START OF A SPIRITUAL REVIVAL? – BY UWE SIEMON-NETTO

News Analysis

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

UPI Religious Affairs Editor

WASHINGTON, March 4 (UPI) — A considerable increase of religious activity over the last 10 years may indicate a start of a spiritual revival in the United States, according to pollster George Barna.

He termed it significant “that we are witnessing a slow but steady development of more traditional religious behavior in the Western states.” Trends, “usually start in the West, take hold in the Northeast, then infiltrate the interior of the nation,” he explained.

A recent poll by the Barna Research Group showed marked jumps in private, rather than public, religious activity, such as prayers, Bible study and participation in worship groups.

This might suggest that groups within mainline denominations “are taking the cue from the para-church movement,” said Thomas C. Oden, a professor of theology and a leader of the confessional movement within the United Methodist Church.

According to Barna’s survey, the share of adults reporting they had read from the Bible during the past week—not including Sunday service—rose from 37 percent in 1994 to 44 percent this year. It was in this category that the increase was most noteworthy in California, Oregon and Washington state, where Bible study among residents almost doubled from 29 to 44 percent in the last decade.

Similarly, participation in small groups for prayer, Bible study and fellowship shot up from 11 to 26 percent in the West, Barna reported. Nationwide, it rose from 12 to 20 percent.

In this context, Barna noted a phenomenon that has been observed overseas as well: Men, traditionally less religiously engaged, are becoming more involved. In the United States, their participation in prayer and other groups doubled to 18 percent in the last decade.

Western European ministers and sociologists of religion attribute a similar development on their side of the Atlantic to feminism and divorces, most of which are initiated by women, which swelled the ranks of single—and often lonely—middle-aged men.

“Isn’t it ironic that while men stop smoking, women take it up, and while women stop being religious, men take it up?” quipped the Rev. Michael Stollwerk, dean of Wetzlar Cathedral north of Frankfurt.

Another piece of evidence for a possible religious revival is the rise in the number of people who said they had prayed to God in the past week from 77 percent in 1999 to 83 percent in 2004; no data for 1994 are available in this category.

Curiously, Barna found the steepest increase in prayer activity among those who identified themselves as atheists or agnostics, where it doubled to 20 percent in the last five years.

Atheists praying to God seem an oxymoron. Yet this phenomenon has been around for almost as long as such polls have been taken, lending credence to the claim that true atheists are a rare species. In the final analysis, they may just be agnostics who don’t know if there is a God but still call on him “on spec.”

This newest Barna survey has a potentially troubling aspect for the churches. It shows that while religiosity in private or in small groups is clearly intensifying, it seems to be stagnating in the public domain.

Weekly church attendance, while still high compared with other Western nations, remained at 43 percent, only one point more than 10 years ago. A mere quarter of the sample group of 1,014 adults did volunteer work in their congregations.

The share of those who explained their faith to non-Christians—actually a duty for believers according to Christ’s Great Commission (Matthew 28:19)—declined between 1999 and 2004 from 58 to 55 percent.

Thomas Oden attributes this stagnation to the “disastrous developments in the mainline churches in the last 40 years,” especially the “loss of theological substance” in their seminaries, most of which he accused of succumbing to a liberal academic elitism that is detrimental to faith.

Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a Washington-based think tank, also warns of the danger of a privatization of religiosity but considers the influence of para-church activities on mainline Christians a blessing.

Remarkably, Oden, a Protestant, sounds like Catholic Church leaders in Europe when he counsels patience. It could take a century for the Christian church to overcome the theological catastrophe of the last four decades.

But there is one hopeful sign pastors are observing throughout the Western world—a general “thirst for God” to which the latest Barna survey attests and the instant success of Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ, attest.