Secularization is More Complicated than You think
First things first … this post is an experiment. I subscribe to the NY Times, and supposedly I get 10 free “gift” shares per month that allow non-subscribers to get past the paygate. I know I can share them directly to Facebook and they work for whoever reads them. But I'm not sure if they will work by sharing the link on this post. My hope is that anybody who tries to read the op-ed linked to this post will be able to do so without being shut-out by a paygate. I'll look forward to hearing from some non-subscriber about whether they can read it or not.
Anyway, this column from Jessica Grose of the NYT is interesting, and does a good job of making clear that while participation in 'religious life' may be declining – as indicated by the closure of 6,000 to 10,000 churches across America closing down every year, we're not on the verge of a religion-free USA. And while fewer people go to church or participate in church life, many people hang on to their religious identities as a cultural label, if nothing else.
As the introduction on a soon-to-be posted page on this website will explain, I am among that group … being an agnostic with no distinct notion of a higher power or divine evolution or however one wants to refer to the 'supernatural' great beyond, and no real sense that it's important to latch on to any specific belief. Nevertheless, when somebody asks what religion I am, I say I'm Catholic, because in truth I feel Catholic.
I unpack that idea in the article on the Cultural Catholic page I'm adding very soon. So for now, I'll just say that I subscribe to Catholicism in large part because I believe that, at least in this country, the average white person has very limited overarching cultural choices. Of course all of us belong to various “subcultures.” But in the largest sense, there's only three possibilities. Just about all of us, I mean, are Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish in our orientation and worldview.
Jewishness remains primarily a 'racial' category rather than a 'religion.' So while a Jew can disavow that affinity, it's awfully hard for them to disavow their heritage and “jewishness” on at least an historical level. For the rest of us, we may say we are atheist … as some 31% of Americans did in a 2021 study, according to citations in this article. But it's very hard, I think impossible, for the great majority of white folks to really cut loose from the cultural immersions that go with protestantism or Catholicism because, in short, we have no other cultural oceans to swim in.
Anyway, that discussion can wait for the posting of my “The Cultural Catholic” page, which I've been working on but haven't quite got worked out.
For the moment, this article is the first of a series about religious life in America by Grose. Because religiosity, and church politics, and the role of theology and religious philosophy in daily life have long been of great interest to me, I look forward to the forthcoming pieces. This particular article is, I think, a good introduction, and at least identifies some of the questions and hints at some of the answers that I think will resonate with me. And as a start, it does a good job of “problematizing” (a word academics use to indicate a particular issue is more complex than most people think it is) people's attitudes and statements about religion.
I hope that anybody who wants to read this article can do so from here.