Church Attendance Decline Symptom of Failing Society

American church attendee population fell 12% over the past 25 years. Likely because Americans increasingly turn to their co-workers for community and identity, rather than their neighborhood churches. So the American future will likely be a bifurcation, with more community groups for some and more intensive church communities for others.

Echoes of de Tocqueville's "voluntary associations" in action. Indeed, in an earlier time of diversity, immigration, and #urbanization (post-Revolution America), there were a lot of voluntary associations, too, as de Tocqueville observed.

One thing the author(s) failed to note, is social trust and the assumptions for it. Communities can only exist, when there is enough intra-group trust to cement the bonds. For without trust, there can be no reciprocity. And we have only thin financial transactions leftover. That, in part, caused the churches to fall apart. (Obviously more importantly, kids keep moving away for colleges and jobs. No community can survive the departing next generations.)

For the new voluntary associations to take over from churches, #diversity has to go down, somehow. As I often noted, Diversity(tm) is always a centrifugal force, requiring a centripetal force to counterbalance.

And more glaringly, the authors failed to address the main problem, posterity geographic mobility. More importantly than the aging demographic, is the mobility demographic. An aging community can gracefully decline if the kids stick around. The authors recognized that mobility is a prime cause, but they gave up addressing the issue.