Demographic Trends

 Back when I was a student at a liberal New England divinity school, my classmates and I—at least, those of us who were theoretically on the "ministry track"—were all facing down a shared doom. We talked about it; we analyzed it; we discussed it together every day and sought for ways to evade it. The doom had a name: "Demographic trends."

The idea was that, due to some all-but-inevitable process of secularization and the way people in our age cohort lived their lives, millennials (they were still the only young people at the time) were drifting away from traditional congregation-based-Sunday-morning forms of worship. (Magnifying our terror of this phenomenon was our sense of guilt and complicity—none of us ever went to Sunday morning services either, unless we were tasked with leading them.) 

The question, therefore, was how to either arrest this trend or slow it down enough that it would allow us to have jobs for the duration of our future careers. 

An older minister sought to provide me reassurance on this point, when I was first starting out on the path to divinity school. I asked him, "Do you think there will still be UU churches left in a few years' time?" "Oh yes," he said. "We're dying, but we're slowly dying." The take-away being that these institutions would probably hang on by their purse-strings for a few more decades at least—propped up by endowments dating back to the puritans—and that people like me would be able to just barely eke out a career in their midst in the time they had left. 

My colleagues and I therefore had some form of survival to look forward to. But it was not exactly an invigorating prospect. We were like the people in the village living on an ice floe whom William James imagines as a metaphor for the perishable mortal condition in his Varieties of Religious Experience—we were still alive for now, but each day the ice was getting thinner. Indeed, we were starting to hear it crack and splinter beneath us, readying our doom. 

This feeling continued throughout the two years I spent working at a Boston-area congregation. Which was a relatively vibrant place, don't get me wrong, but where the median age was still several decades to the north of me. And the feeling did not really go away until it vanished in a flash one day when I was hired for a full-time job at a human rights organization staffed largely by people in their thirties. 

I felt a decade younger working for that organization in my late-twenties than I had while working for a congregation in my mid-twenties. I was no longer shackled to the great demographic doom. I need no longer share the fate of the people living on the slow-melting ice. 

I began to realize that what I had been saying for years about the importance of congregation-based religious communities had been an intellectual abstraction that had nothing to do with my actual experience of life. I had donned a set of arguments and a professional identity that I had seen other people wear, because I had no idea right after college what I wanted to do myself. Now, though, I felt ready to slough these off and live for the first time in my own skin. 

I could grasp why these institutions meant something to other people, why they fulfilled a human need. But they were not what I needed. 

I did not really feel drawn to congregations, I realized, and I did not want to make my career in them. I did not want to join them on the precipice, partly because I did not actually—in my years of discussing the precipice with friends and family and colleagues, looking at it from every possible angle—see a way off of it. 

Maybe, I thought, there's not actually a way around the looming demographic doom. Maybe these institutions are going to wind down. Is the mere fact that we do not want this to happen a reason to think it can't happen? 

To be sure, there were people prototyping different ways of addressing The Problem. There were new ministries geared toward the young(-ish). Most assumed that people in my cohort wanted bad imitations of Evangelical Emergent Church-style worship services, complete with saccharine music, except with a theology that was a little lighter on the Jesus. 

It didn't speak to me. In fact, it struck me as cult-like and creepy. So I was left with the same thought: why couldn't we just fail? Why couldn't these institutions expire, even if we didn't want them to? I didn't see a reason why they couldn't, and I no longer wanted to live feeling that my own future was entwined with this dire possibility. 

My dad, of course, might say that my dislike of the congregational life is simply further confirmation that this model is ill-suited to the needs of my generation, but that this is a flaw in the model, rather than a sign of any change in the core of human need that religious communities serve, which remains unchanged across time. 

He is a believer in the possibility of solving the specter of "demographic decline"; he has faith that the collective doom of these institutions can be averted. He has, in short, what I lack, at least in regard to this particular subject: hope. 

I don't know where this fount of optimism in my dad comes from. None of us in the family has ever been able to divine its source, though we know that it is clearly not heritable: or if it is, it's a recessive trait.

My starting assumption when faced with a problem, whether political, philosophical, aesthetic, moral, etc., is that it has no solution. Sometimes, I can be talked out of this. I can be persuaded by a particular piece of evidence. And when I find such a thing, I cling to it as a life raft. Oh, I think, there might actually be a way out of this! But I always begin by assuming the worst, and work from there. 

It was therefore a revelation to me when, in a recent rendition with my dad of the great "demographic trends" debate, he not only told me that there was a solution, he actually described an example in which it had been implemented with success. 

He spoke about a congregation that had started like so many others in our denomination. It was, that is to say, confronting The Problem. It was aging. It was scraping by financially, just barely. But it was becoming plain to everyone that it was not long for this world. And then a new minister had turned it around, drawing in young families from the largely working-class community that surrounded it, simply by introducing new programming, and convincing the parishioners of the need for change. 

"But they had to hit bottom first," my dad said. "It's like with addiction. The church had to reach a point where they ran out of other options, and they had to try something new in order to survive."

The analogy struck me. It was a moment that New Age types would happily deem a "synchronicity"—one of the sort that constitutes the chief pleasure of my reading life. Because it so happened, when he said this, that I was reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, as I've mentioned before on this blog. And it contains one of the more vivid accounts anywhere of exactly this phenomenon. 

I finally finished Infinite Jest this week, by the way; I find that, while it has many good qualities and passages, it somewhat overstayed its welcome as a novel. Inside DFW's over-long tome, however, there is an extremely-closely-observed description of fighting addiction, through the world of Boston-area AA meetings, that is utterly convincing. 

It is thinly-veiled autobiography, you might say. It is clearly grounded in the author's own experience. It might equally well have served as the basis for a profound personal essay, and it is not absolutely clear why it needed to be encased in the form of a thousand-odd page satire about Canadian separatists and "après-grade" film-makers that is not always quite as funny as it thinks it is. But it is there, nonetheless, in the heart of the book, and it is beautiful and honest and true. 

One of DFW's primary points about AA meetings is that all the things people are encouraged to say in these settings are clichés—but that they have become clichés precisely because they are true, and it is the journey of every newcomer to AA to discover for themself just how true these things are that they had always waved away before as banal. One of these is Hitting Bottom. 

DFW says that no one ever comes to AA because they think it will actually work. They are like me, in the presence of the great "demographic doom." They assume there is no way out of it. They assume their addiction is here to stay. 

And the proposed methods for fighting it, such as the ones AA provides (show up to meetings, keep showing up to meetings, show up again, etc.), don't seem remotely up to the task. Indeed, they seem vaguely cult-like, in their reliance upon mind-numbing and oft-repeated collective mantras (Lifton's "thought-terminating cliché" being one of the hallmarks of the totalistic community), just as the proposed solutions to the demographic trends problem—the alternative models on offer—always struck me.

But, says DFW, people reach a point at which they run out of any possible alternative. It no longer matters to them that they think AA probably won't work out. Or that it resembles a brainwashing cult. Because the addiction has driven them to such a pitch of despair that the only alternative is death. 

Certain death, or probable failure. Certain death, or likely brainwashing at the hands of a cult. When people come to this pass, some choose the latter. This is what finally draws them into AA. They are willing to risk failure and brainwashing because it has become better than the only possible alternative. This is why it is necessary to "Hit Bottom," in AA lore, before one is finally ready to become sober. 

So maybe the problem with UU churches and many other religious denominations is not that demographic trends are causing us to melt away: it is that they are doing it so slowly. We feel survival is still possible under these conditions. We therefore opt to keep going with the way things are. We choose cynicism and pessimism, thinking that the proposed alternative ways of doing things probably won't work, so it's not worth it to try. 

The problem is people like me and my former colleagues, wanting these institutions to hang on as they are just long enough for us to have careers. We are like the addicts who are living just above Bottom, feeling that we can hang in there, when really we need to let go. Surrender and Come In. It is only when these institutions are actually facing The End, when there is no option left, that they will opt for trying something new. 

What will save these institutions, therefore, is probably not people like me, looking for a career path, and weighing the different options. It is people who are deeply invested in these communities already, whose fate is tied up with them, and who are ready to take on risk to help the institution survive, because failure is not an option. Or at least, not one they can accept.

I can see it. I am starting to believe my dad that there is actually a way forward. That change is possible, in the face of demographic decline. I'm not the one to lead it. It's not my calling. But I believe that it is a task that can and should be done. And I'm happy to support those who are up to the challenge.