The Pew Center On Religion and Public Life has published a comprehensive survey of American attitudes towards religion, and the results are surprising. About half of Americans church-shop once they become adults, and close to a quarter simply reject any religious affiliation all together. We are a nation whose public discourse is drenched in religious imagery, yet we are increasingly rejecting the hard-line idea that the religious life has to be a certain way. Indeed, while hardly as secular as Western Europe, we now have evidence that much of the rhetoric concerning religion in our collective life is meaningless to a larger and larger audience.
What's funny about this is that, in our household, we have two people who live on opposite ends of the results of this survey. I was baptized, confirmed, studied theology through, and continue my membership in, the United Methodist Church, for a variety of reasons from personal inertia through a belief in much of the Wesleyan approach to the Christian life. My wife, however, came to the UMC only in 1988. In fact, that was the year she started attending church on a regular basis for the first time in her life. Baptized and confirmed in the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, her grandfather being a pastor in that denomination, she did not grow up going to church. Her father had a falling out with the faith of his youth, and her family didn't go to church until her mother started seeing a man who attended the UMC in the town in which they lived. Lisa started going because of . . . a really cute guy. Within a couple years, she was a US2 missionary for the UMC; within another couple years, she was in seminary. Six years after first setting foot in a church, she was serving as an ordained deacon (under the old ordination rules). This is all good because the Missouri Synod doesn't ordain women, so she couldn't have answered her call there.
What was your religious affiliation growing up, what, if any is it now, and what were your reasons for making the choices you did?
