This blogpost has some addenda — pieces by Lyman Stone and Cameron Hilditch — to my earlier one, “What Does God Think of Us Americans?”
I begin with an interesting paper in April 2020 by Stone here.
Next, Hilditch, in National Review Online on December 13, 2020, cites and discusses Stone here.
Stone then had a piece here along similar lines in National Review’s June 14, 2021, issue, titled, “America Loses Religion, Somewhat.”
Hilditch — “How the West Lost God,” subhead “The overwhelming cause of secularization in the West has been government control of education” (NRO, July 25, 2021), link here — has a piece is similar to Stone’s (which it cites) in diagnosis:
This leaves religious believers with two options. On the one hand, they could start to build institutions with a view to overturning the existing prohibition on taxpayer funding of explicitly religious schools. The strict laicité-like reading of the establishment clause that underwrites this prohibition is completely ahistorical as far as an originalist reading of the Constitution is concerned, and there’s no textual reason why it should prevail in the long term if resistance is persistent and organized enough. Of course, in a diverse and expansive country that is home to many religions, tailored religious instruction will never make a comeback in the public schools — for practical reasons, to say nothing of the legal challenges that would arise. But there are many countries in the world wherein both secular government schools and religious schools receive state funding, and there’s no reason why this arrangement couldn’t obtain in the U.S.
The other option would be for parents to pull their kids out of public school and either homeschool them or pay for them to attend private religious schools instead. This is the easy way out for affluent parents, to be sure, but it would require creative and generous charity work on their part in order to make such an option available for eager working-class families.
These are the only two realistic routes to a religious renaissance in the United States. Secular schooling is the cause of religious decline in the West, and only actions that address this cause will change its effects.
Finally, on August 31, 2o23, there was an NRO post on another paper by Stone [(link to the paper itself here), the gist of which was: The decline in religiosity is a result, not of adults losing their faith as adults, but of children never acquiring faith to begin with — and this, in turn, is not that parenting today is a lot worse than it used to be, but that the culture outside the home is so secularized and antireligion. So parents need to be more aggressive in opposing this culture. The two key paragraphs from Stone’s conclusion (emphasis in original):
[L]oss of religion is about childhood socialization. School environments that prioritize career and never present religious vocation as an option, neighborhoods where churches are zoned out, churches preaching more political sermons than about the challenges of family and adolescence, the explosion of youth pornography usage, social media connecting young children to the social worlds of older children in a totally unsupervised platform, and so forth. The reality is that the last 30 years have seen a dramatic diminution of parental influence in general as kids spend more of their life in child care settings, at school, and online. This shift has protected them from some damaging influences (teens today do less drugs and have less premarital sex) but has also reduced the reach of some good influences (churches, parents).
For parents to keep their kids in the faith, they must recapture their influence. Shield children from schooling environments that relegate faith to a second-class topic, deny access to unsupervised online communities and pornography, and have daily, parent-led activities centered on family solidarity around shared faith. Families that do these things still have extremely high rates of successful religious transmission, but families who trust that children will “pick it up along the way” fail to transmit their religious beliefs, and suddenly find to their great surprise that their 20-something children categorically reject their faith.
Anyway, for anyone interested in the challenges to Christians maintaining their faith in modern America, Stone and Hilditch have done some very interesting work. Here’s a National Review link to Stone, and here’s a National Review link to Hilditch.
P.S. In T.S. Eliot’s “The Idea of a Christian Society,” he argues that, if a society is avowedly neutral rather than avowedly Christian, it will become anti-Christian — which is certainly consistent with what Stone and Hilditch are saying.