Unorganized religion

Congregants at Our Savior's Lutheran Church worship before a mural of Christ some three stories tall. It is a magnificent depiction of Jesus clothed in purple robes, a small crimson cross on each foot and hand where the spikes of the crucifixion were driven, his face turned to heaven while being showered in light.

Sunday mornings in my youth I gazed transfixed at the mural. As I sat on the hard oaken pews of the Sioux Falls church, squeezed between family members, it captivated me, bringing both solace and dread to my young mind.

A survey released this week suggests it is getting harder for even God to hold America's attention these days.

Conducted by the Pew Research Center, the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey found a significant number of adult Americans have either changed their religious affiliation for another or severed their affiliation altogether. Specifically, almost 13 percent of those surveyed said they were raised in a certain faith but no longer consider themselves members of a particular religion.

Add to this group the people who practice a different religion than the one they did in their childhood – say Catholicism instead of Protestantism or from Muslim to Jew – and the number increases to 28 percent of adult Americans. Add to these groups those people who have switched affiliation within a particular faith – say Protestants who were Baptists as children and now are Methodists as adults – and the number of adult Americans who profess a different religion than the one of their childhood climbs to 44 percent.

In interviewing more than 35,000 Americans, credit the Pew Research Center for being thorough. Its report confirms America's religious roots still run deep. The vast majority of adults in this nation – some 83 percent – lay claim to a faith, and even among those who do not, more than a third say religion remains important in their lives.

But the report also clearly underscores the increasingly vagabond nature of God's flock in this country and hints our collective devotion might be waning.

What could be precipitating these changes? The report doesn't say. It is true Americans have become an impatient lot. Consuming has them consumed, and even when they're wrong, they cling to the credo that the customer is always right. "Gratify us," they protest at work, at home and in places between, "or suffer the consequences."

Religion is the opposite. It rests in time, in perseverance. Humility and tolerance are its canons. Discomfort is not an uncommon effect. In religion nothing comes quick – least of all bliss. It requires heavy lifting and cannot be bought like a purse or a pair of earrings. To practice it well demands giving – not getting.

If not a distaste for disquiet, then perhaps what is eating at the margins of religion is competition. Want to watch Japanese teenagers traverse a foul-looking obstacle course? There is a television channel for you. Want to watch music videos? You need to be more specific. There are hip-hop channels and country channels and rock channels and bluegrass channels and even German folk music channels. Tire of watching TV and a universe of information and entertainment beckons on the Internet. The Web doesn't have all the answers. But it has a lot of them.

Like the rows of soda bottles that line convenience store coolers, it might appear to Americans there is not just one tonic for their souls anymore. The possibility exists to drown themselves in neat and uncomplicated diversions or, for those who want to continue to sip from the font of faith, to jump from one brand to the next. God has become a choice.

If America is indeed witnessing an erosion of religion – and that conclusion seems premature – religion itself must shoulder some of the blame. Decades of sex scandals have stained it. Earned or not, there also is a deepening impression that what matters most to religion is money. And though it invites guilt by association, religion has started to flex more political muscle.

In the estimation of some – particularly, one senses, young adults – religion and hypocrisy are strongly synonymous. That might be perceived as an unjust charge, but the Pew report appears to bear it out. One-quarter of adult Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 cite no religious affiliation. In comparison, according to the survey, only 8 percent of Americans older than 70 are unaffiliated.

One suspects as young adults who are without religious affiliation in America today get their feet under themselves, a good number will return to the traditions of their childhood. Life is a hard slog without faith. That message, I believe, is in the Pew report. And it most certainly is on the wall at Our Savior's Lutheran Church.