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September
24, 2002, 9:00 a.m.
The
Unchurched
A new study
puts Washington as the second most irreligious sate. I’m not
so sure.
By David Klinghoffer
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 ew
polling data says my state, Washington, is the second most unchurched
in the nation, but it sure doesn't feel that way. And that subjective
impression — which you would share if you too had moved here from
a place like Manhattan or Washington, D.C. — is worth understanding.
In Manhattan, one
encounters a minority of active Catholics and Orthodox Jews, who are assumed
to have commuted in from the outer boroughs. On the subways you see black
women thumbing through small faded leather Bibles. Otherwise, in my ten
years there I can't remember meeting a single person enthusiastically
committed to the nation's dominant faith, Protestantism, much less an
evangelical. Overall the feeling was that religion, if it exists, is an
attenuated phenomenon of the mysterious, forbidden between the Hudson
and East rivers.
I came out to Seattle
from New York three years ago and was immediately struck by the religiosity
of my new metro area. The sprawling eastside suburbs are suffused with
evangelical Christianity.
I saw the difference
the first morning I was here: In a Starbucks, a young white guy reading
a Bible. You would never see that in Manhattan. The pattern has
persisted. I'm at a Wells Fargo bank, asking an investment adviser about
mutual funds, and the guy starts telling me what his pastor was talking
about in church the other week. A dapper older black guy sells me a used
Volvo and starts telling me about his church. At a Jewish Sabbath lunch
of all places, another guest who happens not to be Jewish gets into a
conversation with me and very sweetly starts witnessing to me right there.
It's the people you
become friendly with just randomly because they happen to be pleasant
and interesting: Christians, Christians, Christians. Not infrequently
you hear the phrase, used casually in conversation, "He's a Christian,"
meaning approximately, "He's got an intense Christian spiritual life
nourished in an evangelical church." (Strangely, by convention, Catholics
are not called "Christians.)
No one denies that
Washington is a liberal-leaning state, and liberalism means secularism.
(The same day that polling data was released, the state Supreme Court
ruled that a guy who used his camera to film up into a woman's dress had
committed no crime because they were both in a public place.) Yet, among
the 50 states, the Glenmary
Research Center, out of Nashville, Tenn., rates us behind only Oregon
in irreligiosity.
This is a puzzle
until you reflect on the frame of reference you bring to bear if, like
me, you spent most of your adult life in one of a handful of big American
cities that are really, really secular — New York, Washington,
D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco. Looked at from the viewpoint of a Manhattanite,
any state in America will seem to be a fever swamp of religious enthusiasm
— even Washington State.
This tells you something
about those few super-secular cities: how isolated they are from the life
of the country, a life that's profoundly Christian. And it tells you something
about the industries found predominantly in those cities: the news media
and Hollywood. If their perspective is distorted, it's no surprise.
After all, media
and entertainment people are just people — they live in neighborhoods,
they have friends, they're affected by their environment like anyone else.
When they reflect back to us an America that's cut off from its spiritual
roots, they're not reflecting America. They're showing us the tiny world
they live in, a place distinctly apart from the rest of the nation,
a soundproof booth where you hear your own voice echoing back at you.
— David Klinghoffer is the author of The
Lord Will Gather Me In and The
Discovery of God: Abraham and the Birth of Monotheism, to be published
by Doubleday in March 2003.
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