Catching Up . . .

. . . with the Economy & Other Issues
The last time we checked in with "the economy" was about six weeks ago, when the Federal Reserve made a surprise cut in its key interest rate. Since then, they have cut rates again and the Congress and Administration have enacted some fiscal stimulus. However, reports of further troubles with mortgage delinquencies, the construction industry and more recently manufacturing continue on a daily basis. High gasoline prices are eating into consumers' discretionary funds for other spending. We think whether these developments make an official "recession" or not may be largely a matter of semantics. Obviously, if you've lost your own job and it's hard to find a new one, it doesn't matter what "the experts" call it. Employment data and the unemployment rate for February are due for release Friday, and we'll come back after that with some more detailed discussion on all these points.

Meantime, the best advice is to make sure your own financial house is in order and if you don't have large savings, that you're at least making plans to accumulate some. Same goes for your church; this is a time to be careful with money.

An Update on Kenya
Perhaps there's room for hope in that troubled country. As Africa gets more and more interest from foreign investors, the kinds of post-election disturbances that occurred there need to be met head-on. Apparently, Kofi Annan's persistence has brought some progress, with an agreement, in principle, at least, announced last Thursday for a power-sharing arrangement between the two Presidential candidates, the incumbent Kibaki and challenger Odinga. Annan cautions that much work remains in actually implementing this plan, which calls for Odinga to be a "prime minister", with as yet unspecified duties.

Note that we mention "foreign investors". Obviously the welfare of the Kenyan people comes first. But a promising source of growth and prosperity for them comes from increasing infusions of private capital, and if pleasing skeptical investors will help improve domestic conditions then it's well worth keeping that goal in mind. In that regard, it's interesting to me that my employer, a company that sells economic databases, is getting more and more requests from clients to add data on African countries, their currencies and stock markets. This is evidence of a favorable trend that can lead to sustained economic development, not simply the spurts that come from occasional public "projects".

The Pew Survey on Church Affiliation
Only a few days after our last, long, post, on young people and churches, the Pew Charitable Trusts published a major new survey on that topic, the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. Last summer, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life interviewed some 35,000 people around the country on their backgrounds and their religion. Bear in mind that for some national surveys, as few as 600 responses are enough for a "representative sample", so this huge number yields many more individual facts. (Don't worry, we won't list them all! – but it's tempting!)

In our previous article, we bemoaned the evidence in other surveys by Pew, Barna and others, that as many as 25% of people ages 18-29 are not part of any religious organization, church, synagogue, Buddhist temple or whatever. Unfortunately, this massive new study bears this out: it too finds 25% of that age group unaffiliated; for the population as a whole, the unaffiliated constitute 16%. The Pew results also reproduce facts about the age distribution of individual religious groups as found in church-centered surveys, such as the U.S. Congregational Life study: 41% of the total population (as reflected in the Pew survey) is over age 50, but mainline Protestant churches (Episcopalian, Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian) have 51% of their membership over 50; only 14% of Mainliners are under age 30 versus 20% of the total population.

This Pew study received much press coverage for its questions about changing religious affiliation. It shows that some 44% of the population now belong to a religious group different from the one they were raised in. The report underscores the dynamism of this switching as some people join new religious groups even as others leave them. So it is that the responses show 53% of the population were raised Protestant and 8.4% of them have joined Protestant churches during their adult lives, while 11% have left Protestant churches, yielding 51.3% of the population as Protestant now. Similarly, 31% of the participants in this survey were raised Catholic, 2.4% have converted to Catholicism and 10.1% have left it for something else. Even those currently unaffiliated are somewhat mixed this way: 7.3% in this survey were raised outside of religion and 12.7% who were raised in a religion have since become unaffiliated. At the same time, nearly 4% of the total population grew up unaffiliated with any religion, but they have now joined one.

Thus, religious "switching" is not a sign of inherent weakness in American religion, but of a dynamic religious "market". While the net change in this switching has been negative, the fact that there are joiners as well as leavers suggests an active potential for growing our churches.

We'll leave this now for a while, but you can be sure that we'll bring you more over time. As we've been saying – and as you Farmers' letters to Debbie Hodgepodge emphasized last week – our lives individually and as communities benefit from what religion does, and we here at Ways of the World want to understand more about when and how that works.

Finally, if you stop and think about these three topics – the economy, the welfare of the Kenyan people and the dynamism of religion in America – you might see that they're not really separate but tied together as our lives in the world and our lives in God are surely tied together.