In his brilliant 1953 history of America, “Seedtime of the Republic: The Origin of the American Tradition of American Liberty,” Clinton Rossiter described a religious landscape that would, in modern lingo, be described as a marketplace.
Competition was fierce in the business of saving souls; dozens of denominations and sects and cults and vague persuasions had come to America.
Rossiter identified many of the major players: In 1775, the Congregationalists had 668 churches, the Presbyterians had 588, Anglicans 495, Baptists, 494 – and the others, including the Jews and the Catholics and the Sandemanians and the Lutherans and the Dutch Reformed and many, many more.
The strongest incumbent churches acted as any dominating business would – using government to create barriers to entry, establishing obstacles to competing religious folks from holding political office or, in some cases, from practicing their faith at all.
The recent national synod of the United Church of Christ in Hartford continued to reflect an economic model of religion. The denomination spent a good part of its meeting fidgeting with the marketing plan, to stem a loss of customers in recent years.
Not only individuals, but entire congregations, have left the UCC, with the popular wisdom suggesting that the UCC had become too lefty-liberal and too enamoured with “social justice,” at the expense of the spiritual that many prefer.
In a sense, the UCC effort to make nice with its more traditional, “religious” members is not much different than Wal-Mart revising its not-terribly-successful experiment to go “upscale” a bit.
And religious folks have their own versions of Wall Street analysis. The UCC synod prompted this comment from Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion and Democracy – a Washington advocacy group that prefers God-stuff to be traditional and conservative:
“The UCC embodies the dysfunction of declining, old-line Protestantism in America. Its elites, unaware or uninterested in the beliefs of average local church members, devote themselves to radical political causes instead of traditional Gospel. The inevitable result has been a massive hemorrhage in membership, finances and overall cultural influence.”
That’s the kinds of analysis that would drop the stock price a few bucks a share.
At about the same time the UCC was meeting in Hartford, the Southern Baptists held their annual convention in San Antonio, where they argued over marketing and branding and how “conservative” they should be.
The main-line Protestant denominations are suffering from a variety of market pressures, from consumers who have lost interest in the product; from aggressive competitors that have stolen customers away; from a decline in the competitive advantage of being “Protestant.”
A University of Chicago study suggests that Protestants will soon be a minority religion in America, for the first time in its history.
A Harris Interactive poll in 2004 found that most Americans “believe in God,” but aren’t necessarily inclined to “participate in organized worship.”
While the mainline Protestant faiths battle to create some new marketing sizzle, the “conservative” evangelical Protestant groups have successfully targeted the main-line faithful who want a bit more transcendence and a bit less left-wing political posturing from the denominational leadership.
The battle for souls is much like the battle for consumers of ice cream or variable annuities.
The old Institute for the Future think tank in Middletown had this to say in 1970 about the religious landscape: “Churches today are more than custodians of the symbols, rituals and cultural history of the religious which they interpret. They are (or have been) welfare agents, educators, acculturators, employers, medical healers, sanctifiers, social directors, instruments of social status, moralizers, hope givers, politicians, social critics and contributors to social justice. But above all, churches are institutions that…move to perpetuate themselves and grow.”
Perpetuate themselves and grow. Sounds sort of like a business plan, doesn’t it?
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
