Jonathan Threlfall serves as lead pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in Concord

New Hampshire is one of the least religious states in the U.S., but this coming Sunday will be the “Superbowl” of church attendance.

According to Pew Research, 22% of Granite Staters attend church weekly. This number could easily double on Easter Sunday, which means that over half a million Granite Staters could be in church on March 31.

But Sunday, April 7, will be a different story. Pews will be empty again. Congregations will still gather, but there will just be fewer people in the building. Church attendance, which plummeted to a historic low in 2021, will continue its precipitous decline.

You might not be worried about the drop in church attendance, especially if you’re not a regular churchgoer. But maybe you do have reason to worry.

Over the past few decades, American sociologists have been sounding the alarm about the loss of social cohesion for several decades, notably since Robert Bellah coined the term “expressive individualism” to describe the tendency of Americans to value “independence and self-reliance above all else.” As late as the 1990s, churches continued to be the associations that wielded the strongest power to maintain solidarity, even across racial and socio-economic boundaries. In the past few years, however, all that is drastically changing.

“The decline and loss of congregational religion,” writes reporter for Religion News Service Bob Smietana, “which gathers people together, inspires them to do good, rallies them in times of joy and sorrow, and then sends them out in the world to make it a better place — should worry us all.”

In his book, “Reorganized Religion: The Reshaping of the American Church and Why it Matters” (which I recently checked out at the Concord Public Library), Smietana argues that “organized religion is worth saving.” He shows that throughout American history, positive social goods delivered by orphanages and hospitals emerged within the context of organized religion. Secular initiatives, on the other hand, have struggled to deliver the same kind of impact because they lack the underlying narrative of self-sacrifice necessary to sustain these efforts.

Your Daily Puzzles

Cross|Word

Flipart

Typeshift

SpellTower

Really Bad Chess

Church attendance is often associated with conservative political values, and so many on the political left may view the decline of church attendance to be a happy signal of a more progressive society. But there is reason for politically liberally-minded people to be worried as well.

Last September, The Atlantic reported that “declines in church attendance have made the rural Republican regions of the country even more Republican and —perhaps most surprising — more stridently Christian nationalist.” As it turns out, in general, the more people go to church, the less likely they are to become politically radicalized simply because their ultimate loyalty is to the kingdom of God, not a political party.

But what about all the harm that has been done by organized religion? If you have a distaste for organized religion, you probably came by it honestly. It is a tragic reality that much harm has been done in the name of religion and that some churches have become havens of abuse.

That is why I disagree slightly with Smietana’s thesis that “organized religion is worth saving.” Not all organized religion is worth saving. I believe that it depends on what religion is organized around.

To be “worth saving,” religion should center and organize itself around a source that can dismantle our pride and tribalism and transform us to become humble, just, and caring humans. It should, moreover, have a moral standard against which churchgoers and pastors alike are held accountable. This “source” is what we celebrate at Easter time: Jesus, who rose from the tomb, and invites all to trust and follow him.

Yes, we will always be the “Live Free or Die” state, but the erosion of social cohesion should concern us all. “No man is an island,” poet John Donn wrote, “entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”

My plea to my fellow Granite Staters is this: Buck the trend. Come to church on Easter Sunday, of course. But come the next Sunday, too.