Joe Weisenthal, deputy editor of the Business Insider website, put this provocative title on a graph that showed a dramatic downwardtrending line. Taken from the US Department of Commerce Census Bureau, the graph indicated that construction spending on religious institutions, which had been near $9 billion in 2002, had fallen to below $4 billion in 2012. Wiesenthal’s commentary was brief: “Off the cliff.”
Church buildings are a crude measure of the state of American religion. The economy for all kinds of construction has taken a hit with the recent global recession. But the trend illustrated by the graph began before the recession, and it reflects something that many people are feeling intuitively: Something is changing in the relationship we have to our religious institutions and perhaps even to God. One visible sign of this change may be the decline in church construction projects, but there are others as well. Is the United States, with one of the Western world’s highest rates of religious belief, turning away from organized religion? What is happening, and what does it say for churches?
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