The following was originally posted on February 13, 2007:

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has an excellent news service that I read daily. Today they shared an excellent article on how religious identity is no longer a given. Instead, Americans are increasingly exercising their freedom of choice to switch their religious identity. Gone are the days when ethnic identity or religious heritage determined one’s own spiritual path.

According to the pew study, 8% of Americans had no religious identity at all in 1990. By 2001, that number had risen to 14%. During that time, twice as many Americans left Catholicism as joined, and three times as many people joined “evangelical” Christianity as left.

The article states:

While religious switching may bring satisfaction to individual seekers, the phenomenon can be unnerving for religious leaders, who are vying for “customers” ever more aware of new options, according to Kosmin.

“We have a supply-side religious market with more competing firms each year,” he wrote in an e-mail interview. Megachurches are successful in part because they actively reach out to “potential” members, of which there are many in high-mobility suburbs and exurbs, Kosmin wrote.

But success in attracting new members doesn’t necessarily translate into success at keeping them, according to Daniel Olson, a sociologist at Indiana University South Bend who studies religious competition.

“There is a strong relationship between rates of leaving and rates of joining, both for congregations and whole denominations,” Olson wrote in an e-mail response to questions. The 2001 survey found, for example, that while the Mormons welcomed a relatively large number of converts, an equal number left the faith. Jehovah’s Witnesses and Buddhists displayed similarly high levels of turnover.

If things continue to move in this direction…with each individual shopping for his/her own faith, what does it mean for the Church in America. Obviously, many who read this article are drooling…for example, the seeker church crowd stands to gain by this trend. Mainliners are probably upset by this article, because their strength has come from ethnic and regional ties.

This is happening to congregations as well. Within the Baptist General Conference there has been talk of “rebranding”–clearly motivated by the bad baggage of the word “Baptist.” The BGC is clearly trying to identify itself more and more as a movement of seeker churches rather than a Baptist denomination. This push is part of the larger trend of trying to trade in an old religious identity for a new one.

This is also happening with congregations…I hear stories of many churches leaving their denomination to become non-denominational or to opt into a different denomination. My church, Missio Dei, is trying to opt into the Mennonite Church USA (though we aren’t going to break ties with our existing denomination).

The trend disturbs me, as a whole, because there doesn’t seem to be a lot of theological reflection or any sort of spiritual “revival” pushing the trend. Instead, we see people easily breaking ties with their past (which seems like a flighty consumer thing to do) to jump in bed with a new church–usually one that spends a lot of money or energy marketing to them (whether it is the marketing campaign of the mega-church or the evangelistic tactics of the Mormons). In other words, the church has pretty much conformed to free-market capitalism. The products that are being bought are the ones that are being heavily marketed.

And all the while, religious identity is becoming almost purely a matter of individual choice, rather than something formed in a community with a tradition and a way of understanding the world. This growing phenomenon is the big reason I don’t buy it when folks say that postmodernism has emerged and people are looking for a community in which to belong and find identity. American Consumer Capitalism is too seductive as a metanarrative, and everyone from Somali refugees to suburban goth kids are begining to see themselves, their world, and their faith through the lense given to them by Consumer Capitalism.

The BIG question is: What do we do about it? We can either 1) jump into the fray and start marketing to religious consumers (evangelical seeker church 2.0), 2) bitch about the phenomenon but do nothing (the Mainline approach), or 3) try to foster deeper Christian identity with the Christians we know (the monastic impulse).

Thoughts?

About Mark Van Steenwyk

Mark Van Steenwyk is a member of Missio Dei. He is a speaker, writer, educator, and grassroots organizer. With the support of the Central Plains Mennonite Conference, he travels to radical and intentional communities around the country to help network and offer support.