Barack Obama's America: How New Conceptions of Race, Family, and Religion Ended the Reagan Era by John Kenneth White

Author:John Kenneth White
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Five • Shrunken Congregations, Soulful Citizens

“This is a Christian Nation.”

—HARRY TRUMAN, 1947

“Christianity will go.”

—JOHN LENNON, 1966

CHRISTMAS DAY 2007. At precisely 10 A.M. the White/Prevost family made its usual trek to the century-old St. Anne's Shrine in Fall River, Massachusetts. But as we took our seats and admired the familiar Christmas decorations, something was clearly amiss. Unlike the crowded pews of past Christmases, this particular mass had no more than 75 worshipers, most of them elderly. Only two children were present, including our daughter, Jeannette. The pastor took note of the empty seats, telling the few gathered that many others had gone to mass either the day before or at midnight.

Still, the vacant pews were a shock, especially to me. I was reared in the 1950s, when Sunday mass attendance (and in particular, Christmas Day mass) was virtually compulsory. I am hardly alone in having such recollections. In The Lost City, Alan Ehrenhalt remembers that in 1957, the Catholic church in his Chicago neighborhood had 1,100 seats filled to capacity every Sunday at nearly “every hour on the hour”: “at seven o'clock, Page 154 → when the nuns attended and Monsignor Fennessy sometimes presided; at nine, when the parish children filed in and arranged themselves next to their school classmates; at noon, when the stragglers got their final chance to avoid starting the new week on a sinful note.”1 A 1958 poll confirms these remembrances: 75 percent of Catholics surveyed said they attended mass every week.2 As Bishop Kenneth Untener of Saginaw, Michigan, put it, “When I grew up you had two choices: go to Mass … or go to hell. Most of us chose Mass.”3 Such devotion (however compulsory) certainly enhanced one's sense of religious identification: in 1952, 83 percent of Catholics told pollsters that their religion was a very important part of their daily lives.4

But in the twenty-first century, shrunken congregations in Catholic parishes and other houses of worship are commonplace. According to a 2005 survey, only 40 percent of Catholics attend mass on any given Sunday, while the number of young Catholic churchgoers has dropped to a mere one in five.5 Charles Morris notes that starting in the late 1960s, “skipping Sunday Mass was quietly, if unofficially, dropped from the Catholic catalog of mortal sins.” “Rightly or wrongly,” he argues, “most Catholics apparently feel that once-or-twice-a-month Mass attendance keeps them in sufficient touch with their religion.”6 Even among religiously active Catholics, the once-familiar church practices are falling by the wayside: 61 percent never pray with a rosary, 76 percent never engage in the novena (nine consecutive evenings of prayer), 44 percent never participate in the stations of the cross, and 53 percent never attend benediction.7

Catholics are hardly alone in loosening ties to established faiths. Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow reports that although 58 percent of those surveyed believe that “Christianity is the best way to understand God,” only 25 percent think it is “best for everybody.” Today Wuthnow finds that most Americans see elements of truth in

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