What's Keeping People Out of Church?

The LA Times thinks it's conservative politics:

The most rapidly growing religious category today is composed of those Americans who say they have no religious affiliation. While middle-aged and older Americans continue to embrace organized religion, rapidly increasing numbers of young people are rejecting it.

As recently as 1990, all but 7% of Americans claimed a religious affiliation, a figure that had held constant for decades. Today, 17% of Americans say they have no religion, and these new "nones" are very heavily concentrated among Americans who have come of age since 1990. Between 25% and 30% of twentysomethings today say they have no religious affiliation — roughly four times higher than in any previous generation.

So, why this sudden jump in youthful disaffection from organized religion? The surprising answer, according to a mounting body of evidence, is politics. Very few of these new "nones" actually call themselves atheists, and many have rather conventional beliefs about God and theology. But they have been alienated from organized religion by its increasingly conservative politics.

I have a hard time buying the idea that conservative politics are keeping people out of church because in the hundreds of churches I've been in (either as member or visiting singer) I've never seen any politics at all. Perhaps it's not actual politics in church that's keeping people away, but the media obsession against conservative politics and their efforts to link it to evangelical churches that's doing it.

This article talks about young people who have no interest in church, but I can tell you from firsthand experience there are plenty of older adults who have lost interest as well.  They, like me, grew up in a traditional evangelical church (you know, the kind with choirs, organs, hymns and stuff) and find today's worship model to be maddening.  Instead of a worship experience they find themselves angry at the music and bored at the simplistic sermons.

True story - from 1997-1999 I sang a song called "A King is Born" , Caribbean-inspired Christmas song, with a group of guys in every one of the 28 Saddleback Church Christmas Eve services those three years.  The song has a good bass part and I was asked to sing with the Saddleback worship team (if you don't know the song I've included a YouTube version of the original below).

Funny thing is, all these years later I still get stopped by strangers every now and then who tell me how much they enjoyed that song and wish we were still singing it at Christmas time.  It happened again just a week or so ago while I was eating a sandwich at Togo's.

In 2007 the church decided to do the song again for one of the December weekends and brought back a lot of the guys who sang together in the late 90's.   When we sang back then all of us attended Saddleback Church.

Between two of the services we were sitting around a table in the Green Room catching up and in the course of the conversation discovered that five of the six guys at the table no longer regularly attended church anywhere.  They were all burned out.  I was one of the five.

They hadn't lost their faith, just their desire to attend regular church services.  I knew exactly how they felt.  And I know there are a lot more people like that who simply aren't having their spiritual needs met in today's modern worship services.  Politics has nothing to do with that problem.

Oh well...here's the original version of the song we were doing: