Coming Apart : The State of White America, 1960-2010 (9780307453440) by Murray Charles

Author:Murray, Charles [Murray, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307453440
Publisher: Random House Digital
Published: 2012-01-31T05:00:00+00:00

Secularization

The central fact about American whites and religion since 1960 is that whites have become more secular across the board, in every socioeconomic class. But the whole story is more complicated and interesting than that.

From the beginning of the twentieth century through the eve of World War II, American church membership and attendance did no more than keep pace with population growth. Maybe not even that. After piecing together the elusive data on such questions for the first decades of the century, historian William Hutchinson concluded that attendance actually eroded over that period.10 Nominal membership remained high, with three-quarters of Americans claiming membership in a church or synagogue when asked by pollsters, but weekly attendance was much lower. In the prewar Gallup polls, the low point occurred in 1940, when only 37 percent of the respondents said they attended worship services in the preceding week.11

Then, suddenly and for no obvious reason, membership and attendance both started to rise and continued to rise during the 1950s, reaching historic highs. The membership apogee occurred in the mid-1960s.12 The attendance apogee occurred around 1963, according to the Gallup data.13 So when the General Social Survey (GSS) took its first reading of religiosity in 1972, America was already several years into a decline. With that in mind, here’s the story that the GSS documents.

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