Bonus Episode: Interview with Dr. Patricia O’Connell Killen

Retired Religion Professor, Dr. Patricia O’Connell Killen, joined the Religion Desk to share insights on the changes in the religious landscape in the United States and how that has affected mainline congregations and denominations. You'll find the entire interview with Dr. Killen here.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

And and also, I mean we're recording now, but I'll do a lot of post-editing uh and I try to ed uh edit out the ums and you know's and all of that to kind of make it sound a little better. So my first question is the big one is why have mainline congregations changed so much that sometimes I look into the statistics that say like in the 50s that about half of the country was at least a member of a mainline congregation, and now it's maybe down to about 12 percent or so. So how would you describe that change, the whys of that change?

SPEAKER_00 0:38

First response is that the fate and fortunes of different religious denominations or communities in the U.S. have always been changing. So if we go way back out, for example, at the time of um when the the US becomes independent from Great Britain, you the religious landscape is dominated by Anglicans, Congregationalists, uh Presbyterians, what we think of now as more northern Baptists and Quakers.

SPEAKER_01 1:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

Um if we think about the Methodists, the Methodists get organized in this country in uh 1788 is the Christmas Conference. By 1810, they're the single largest Christian group in North America. Um so I I share that to put into context that the fortunes of religious communities are always tied to everything else that's going on socially and politically and culturally. You know, some would say Methodism fit um the kind of restless energy and expansionism of um the nation in a way that the uh churches out of the English Reformation didn't. So from the 17, you know, from 1780 on, um, the congregationalists who were the biggest very quickly become one of the smallest. Uh, in terms of what's happened since the 1950s, you know, that's a a more medium-term uh uh context to to think about. And there are there are a set of things that have happened uh that are tied to age cohorts. So uh for example, we have the boomers, um, the baby boomers who are born between 1946 and 64, then we have Gen X, 65 to 80, millennials 81 to 96, and Gen Z 97 to 2012. Um and the biggest shift in uh what's happened, the the reason why everybody is noticing the change now in every kind of denomination is the shift in behavior between the boomer generation and generation X. And historically, when people got older in this country, they would get more religious. So um, if if you as a seminarian would have raised the question, what seems to be happening here? And older church leaders would say, Oh, it's just we'll be just fine, they were banking on what had been a long practice that when people got married, settled down, had kids, they came back to church. That ceased to happen in the uh with the generation, the Gen X people reaching adulthood. And so um, since demography is destiny, if you don't have kids, the church doesn't last. Um that's where we saw the the shift in a historic pattern. Uh and the next generation, the millennials, are the ones who really significantly step away. There are a lot of reasons for this, these changes. Um of them have to do with what's going on, particularly in the decade of the 1990s and 2000s. If we step back, starting in the 1960s, there is an expansion of religious volunteerism and of individualism. So up until about 1960, you could predict someone's odds of religious affiliation if you knew about their family, their ethnicity, their education, and their region of the country. Um by the 19 by the end of the 1980s, that doesn't work anymore. Uh, and it's because as individualism um became more significant and expanded, if you will, Americans reached the position, and this was true by the late 1980s, that the vast majority of American adults thought the only way to come to your religious beliefs was all on your own. Which doesn't really make sense, but you had if you think about the history of Christianity, faith is always passed on through communities. But as we became a society where individual authenticity became the heart of everything, then people wanted to do it on their own. Even parents are concerned about talking to their children about religion because it might be oppressive. Um, and you know, there are a set of things that happened. I won't go through all of them. It would, I'd be a boring historian if I did that, but certainly the end of the Cold War is significant. Um the rise of um a meaner, more individually oriented form of capitalism, that you really are all on your own, and the beginnings of the unraveling of the social safety net in this country. Um the digital revolution plays a big part of this. Um, and the increasing move of millennials is uh into the cities as as they become adults. Um you've also got something that the sociologist Christian Smith calls the crucible of despair. So we have the the war on terror. You know, we've got two generations of adults who've never lived when we weren't in carrying out some kind of war on terror. Um the dot-com bust of the early 2000s, and then the the recession of the later 2000s, so you've got the dimming of the American dream for younger age cohorts. Um uh, and you have uh a world in which it become it's has become more acceptable not to be uh religious. Now, to zero that all this in on um the mainline denominations, which are also sometimes talked about as the churches of the magisterial reformation. In other words, they're the Christian bodies that can trace their history all the way back to the English and Continental Reformations. Um what's what's happened, if I had to put it in one sentence, is the larger social, political, cultural, psychic changes that have been going on in the late 20th into the through the first quarter of the 21st century, um have created a context in which the um two things have happened. One religious institutions, like most almost all other institutions, are not considered trustworthy, they're impersonal, and they are easily corrupted by money and power. Uh, and you could do a history of the 90s and 2000s just looking at the successive kinds of scandals in religious bodies, the sexual abuse and financial scandals. You can talk about Roman Catholics, you can talk about Southern Baptists, but then we've got all of our, you know, the Jim Bakers, the Jimmy Swaggerts, and we we can go on from there. So the institute because institutions are not seen as trustworthy, um, then what it and because we are the quote mainline denominations or used to be now we are often referred to as the sidelined or the old line, um yeah, what they offer is not plausible. So what I what I'm saying is the kind of nexus of factors that create the context of our lives um are out of alignment with the the nexus of factors that made the historic mainline denominations make sense. So I am not unusual as a baby boomer in that, for example, none of my nieces and nephews are any longer uh religious at all, let alone religious in the way that I have been. I'm what is referred to as a religious stable, the kind of person who was born and raised and still is in their religious community. Yeah. So so the issue is plausible, the issue is uh plausibility and trustworthiness. Um and as younger generations have become more critical of the flaws in faith communities and religious institutions, they um they just large numbers, the majority of them don't sense that the historic teachings or a tradition is something to bother with that doesn't need to be trusted. And besides, if you are a person, if if individual integrity is the center of everything, my individual integrity, which is my responsibility, is the anchor of life, then I don't want to get myself caught up in something that is going to um limit my options. There's a wonderful book by a uh millennial Pete Davis, um, called Dedicated, and in it he looks at why it is that he and his um co, you know, his friends and his peers admire people who are committed to something and stay with it, but themselves have a hard time committing. So um so the way people do life is different. I'll give you a concrete example. Um in historically, in mainline denominations, if we were active, if I'm active in a congregation, I may take on a role or an office. Sociologists who looked at the emergence of early megachurches, um, you know, huge churches and the post-denominational churches, those people are willing to take something on the members of the congregation, if it has a clear purpose, they can use the skills they have from their work life, and it has a clear time-limited commitment. So mainline denominations came out of a world and makes sense in a world where where we live, our family, our work are usually fairly physically proximate, and we have a sense of being part of something. Particularly with uh large numbers of millennials and and Gen Z, and even some people who are boomers are so into a digitally mediated life that um we just don't make sense. Uh sorry to ramble so much, but no, no, it's it's it's all good stuff.

SPEAKER_02 15:07

And the the thing, and I, and I'll go back later and and kind of make sense of this and and be sure and get the the main points out there. But the thing I'm taking from this is is often when I hear, because I've my adult life has been around mainline church communities, is the explanation for why the decline from the 50s is often, you know, they talk about theological, like too conservative or not conservative enough, or too liberal, or you know, or not progressive enough, or whatever. And but what you're describing is actually a lot of social forces that sound very complicated and it's not the easy blaming.

SPEAKER_00 15:46

Right. We like to blame ourselves because if I blame myself, then I yeah, then the corollary that is I should be able to figure out a program or a strategy that's gonna turn this around. And the fact of the matter is, as I started with the fortunes of religious bodies rise and fall in relation to a whole set of larger social converging forces. Now, that doesn't mean what the community, what the congregation does, doesn't matter, but it does matter where your congregation is. Um, that's part of it. Um, and it matters um, what can I say? It matters how you understand what the congregation and what the faith community, be it disciples or or presbyterian, you know, or Lutheran or whatever, um, or Methodist, what um, you know, what it's about. And the penchant in the United States for individuals to want to come to their religious ideas all on their own, which is very well established by the 1980s, makes the work of evangelism and formation of people in faith through religious education and faith activities in a congregation, you know, how do how do you make how do you do that in a way that's really inviting? Particularly if you know one of the larger cultural shifts that happened was the move to intensive parenting. So as the economy becomes meaner, society more stingy about any kind of social safety nets, parents want their kids to succeed. And you're not going to church on Sunday if you need your kid to be in the highest-level soccer uh league in town. Yeah, and so these are choices that that people are making. It's also true that millennials, especially, are very suspicious of the notion that there could be an overarching narrative into which one's life and experiences could fit. Um their immediate presumption is that a tradition or an overarching narrative is manipulative and constraining. It will somehow violate my authenticity as a person. It's not true for everybody. And that's why the work of pastors and of, I would argue, the lay people in mainline congregations, is to really listen and hear the questions that are young, younger age cohorts are asking, um, even though they may be asking them in a different kind of idiom. And then how do we how do we build the bridge?

SPEAKER_02 19:10

Okay. Well, if you could cast out 25 years, what do you what do you see the next 25 years for mainline denominations and churches look like?

SPEAKER_00 19:22

That's a really good question. Um and when I read it even the first time, I thought it it brought me back to um then a 19th century sociologist of religion, Ernst Telch, who talked about how in the 20th century um human beings were going to, their religiousness was going to become more um mystical, by which I mean um that there would be an increase in the desire of human beings for an intense interior human experience. And that then the 20th century, great 20th century theologian Carl Rahner, um, you know, has is is credited with saying that in the 20 or by the end of the 20th century, that um Christians really would need to have that kind of mystical, um, prayerful, contemplative way of being. So I think um I think 25 years from now, things, depending on what happens, you know, nuclear war could shift this a lot. Um or uh utterly catastrophic climate things happening. Um I don't think the mainline churches are not going to return to being the uh acknowledged moral spokes bodies for the larger culture. Our culture is very fractured. Um, what what we're going to see happen, I think, and what we're seeing happen, is something that actually has been going on since the beginning of religion in this country, Christianity in this country, which is a lot of innovation and experimentation. And I think um that takes different forms. For example, I have one colleague who uh took a position in Boston and their uh Spouse, who was a pastor, took uh a pastorship that took the, you know, the became the pastor of a very old, well-established uh American Baptist congregation in Cambridge. And it had a very big endowment and had a very small membership, and they knew they were dying, and they set this up and hired a pastor who would do new forms of ministry in the community, because the community where that church was located had been very um, you know, European American ethnic, and now it was much more multicultural, and so that's what the pastor did. So they're the pastor of this denomination, and the denomination's funds are supporting the work, and then they were innovating in the community. We're also going to have some churches uh who will be, it'll be kind of like the what was the case in the medieval period where uh monasteries were centers of learning and holding of the inheritance, the wisdom of the community. And so we've got we've got churches that are doing that. There's an episcopal church in um, I'm forgetting the name, in Portland, Oregon, um that I think it's St. Mary's, that very much runs all kinds of programs for all kinds of people. Um so there's there's going to be innovation. Some groups will die out. Um all groups will will grow and change, and we're we will see new new forms. Um the question, one of the questions that I have um is well, actually, two. There are two. One, what does it mean to be faithful in how we nurture a congregation and how that congregation serves in the world in the context we're in? Um where in a world where identity, politics, and personal authenticity mean so much, and where the public discourse that has become so brazenly coarse and kind of off the mark, um, how do we be faithful? Uh, and then secondly, how do we how do we take the tradition? Because if we think about tradition, what really is tradition? Well, it is the way human beings pass on accumulated insight about the meaning of our living, loving, creative, hoping, suffering, and dying to the next generation. And so how do we think about and uh convey that wisdom? And who who are going to be the the the keepers? So when I look at mainline denominations and and uh and think about what's um what's happening, it it varies by region of the country. And I'm in the Pacific Northwest, and I've this where I've done most of my my work and my research on religion in the Northwest. I think about it in terms of um, this is a metaphor. We are the nurse logs in a forest. A nurse log is an old tree, big old tree, that falls over when it dies, and it becomes the the nurture for all kinds of other plants. And this really struck me when I was on the west coast of Brent, Vancouver Island in Tefino, and I'm walking in this forest with these trees that are 1,500 years old, uh, huge, beautiful old growth forests, and I run across this nurse, this nurse log, and at one end of this huge old cedar tree, there's salal and ferns, and it and then I start seeing tree roots, and there's a hemlock that's you know at least 50, 60 feet high growing out of this thing. So I think um for mainline denominations to have clarity about what they're doing, kind of what is their mission, and that what matters is faithfulness to mission, um, and making finding ways to make that mission intelligible to others, but knowing we do what we do faithfully, but we can't guarantee an outcome, which goes totally against our cultural messages. Um, I think we're gonna see a lot of of creativity and and people will how do we find ways for people to visit the wells of the deep wisdom of Christianity and to discover that um the tradition not only carries the wisdom, it also has in it the sources of its own renewal and criticism. Uh, because one of the things that I notice in my conversations with young people and in the research that I've done is right now we're in a moment where people very quickly move from if it's flawed, reject it. The notion that it's I mean, there there is, I think, a false notion that people that people are easily operate out of that uh somehow we can get out of being part of humanity and make a judgment that will be true and accurate for all time. And it's like, no, you know, not how it works. Sure. Yeah. So okay. Well, I'd um so I'd say the hope for mainline congregations is um for people to get for members of congregations to get in touch with what has mattered, what have been the gifts of this for them, and then um how do we think about what it would mean to pass on those gifts to the people around us now? I think, for example, it's no accident that so many churches do daycare. Um they see uh see needs because one of the things that makes the mainline denomination stand out is there is in them goes back to their roots, a notion that we are responsible for the welfare of our brothers and sisters, not just the ones we know, not just the ones and close to us, but all of our brothers and sisters and welcoming welcoming strangers. And it's it's creative ways that congregations are finding to do that that that matter. Um and how, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:21

No, this is this is all perfect, and and I love the the metaphor of the nurse log, and it seems to me part of if you embrace that, that part of it is you have to be willing to to accept a little bit of death.

SPEAKER_00 30:33

A little, yeah, a little bit of death, and to be willing to accept change. Um yeah, because the yeah, and that that's I think um significant. I think there's a lot of really intriguing and good, uh amazing work being done on local levels, but even the structures of denominations are somewhat out of sync with how the world of business and and other things happen, you know, and then we watch things like um how can I put this? Rather than talking about the material needs of our neighbors, we have been sucked into a vortex of conflict over identity politics that's just exhausting. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:38

Um, is there anything you wish I would have asked about, or is there more that you want to get out there?

SPEAKER_00 31:46

Um I put this there is a presumption now that's very different than what was the case in the nineteen fifties. In the nineteen fifties, there was still there was respect for the clergy person that they had studied, and there was the notion that there that it mattered, some kind of expert knowledge about the Christian tradition and theology and scripture mattered. Um that evaporates by the year 2000. So now the presumption is one uh office doesn't matter. You might be the pastor, but you have to prove your credibility to me, prove your authority. Uh, and the second is people do not distinguish between their own personal opinions and what the theological teachings of a community might be. And they view those theological teachings as personal opinions as well. Um so I would say clergy need to be kind to themselves. Uh, I've the my scholarly work has been on religion in the Northwest, and I did a book in the early 2000s called Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest, the Nun Zone, which I put together the authors and such. Um, and one of the biggest things, um, one of the most important things is for people not to try and make the fruits of their labors their responsibility. You can't predict the outcome. Um, so I think one of the reasons there's been a renewed interest in forms of spirituality and uh practices of discernment that have been spreading in mainline denominations is because that's really what's what's needed now. We're in a precarious situation, an unprecedented situation. Um, and it takes a discerning spirit um to know how to lead and how to serve in the kind of context we're in when you've got when you're surrounded by a lot of ranting and raving and screaming that um it is not very helpful.

unknown 34:51

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:53

Well, thank you. You're welcome. Um