The Hidden Revival

The great postwar religious revival in the U.S. is over--and many church leaders are thankfully saying "Amen." The 1963 Yearbook of American Churches reports that membership among religious bodies is falling behind the rate of population growth; TIME correspondents, interviewing ministers, priests, rabbis and informed laymen across the country, find general agreement that the Yearbook evidence is right. They also find agreement that a hidden and more profound revival of the religious impulse is beginning to take shape within the churches. Visible in this new shaping of U.S. religious life are some important trends and significant distinctions:

P: Established, Biblically conservative groups, such as the Baptist churches, are losing some of their appeal, while some sects on both the left and right are growing. Such liberal organizations as the Unitarian Universalist Association claim higher membership among intellectuals and professional men, and evangelical groups, notably the storefront-centered Pentecostals, are gaining ground in the city among Negroes and Latin Americans.

P: Mainstream Protestantism, still surging in the suburbs, has suffered heavily in the industrialized "inner city." In Boston, 24 Protestant churches closed down between 1950 and 1960. while 32 surrounding suburbs have shown an increase in church affiliation that is greater than the population growth. "In the outer ring of the city," says the Rev. Raleigh Sain, Director of Strategy and Church Planning for the Detroit Council of Churches, "we are still holding our own. The inner city is still losing, but we're starting to retrench and fight a holding action."

P: Roman Catholic leaders everywhere acknowledge losses due to the church's stand on divorce and contraception, but find that problem negligible compared with the simple task of building enough churches and schools to serve the remaining communicants. Washington, D.C.. for example, may need 42 new parishes by 1980. Church officials in Illinois' Cook County expect to establish 300 new parishes in the next 25 years, and will need to build new high schools to accommodate a 350% increase in the teen-age population.

P: Within Judaism, Conservative and Reform synagogues are generally gaining at the expense of Orthodox congregations. Yet in Greater New York, home to almost half of the nation's Jews, Orthodoxy shows surprising strength among the third and fourth generations; about 40,000 children are currently enrolled in the Hebrew day schools run by Orthodox groups.

To many who study the American churches, the end of the boom is no surprise at all. Jewish Scholar Will (Protestant-Catholic-Jew) Herberg of Drew University argues that a natural growth ceiling has been reached. "The market is simply saturated," he says. "It is impossible that the figures should have kept on rising." Others believe that the boom itself was much exaggerated and never accurately reflected the inner strength of religious feeling. "It was a boom in numbers and dollars and buildings," argues the Rev. Robert D. Allred of the First Presbyterian Church in Middletown, N.Y. "We were caught in the trap of statistical success."

Too many people were brought into church by fear of war, hope of social prestige, or for other nonreligious reasons. Washington's Methodist Bishop John Wesley Lord charges that "the church recruited people who had been starched and ironed before they were washed." In the nuclear age, suggests San Francisco's puckish Episcopal Bishop James Pike, God became "a sort of tranquilizer pill to a populace keeping a wary eye on the sword of Damocles." Others who joined churches found them not serious enough, or contemptibly unconcerned with corruption and injustice.

Always a Minority. Many of the parishioners who casually drifted into religion have just as casually drifted out of it--a fact that has caused many ministers to look at their flocks with new realism. Says Dr. Dietrich Ritschl of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary: "Christians are, and always have been, in the minority. I don't think that's the meaning of 'salt of the earth'--that everyone becomes salt." Some churches have voluntarily pruned the names of nonworshiping Sunday golfers from their roles of "active" members in a much-neglected procedure called maintenance of the rolls. In Washington, D.C., the nondenominational Church of the Savior requires prospective worshipers to take a two-year course of study in the Bible and Christian principles, has accepted only 150 full-fledged members in 16 years.

Now, argues Robert Reagan, chief of public relations for Los Angeles' Episcopal diocese, "there is a smaller percentage of church attenders, but an increased percentage of church participants." The Rev. Dr. Bryant Kirkland of Manhattan's Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church observes that there is a "marked evidence of personal religious commitment among our new membership." This commitment shows up in countless ways--in more lay interest in theological study classes, in impromptu Bible study cells set up in private homes, in parishioners' demands for better sermons and more dignified worship, in cutting down social activities in churches. Says the Rev. Andrew Greeley, study director of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago: "Every indication I get gives me the impression that people are more intensely concerned with what religion means in their lives and more are eager to do something about it."

A Gain in Vitality. The cresting of the postwar revival leaves churches looking for new ways to do their work. Protestant churches in scores of U.S. cities have sensibly ended the cutthroat competition for members, joined to set up thriving new interdenominational inner-city missions, many of them modeled after New York's famed East Harlem Protestant Parish. Such missions operate everything from credit unions to narcotics clinics, place service to the poor ahead of proselytizing. "The city churches are not gaining in membership," says Presbyterian Robert McAfee Brown, professor of religion at Stanford, "but they are gaining in vitality."

Churches are also searching for new ways to minister to an increasingly mobile population. In Philadelphia's West Mill Creek redevelopment project, 3,200 residents are served by a young Presbyterian minister who has no church, preaches no sermons, collects no contributions. Instead, the Rev. Eugene Turner simply moves among the development homes, offering his help, and only incidentally guiding the religiously inclined to the church of their choice. "Mine is a ministry of mobility," he says. "I can most successfully meet these people without the traditional institutional forms." In Denver, pastors are worrying about how to reach families living in the anonymity of tall new apartment buildings. "They are sealed in their apartments," says Dr. Paul Noren, the Augustana Lutheran pastor who is president of the Denver Area Council of Churches, "but they are a responsibility of the church." To reach these hidden Christians, many Denver churches play down Sunday worship in favor of midday services during the week.

Believer from Pagan. Church leaders readily grant that all is not yet apostolic. The suburbs remain a center of concern, and some ministers feel that a vast majority of Christians still have no sense of commitment at all. "When I look out into the market place." complains one Catholic priest, "I can no longer distinguish the believer from the pagan. I can distinguish the Jehovah's witness; I can distinguish the followers of Father Divine --but not the followers of the traditional faiths." A majority of clergymen gloomily accept the guilt of the churches for failing to administer to the Negro, the workingman, the drug addict, the divorcee--to nearly everyone, in fact, but the prosperous middle classes. Too often, says Stanford's Brown, paraphrasing the time-honored description of the Anglican Church in Britain, U.S. Christianity "is simply the Republican Party at prayer."

Yet even as they criticize, these clerics note that since the church-going boom ended, the nation's great religious bodies have begun to face up to realities. Many pastors believe that their churches will be more relevant, and accomplish more good, with a committed core of true believers. "The church is moving inward," says Dr. Blake Smith, pastor of Austin's University Baptist Church. "There are a great many experiments, little trailblazers, to rediscover the reality that lies beneath the outward structure."

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