholic church to retrieve a lot of its solid social teaching on issues like poverty that had been swamped by the almost exclusive pre-occupation with abortion and homosexuality in the last decades.

Here’s what this looks like on the ground. There is a large United Church of Christ (liberal Protestant) church in a western suburb of Chicago where 90% of the large and active church membership was not raised in the Congregational tradition. More than half of this church’s growing membership were formerly Catholic. The pastor told me that in a meeting on stewardship, a church member of several years and now a member of the senior leadership of the church, raised a hand and queried why this committee was spending so much time on fund-raising. “Doesn’t the diocese just send us a check?” he wondered. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Protestant churches cannot count on their members knowing anything about the history and faith commitments of their particular tradition. These folks who are migrating from Catholic to Protestant or from liberal to evangelical or evangelical to progressive or whatever the pattern know more what they don’t want in a church than what they do want or believe.

This is true at our seminary as well. We are a graduate school that trains people for religious leadership. We stand in the Congregational tradition (we’re the Pilgrims!), and yet today our student body has between twenty-five and thirty different denominations and even religions (Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist). Our faculty is very diverse as well, with United Church of Christ, Baptist, and Catholic representatives among others.

What holds us together? We are a progressive institution and known for our commitment to social justice. Our seminary motto is “Ministry for the Real World.” We teach on the corner of church and society, and clearly now also on the corner of synagogue and society and even mosque and society.

These trends are examples of both strengths and weaknesses within the American religious experience. Clearly, the church I describe above where people don’t know the basic structure of Protestantism let alone its doctrines is a problem. It is also fraying the connections between the local church and the regional and national bodies of the church and also fraying the connections with church institutions (like seminaries).

On the other hand, it is wonderful to go to these churches where people used to be all kinds of different faiths and traditions, but they chose this one because they want to be part of this kind of a church. This, I believe, is more dynamic and faithful than just sitting in the pew in the Methodist (Presbyterian, Baptist, Catholic—you fill in the blank) church that your parents sat in and their parents sat in etc. without ever asking yourself “why?”

The extreme of this view, however, is that ultimately everyone’s faith is under their own hat. Could we have millions of faiths, each with only one member? The sociologist Robert Bellah described this phenomenon in the person “Sheila” “whose faith was so private and personal she called it ‘Sheilaism.’ In terms of our [Bellah et al.] categories of basic American values, she was an example of expressive individualism.”

So while the Pew study indicates that the “United States is on the verge of becoming a minority Protestant country,” these trends toward self-direction in faith is the distinctly, even uniquely Protestant ethos.

We may be declining in numbers, we Protestants, but sociologically speaking, in the U.S. we won.

By Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite  |  February 27, 2008; 7:15 AM ET
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He does time to time but if your heart hasn't been changed by the Holy Spirit you won't recognize it for what it is.

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TommyO.

From the same movie...

"Yeah if God would only cough or something, just so we know he's really up there"

Great lines from a very funny atheist.

Posted by: Thin Albert | February 28, 2008 9:32 PM
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If only God would give us a clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.
(from a Woody Allen quote)

Posted by: Tommy O | February 28, 2008 3:19 PM
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Julie,

I recommend another look at your Catholicism based on the following:

Jesus, the illiterate Jewish peasant/carpenter possibly suffering from hallucinations, has been characterized anywhere from the Messiah from Nazareth to a mythical character from mythical Nazareth to a mamzer from Nazareth (Professor Bruce Chilton, in his book Rabbi Jesus). Analyses of Jesus’ life by many contemporary NT scholars (e.g. Professors Crossan, Borg and Fredriksen, On Faith panelists) via the NT and related documents have concluded that only about 30% of Jesus' sayings and ways noted in the NT were authentic. The rest being embellishments (e.g. miracles)/hallucinations made/had by the NT authors to impress various Christian, Jewish and Pagan sects.

The 30% of the NT that is "authentic Jesus" like everything in life was borrowed/plagiarized and/or improved from those who came before. In Jesus' case, it was the ways and sayings of the Babylonians, Greeks, Persians, Egyptians, Hittites, Canaanites, OT, John the Baptizer and possibly the ways and sayings of traveling Greek Cynics. http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/theories.html

For added "pizzazz", Catholic/Christian theologians divided god the singularity into three persons and invented atonement as an added guilt trip for the "pew people" to go along with this trinity of overseers. By doing so, they made god the padre into god the "filicider".

Luther, Calvin, Joe Smith, Henry VIII, Wesley et al, founders of Christian-based religions, also suffered from the belief in/hallucinations of "pretty wingy talking flying fictional thingie" visits and "prophecies" for profits analogous to the myths of Catholicism (resurrections, apparitions, ascensions and immaculate conceptions).

Posted by: Concerned the Christian Now Liberated | February 28, 2008 3:17 PM
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Rev. Thistlethwaite,
Let's hope the former Catholics in the UCC find their way back to the church Christ founded.
I left the Catholic Church for a while due to aggresive proselytism by college classmates who convinced me to attend a United Church of Christ. Due to later study and reading, I discovered that what they were telling me about the Catholic Church were lies. Here is a wake up call for better catechesis in the Catholic Church. You won? If removing the truth and making Christianity relative and morality negotiable is a good thing, then yes, you've won.

Posted by: Julie | February 28, 2008 1:37 PM
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Given the stereotype of the average American as a rugged individual, endowed with the blessings of liberty, freedom of speech and expression, pride in personal achievement and the means to turn dreams into reality, it's no small wonder that memberships in traditional religious faiths are declining. The Vatican cites moral relativism as the evil of our time. Dogmatic creeds and canons of organized religions, albeit touted as absolute truth ironically obstruct our finding the real truth - the truth of who we are, the essence of our Spiritual Being. Blind compliance with dogma limits our sphere of vision. It makes us intolerant of difference and leads to isolation, communication breakdown and conflict. We must look beyond the external. We must look within and feel the love that burns at the root of all existence. This is what everyone seeks through religion - the experience of the Divine, the experience of Love. Therein we will find God.

Posted by: Russell Spencer | February 28, 2008 12:42 PM
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GaryD: Whether or not we atheists are increasing as a percentage of the population is mostly irrelevant to me, but there are 12 million of us. That is more than the combined population of Jews and Muslims in the U.S. We're citizens and we're here to stay - you should probably just get used to that.

Posted by: DZ | February 28, 2008 12:14 PM
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Haha, Reverend. :)

Can you believe some religions actually go *looking* for converts? Oops. :)

(This is totally said in all good cheer, but,)

You think it's hard when people aren't getting the finer points of *Protestantism?*

Pagan clergy types look at these studies and go, "Exactly what do you mean, 'exponential?' ...Darn it, who told the Gods they were bored!!?"

:)

Good thing a lot of this stuff kinda teaches itself, bumps and scrapes aside.

My advice, ...you have to laugh about this sort of thing... Look at me....Twenty years ago, I think I'm settling in this nice quiet religion that maybe just me, the Gods, and some like-hearted friends happen to have, next thing I know I'm arguing with the U.S. Army about burial plots. :)

Who knew. :)

I think people'll end up where they need to be, in due time. People tend to expect it's easy and all laid out for them, whatever it is, but that's a story we tell ourselves.

Posted by: Paganplace | February 28, 2008 1:40 AM
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Define Protestant. Not Catholic is wrong.

The chief Problem in most Protestant churches is that they abandoned sound doctrine and feeding the sheep as the sheep ought to be fed in order to appease the world.

You want to grow a real church instead of a country club that's only open two days a week give the believers a true home and feed them regularly on the word of God, the pure unvarnished truth. It has worked in the past it will continue to work today But few if any seem to have the guts or the faith to try.

Posted by: Garyd | February 27, 2008 11:24 PM
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Pseudo,

The flaws in religion are not restricted to orthodox Christianity. BTW, Professors Crossan and Funk and Fredriksen and Borg earned their right to critique Christianity. And your critiques are backed by what credentials??

Posted by: Concerned The Christian Now Liberated | February 27, 2008 11:00 PM
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I've moved from the Methodist to Episcopal to Unitarian in recent years, grew up as a Methodist, but it has become more conservative and I was appalled by what I would call "Church Cheerleading" in the Methodist church when we had a Jewish rabbi come to speak at our Bible Study. All the group wanted to do was spout bible verses at him in an effort to determine who was on the right path. After that I really didn't feel part of the church and when I heard nearly all of the members going great guns for George Dumbya Bush in 1999 and 2000 I left. I've never attended what I would call a "Fundamentalist" Church, but I've been horrified by their rise and the parallel rise of such fruitcakes as Dumbya and Huckabee who serve them....
Huckabee's flat-earth rejection of evolution is really sickening to me, but I've been VERY close to the Baptist Church all my life(I attended a Baptist University) and I know what a rigid and intolerant religion it is. I believe that religions evolve too, which ought to really rile up the Fundamentalists out there who hold the key to my eternal salvation! And I feel quite sure that our nation's religion is evolving more than it might seem at first, and I predict we will see some really big changes in the near future as we move away from the mindless dogma of fundamentalism...

Posted by: Mike in Dallas | February 27, 2008 9:59 PM
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Thank you, Susan, for this insightful commentary. Isn't this what Wade Clark Roof described in 1999 as a 'spiritual marketplace?' He described America's anchorless spirituality, touted by a generation of seekers. He noted that religious experience could not survive without the supports of creed and community. Certainly, many believers-on-the-move are finding new communities to nourish their experience, but I would agree with you that the creeds that once held us together are endangered in favor of a designer religiousity. I see this in my own denomination. I am fascinated by your description of Protestants who find more in common with those who share similar religious cultural assumptions than they do with people of their own religious affiliation. I think this is similar to the observation that there are adolescents today who find more in common with peers around the world than they do with those of an older generation living under the same roof. Rapid cultural shift seems to have re-aligned our patterns of association. I also wonder how much of this has to do with consumption replacing conversion as a way of establishing religious identity.

Posted by: blueman | February 27, 2008 9:18 PM
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Lets understand something Ms. Thistlewaite, Atheists do not appear to be gaining much ground as the shift seems to be more from one religious group to the other. Part of this is because increasingly churches are not strong on doctrine but rather put forth feel good pablum like what you get from the prosperity theologians for whom God seems to be more of a genie in a bottle rather than the all powerful almighty creator of the universe.

Very few churches any more give the people in the pews something to hang their hats on in the way of doctrine and many of those that do are so obviously clueless as regards the basic elements of logic that real Christians keep moving on looking for real food for the meat with which the Bible is loaded and find instead the same milk they've heard since they were children. Is it any wonder than that they keep moving from one church to another in search of the real deal?

Posted by: Garyd | February 27, 2008 8:14 PM
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Lets understand something Ms. Thistlewaite, Atheists do not appear to be gaining much ground as the shift seems to be more from one religious group to the other. Part of this is because increasingly churches are not strong on doctrine but rather put forth feel good pablum like what you get from the prosperity theologians for whom God seems to be more of a genie in a bottle rather than the all powerful almighty creator of the university.

Very few churches any more give the people in the pews something to hang their hats on in the way of doctrine and many of those that do are so obviously clueless as regards the basic elements of logic that real Christians keep moving on looking for real food for the meat with which the Bible is loaded and find instead the same milk they've heard since they were children. Is it any wonder than that they keep moving from one church to another in search of the real deal?

Posted by: Garyd | February 27, 2008 8:13 PM
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Shell Script:

Crossan and Funk who you worship them with fundamentalist fervor, have been deflawed.

You do not need to waste time repeating their flawed doctrines.

You do not need to waste time repeating their flawed doctrines.

You do not need to waste time repeating their flawed doctrines.

Posted by: Pseudo | February 27, 2008 6:07 PM
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Why are many of us dropping our orthodox affiliation and becoming persons with religious reservations, secularists or atheists??

The answer is simple, the "pew sitters" and "bowers" are becoming more aware of the flaws in the founders and foundations of religion and no longer accept the myths, embellishments and lies associated with these religions.

Posted by: Concerned The Christian Now Liberated | February 27, 2008 4:01 PM
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Rev Thistlethwaite, excellent observations as always.

I think our American tradition of individualism and self-relience come from Protestantism.

I think there is a struggle with our individual freedoms and the social freedoms such as freedom from poverty and crime. How much is an individual repsonsible for their community?
Is it possible to keep the indiviual freedom we have and reduce our problems with poverty, racism, and crime?

From reading your articles, I know that you are knee-deep in fighting for the unfortunate.

Posted by: FRIEND | February 27, 2008 3:31 PM
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The chart in the New York Times shows that Protestant affliation decreased from above 60 percent to below 50 percent. Those who are unaffiliated has increased steadily, and the Catholic trend is about to break out of its "trading range" or volatility range. Somehow the chart shows bad for Protestants but the news story reads bad for Catholics. Why is that?

The analysis on Catholicism is downright un-American. Researchers say that American Catholicism is doing far, far worse than the numbers show because the church is filling pews with immigrants. What a scandal in a nation of immigrants!

Are immigrants who are naturalized Americans somehow less patriotic than native-born Americans?

If these Americans love their country no less, then why is the American Catholic church considered weaker because of them?

If immigrants who are naturalized Americans and Catholic have remained with the faith of their youths, then why aren't they considered part of the resurging Catholicism success story?

Imagine this: "Catholic churches have seen a dramatic increase in the number of Americans participating in services due to the high number of naturalized Americans who are Catholic from birth, and who have remained in their faith. Protestant demonomations show no such revitalization within their congregations and affiliation has erroded dramatically in recent years as those claiming no affililation has grown."

The media deserves a lecture from that loud-mouthed, gap-toothed, Catholic guy that screams at liberal bloggers.

Posted by: Kacoo | February 27, 2008 2:19 PM
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The spiritual community you desribe at the UCC sounds a lot like the one I have at my UU congregation. You need to add Pagan and Wiccan to the mix of faith traditions. I might have considered something like UCC when my orthodox Jewish upbringing no longer worked for me, but the Christ bit is even less of a fit. UU spirituality and community is a fine place to seek encouragement, support, direction and accountability for me. And it is very post-denominational.

Posted by: WindReader | February 27, 2008 12:54 PM
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Get a life CCNL...no one is listening to you, and all your credibility and respect has been lost. Don't quit your day job!

Posted by: Get a life | February 27, 2008 11:35 AM
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