The Roman Catholic Church in “Protestant” America Today

Other Catholic churches have become almost everything imaginable such as one that became a gymnasium in another small Midwestern town; the new owner praised the facility: “We were looking for a big open space. A big, vaulted ceiling like this works out great for a fitness center.” http://www.wjfw.com/stories.html?sku=2013090161553&display=video.

Russell Shaw, American Church: The Remarkable Rise, Meteoric Fall, and Uncertain Future of Catholicism in America (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2013), 188.

Peter McDonough, The Catholic Labyrinth: Power, Apathy, and Passion for Reform in the American Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 5.

Tom Roberts, The Emerging Catholic Church: A Community’s Search for Itself (New York: Orbis Books, 2011), 281.

John L. Allen, Jr., The Future Church: How Ten Trends Are Revitalizing the Catholic Church (New York: Doubleday, 2009).

Thomas Reese, “The Hidden Exodus: Catholics Becoming Protestants,” National Catholic Reporter, April 18, 2011, www.ncronline.org/news/faith-parish/hidden-exodus-catholics-becoming-protestants.

Robert Booth Fowler, Allen D. Hertzke, Laura R. Olson, and Kevin R. den Dulk, Religion and Politics in America: Faith, Culture, and Strategic Choices, 5th ed. (forthcoming). (Boulder: Westview, 2013), Chapter 3.

The best, most detailed study of Catholic views, political and policy, and others, to this point is in http://www.pewforum.org/2012/10/11/the-catholic-swing-vote/.

www.UScc/data.

Fr. Bruce Lewandowski, “Churches for Sale,” Liguorian, October 2013, 8.

Peter Steinfels, A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004); David Gibson, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful Are Shaping a New American Catholicism (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003); Shaw, American Church.

Ibid.

Michael Warren, “Among the Evangelicos,” Weekly Standard, March 25, 2013, 31–36; “Vocations: New Priests: Reviewing the Class of 2013,” America, May 20, 2013, 7.

Alison Bath, “Catholic Schools Failing to Keep up Enrollment,” US Today, April 5, 2013, 3A; Patrick J. McCloskey and Joseph Claude Harris, “Catholic Education, in Need of Salvation,” New York Times, January 7, 2013, Op-Ed.

George Weigel, Evangelical Catholicism (New York: Basic Books, 2013).

See the key studies: Steinfels, People Adrift; Gibson, The Coming Catholic Church; Allen, Future Church.

Shaw, American Church, Chapter 1.

Ibid., 11 and Chapter 2.

Ibid., 194.

As Weigel does in Evangelical Catholicism, 154–157.

See the Evangelical Catholic Institute at evangelicalcatholic.org.

Finke and Stark, Churching of America.

See www.pewforum.org/Gov/Faith-on-the-Hill for the basic data; Stephanie Banchero and Jennifer Levitz, “Vouchers Breathe New Life into Shrinking Catholic Schools,” Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2012, A1 and 10.

McCloskey and Harris, “Catholic Education, in Need of Salvation”; Anne Hendershott and Christopher White, Renewal: How a New Generation of Priests and Bishops Are Revitalizing the Catholic Church (Jackson, TN: Encounter Books, 2013).

Allen, Future Church, trend one.

Philip Jenkins, The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

See Warren, “Evangelicos” and Fowler et al., Religion and Politics, Chapter 10.

See notes 2 and 4.

For example, Roberts, Emerging Church, 160.

McDonough, Catholic Labyrinth, 281; Roberts, Emerging Church, xiv, Chaps. 3–5.

Roberts, Emerging Church, 85.

McDonough, Catholic Labyrinth, 45.

Ibid., 96, 5.

Roberts, Emerging Church, Chapter 8.

McDonough, Catholic Labyrinth, 96.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/359863/its-fun-be-catholic-again-george-weigel, 1–4.

Wade Clark Roof, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993); Wade Clark Roof, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); on generations X and Y: Richard Flory and Donald E. Miller, Finding the Truth: The Spiritual Quest of the Post-Boomers Generation (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008); Christian Smith, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Robert Wuthnow, After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Robert Fuller, Spiritual But Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Christian Smith, Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); David Kinnaman, Unchristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2007); Dan Kimball, They Like Jesus but Not the Church: Insight from Emerging Generations (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007); Kimon Howloand Sargeant, Seeker Churches: Promoting Traditional Religion a Nontraditional Way (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000); also see Phillip Hammond, Religion and Personal Autonomy: The Third Disestablishment (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), a pioneering and prescient early analysis; and Ross Douthat’s superb discussions in Bad Religion (New York: Free Press, 2012).

Roof, A Generation of Seekers; Roof, Spiritual Marketplace; regarding generations X and Y, see Flory and Miller, Finding the Truth; Smith, Soul Searching; Wuthnow, After the Baby Boomers; Fuller, Spiritual But Not Religious; Smith, Souls in Transition; Dean, Almost Christian; Kinnaman, Unchristian; Kimball, They Like Jesus but Not the Church; Sargeant, Seeker Churches; also see Hammond, Religion and Personal Autonomy; and Douthat’s Bad Religion.

Some general histories of religion in the US: Edwin Gaustad and Leigh Schmidt, The Religious History of America: The Heart of the American Story from Colonial Times to Today (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004); Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972); Martin Marty, Pilgrims in Their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in America (Boston: Little Brown, 1984); Mark Noll and Luke E. Harlow, eds., Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

See the discussion in Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Chapter 11; for another discussion of this entire subject see, Fowler, Hertzke, Olson, and denDulk, Religion and Politics, Chapter 1 and Chapter 9.

Pierce v. Society of Sisters 268US510 (1925).

Paul Blanchard, American Freedom and Catholic Power (1949) states the case most famously in the twentieth century; Hamburger in Separation of Church and Statemakes the best case for the exclusive rule of Protestantism in the nineteenth century.

Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Garden City: Doubleday, 1955).

I was first stimulated to think about American Protestantism’s historical cultural sway by Sanford Levinson’s Constitutional Faith (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); also see Mark Noll, The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

Noll, The Protestant Origins.

An excellent discussion of competitive and alternate strategies and their putative results is in Finke and Stark, The Churching of America 1776–2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008).

John Courtney Murray was one of the most articulate celebrants of change, though not, one may guess, of many of the actual. changes that came in We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1960).

http://www.pewresearch.org/key-data-points/u-s-catholics-key-data-from-pew-research/; Shaw, American Church, Chapter 3.

Shaw, American Church, Chapter 2.

Shaw, American Church, 188.

Carl Bialik, “Tracking Religious Trends Takes a Leap of Faith,” Wall Street Journal, October 13–14, 2012, A2; Cathy Lynn Grossman, “1 in 5 are Without Religious Affiliation,” USA Today, July 20, 2012, 3A; Time, March 12, 2012, 68; note, for example, almost the entire issue of Ministry Today, September/October 2013, addresses aspects of the declining involvement of young people in religion, including the phenomenon of the Nones.

Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); Robert Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Pippa Norris and Ronald Ingelhart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

On the secularization thesis see Mary Eberstadt, How the West Really Lost God (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2013); Steve Bruce, God Is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); Steve Bruce, Religion and Modernization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Inglehart, Culture Shift; Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization; Wuthnow, After Heaven; Norris and Inglehart, Sacred and Secular; Christian Smith, ed., The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Robert Putnam and David Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010) discusses the rise of the Nones; David Yamane, “Secularization on Trial: In Defense of a Neosecularization Paradigm,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 36, January 1997, 109–122.

Fuller, Spiritual But Not Religious; also see Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Stephen M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

Robert Wuthnow, America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), Chapter 4; see Nancy T. Ammerman, “Spiritual but Not Religious? Beyond Binary Choice in the Study of Religion,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 52, no 2 (2013), 258–278 for an interesting take on the situation.

See Smith, Souls in Transition; Dean, Almost Christian; Kinnaman, Unchristian.

Jim Yardley and Elisabetta Povoledo, “Pope May Be Setting Stage for Bigger Changes in Church, Vatican Watchers Say,” New York Times, September 21, 2013, A13.

Antonio Spadaro, S.J., “The Exclusive Interview with Pope Francis: A Big Heart Open to God,” America September 30, 2013, 15–38; for a highly approving and highly selective read of his interview by Laurie Goodstein, see “Pope says Church Is ‘Obsessed’ with Gays, Abortion, Birth Control,” New York Times, September 20, 2013, 1A and ff.

Spadaro, “Exclusive Interview,” 24.

Ibid., 28.

Ibid., 34.

Ibid., 36–37.

www.americamagazine.org/pope-interview, 7.

Ibid., 8.

Don Fier, “Interview with Cardinal Burke … Insights on the Church and Modern Society,” The Wanderer September 27, 2013, 2.

Ibid., 3.

Ibid., 5.

www.americamagazine.org/pope-interview, 8.

“Pope Francis: Faith is a Gift that is Meant to be Shared,” The Catholic Herald, October 17, 2013, 8.

Reese, “The Hidden Exodus.”

Damon Linker, “Francis versus the Vatican,” The New Republic, September 2, 2013, 26–31; for a statement of warm reception see, for example, Cardinal Donald W. Wuerl, “A Pastoral Invitation,” America, October 21, 2013, 19–20.