In a recent on-line piece, Anglican scold David Virtue quotes a traditionalist priest in England who claims to know why church attendance has declined in that country:
Low blasted what he called the feminization of the Church of England. “The CofE has experienced the very opposite of the growth promised by the feminizers. Twelve years has seen one in five worshippers disappear. The overwhelming majority of those have been men.”
Low said studies showed that male church-going is the decisive influence in children. “It is not surprising to see children’s attendance in free-fall over that period. The 45/55 male/female split of a decade ago is now a 37/63 split of a much smaller number of regulars.”
Men, he wrote, will see a decreasing place for themselves in an organization dominated by militant feminism and bloodless males.
“With the growing triumph of the homosexual lobby and key appointments for many of its senior supporters, men will continue to drift away and so will their children. On current trends, in a decade or so the Church of England will be down to half the 1990 figures and staffed mainly by masculine women and feminine men,” said the former Vicar of St Peter’s, Bushey Heath, Diocese of St Alban’s. Low now lives in Cornwall.
Another possibility, however, is that people in first-world countries are becoming less socially engaged across the board, as summarized in this review of the book Bowling Alone:
. . . Church attendance is declining along with other kinds of civic engagement. Declines in church attendance are mainly produced by a generational changing of the guard, as are declines in many other institutional arenas. Religious participation, it seems, is a special case of something much more general.
It appears, then, that declining church attendance is unlikely to be fundamentally caused or cured by developments specific to religion. Churches may be having trouble attracting young people, but so are virtually all other voluntary and membership organizations. Looking for root causes or solutions only within the religious sphere is like the man who, faced with a flooded basement, looks for the leak in his own pipes, not realizing that the water main has broken and every house on the block is flooded.
Moreover, I suspect at least part of the attendance decline comes from another factor: Intellectually, unbelief is much easier than belief, because so much of “orthodox Christian” dogma simply can’t easily be reconciled with what we know about the world. As a recent survey report noted:
Barna noted that to unchurched people embracing church life is “both counter-cultural and counter-intuitive.” Reaching out to unchurched people is difficult for born again Christians because the two groups have such different viewpoints and lifestyles. “Born again adults are more excited about a church’s strengths and more forgiving of its weaknesses, more disposed to spiritual growth, and less skeptical of theological and biblical claims. They neither see nor understand the obstacles that impede the unchurched. Addressing the reticence of the unchurched takes more than prayer and hard work: it requires a lot of deep reflection to see the world and the local church from a completely different angle.
(Emphasis added.)
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