The Church Membership Crisis That Wasn’t
Some worry a recent, steep decline in church membership will lead to a lack of moral values among Americans. We should doubt that.
On March 29th, 2021, Gallup released a striking poll: for the first time, in the last eight decades, American church membership fell below the majority. The numbers align with a trend that has been on-going, but are still striking—especially since Americans remain more religious than their European counterparts. And the reaction to this precipitous decline was mixed. Some celebrated the decline in church membership citing the societal benefits of secularization, arguing that secular societies tend to be less violent, and enjoy higher levels of well-being and happiness. In contrast, others worried that a decline in church membership would result in fewer church resources for social causes like feeding and educating the poor.
Whether those worries are empirically well-founded is unclear. However, there is one worry that we focus on here, namely: the claim that a declining church membership will result in a decline in the moral fabric of the United States:
But modern America’s lack of a moral compass can be directly attributed to that basic lack of Church attendance […] Too many are following the ways of man as opposed to the Way of the Cross. The Judeo-Christian tradition has a lot of good guidelines to consider, even if you do not practice […] Honor thy father and thy mother. Thou shalt not murder. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
If one thought of the church as an invaluable social tool for instilling moral values in a society, it would then make sense to see the decline in church membership as a crisis. There are though good reasons to doubt this assessment—where instilling moral values is concerned, there really isn’t much of a crisis.
The first reason to doubt that this is a moral crisis is that it looks likely folks most likely to cease membership are those who weren’t that keen on church to begin with. As the New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat astutely observed, back in 2019:
The relative stability of the Gallup data fits with analysis offered by the sociologists Landon Schnabel and Sean Bock in a 2017 paper, ‘The Persistent and Exceptional Intensity of American Religion.’ … [They] argued that the recent decline of institutional religion is entirely a function of the formerly weakly affiliated ceasing to identify with religious bodies entirely; for the strongly affiliated (just over a third of the American population), the trend between 1990 and the present is a flat line, their numbers neither growing nor collapsing but holding steady across an era of supposedly dramatic religious change.
Second, there is a more basic reason to doubt that a decline in church membership will result in a decline in moral values: people act morally for the same reason that they were members of a church namely to signal their commitment to their community.
Before we delve into this point, we should first understand the nature of signaling. What is it to signal, and why do people engage in signaling? First to signal is to say or do something which conveys valuable information about someone to those around them. An obvious example is that of the peacock: the male peacock has bright colorful features to signal fitness to potential mates. Why does he do this? Consider that having bright features makes one a target for predators—yet if a peacock has bright features for a while, and hasn’t yet been eaten, it is a good signal he is fit, and would make a good mate; he’s good at surviving, despite having a handicap that makes him obvious to predators. Another example is the act of lifting two hundred pounds above one’s head: to do that would require a lot of strength; something that one couldn’t fake if they lacked the strength.
Signaling is important for human cooperation. We depend on the cooperation of others for our survival—one of the most distinctive aspects of humans is our capacity to cooperate with nearly anyone, on nearly any task. Many animals—like bees, beavers, and wolves—cooperate, but only on a rigid set of tasks with others closely related to them. Humans, in contrast, cooperate with relatives, friends, and even strangers on a wide range of tasks from a forming social clubs, religious organizations, businesses, and so on. Without the cooperation of others, we wouldn’t be able to survive—we need others to cooperate with us to survive, as we often cannot do things on our own, whether it’s hunting parties in ancient societies, or a division of labor in contemporary ones. As Dan Sperber and Nicolas Baumard forcefully argue:
Throughout their lifetime, humans depend for their survival and welfare on frequent and varied cooperation with others. In the short run, it would often be advantageous to cheat, that is, to take the benefits of cooperation without paying the costs. Cheating however may seriously compromise one’s reputation and one’s chances of being able to benefit from future cooperation. In the long run, cooperators who can be relied upon to act in a mutually beneficial manner are likely to do better in what may be called the ‘cooperation market.’
The problem with a highly cooperative species like ours is that we must be able to differentiate individuals who would make good cooperators from free-loaders—those who benefit from the contributions of others, and yet won’t contribute anything themselves, even when they have the ability. We cannot read the intentions of others, so sometimes it is hard to know who is sincere in what they say—talk is cheap, as they say—from those who would free-ride on the hard work and contributions of others. We wouldn’t start a business with a flake, or marry someone who will not keep their promises, by example.
This is where good signals—ones hard to fake—comes into the picture. A hard-to-fake signal can provide information for differentiating between individuals who commit to doing their fair share and those who would rather free-ride on the efforts of others. So a good signal, one that is hard to fake, is valuable for cooperative species like humans. Here though you may wonder how this applies to religion. Signaling theories argue religious observance and affiliation is partly explained by our need to signal to others we really are part of the group, and will contribute our fair share for the welfare of the tribe. As John Shaver and Richard Sosis explain:
From an evolutionary perspective, religion is perplexing because its many manifestations appear nonfunctional or maladaptive. At the very least, ritual behavior involves temporal and energetic costs, but rituals are also often incredibly painful and even dangerous. Anthropologists have applied [signaling theory] to the study of ritual behavior and suggest that the costliness of ritual behavior ensures that it reliably communicates an individual’s commitment to the group […].
Religious ceremonies, rituals, and so on look wasteful from an evolutionary point of view—they waste time and resources. They don’t obviously keep us warm or fill our bellies. And we know evolution abhors waste: if we spent every hour, by example, painting rocks, and ignoring our empty bellies, evolution would quickly rectify this by swapping us with others who had better priorities. So then, where evolution is concerned, we should find religious observance puzzling. However, if by engaging in costly signaling, like devoting time and energy to religious rituals, we could thereby signal to others we’re committed to the group—e.g., engagement rings while impractical, signal a romantic commitment to someone since they’re expensive and wasteful. Since cooperation, and how we look to others, is important for our survival, religious observation and practices have an evolutionary explanation after all.
Return to whether a steep decline in church membership reveals a crisis instilling moral values among Americans. We should be doubt it reveals anything like that. Why? Since humans are a cooperative species who rely on help from others, we have a need to signal that we will be good cooperators to others. And religion is but one way to do that. Moral values likely do that too. We want a good moral reputation—it matters how we look to others, so they will be more likely to cooperate with us:
If you were endowed with a moral sentiment that made you feel bad when you cheated your partner, even if no one could see that you had that sentiment, this would make you better able to resist the temptation to cheat in the first round. And that, in turn, would enable you to generate a reputation for being a cooperative person, clearly to your advantage.
So even as church membership wanes, we shouldn’t expect moral values to wane too—we need some reliable method for signaling to others that they can trust us. And that role can be filled by moral values, just as easily as church membership. This isn’t to deny these numbers may be a crisis for other reasons—church membership is likely more than simply about instilling moral values. It is to point out that a dearth of moral value among Americans isn’t likely one of them.
The Church Membership Crisis That Wasn’t
Interesting take on Church membership. Personally, I was not thinking of the "morality card" being whipped out - I had other thoughts about the decline in membership (from personal experience).