Are Conservative Churches Really Winning by Being More Orthodox? [View all]

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/atheologies/6933/are_conservative_churches_really_winning_by_being_more_orthodox


Big crowds, drawn by moral strictness

March 18, 2013
Are Conservative Churches Really Winning by Being More Orthodox? Or, one more reason for journalists to be better versed in U.S. religion
By DANIEL SCHULTZ
Daniel Schultz, a.k.a. pastordan, is a minister in the United Church of Christ. He serves a small and very patient church in rural Wisconsin. He is the author of Changing the Script: An Authentically Faithful and Authentically Progressive Political Theology for the 21st Century, forthcoming from Ig Press.

This weekend, NPR’s Scott Simon invited Mary Eberstadt, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, to discuss what lies ahead for the Catholic Church under Pope Francis. Eberstadt used the opportunity to promote the thesis of her forthcoming book, How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization.

Despite its title, Eberstadt’s book—and her interview with Simon—peddled a well-worn idea. As Eberstadt herself put it,



This harkens back to Dean Kelley’s 1972 book, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, which argued that liberal denominations were losing a battle of ideas to stricter, more conservative communions.

The new twist here is Eberstadt’s argument that “orthodox” churches are winning not by directly drawing converts from liberal churches, but through the sheer power of birth rates.

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