Loading ...Does church attendance climb during a recession?
flockwoodOn Dec. 14, the New York Times had a front-page story about the alleged increase in church attendance due to the economic meltdown. Soon thereafter, CNN hopped on the story, too. I was skeptical that attendance is really up. I still am. Apparently, the Gallup organization has its doubts too, according to this article in Slate.
Assistant Economics Professor David Beckworth of Texas State University in San Marcos has written a paper arguing that the rate of growth at evangelical churches increases during recessions and that the rate of decline decreases at mainline churches. Beckworth was reviewing data from an era when evangelical churches were growing and mainline churches were in decline. Mainline churches, of course, are still in decline. What’s changed is that white evangelical churches are no longer growing. This is due to a number of factors, including lower birth rates and (believe it or not) the decline of mainline churches. Many of those “new” evangelicals were simply “old” mainliners who had switched churches. As the pool of potential mainline “converts” shrinks, it’s harder for evangelical churches to find new members.
The real question, I think, is whether the recession will help slow the evangelical church decline that appears to be looming. (For more on this topic, there are several recent books, including “The American Church in Crisis” by David T. Olsen.)
December 27th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
I don’t know if church attendance goes up during bad economic times or not. The press makes out the Episcopal Church as about to dry up and blow away, but you wouldn’t know that by the turnout at my parish’s midnight service on Christmas Eve. Of course you also wouldn’t know there was a recession on by how they dressed; PETA would have had a cow. And these are supposed to be liberals.
My son’s fiance manages a retail women’s clothing store, and she says that she thinks that in hard economic times, shoppers get surlier and meaner. She says that this year’s crop of shoppers was a lot meaner than last year’s. They haven’t tallied up their sales yet for the season, but she doesn’t seem to think that at least her store’s retail sales were much off from last year, though they were off by some factor. It will be interesting to see how all this plays out.