On the first Sunday after the terrorist attacks, people filled the pews at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Louisville, Ky., seeking solace in a sermon about grief and joining together to sing “America the Beautiful.” That day, the church drew 200 people, significantly more than the average Sunday attendance of 150, and for the next two Sundays the crowds kept coming.
But by yesterday attendance was back to normal at St. Andrew's, an average-sized American church, as it has been in recent weeks at houses of worship across the country. Americans, who after the attacks turned to religion in an outpouring that some religious leaders hailed as a spiritual “great awakening,” have now mostly returned to their former habits.
“I just don't see much indication that there has been a great awakening or a profound change in America's religious practices,” said Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll. “It looks like people were treating this like a bereavement, a shorter-term funeral kind of thing, where they went to church or synagogue to grieve. But once past that, their normal churchgoing behavior passed back to where it was.”
The return to religion as usual is a stark contrast to the spiritual thunderclap after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Stunned Americans flocked for prayer and comfort not only to their local houses of worship, but also to sports stadiums, public plazas and convention centers.
Some religious leaders predicted the phenomenon would be short-lived, but many, like the evangelist Franklin Graham, the Rev. Billy Graham's son, hailed it as an enduring turn toward God. Just last Tuesday, the conservative Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson said on CNN that the terrorist attack “is bringing about one of the greatest spiritual revivals in the history of America,” adding: “People are turning to God. The churches are full.”
But the evidence from churches and synagogues, combined with several polls, now indicates that for most people the spiritual storm has passed.
For the last three decades, the percentage of Americans who told the Gallup Poll that they had attended church or synagogue in the previous week has hovered between 39 and 43. In May 2001, the figure was 41 percent. In the 10 days after Sept. 11, it climbed to 47 percent -- a noticeable rise, but no more than what is usually seen during the Christmas or Easter seasons. By early November, attendance had dropped back to 42 percent.
The result, said Robert Wuthnow, director of the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, is that the terrorist attacks have not undermined the nation's basic religious equilibrium: one-quarter of the population devout, one-quarter secular and one-half mildly interested.
“We are in some ways a very religious country, especially compared to Western Europe,” Wuthnow said. “But we're of two minds, and the other mind is that we really are pretty secular. We are very much a country of consumers and shoppers, and we're quite materialistic. And as long as we can kind of paste together a sense of control through our ordinary work and our ordinary purchases, we're pretty happy to do that.”
For instance, at Highview Baptist Church, the largest Southern Baptist church in Louisville, attendance swelled to 2,624 on the Sunday after Sept. 11, from an average of 2,300, said Norman Coe, the associate pastor. It then gradually dropped to 2,571, then 2,400, and it is now back to the pre-attack average.
Coe said he never expected Americans to get religion -- and keep it -- only because of war. “Faith,” he said, “has to be internalized with a relationship with God, and outside circumstances such as an attack on the World Trade Center may move us to action, but it will not necessarily change us on the inside. It can be a catalyst for change, but it alone would not be something that would change a person's heart.”
The events that are more likely to “change a person's
heart,” Coe said, are those closer to home, like marriage and divorce, illness
in the family or losing one's job.
The quick climb and fall off in attendance held across most religions.
Synagogues were packed this year when the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashana and
Yom Kippur, which always produce overflow crowds, coincided with the
post-attack shock and mourning.
“We did see a larger influx for the holidays, and the mood was very intense,” said Rabbi Ronald Roth of West End Synagogue in Nashville. “I can't say, however, that this increased interest in services has been sustained.” The reasons, he said, are perfectly understandable.
“When people face such a tragic and horrible event, they
need comfort, they need community, they need to relate to their God and their
traditions, and try to find a way to get through the pain,” Roth said. “Once I
think people got past some of the initial shock and difficulties, they started
to get back to how it was before.”
Attendance at services is, of course, not the only indicator of religiosity.
This is the age of the spiritual supermarket, in which people look for
religious guidance in small groups, in prayer meetings, at retreat centers and
monasteries, and in books, tapes and lectures.
George Barna, president of the Barna Research Group, a marketing research company that has studied religious trends for 20 years, said he was surprised to see that a fresh poll of his showed no increase in 11 of the 13 key measures of religiosity from before to after the terrorist attacks. Barna found a larger rise in church attendance than the Gallup Poll did, as well as a slight increase in Sunday school attendance.
But Barna found no change in the number of people who said they had prayed to God, read the Bible, participated in a small prayer group, volunteered at church, or made time for personal prayer or meditation. Even the number of those who said religious faith was very important in their lives stayed the same.
“I hope Pat Robertson is right, but we don't see any evidence of it,” Barna said. “I think it confirms that for the most part we take faith for granted, and we turn to religion in times of crisis. But after the immediate crisis passes, so does our flirtation with any kind of deeper faith.”
Bookstores have been reporting many requests for Bibles and books on Islam. But over all, the sales figures for religious books after Sept. 11 “are really mixed,” said Bill Anderson, president of CBA, the international trade association for the Christian retail industry.
“I've heard retailers who said they haven't seen all that much of a change, and others said their sales are up 7 or 8 percent” when they compare October 2001 and October 2000, Anderson said.