Like most of what people do and are, religious beliefs and practices are based primarily on the culture they’re raised in. When the culture no longer supports certain beliefs and practices, they erode very quickly: A single generation will see major effects.

It’s very common for various social ills to be blamed on the loss of religious faith in countries like ours, and I have gotten to the point of life that I actually agree. What we don’t see, however, is much discussion of the reasons for that change. It’s like blaming election results on the fact that our side doesn’t vote as it should, but without attempting to determine—or at least admit—why it doesn’t vote. It’s very comforting to find something to blame other than the beliefs and practices themselves, regardless of whether those beliefs and practices are political or religious.

I am currently rereading the book Godless by Dan Barker that wasn’t published until 2008, but which discusses his earlier deconversion from being an evangelical Christian preacher to atheism. When I went through something similar long ago such works were very rare, in fact I don’t recall seeing any until much later. Today, however, there are many books and countless Internet videos that discuss things like the history of the Christian Church and its Bibles as well as the bases and logic of their beliefs and practices. It would therefore be easy to blame those forces for the decline in church membership and attendance.

But even though I am very familiar with them because of my personal interest, I cannot for a moment believe that they have any significant impact on the cultural changes we are seeing. When we can’t expect national leaders to know enough about history to realize that dancing with dictators is a bad idea, what gen Xer, Yer, or Zer has the slightest interest in knowing how the New Testament canon came to be or why the problem of evil (“theodicy”) was the reason why an evangelical Christian scholar became an atheist?

My point of all this is that in neither case, religion or politics, the symptom, i.e., lack of participation, should be confused with the cause which, fundamentally, is “Why should I do (or believe) that?” Without such understanding there will be neither the attendance or votes.