Has Declining Church Attendance Caused Moral Decline?

Americans seem to have lost their moral compass. No, I’m not referring to changing sexual morays, but rather to the increasing tolerance of disinformation, misinformation, outright lies. There’s decline as well in civic involvement that leaves service organizations begging for volunteers. There is a large decline in our sense of a unified national community with shared values a clear purpose. Disrespectful behavior toward others has become more acceptable. We are clearly more materialistic and self-centered than we once were.

A friend recently suggested that negative societal changes such as these are attributable to declining church attendance. He may well be correct, but is the drop in attendance a cause or a symptom of our moral decline? Or is it due to something else altogether?

Are people shunning religion because they are too busy with materialistic pursuits, over- invested in virtual communities or more educated thus rejecting the supernatural basis of religious dogma? Are they disillusioned by the hypocrisy engendered in organized religion and in recent scandals? Is rejection of church part of a general trend to distrust institutions? Whatever the reason, their rejection of the church leaves people without the traditional aid to creating a sense of a community and to the task of developing a sense of morality. Regular church attendance serves as a reminder to maintain ethical behavior. Lacking these aids, do avoiders of religious participation feel less conflicted about their immoral behavior and more free to manifest it?

My wife and I like to think that the fact our daughter turned out to be a very good person despite having not attended religious services or having had any formal religious training shows that religion is not as important as parental guidance in forming moral character. But that ignores the fact that we both had religious training as kids. A part of my sense of ethics was definitely derived from weekly attendance at religious services as a pre-teen. What if that had not been the case?

We should perhaps widen our view beyond waning church congregations to a view of the political orientation of the national “congregation” they exist in. With the advent of the Nixon years and the “greed is good” mentality of Reagan’s neocons there was a shift away from a sense of shared purpose and social responsibility that had been embodied first in Roosevelt’s New Deal and culminated in Johnson’s Great Society. During that period of time as well, the sense that we shared a national identity and purpose was fractured by the Viet Nam war and by increased public awareness of the extent of racial injustice, economic inequality and inequality between the sexes. Meanwhile, the image of America as a White Christian nation exemplified in Norman Rockwell’s iconic Thanksgiving dinner illustration began to weaken in the face of the reality of increasingly diverse demographics.

Contributing to these factors was the change in the entertainment and information system from the written word and radio to television. Limited options, three TV stations that were all pretty much middle of the road politically and fed into the White Christian national identity, gave way to the explosion of uncontrolled and unfiltered information and misinformation sources seen today. We are increasingly insulated and isolated from fellow members of our national “congregation,” at least partly due to our immersion in this new information culture. Additionally, the anonymity afforded by social media facilitates antisocial behavior that extends to face to face situations.

My guess is that changing morays are not primarily a result of waning church attendance, but is rather a multifaceted phenomenon. Reduced church attendance, significant as it may be, is but one component and, as stated, it’s hard to tell if it is clearly causal rather than simply symptomatic of those changes.

But let’s, for argument’s sake, say the moral decline is due primarily to waning church attendance. Assuming people will not return to the churches, if church no longer fulfills the task of moral guidance, what, if anything, might take over that role?

To this question I have no answer. Do you?