Looking from the Inside Out

A churchman studies why 80 million are unchurched

Despite all the talk about a religion boom and the fact that 125 million people are on church membership rolls, masses of Americans have nothing whatsoever to do with organized religion. According to a 1974 report by the Glenmary Home Missioners, a Roman Catholic agency, they number about 80 million.

A man of the cloth intrigued by that figure was the Rev. J. Russell Hale, a professor of church and society at the Lutheran Theological Seminary, Gettysburg, Pa. Hale, 58, decided to try to find out why so many people prefer to be unchurched. Doing so he logged 30,000 miles by air, auto, foot and boat, even visiting almost inaccessible "hollers" in West Virginia and a topless bar near Sarasota, Fla. He lived for a month in each of six counties ranked by Glenmary as among the country's most irreligious.* Though social conformity makes church shunners tend to keep their views to themselves, Hale located 165 of them for intensive interviews.

Hale's main purpose was to try to study the motives and develop descriptive categories of the unchurched. The results, just published in a 99-page booklet, are impressionistic but provocative. The tiniest group identified is what Hale calls the True Unbelievers--agnostics, humanists and atheists--most of whom turn out to be only latent unbelievers who often express a certain longing for faith. By far the largest group is the Publicans, named after Jesus' story in Luke 18 about the prayers of the Pharisee and the Publican. Whether they themselves are humble or self-righteous, Hale's latter-day Publicans scorn what they regard as the self-righteousness and hypocrisy of churchgoers. Oddly, many complain about the fact that Christians drink. Other categories:

>The Boxed-In. They feel the church stifles personal growth or makes intolerable moral and doctrinal demands. Many are ill-informed ex-Roman Catholics who used to chafe under strict rules that now have eased somewhat.

>The Burned-Out. Once heavily involved in church work, the members of this group simply got tired of it or decided that it consumed far too much time and money. "You get bombarded," complained an ex-Episcopalian in Florida.

>The Locked-Out. They remember feeling unwanted or embarrassed--often by the clothes and manners of Sunday-best services. Recalls an Oregon housewife: "I kind of felt put down." Some blacks sense white prejudice. And then there are those whose lives became linked with unacceptable behavior: a woman lately married to a drunkard, a homosexual, a topless waitress in a Florida bar.

>The Nomads. A growing category of Americans who seldom live in one place long enough to consider it home. They either have trouble finding a new church where the services are familiar or purposely avoid making any deep community ties. Explained a highly mobile executive in California: "We've discovered that to prevent the pain of saying goodbye, we don't say hello any more."

>The Anti-Institutionalists. This type either complains about the inevitable church politics, bureaucracy and fund raising or takes the line that you don't have to join a church to be a Christian. A subspecies labeled the Scandalized were turned off by the sheer proliferation of churches, each one claiming to be right.

>The Pilgrims. People who keep looking for spiritual belief and absolute values, without finding a creed to embrace in the religions they are exposed to.

*Boone County, W. Va.; Waldo County, Me.; Polk County, Ore.; Orange County, Calif.; Marion County, Ala.; and Sarasota County, Fla.

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