The great postwar religious revival in the U.S. is over—and many church leaders are thankfully saying "Amen." The 1963 Yearbook of American Churches reports that membership among religious bodies is falling behind the rate of population growth; TIME correspondents, interviewing ministers, priests, rabbis and informed laymen across the country, find general agreement that the Yearbook evidence is right. They also find agreement that a hidden and more profound revival of the religious impulse is beginning to take shape within the churches. Visible in this new shaping of U.S. religious life are some important trends and significant distinctions:
¶ Established, Biblically conservative groups, such as the Baptist churches, are losing some of their appeal, while some sects on both the left and right are growing. Such liberal organizations as the Unitarian Universalist Association claim higher membership among intellectuals and professional men, and evangelical groups, notably the storefront-centered Pentecostals, are gaining ground in the city among Negroes and Latin Americans.
¶ Mainstream Protestantism, still surging in the suburbs, has suffered heavily in the industrialized "inner city." In Boston, 24 Protestant churches closed down between 1950 and 1960. while 32 surrounding suburbs have shown an increase in church affiliation that is greater than the population growth. "In the outer ring of the city," says the Rev. Raleigh Sain, Director of Strategy and Church Planning for the Detroit Council of Churches, "we are still holding our own. The inner city is still losing, but we're starting to retrench and fight a holding action."
¶ Roman Catholic leaders everywhere acknowledge losses due to the church's stand on divorce and contraception, but find that problem negligible compared with the simple task of building enough churches and schools to serve the remaining communicants. Washington, D.C.. for example, may need 42 new parishes by 1980. Church officials in Illinois' Cook County expect to establish 300 new parishes in the next 25 years, and will need to build new high schools to accommodate a 350% increase in the teen-age population.
¶ Within Judaism, Conservative and Reform synagogues are generally gaining at the expense of Orthodox congregations. Yet in Greater New York, home to almost half of the nation's Jews, Orthodoxy shows surprising strength among the third and fourth generations; about 40,000 children are currently enrolled in the Hebrew day schools run by Orthodox groups.
To many who study the American churches, the end of the boom is no surprise at all. Jewish Scholar Will (Protestant-Catholic-Jew) Herberg of Drew University argues that a natural growth ceiling has been reached. "The market is simply saturated," he says. "It is impossible that the figures should have kept on rising." Others believe that the boom itself was much exaggerated and never accurately reflected the inner strength of religious feeling. "It was a boom in numbers and dollars and buildings," argues the Rev. Robert D. Allred of the First Presbyterian Church in Middletown, N.Y. "We were caught in the trap of statistical success."