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Too many people were brought into church by fear of war, hope of social prestige, or for other nonreligious reasons. Washington's Methodist Bishop John Wesley Lord charges that "the church recruited people who had been starched and ironed before they were washed." In the nuclear age, suggests San Francisco's puckish Episcopal Bishop James Pike, God became "a sort of tranquilizer pill to a populace keeping a wary eye on the sword of Damocles." Others who joined churches found them not serious enough, or contemptibly unconcerned with corruption and injustice.
Always a Minority. Many of the parishioners who casually drifted into religion have just as casually drifted out of it—a fact that has caused many ministers to look at their flocks with new realism. Says Dr. Dietrich Ritschl of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary: "Christians are, and always have been, in the minority. I don't think that's the meaning of 'salt of the earth'—that everyone becomes salt." Some churches have voluntarily pruned the names of nonworshiping Sunday golfers from their roles of "active" members in a much-neglected procedure called maintenance of the rolls. In Washington, D.C., the nondenominational Church of the Savior requires prospective worshipers to take a two-year course of study in the Bible and Christian principles, has accepted only 150 full-fledged members in 16 years.
Now, argues Robert Reagan, chief of public relations for Los Angeles' Episcopal diocese, "there is a smaller percentage of church attenders, but an increased percentage of church participants." The Rev. Dr. Bryant Kirkland of Manhattan's Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church observes that there is a "marked evidence of personal religious commitment among our new membership." This commitment shows up in countless ways—in more lay interest in theological study classes, in impromptu Bible study cells set up in private homes, in parishioners' demands for better sermons and more dignified worship, in cutting down social activities in churches. Says the Rev. Andrew Greeley, study director of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago: "Every indication I get gives me the impression that people are more intensely concerned with what religion means in their lives and more are eager to do something about it."
A Gain in Vitality. The cresting of the postwar revival leaves churches looking for new ways to do their work. Protestant churches in scores of U.S. cities have sensibly ended the cutthroat competition for members, joined to set up thriving new interdenominational inner-city missions, many of them modeled after New York's famed East Harlem Protestant Parish. Such missions operate everything from credit unions to narcotics clinics, place service to the poor ahead of proselytizing. "The city churches are not gaining in membership," says Presbyterian Robert McAfee Brown, professor of religion at Stanford, "but they are gaining in vitality."