DuPage County, Illinois is a vibrant suburban county with over 930,000 residents, lots of jobs, and numerous communities. Like many suburbs, it has become more complex in recent years due to demographic, cultural, economic, and social changes. It is also home to hundreds of religious congregations.
Brian Miller (Professor of Sociology, Wheaton College, and co-author of Building Faith: A Sociology of Religious Structures) is using a quantitative approach focusing on DuPage County in Illinois, which is home to hundreds of religious organizations. He is documenting the number and types of transitioned congregations in the suburban context, looking for patterns of building usage and community impact.
I have started looking at sources that will help with the project. Here are two that are proving very helpful:
This builds on earlier work I have done regarding religious buildings. Based on existing research, I would expect a variety of outcomes for former religious buildings from no building present on the site to empty structures to buildings converted for other uses.
1. Allow Area N to remain a wetland and preserve the open space in line with the South Barrington park district’s overall mission.
2. If Area N will be sold for a development, access should not be granted through Acadia Drive. Acadia Drive is within a residential community that has no sidewalks and permitting access to the development through the residential community, without sidewalks (the Woods of South Barrington), presents a nuisance and would be grossly negligent on behalf of the Village and the South Barrington park district. There is a walking trail (that is accessed from Acadia Drive or feeds residents onto Acadia Drive) where the access would be granted and children and residents are outside after school, on weekend and holidays. These are all peak worship times. The school also presents this same safety issues at the end of the school day where children who live in the residential community are walking home from being dropped off by the school bus. The residential community should remain residential and not be subject to increased development traffic. As repeatedly noted, this is a significant safety concern. The safety of our children and residents should be top priority for the Village and the South Barrington park district.
3. Further we request access not be granted on Bartlett road at all to preserve the surrounding residential communities from the same safety concerns.
Additionally, some of those signing the petition offered reasons they do not want this particular church in their community.
While this is about a particular piece of land and a particular religious group working within a particular suburban community, these reasons are fairly standard from what I have seen in my research. They have concerns about losing open space/natural space and park land. They are worried about traffic in residential neighborhoods. They do not want a group that multiple commenters call a cult in their community.
This will work its way through the legal system and local government bodies. Suburbanites who do not want certain land uses nearby can be quite persistent in their efforts to make sure proposals they do not like reach a certain outcome. Whether they can guarantee the outcome they want is another matter.
Some readers mentioned fandom as a bonding mechanism — World Cup enthusiasts and participants in fantasy football leagues, for instance, are creating ongoing relationships. But mostly I heard from people who bonded through athletic activities. Some talked about clubs that formed organically in their neighborhoods or towns, like that Colorado hiking group. But many who answered the questionnaire I launched in April about moving away from organized religion talked about replacing their weekend worship with SoulCycle, CrossFit or Orangetheory, and finding friends and even some spiritual solace in those activities. (In case you’re wondering, I’m an Orangetheorist and a SoulCycle dropout, though I can’t say I’ve ever felt a metaphysical connection to either one.)…
Casper ter Kuile, the author of “The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities Into Soulful Practices,” studied CrossFit and SoulCycle when he was a student at Harvard Divinity School, and told me that he observed some of the “mutuality” that Johnson experienced when he talked to CrossFit devotees. CrossFitters write down their fitness goals on a whiteboard and, whether a goal is comparatively big or small, “goals are honored with the same amount of dignity and celebration.” There’s a feeling that you have the agency to meet your goals and that the community is also involved in your success. There’s also a lot of evangelizing for CrossFit that can parallel the outreach or recruitment aspect of religious worship…
SoulCycle even mimics some of the emotional beats and physical qualities of a church service. Ter Kuile and Thurston have described the “soul sanctuary,” where classes are held, and the way “Every SoulCycle ‘journey’ has a similar arc, which peaks during a hill ballad when riders turn up the resistance dial on their stationary bike and climb uphill in the dark.” The reader Susana Odriozola, 40, who lives in California and was raised Catholic, though she no longer goes to church, said that parts of the SoulCycle experience reminded her of going to Mass: They throw water out to you and you turn to your neighbors and greet them…
One part of churchgoing that’s tougher to satisfy with group fitness is the multigenerational inclusiveness of those spaces. You’re not going to bring a little kid to a CrossFit box. And though Schnurr told me that people bring their families hiking, her own experience is that some of her grandkids love it, but others, not so much. I’ve tried to drag my kids along on various hikes and climbs and, similarly, it’s not always a hit. Like me, Odriozola said she’s still trying to figure out how to give her children “spiritual strength without religion,” and that is an ongoing journey. And there are fitness spaces that are difficult to access or inaccessible for those who have mobility and health challenges.
Not mentioned here is the involvement of bodies in these activities. As sociologist Randall Collins suggests in Interaction Ritual Chains, the movement of bodies together and the emotional energy that develops is important. These physical activities help by asking people to move their bodies in sync. Religious activities do this as well; people do not gather and worship as a bunch of brains but they involve their bodies and emotions. Additionally, none of the stories in the piece above mention transcendence or interacting with forces/being beyond the people in the room.
How many of these groups/activities explicitly advertise these particular benefits? They cannot guarantee certain communal experiences but they could point to the potential for it to develop.
It’s a “good’ neighborhood now. And the land that Transfiguration once occupied will be turned into about a dozen single-family homes, where, in an area that was zoned for and still is largely home to two- and three-flats, the starting price of a new house is $1.35 million. Talk to me about the zoning on that one.
This week is the one I dreaded: the physical building, Transfiguration of Our Lord, is being torn down. I held out hope that the building that had welcomed and taken care of so many would be preserved. At the very least, I hoped that the land that nourished thousands of families would house a few more of them in the middle of a nationwide affordable housing crisis. But why build homes for two or three families when you can get rich selling a house to just one?
So the fences have gone up, and the building is coming down.
Processing the closing of a long-time religious congregation can be difficult.
But, there is also a suggestion above that these are two very different uses of land. According to this member, the church nourished families and the community. The church welcomed immigrants. Its school educated kids. The church was a gathering place. Churches in the United States do not pay property taxes, but they can provide services for the neighborhood.
In contrast, the buildings that will replace the church will be expensive single-family homes. These will provide private space for households within a desirable neighborhood. There is money to be made in the developing and selling of the buildings.
This could lead to a question: is land better used for organizations that serve the community or for single-family homes? If people care more about money, creating more real estate is the answer. If people want to emphasize community, there might be room for religious congregations and other neighborhood organizations, but they may need to sustain themselves. Americans value single-family homes and like making money. When congregations close, it is a relatively easy step in many communities to redevelop this land or reuse the buildings in ways that generate money and revenue.
His insights hit a nerve at a time when evangelicals were realizing that “postmodern” and “urban” challenges—religious diversity, isolation, transience—were becoming common in rural and suburban contexts as well.
In the American context, suburbs often served as a refuge from perceived problems of the city. Religious diversity in cities involved all sorts of religious traditions as people flocked to cities in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Even with the number of people in cities, Americans often celebrated an ideal of families living in suburban single-family homes rather than feeling atomized in large cities. Whereas people moved in and out of cities and urban neighborhoods, Americans often perceived suburbs as built around family and children, neighbors, and community groups.
How might we evaluate these features separating places? It is hard to discuss religious diversity without addressing race and ethnicity. As suburbs often excluded people who were not white, religious diversity was limited. Suburbs are increasingly diverse in terms of race and ethnicity and social class. Regarding isolation, plenty of narratives have been shared and told where individuals found the suburbs to be isolating. Compared to suburbs, cities offer opportunities for exploration and finding a place among other similar people. The suburbs may have celebrated certain social relationships but they were also quite transient for decades in the postwar era as people took advantage of opportunities.
If the lines between cities, suburbs, and rural areas are now more blurred, are evangelicals better equipped to address a changing world? How might they address complex suburbia?
As someone who enjoys music, is a musician, and likes some large collective activities, part of the joy of Easter is having a full sanctuary with people singing.
This level of congregational singing does not happen every week. Our church is full on Easter. The songs are familiar. Many people arrived early and the level of conversation beforehand was high.
By the time university leaders concluded the gathering, an estimated 50,000 students and visitors had come to the campus to pray, said Kevin Brown, Asbury’s president. The outpouring attracted students from more than 260 colleges and universities, many drawn by social media livestreams and posts. Similar prayer services cropped up at other Christian universities, including Lee University in Tennessee, Cedarville University in Ohio and Samford University in Alabama…
The surge of worshippers overwhelmed the campus and the sleepy town of Wilmore, which is home to roughly 6,000 residents, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Cars streamed into the city, backing up traffic and filling the town’s parking spaces.
“We have two stoplights, to give you an idea of how large our town is,” Brown said. Suddenly having to figure out how to accommodate thousands of visitors “on the fly” was “unnerving and unsettling.”
“Our town and our institutions are just not equipped to absorb such a large influx of people,” he said. “On the other hand, it was really, really sweet and really beautiful to see so many different people, so many different ages, representing so many different geographies … just to see everyone in one space, united and experiencing something together.”
The juxtaposition of religious activity and visitors in a small town is worth considering. Three questions come to mind:
1. How many communities would be prepared for a large influx of visitors there for religious purposes? What exactly would they need to respond and what would mark the interactions and activity outside of the clearly marked religious spaces?
3. Are the conditions of small town life more or less conducive to religious fervor? Americans often have romantic notions of small towns yet big cities are denser and have more people coming and going.
About 4,500 Protestant churches closed in 2019, the last year data is available, with about 3,000 new churches opening, according to Lifeway Research. It was the first time the number of churches in the US hadn’t grown since the evangelical firm started studying the topic. With the pandemic speeding up a broader trend of Americans turning away from Christianity, researchers say the closures will only have accelerated…
“In the last three years, all signs are pointing to a continued pace of closures probably similar to 2019 or possibly higher, as there’s been a really rapid rise in American individuals who say they’re not religious.”
The rest of the article deals with why this is happening and what happens to these buildings.
For this post, I am more interested in putting the cited numbers in context. Here are different aspects of this:
As cross-sectional numbers (first sentence above), it is hard to know what do with these figures. In 2019, more Protestant churches closed than opened. This is a one year figure.
Looking at trends over time is useful. The next sentence above says this is the first time that more congregations have closed than opened since Lifeway started tracking this. So this is a reversal or change to a larger trend? How long has anyone tracked this? Is it assumed that it is good or normal that more churches open than close each year?
As noted above, there are fewer people claiming religious affiliation. Are there additional factors involved, such as a shift of attendees toward larger congregations?
Are there other data sources for the number of churches and what does their data show?
With the attention that is paid to the declining number of religious Americans, it would be helpful to continue to look at the corresponding organizational changes including changes in the number of congregations.
the Catholic Church is the largest nongovernmental property owner in the world
While there are no numbers on the number of properties, acres, or value, I would guess that it adds up to a lot. To serve over 1.3 billion adherents around the globe – 2019 pre-Covid figures – requires a number of buildings and properties all over the place.
Asking questions about how much property a religious group should own is another matter. Is one interested in efficiency and how many people are served through each property? Is there a religious group has too much property? Does it matter if the property serves the community as well as religious adherents? All of these could factor into whether the amount of land owned is seen as a moral good or a moral problem.
Church membership, church attendance and belief in God all declined during the pandemic years, survey data suggest, accelerating decadeslong trends away from organized worship.
At least one-fifth of Americans today embrace no religion at all. Researchers call them “nones.”
A similar share tell pollsters they do not believe in God, an all-time high.
The lone, striking countertrend is a steep rise in nondenominational Protestants, who attend churches outside the “mainline” denominations — the once-ubiquitous Baptists, Methodists and Lutherans.
The story is set up this way: religion is on the decline and the only phenomena standing out are megachurches. This is an interesting set of evidence to put together. Do religion and megachurches go together or cause each other? Here are just a few ways they might be related:
Religion is down and megachurches are up. (This is what the article suggests in the headline and later in the story.)
Religion is down and megachurches are a last gasp of religion.
Religion is down and megachurches helped contribute to this decline.
Religion is down. And megachurches are not related to this overall pattern.
Which of these options is most accurate? What is the causal link between overall American religiosity and the presence of sizable religious congregations?
Legally Sociable 