Empty churches

by Charles Josiah Galpin

One third of all rural pastors receive so low a salary that they can live only by working at some other occupation.

One half of the rural churches of the country make an annual gain in membership of as much as 10 per cent.

In striking contrast to this churchless seventh of the country, are the other six sevenths of rural America, many of them so overchurched that they are crying out for relief from the burdens the churches are laying upon them. There are ten times as many churches for every thousand persons in some of the rural districts of the United States as there are in New York City. Yet the percentage of attendance for every thousand persons is slightly lower in these rural sections than it is even in New York. Obviously, such a showing indicates a startling lack of system in the distribution of rural churches, a woeful waste of the religious potentialities of the country.

Recently, a thorough survey of the rural church problem of the United States was made for the first time in the history of the country, under the direction of H. N. Morse and Edmund de S. Brunner, of the Institute of Social and Religious Research, of New York. Some of the statistics obtained by them are presented in the foregoing paragraphs.

These facts, of course, offer a severe shock to those who have the little white church of the countryside enshrined in memory along with the little red school-house. We have fallen into the rut of taking it for granted that our country churches not only keep pace with the best religious life of the nation, but even stay a step or two in advance, if not in theology, at least in interest in godly things and in piety. We have come to think of country folk as the true church-goers of the United States. To this sentimental point of view the facts stated offer a true affront.

Fewer Church-goers

There are to-day approximately 101,000 rural churches in the United States. A long time ago, when there were only a hundred such churches, virtually the entire country population attended them. Some time later, when there were a thousand churches of the kind, the average of attendance was still exceedingly high. But of recent years the percentage of rural church-goers has almost seemed to be in an inverse ratio to the increase in churches. One out of every five is not a showing that would have brought joy to the Puritan Fathers. What is the reason for this precarious situation in the rural churches of our nation? Does it indicate that our country population is made up of a less God-fearing folk than in former years? Does it demonstrate that religion is less near to the hearts of the farm workers of the United States than is true of its city dwellers? Or are these conditions the logical outgrowth of a faulty system, the inevitable result of a church distribution spiritually and economically unsound?

More than one thing must be taken into consideration in any fair-minded attempt to answer these questions. For instance, there is the fact that during the past few years the number of tenant-farmers in the United States has steadily increased, until now thirty-eight per cent. of the farms are tenant operated, most often on the basis of the one-year lease. Any fact that tends to make the farmer more or less a transient in the community naturally deters him from forming social or religious relationships.

Another reason frequently given for the low average of rural church attendance is that so high a percentage—nearly 30 per cent.—of the nation’s land workers are new Americans, the foreign-born, or the children of the foreign-born. There are States, such as North Dakota, where nearly every other farmer belongs to other than American nativity, and whole sections of the country, as in the Middle West, where foreigners are in excess of two fifths of the population. It is estimated that at the present time more than fifty per cent. of these people are unministered to by any church, Catholic or Protestant. Where anything like an earnest and comprehensive attempt has been made by churches to be of aid to them, as among the Mexicans of California, it has been marked by astonishing results. Then why have the churches done practically nothing for the foreign-born in rural sections? If the new American can make good on the land, is it too much to ask the church to make good with the new American?

When I hear it said that no one is really interested in religion any more, I cannot help thinking of an elderly Yankee farmer in the State of Vermont, one J. C. Coolidge, father of our President, a man who talks little about religion, but who for years has given virtually all his leisure time, and a considerable slice of time not leisure at all, to keeping alive the little white church near his farm at Plymouth Notch. He hauls the wood from his own land that the congregation of that little church may listen in comfort to the Word of God; he even, I am told, does the janitor work himself, since the church has no funds for a janitor. There is nothing especially remarkable in this. There are thousands of such men all over our country, men to whom the church is a thing to make sacrifices for, to keep alive at whatever cost.