Why Are Growing Faith Groups News?

(ANALYSIS) Ask yourself this question: Based on the mainstream news coverage you have seen in the past decade of two, which is the bigger news story — growing churches or dying churches?

I have been asking this question for a long time, of course. Thinking back on the rise of the Religious Right in the late 1970s, and lots of political coverage since then, I would have to say that “growing churches” have received more ink.

Why? Growing churches are more important because that trend helps elect dangerous members of the Republican Party who are on the wrong side of history on all of the crucial cultural issues that represent positive trends in a pluralistic, diverse culture. That’s news!

At the moment, many “growing churches” reports tend to focus on a stampede of young men into sanctuaries. That’s important, since these young men played a key role in the election of Orange Man Bad. The complicating factor is that many growing churches are welcoming an even larger wave of young families, often folks with lots of children (#HintHint).

Now, the “dying churches” stories are more complicated. So much depends on which churches are shrinking and dying. In terms of politics, since that is what matters the most to newsroom managers, are these “good” churches or “bad” churches?

Maybe these “dying” stories need to be framed in more positive terms? Try this: If America is getting less religious, that means the culture is getting more complex, diverse and pluralistic.

That’s good, for Democrats, since most of the people who go to churches and synagogues all the time tend to be more conservative, especially on moral and cultural issue (see the classic 2003 “Blue Movie” feature from The Atlantic).

You can read the rest of this post on Substack.

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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.