Why Social Justice Is Killing Synagogues and Churches
Data suggests that the more a religious movement is concerned with progressive causes, the more likely it is to rapidly lose members
“If it turns out that there is a God … the worst that you can say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever.”—Woody Allen
If you go into a Reform or Conservative temple, it’s likely that you will notice two things: The congregation is becoming smaller and older. Across the United States and Europe, Jewish congregations are aging at a rapid rate, a phenomenon increasingly common for mainstream religions across the high-income world.
Overall, the American Jewish population—unlike that of demographically robustIsrael—is on the decline, with a loss of 300,000 members over the past decade, a number expected to drop further by 2050. The median age of members of Reform congregations is 54, and only 17 percent of members say they attend religious services even once a month. Four-fifths of the movement’s youth are gone by the time they graduate high school. The conservative movement is, if anything, in even worse shape: At its height, in 1965, the Conservative movement had 800 affiliated synagogues throughout the United States and Canada; by 2015 that number had fallen to 594.
But Jews, and their religious institutions, should not feel singled out. The share of Americans who belong to the Catholic Church has declined from 24 percent in 2007 to 21 percent in 2014, a more rapid decline according to Pew, then any other religious organization in memory. There are 6.5 former Catholics in the U.S. for every new convert to the faith, not a number suggesting a very sunny future.
The mainstream Protestant churches are not exactly filling the sanctuaries either. Some, like the internally conflicted Methodists have seen their number of North American congregants drop from 15 million in 1970 to barely half that today. Since 2007 alone, America’s mainstream churches have lost 5 million members, and even the once vibrant evangelical movement is losing adherents outside of the developing world. Ever more churches, particularly in urban areas, are being abandoned, turned into bars, restaurants, and luxury condos. And nothing augurs worse for the future than the fact that American millennials are leaving religious institutions at a rate four times that of their counterparts three decades ago; almost 40 percent of people 18 to 29 are not unaffiliated.
This decline is not necessarily a reflection of less spiritual feeling: Two-thirds of unaffiliated Americans still believe in God or a universal spirit. The Pew poll shows that since 2012, the share of Americans who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious” has surged from 19 percent to 27 percent five years later.
Why, then, the decline in religion? For one thing, young Americans have different habits. Rather than join institutions, millennials, argued Wade Clark Roof, author of the book Spiritual Marketplace, are indulging in a kind of “grazing,” finding their spiritual fixes in various different places rather than any one organized church. As sociologists Robert Putnam and David Campbell explained, those in this age group “reject conventional religious affiliation, while not entirely giving up their religious feelings.”
But the consumption habits of the young aren’t the only reason for America’s religious drought. Religious institutions and ideas are currently under political attack, predominantly from the left, with some progressives, such as California’s Dianne Feinstein or New Jersey’s Cory Booker, appearing to see embrace of Christian dogma, or even membership in such anodyne organizations as the Knights of Columbus, as cause for exclusion from high judicial office.
This trend is reinforced by the media , which is often dismissive of traditional faith. There has been a powerful tendency to demonize and suggest the worst of motives among the faithful, which was evident in the rush to judgment about the alleged racism of the Covington, Kentucky, religious students. Before the facts proved claims of racism to be false, newspaper accounts and tweets from journalists endorsed actions against the students, sometime including violence, in ways more reminiscent of Joseph Goebbels than Joseph Pulitzer.
As in many cases, this bias reflects the groupthink nurtured at our leading universities. Evangelicals and religious conservatives barely exist in the country’s leading theological seminaries, where they are outnumbered, by some estimates, 70 to 1 by liberals, and evidence suggests that those espousing traditional religious views are widely discriminated against in academic departments.
In this difficult environment, many religious movements—Reform Judaism, mainstream Protestantism, and increasingly the Catholic Church under Pope Francis—have sought to redefine themselves largely as instruments of social justice. Although doing good deeds, or mitzvot, long has constituted a strong element in most religions, the primary motivation of the faith community traditionally focused on heritage, spirituality, and family. In their haste to be politically correct, even Catholic private schools such as Notre Dame are rushing to cover up murals of Columbus, and, in one California case, a private Catholic grammar school has gone as far as hiding statues of saints.
Yet rebranding themselves as progressive often brings religious activists into alliances with people who reject their core values. The Catholic left, for example, allying itself with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, implicitly embraces the advocates of the most extreme abortion liberalization. Sometimes, these linkages are ironic: Faith in Public Life, for example, a strident “religious” group advocating a progressive anti-Trump line, gets much of its funding from George Soros, arguably the world’s most well-heeled and active promoter of atheism.
For their part, progressive Jews, embracing the notion of tikkun olam, face a similar dilemma. In their rush to oppose President Trump, with his occasional despicable winks at alt-right groups, many Jewish activists have collaborated with the organizers of the Women’s March, including enthusiastic backers of the most influential anti-Semite of our time, Nation of Islam head Louis Farrakhan.
Deep blue cities and the progressive feeding lots of the academy—strongholds of progressivism—are precisely where support for such anti-Jewish measures as the BDS movement is strongest. Anti-Semitism is particularly rife not in conservative Southern schools but in progressive places like San Francisco State; in that city, the ultimate progressive stronghold, a leftist gay Jewish café owner recently has been subject to repeated protests for being a “Zionist gentrifier.”
This alliance with anti-Semites and those opposing the existence of the state of Israel pushes the limits of cognitive dissonance. Jews in the U.K. are confronted with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who defends not only anti-Zionist but also traditional anti-Semitic tropes. Recently progressive heartthrob Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, herself an adopter of anti-Israel memes about Gaza and other occupied areas, gushed over her recent “lovely and wide-reaching” conversation with Corbyn, the West’s most politically prominent Judeophobe.
Indeed, despite the impression left by some progressive Jews, the largest threat to Jews in America stems not from the isolated and pathetically small lunatic fringe of white supremacists. The most anti-Israel members of Congress, as well as on the local level, come primarily not from the right wing of the GOP but the burgeoning left wing of the Democratic Party. Democratic voters—as well as key constituencies like minorities and millennials—poll consistently less sympathetic to both Jews and Israel than older, generally white Republicans.
Is there a way back from this sorry state of affairs?
However satisfying to its practitioners, the emphasis on social justice is clearly not attracting more worshippers. Almost all the religious institutions most committed to this course are also in the most serious decline, most notably mainstream Protestants but also, Catholics and Reform and Conservative Jews. The rapidly declining Church of England, which is down to 2 percent share among British youth, is burnishing its progressive image by adding the use of plastics to its list of Lenten sacrifices, but seems unable to serve the basic spiritual and family needs of their congregants.
In contrast, more conservative faith organizations generally enjoy better growth, and higher birthrates, particularly in the developing world . The University of London’s Eric Kaufmann explains in his important book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? that if current trends continue, the more fundamentalist family-centered faiths seem most likely to survive. Already, for example, Orthodox Jews, historically a small subgroup, are projected to become the majority of the Hebraic community in Britain by 2100, and already constitute some three-fifths of Jewish children in New York.
Orthodox Jews and evangelicals may be finding common ground, then, but the future of religion overall does not seem a bright one. It’s hard to imagine most young Jews becoming Orthodox, or casual Christians embracing en masse Mormonism or evangelical Christianity. Instead, the future seems to point to a smaller, more conservative religious community, isolated amidst an increasingly secularized culture.
To survive, less traditionalist faiths need less “virtue signaling” and more emphasis on serving the needs of congregants. Marshall Toplansky, who advises Church World Services, a major Protestant aid group, suggested that groups like Mormons and evangelicals who focus on providing services for families and their local communities fare far better than those more tied to strictly a social gospel. Toplansky said that many mainstream churches “have overlooked the value of building grassroots relationships with their donors,” who sometimes do not share the progressive ideology of the clerical class. Without engaging the faithful and addressing their needs, he noted, “people stop identifying with their local institution and stop participating in the local activities that defined them to begin with.”
Catholicism, now under a reforming and politically progressive pope, faces a similar challenge. It is losing adherents, not only in North America and Europe, where his views are popular, but also his homeland of South America, where the church is steadily losing out to more conservative evangelical churches. Until the 1960s, at least 90 percent of Latin America’s population was Catholic, but that number has fallen to under 70 percent. Today, roughly 1 in 4 Nicaraguans, 1 in 5 Brazilians and 1 in 7 Venezuelans are former Catholics. The one place where the church is growing most, Africa, is dominated by conservative bishops often at odds with Francis.
Anthony Lemus, an influential lay Catholic, believes the church’s future relies on remaining true to its principles while refashioning its message to serve its adherents’ worldly, as well as spiritual, needs. An astrophysicist brought up in a deeply Catholic East Los Angeles household, Lemus is working with a prominent Catholic theologian, Rev. Robert Spitzer, on rewriting of the Catholic Catechism to make the faith more accessible to the new generation. He also supports efforts to improve services from the church—day care, athletic clubs, camps—that might attract young families back to the faith.
“Today’s generation is more in tune with value-add products and services influencing their lives immediately, and the relevance of faith competes with these promotions,” he said. “A ‘sticky’ rebranding of the importance of faith formation’s value in everyday life is key to reposition its importance for living a holistic life.”
Ultimately, as Lemus suggested, religions, including Judaism, can only hope to thrive if they serve a purpose that is not met elsewhere in society. It is all well and good to perform good deeds, but if religions do not make themselves indispensable to families, their future could be bleak. As we already see in Europe, churches and synagogues could become ever more like pagan temples, vestiges of the past and attractions for the curious, profoundly clueless about the passion and commitment that created them.
Back to another age two weeks before, eons ago, when Colin Kaepernick’s lawyer had announced that he could imagine two or three teams signing him to play quarterback again, and the Patriots, Super Bowl champions, were one of them. The EIC, who watches zero football but has a professional interest in prominent Jews, had walked into my office a few days before to ask, “Why doesn’t Kraft sign him?” meaning Kaepernick, and I had to explain why the Patriots don’t really need a QB right now, what with six rings and the guy who got them those six rings repeating often that yes he means it when he says he wants to play until he’s 45, three to four years from now, Gisele’s thoughts on it be damned.
Anyway, EIC felt vindicated by the report. Bob Kraft, he of the Meek Mill, he of prison reform and the cause of Israel, he of the yeshiva, Columbia grad, Pittsburgh empathizer in chief, capital P Philanthropist, he would be the one to, OK, yes, heal the world. Sign the Anthem Kneeler, the Trump antagonist, bring him back into the fold from the wilds of his Sacrifice Everything billboard. The guy can still play, they say. Right the obvious wrong that stifled a professional athlete who happens to express his political views.
That was several outrage cycles ago. A busted-up prostitution and sex-trafficking ring in the sinking karst pools of Florida snared a hundred men, nabbed a number of Chinese madams, and enslaved dozens of unsuspecting Asian women, right here in America, my gawd. On the Twitter video loop of network-affiliate live TV news of the Jupiter, Florida, police, you can hear a reporter ask off-screen, “Is that Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots?” and the uniformed cop answering, “We’re as equally stunned as everybody else.” A human-trafficking ring in the Floridian banana pararepublic would be local news at best, but the owner of the New England Patriots is here, and we’re down the bayou from Mar-a-Lago, and so it “goes viral.”
I grew my Patriots fandom as a boy, I declared it and stuck with it through all the previous scandals and pseudoscandals. And because I’m otherwise relatively private (no Facebook, no MyFace, gave up the Twitters), for a number of folks in my secondary orbit it’s my defining feature. That guy loves the Patriots. Big Football Fan. Don’t talk to him, they lost last night. I’m fine with that. Think of me how you will. I wear a T-shirt that I made that reads “I ENJOY WATCHING FOOTBALL.” It gets comments at the sports bar and a nod or two. I owe The Onion for the sensibility. But I do enjoy watching football. Apparently I’m not alone in that.
And what is Kraft to me? I’ve never met the guy but as the undeniably successful owner of my football team, he represented some kind of great-uncle figure, diligent, loving, and demanding in familiar ways, confounding in his politics, a Jew who bet on America only to have its worst expression tear him down at the first opportunity.
So, now the emails come in to me, midday Friday, literally minutes after the announcement. From my father, a lifetime Pats fan, poor guy: “are you catching this?” From a co-worker: “How you holdin’ up?” From a friend, a text: “He’s Krafty! / He gets around / He’s Krafty! / He’s always down!” followed by three emojis reading [lips] [money bag] [eggplant]. And so on.
The EIC texts, this time “Oh God Kraft.” I am at the same moment picking up her Kaepernick email thread and typing to her “Welp,” with a link to the breakingest of breaking stories—ROBERT KRAFT SOMETHING SOMETHING PROSTITUTION. You can practically hear the desk editor in an open-plan office in New York shouting at a desk-journo-intern to GET SOMETHING UP, STAT. The clicks are clicking, the clicks will go to another “media outlet” if you don’t have your flag planted. EIC answers, “yes I texted you,” by email. Tag. I saw it. Yes. Kraft busted at Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter. There’s video of it, they say. As first reported by USA Today’s Treasure Coast Newspapers of Palm Beach County.
My father thinks Trump is to blame: “another fine example of everything schtroumpf touches turns to shit,” he writes. The other texting friend gave up watching football after Deflategate and took a Brooklynish moral-high-ground position on brain murder and such. He’s holier than thou now but fuck him, he’s also a gentrifier. No one’s perfect. I enjoy watching football.
And at least we can all agree that the New York tabloids should have a field day with it. Sadly they have to endure some 18 hours before their ink hits their pages, so slow compared to the Instagrams, which has a random old picture of Bob Kraft driving a car with the window down and the caption, “Get in loser, we’re going to pay for hand jobs.” Liked by 30,638 (at the time), and forwarded to me via texted screenshot. I reply with a screen grab of the Orchids of Asia Day Spa Yelp page, which has been flooded with gleefully hate-mobbing reviews, 5 stars for “really knowing how to kraft a good massage,” get it? The Wall Street Journal quotes a Patriots spokesman saying, “We categorically deny that Mr. Kraft engaged in any illegal activity.”
Go online, anywhere, and the stuff comes at you. Here’s a Giants fan, he’s wet still from the pool or beach in Jupiter but he had his Giants T-shirt on, or he went and got it, and he drove himself over to the Asian Orchid Day Spa—or was it Orchids of Asia?—and had someone take his picture pointing at his shirt (whose subtext is, “I enjoy watching football”) and at the sign above the entrance to the massage parlor where Robert Kraft allegedly got a sexual massage, and now this guy’s on the Daily Mail.
The former football fan, the Brooklyn lib, at least he’s old-school enough to still appreciate a good Post pun and so we place bets on how the tabloids might play it on Saturday. Sack Fumble. Illegal Procedure. I think I hit on it with SEX RINGS, but it’s too many steps from there to the six Lombardi trophies and it suggests maybe a toy, not a human tragedy. PATRIOT CAME is good but too vulgar even for Murdoch. Then I wonder how long until Patriot Came is a headline that is acceptable to the New York Post, which I realize is oddly now a bastion of propriety and decorum in New York cultural circles. Despite the tabloid tawdriness of the charges, and the high profile of the charged, the headline does not write itself. Is that because maybe the crime here has nothing to do with Bob, and sex trafficking is no joke?
I suggest HAPPY ENDING. Because it’s a happy ending to the so-called and seemingly unending “Patriots dynasty” for New York’s Jets and Giants fans, who, let’s face it, are all, as they say, jackin’ it to the news today. Because that’s what this is about: This is about masturbation. Bob Kraft’s alleged masturbation by an unfortunate Asian slave. The masturbation of hundreds of other men who visited Asian Orchids of Asia Day Spa and the other rub-n-tugs in Jupiter, on Mars, and in just about every godforsaken Sodom and Gomorrah on the planet. And all of it compounded by the masturbatory pile-on of individuals at their computer screens and phones and other glowing rectangles, alone, imagining themselves to be telling that billionaire off, laughing in his face—yes, what a release! Poor schlubs everywhere now more powerful even than the most powerful owner of the biggest sports league in America, a friend to Donald Trump no less! HAHAHAHAHA SUCK IT ROBERT KRAFT! I AM A GIANTS FAN AND A GIANT AND I’M STANDING HERE WHERE YOU GOT A HAPPY ENDING, WEARING MY GIANTS SHIRT! With such a lynch mob’s glee.
This is the Internet now—a circle jerk of humiliation.
***
Let me apologize, because apologizing is the spirit of the age, and because I’m bound to offend someone here. I surely already have. And I should also reiterate my outrage, MY ALL-CAPS OUTRAGE, at the abomination that is human trafficking, and at the johns who are the demand to fuel that supply, and Jesus can’t we get our shit together and save these women (and men and boys and girls) from the global scourge of bondage? Even for the libbest of libs, legalization of prostitution only works if it includes safeguards to ensure that sex workers are in complete control of their bodies and their volition, and beholden to no one but their sacrosanct selves, owners of their business. Beyond that is some form of barbaric libertarianism. So let me be clear: Sex trafficking is horrible and we must do all we can to remove it from the world, including not visiting places of business where the employees have been trafficked. Even—especially—if you’re a billionaire.
But you know what? Beyond that I can’t really get mad at Bob Kraft. I know I’m supposed to summon the Outrage, but the only outrage I can find is against America right now, and against the Internet that is making it into what it is. You go get whatever kind of hand job you want, Mr. Kraft. Next time do it with a consenting and safe adult. But you’re 77. G’bless you, man. The mind is an incredible place, and our wants and desires and needs run the gamut from the ethereal (and perhaps payment-deferred) pleasures of total abstinence to the kinkiest earthly depravity, which I don’t need to enumerate because every adult reading this can reach into their own brains to find examples of it. (Even you, Mike Pence.)
Did you royally screw the pooch by going to a trashy strip-mall joint that happened to be at the center of a trafficking sting? Absolutely. Even if it was a short drive from your house. And would it be specifically wrong of you to go to a massage parlor to seek something besides a massage? Again, yes. But fuck if I’m going to throw you out in the hinterlands of moral condemnation for wanting to get some physical pleasure and a few seconds of blackout relief from the human condition. Is paying for it the sin? I’m not sure. Maybe. OK, yes. I don’t know. Let us consult Philip Roth. He knows something about Jewish lust. This is Sabbath’s Theater, and Mickey here is huffing on your daughter’s underwear! Dude, this other guy over here, he’s fucking a liver! OK, yeah, it’s not about the money, except that Kraft and a very few others have lots of it and the rest of us don’t.
Meanwhile, our president serves Big Macs to the winning collegiate football team, on Lincoln’s silver. And lest you thought this a symptom of Trump Derangement Syndrome, I remind you that Bill Clinton pushed a cigar into one of his interns, and then removed it, lit it, and smoked it. Or as I told my father, “Call me a cynic but human beings disappointing us is not really front page news.”
By the time Saturday rolled around, eons later, the stupid Internet had moved on. It was clear the tabloids had dropped the ball, butterfingered an easy Pick 6. The Postwent with “Inflate Gate,” which in all sincerity I don’t even understand. I get that it’s supposed to reference the ball-deflation scandal that kept the Outrage Fire lit in a certain sports-world dumpster for months. Or is it a penis-pump joke? Because he’s old? Come on, man. C- at best. D, more like. The Daily News went with “Kraft American Sleaze,” which beats the Post by a mile but is still a B. If our Kraft here had anything to do with the company that makes plastic squares of pasteurized processed cheese food, it would have been a win. But they abandoned their rigor and said, “close enough.” That’s where we are. In fact, I’m really angry about this. OLD NEW YORK TABLOIDS CAN’T GET IT UP ANYMORE. I’d tweet that if I still had an account.
Or maybe the American Sleaze is us. We’re all Uncle Bob now, lost souls driving around the strip mall of America in search of a happy ending.
***
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