Yesterday we blogged about what appears to be a religious cycle, in which countries vacillate between times of religious indifference to times of intense religious commitment. I came across another discussion of religious cycles that is somewhat different. I disagree with the study’s applications and conclusions, but, looking at their findings from a different angle, I find it illuminating.
The useful website Study Finds, which tracks the latest research in various fields, posted a report entitled Why More Americans Believe in God—But Not Religion. Researchers found that while church attendance and affiliation has been plummeting, belief in God, spiritual reality, and various religious practices such as prayer and meditation are still very high.
Throughout history, religious movements have often begun as challenges to established systems before eventually becoming institutions themselves. The research team sees today’s shift as part of that recurring pattern: people rejecting what they view as rigid, politicized religious structures while seeking more authentic forms of spiritual connection. . . .
The researchers developed a concept they call the “faith-religion cycle” to explain these patterns. Rather than seeing religious change as a straight line toward greater secularization, they propose a pendulum that swings between institutional religion and more individualized faith expressions throughout history.
This framework challenges assumptions about inevitable secularization. Instead of simply becoming less religious, many young Americans are finding new ways to engage with spirituality outside traditional structures – similar to how religious reformers have done throughout history. . . .
What we’re witnessing isn’t the death of religion but its transformation. Young Americans are crafting spiritual identities that prioritize authentic self-expression and moral consistency over institutional loyalty – breaking free from bureaucratic structures while still seeking meaning, purpose, and connection.
For the original study, published in the sociology journal Socius, see Breaking Free of the Iron Cage: The Individualization of American Religion.
Now the study fixates on individualism, neglecting the communal dimension of church-going, and it ascribes the desertion of institutional religion to LGBTQ issues, while half-way admitting that mainline liberal Protestant denominations are all in on the LGBTQ cause, but they are shrinking faster than any other church body. The study attributes that to the mainliners still being “bureaucratic,” which is out of synch with the emotional orientation of people today, which evangelicalism–despite its conservative politics–does appeal to. The study’s historical survey is perfunctory.
So let me help the researchers out by supplying some historical examples of “people rejecting what they view as rigid, politicized religious structures while seeking more authentic forms of spiritual connection” and “religious movements [beginning] as challenges to established systems before eventually becoming institutions themselves.”
But I would propose this additional thesis: Established systems don’t go away when they provoke reform movements. Rather, even though the reform movements go their separate ways, the established systems tend to change, either because of the influence of the reform movements or resistance to them.
The obvious example would be the Reformation. Medieval Catholicism had become bureaucratic, impersonal, and ossified. Luther offered “more authentic forms of spiritual connection.” Contrary to how it’s usually described, Luther didn’t break away from the Catholic church; rather, he was excommunicated–thrown out of the Catholic church–which meant the formation of new ecclesiastical structures.
On the Catholic side, though, the Reformation gave birth to the Counter-Reformation. Many of the abuses Luther attacked–such as the selling of indulgences, the moral and financial corruption of the clergy, and the lack of education of the priesthood –were addressed and put a stop to by the Counter-Reformation. At the same time, the Council of Trent reacted against Reformation theology in a way that more clearly codified what the Roman Catholic Church believed, such as the authority of the pope, the role of good works in salvation, and the nature of the sacraments.
Nevertheless, to counter the Reformation, the Catholic church created a new emphasis on individual, personal piety. Many elements that have become definitive of Catholic devotion–sacramentals (rosaries, holy water, and other “holy objects), meditations, the pursuit of mystical experiences, the standardized “Tridentine” (which comes from the Latin for “Trent”) Mass–became prominent among the laity over after the Counter-Reformation. An especially significant example is frequent, even daily, reception of Holy Communion. In the Middle Ages, the laity might receive the sacrament once or twice a year, otherwise just watching the priests consecrate and consume the sacrament.
To trace this tendency in my own tradition, the new Lutheran churches flourished–theologically, artistically, intellectually, musically–in the late 16th and 17th centuries, which became the “golden age of Lutheran orthodoxy.” Then arose a reaction, the Pietist Movement, which opposed “dead orthodoxy” and stressed a more personal, less institutional piety. The established church opposed that, and yet the Lutheran “Awakening” of the 19th century, the revival of confessional Lutheranism that would lead to the migrations that would form the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, offered a more personal faith like the Pietists called for.
Meanwhile, in England, the Anglican church became ossified, but then John Wesley brought back a personal faith, which led to the Methodist Church but also to evangelical Anglicanism. In America, the major denominations churches became somewhat stagnant, but the revivals of the various Great Awakenings not only won many fervent converts, but inspired many of the major denominations to emulate revivals in their worship services.
I’m sure the modernist theologians of the 20th century felt they were offering “more authentic forms of spiritual connection” to the old-fashioned churches of their day, giving us the reforms of Vatican II among the Catholics and the social and psychological gospels of Mainline Liberal Protestantism. But reaction against them led to the evangelical movement, which offered that personal faith that the liberals were trying to demythologize. Not only that, the evangelicals, in combating the liberals, grew in their intellectual and organizational sophistication.
To go back to the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, the denomination’s conflict with its own liberal theologians in the Seminex walkout (who felt they were offering “more authentic forms of spiritual connection” to old-fashioned, out of date Lutheranism), led to a greater defining and strengthening of confessional Lutheranism.
Today, confessional Lutheranism is also being challenged as too old-fashioned from another direction by non-denominational evangelicalism, the church growth movement, contemporary worship advocates, and other trends of “conservative” Christianity in its contemporary forms.
To what extent should today’s LCMS be influenced by these movements and to what extent should it resist them? Should we too be more “non-denominational” in playing down our doctrinal distinctives and imitating the megachurches? Should we throw out our Lutheran liturgy and bring in the guitars, drums, praise songs, screens, and the other conventions of contemporary worship like everybody else? Some pastors and congregations think we should, or at least to a certain extent.
Or should the LCMS resist this “reform movement”? It seems to me that resistance is a type of influence, one that can benefit and even change an institution in a positive direction.
My impression is that due to the resistance to both the liberals and the evangelicals, confessional Lutheran congregations are now more doctrinal, more liturgical, and more sacramental–all in line with the Book of Concord–than they used to be, even during the fight against Seminex.
Used to, LCMS congregations had Communion as seldom as once a quarter. Then once a month. When we joined in 1979, we received the sacrament twice a month. Today, I think it’s pretty much the norm, even among the more “missional” churches, to have the Sacrament every Sunday, as called for by Luther and the Confessions. (See this.) That’s progress, in my opinion, a genuine reform that came from interacting with but saying “no” to these other reform movements.
And what about what this original study is saying, that the current religious reform movement can be seen in the Nones who are “spiritual, but not religious”?
Certainly, in Christianity the non-denominational movement reflects this anti-institutionalism while still keeping the church as congregations. We are also seeing a recovery of traditional Christian spirituality, as in the revival of the Latin Mass, especially popular among young adults, though strongly opposed by the Catholic bureaucracy. I think I am seeing this impulse also in other traditions, including Lutheranism.
Wait. I just realized I’m sounding like Hegel! Thesis brings forth anti-thesis, followed by synthesis. A movement brings forth its opposite, leading to a synthesis of the two.
For the record, though Hegel was a professed Lutheran, I renounce his pantheistic theology, his historical reductionism, and his overall philosophy. But maybe he was on to something about the history of ideas.
Illustration: Wilhelm Hegel (1831) by Jakob Schlesinger – anagoria, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33762804
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