[CS-FSLUG] Decline in churches membership linked not only to teaching and worship-style, but also to contraception

[Michael Bradley, Jr.]

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Posted: 10/19/05
Mainline church decline caused by fertility rates, study shows
By Greg Warner
Associated Baptist Press

CHICAGO (ABP)—The decline membership in of mainline churches over the  
last century had more to do with sex than theology, research by a  
trio of sociologists suggests.

The popular notion that conservative churches are growing because  
mainline churches are too liberal is being challenged by new research  
that offers a simpler cause for much of the mainline decline—the use  
of birth control.

Differences in fertility rates account for 70 percent of the decline  
of mainline Protestant church membership from 1900 to 1975 and the  
simultaneous rise in conservative church membership, the sociologists  
said.

“For most of the 20th century, conservative women had more children  
than mainline women did,” three sociologists—Michael Hout of the  
University of California-Berkley, Andrew Greeley of the University of  
Arizona, and Melissa Wilde of Indiana University—wrote in Christian  
Century.

“It took most of the 20th century for conservative women to adopt  
family-planning practices that have become dominant in American  
society,” the writers said. “Or to put the matter differently, the so- 
called decline of the mainline may ultimately be attributable to its  
earlier approval of contraception.”

While mainline churches could claim 60 percent of the total  
Protestant congregants in 1900, their share fell to 40 percent in  
1960. Many religious observers and some sociologists attributed the  
drop—and simultaneous growth of conservative churches—to the lethargy  
of liberalism and the appeal of biblical certainty.

But simple demographics can account for almost three fourths of the  
mainline decline, the trio of sociologists said.

“In the years after the baby boom, the mainline (fertility) rate  
declined earlier than did the rate of conservatives. Only in recent  
decades has the fertility rates of the two groups become similar.”

The researchers studied shifts in church membership from 1900 to 1975  
and the accompanying differences in fertility rates between women in  
conservative churches—Baptist, Assembly of God, Pentecostal, and the  
like—and mainline ones such as Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopal and  
Lutheran.

They also created a demographic model that projected what would have  
happened to mainline and conservative memberships if the difference  
in fertility rates was the only factor influencing membership during  
the same period. “The answer is that it would look remarkably like it  
does in real life,” they concluded.

The trio also studied other factors that could have influenced the  
real-life shift in memberships. For instance, they looked at how many  
people switched from mainline to conservative churches during the  
period, and vice versa.

During most of the last century, more people moved from mainline to  
conservative churches than in the other direction. Conservatives were  
much more successful at retaining their church members, even when  
they married mainliners.

“The declining propensity of conservatives to convert to the mainline  
accounts for the 30 percent of mainline decline that fertility rates  
cannot account for,” they concluded.

The researchers investigated other possible causes for mainline  
decline—support for homosexual and abortion rights, a lower view of  
the Bible, a higher “apostasy” rate, and fewer conversions from  
outside the Christian fold. But they dismissed these other factors as  
irrelevant because none could produce numerical changes significant  
enough to explain the shift in church membership.

“Higher fertility and better retention thus account for the  
conservatives’ rising share of the Protestant population,” they  
concluded.

However, the authors suggested, the trends underlying the mainline’s  
decline “may be nearing their end.”

Fertility rates are now virtually the same between the two groups and  
will produce only a 1 percent decline in mainline membership over the  
next decade, they noted.

“Unless conservative Protestants increase their family size or  
mainline Protestants further reduce theirs, this factor in mainline  
decline will not be present in the future.”

Moreover, fewer people are now switching membership from mainline  
churches to conservative ones. While 30 percent of conservatives in  
the 1930s had come from mainline churches, only 10 percent of those  
counted among the conservatives in the early ’90s had made the  
switch, the authors said.

That downward trend will continue—if only because there are fewer  
mainliners left to make the jump.

However, the sociologists cautioned, it could take 50 years before  
the conservatives’ “demographic momentum” exhausts itself because  
people born during the conservatives’ belated baby boom of the 1970s  
will be filling those pews for quite awhile.


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