[lbo-talk] how many Americans go to church, and why?

Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net
Sat Apr 7 03:27:46 PDT 2007


On Friday 06 April 2007 20:36, Jim Farmelant wrote:
> The evangelicals place their
> emphasis on the formation of a personal relationship
> with God/Jesus. It's a highly individualistic form of
> religion, in contrast with the communitarianism of
> Catholicism. In theory, once you have established
> a personal relationship with God, the social aspects
> of religion become secondary.

Ah, but has it not been noted from time to time that theory and practice are two different things?

I grew up in a small town in the South and knew the evangelical Protestant 'scene' very well indeed. Up-close personal observation leaves me thoroughly convinced that the social matrix of the evangelical church is quite important in congregants' lives -- and the more 'into' religion they are, the more churchy their social circle is.

There's been something disappointingly reductionist and monocausal about this discussion so far -- as if the personal and social elements of religion were mutually exclusive, or could be distilled out for analysis by some sort of Trotskyist political-cultural-psychological chromatograph.

Admittedly, the Gallup poll was silly, as they usually are. The list of "reasons" for going to church was clearly compiled by some smug secular-bourgeois Philistine with no understanding or experience of religion at all; and asking people about their reasons for going to church, or for anything else that they do, is dumb from the get-go.

Still, there's something to be said for listening to people, and taking them seriously, even if they're Baptists, though Gallup went about it in a characteristically blockheaded way. This listening and talking seriously is something that a lot of us peoples' tribunes here on lbo-talk don't want to do. We already _have_ all the answers, thank you very much.

The people have lost our confidence; perhaps we should dissolve the people and elect a new one.



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