Standing along the first base line, I did something I had not done before during a game: I prayed for a specific result. Not that he would get a hit. Just that he would hit the ball, and not strike out.

He ended up hitting a home run over the centerfield fence – a rare feat for anyone at this field – and was mobbed by his teammates. The coach sent his younger son to retrieve the ball, and gave it to my son after the game, which his team won.

Should I have prayed about a kids’ baseball game? Did my prayer make a difference?

The success of Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow and his personal expressions of faith – including the addition of a prayer posture now known as Tebowing – has reignited conversation about the relationship between sports and religion.

Some secular commentators argue against any breach in what they would like to see as a wall separating faith from the playing field. Many religious folk fear too great an accommodation with big-time athletics can promote worship of false idols.

As Super Bowl XLVI approaches, however, research provides evidence that for both athlete and fan, prayer may serve to help them cope with the pressures of sports, and help them keep in perspective that, in the end, it is just a game.

Winning isn’t everything

Athletics and religion have a long history together. Sports first appeared in culture as cultic rituals.

The early Mayans, “like ancient Greek sprinters, Egyptian ball players and American Indian stickball players, regarded competitive games as depictions and celebrations of ultimate realities,” Shirl Hoffman of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro wrote in an article in “Word & World.”

In the United States, early Puritan wariness of the frivolity of play gave way to the notion of “muscular Christianity.” After the Second World War, athletics increasingly came to be seen as a platform for evangelists to urge consideration of a higher playing field. Organizations such as the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and Athletes in Action developed in the 1950s and 1960s.  Many religious groups today offer athletic programs as a way of inviting and integrating the faithful into their communities.

Concerns abound that the conflation of religion and sports promotes a “winning-at-all-costs” attitude, but some research suggests prayer has a greater purpose for many athletes.

• In an in-depth study of nine former NCAA Division 1 Christian athletes, researchers from Samford University and the University of Tennessee found prayer helped the athletes cope with the stress of competition and provided a sense of self-worth and mission that transcended winning and losing. One participant said, “When I prayed, I felt more relaxed because I had a connection with God. I felt like whatever happened, happened. If I was successful, I was successful. If I failed, it’s not I failed. It’s not the end of the world.” Winning or losing was inconsequential to most of the athletes, the researchers wrote in an article on “The Experience of Christian Prayer in Sport” for the Journal of Psychology and Christianity.
• Researchers also discovered a general antipathy to praying for wins in a separate study of 92 Division 1 softball players. The study found that athletes who spent individual time praying for teammates demonstrated higher levels of spirituality, but team prayer also helped participants feel more together, happier, calmer and more hopeful. “I think it lets people know they can put their trust in God and, whatever the outcome, it’s OK,” one participant said in the study also reported in the Journal of Psychology and Christianity.
• In groundbreaking interviews with 104 former or current NFL players, sociologist Eric Carter of Georgetown College found high levels of unhappiness and deviant behavior. What made a positive difference, the study found, was faith in God and access to a religious support system. Overall, 72 percent of the players who reported that they were happy with life also reported that religion was an important support mechanism.

After the game

You need not look beyond the riots in Vancouver after the Stanley Cup last year or instances of parents attacking coaches, referees or even other players at high school and youth league games to see how fan obsessions can escalate out of control. Movies such as the 1996 film “The Fan” with Robert De Niro and Wesley Snipes and the 2009 “Big Fan” with Patton Oswalt illustrate the darker side of wrapping up too much of one’s self-identity and self-worth in the exploits of a favorite player or team.

But sports in perspective can also bring a lot of pleasure to individuals and help fans vicariously experience emotions of triumph and loss, the “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” without giving over their souls to big-time sports.

Even in the early stage of research on religion and sports, there are indicators that prayer can help fans and players alike. 

In sports and war, “identification is facilitated by the clear differentiation of opposing sides, rules of engagement, a desire to determine a ‘winner’ and ‘loser,’ and denigration of the opponent,” Fred Mael and Blake Ashforth note in the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour.

 But religion, they note, carries with it the potential for raising aspirations and promoting transcendent values such as care for others.

 In my own experience at that long-ago Little League game, what I can say my prayer accomplished was that it helped calm a nervous father.

Perhaps I was expressing what scholars might call an evolutionary-based desire to respond to someone in need with an act that offered support and helped alleviate my own feelings of helplessness. But it was a moment I will never forget.

After the game, I bought a little stand and mounted the ball to display in my son’s room. But it seemed to always end up buried in the closet along with piles of old baseball cards. When my son moved away after college, I held on to the ball.

Every time I look at the ball, it still gives me a warm feeling inside of a magical – perhaps even mystical – moment in time.

More than many people could ever imagine.

Forget the popular cultural images from shows such as HBO’s “Big Love” that revive stereotypes linking Mormonism with polygamy or the ubiquitous images in the news associating Islam with terrorism. Look past the cultural crossfire that lumps religious liberals and conservatives into separate boxes defined by extremist political and social agendas.

The reality, as presented in a new book by two respected scholars, is that if you walk into a mosque, synagogue, temple or church next weekend, you will most likely find groups of believers in prayer and meditation seeking spiritual growth.

For six weeks, Pennsylvania State University sociologists Christopher Scheitle and Roger Finke traveled nearly 7,000 miles across the country visiting diverse religious communities. What they report back in “Places of Faith: A Road Trip Across America’s Landscape” is a portrait of people of faith sharing many of the same aspirations across theological and denominational divides.

They encounter members of a black church in Memphis and a Mormon congregation in a small Utah town giving personal testimonies amid Sunday worship and religious education classes lasting three hours and more. In both the Friday prayer service at the Islamic Center of America in Detroit and the Saturday morning Shabbat service at B’nai Avraham in Brooklyn, the authors find immigrants from Africa, Asia and Europe praying for the well-being of humanity.

These straightforward observations of faith groups at worship have a critical role to play in public discourse on religion – especially when an increasing body of research reveals sharp declines in religious prejudice the more people of different beliefs get to know one another.

“Places of Faith” allows “students and people in general to look over our shoulder and to find out what these communities are like and how similar they are in many ways,” said Finke, who is also director of the Association of Religion Data Archives.

Leaving comfort zones

The similarities do not mean there has been a homogenization of religion in America equivalent to the impact of, say, a  Starbucks or a Wal-Mart on the nation’s retail culture.

Many of the cities Scheitle and Finke chose for their journey – Memphis, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Detroit – continue to offer fertile soil for  distinctive religious communities to blossom.

In San Francisco, for example, the authors explore the wealth of places to experience Asian religion. In the upper-floor Taoist and Buddhist temples in Chinatown, individuals in incense-filled rooms pray and perform rituals to a deity or deities. Over at the Buddhist Church of San Francisco, worshippers in wooden pews meditate, hear a Dharma talk similar to a sermon and sing and listen to congregational announcements.

The dynamism in the American religious scene extends from Houston, where more than 5,000 volunteers each week serve Joel Osteen’s arena-sized Lakewood Church, to Grand Island, Neb., where St. Mary’s Catholic Church offers a charismatic prayer service with people “speaking in tongues” after one of two Hispanic Masses serving Mexican, Guatemalan and Salvadoran immigrants.

But what remains striking throughout this journey across America are the similarities at the core of the spiritual experiences.

Common activities include community service projects reflecting the fruits of their faith, but the connections also extend to basic spiritual practices, the authors found.

Almost everywhere, Finke said, worship includes a message, references to a sacred text and meditation.

“In the end,” Finke said, “it’s all about how you connect to the supernatural being you believe in.”

The more you know …

In an age of so much misinformation, the unvarnished portraits shared by Scheitle and Finke of what actually goes on in neighborhood houses of worship can have profound consequences.

As religious prejudice thrives on ignorance, so does firsthand knowledge lead to more positive attitudes, several recent studies indicate.

In a 2010 University of Munster study of more than 1,000 respondents from five Western European nations, what came to many of their minds when they thought of Islam were discrimination against women, fanaticism and, somewhat ironically, narrow-mindedness. What did not come to their minds were notions of Muslims as peaceful and tolerant.

Yet those attitudes were far different among respondents who had personal contact with Muslims. For example, in the former West Germany, 38 percent of respondents who reported a lot of contact with Muslims reported very positive attitudes; only 1 percent of respondents who had no contact held very positive attitudes toward Muslims.

In the 2002-2003 Religion and Diversity Survey, 90 percent of respondents said they would welcome Christians becoming a stronger presence in the United States, but less than six in 10 said they would be as supportive of Hindus, Buddhists or Muslims.

Yet when people met across faith lines, the experiences were mostly positive, according to the U.S. survey. About two-thirds of respondents said their contacts with Muslims were mostly pleasant; 6 percent said they were mostly unpleasant. Three-quarters said their contacts with Buddhists were mostly pleasant, with 3 percent saying they were mostly unpleasant.

The people you will meet in “Places of Faith” – the Memphis pastor with five children and 14 grandchildren devoted to keeping youth out of jail and on a path to college; an Amish family concerned about the safety of their aging grandfather continuing to drive a horse and buggy – help close the chasm of apprehension about people of different beliefs.

“At the same time,” Scheitle and Finke note, the diversity within the ‘them’ begins to appear.”

The journey of Scheitle and Finke helps to open the door to the reality of religious life in America.

Perhaps it also will inspire more people to choose to walk through the open doors of temples, churches and mosques in their communities to experience it for themselves.

Read more about Places of Faith: A Road Trip Across America’s Religious Landscape on the book’s website

The Pew Research Center recently reported that just 51 percent of U.S. adults are married, a record low, and that the number of new marriages declined 5 percent from 2009 to 2010.

But those people questioning whether the institution can still work for them may want to have a little faith – or, even better, share faith with their partner.

Couples who pray together and share religious values are more likely to express affection and love, perform acts of kindness and be less critical of their partners, according to a study of 1,491 respondents ages 18 to 59 to the 2006 National Survey of Religion and Family Life.

Sanctification of marriage – the belief of partners that God is at the center of their unions – also was associated with kinder, gentler relationships, according to the study by University of Texas at San Antonio sociologists Christopher Ellison and Xiaohe Xu.  Ellison and Xu reported the results at the recent National Council on Family Relations meeting in Orlando.

The bottom line: Faith matters in marriage.

“One of the findings that comes through loud and clear,” Ellison said in an interview, is that couples who do in-home worship activities such as prayer and Bible study together are more likely to have loving unions.

Battling demons

Not all religious beliefs and practices lead to happier marriages.

Those religious individuals who pull God on their side against their spouses are likely to experience more conflict, says psychology professor Annette Mahoney of Bowling Green State University.

And when marriages break up, people who strongly identify God as being at the core of their unions may experience “the dark side of sanctification,” depressive symptoms and a deep sense of sacred loss when the relationship is unsuccessful, Mahoney said.

Recent research also indicates that other factors such as racial and economic inequality can create pressures on a marriage that even people with active faith lives may find difficult to overcome.

In a study presented at the recent joint meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and the Religious Research Association, researchers Mark Killian and Steve Carlton-Ford of the University of Cincinnati found religious black adults reported lower marital satisfaction than religious whites. The lower rates of marital quality were despite the generally higher rates of religious practice among black partners.

“It would seem that structural inequalities, particularly the lack of cultural and economic resources, have a significant effect on the rates of satisfaction within the African American population,” Killian reported on the study analyzing data from the Portraits of American Life Study.

Love is kind

In general, however, a great body of research indicates religion can play a positive role in healthy marriages.

In the last 30 years, slightly higher marital satisfaction has been found among partners who attend services frequently and share the same religious affiliation, according to Mahoney. She examined nearly 200 peer-reviewed studies on religion and family life from 1999 to 2009 in an article in the Journal of Marriage and Family.

Newer research shows that beliefs and actions such as praying privately for their partner, seeing marriage as part of a divine plan and engaging in religious activities together also are associated with happier, more loving unions, she said.

In addition, multiple studies show people who attend religious services frequently are less likely to perpetrate or be the victim of domestic violence, Mahoney said.

In their study, Ellison and Xu found that husbands and wives who prayed together and shared other religious activities in the home were significantly more likely to express affection, to perform small acts of kindness for one another, to compliment each other on the work they do around the home or as a parent and to refrain from criticism.

Sharing core spiritual values and believing God is at the center of their relationships also were predictive of kinder and more affectionate unions, the researchers found.

The findings make sense for several reasons, say researchers on religion and marriage. Ellison and Xu offer these considerations:

• Shared religious values may contribute to intimacy, trust, empathy and mutual understanding.
• Couples who pray and study the Bible together can reinforce religious commitments that may lead to more acts of routine kindness and forbearance in their daily lives.
• Believing their relationships are sanctified by God can provide added incentives for expressions of loving kindness, compassion, and affection among partners. The belief may also encourage partners to practice spiritual models of unconditional forgiveness.

As hard as it is these days to get people to the altar, the challenge for religious institutions goes beyond making sure couples get to the church, mosque or temple on time on their wedding day. The happily ever after part, the research indicates, also involves a commitment by couples to continue to share their spiritual lives with one another.

Then Smith decided to run for president.

It was one of the last in a series of fateful decisions about the personal power he sought that proved too much for many of his neighbors or former political allies to accept. Not long after, on June 27, 1844, he was killed by a mob in Carthage, Ill.

Now, in his run for the presidency, another Mormon, the more mild-mannered Mitt Romney, is asking voters to judge him on his individual qualifications, and not as a representative of an entire faith – just as the Catholic John F. Kennedy did in his groundbreaking run five decades ago.

And the issue Romney is most criticized for, flip-flopping on key issues from taxes to gay rights, would seem to mitigate efforts to portray him as a puppet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

But each step of the way, the former Massachusetts governor will have a lot to overcome to become the first Mormon to be elected president, say scholars studying religion and presidential politics.  Those obstacles include everything from evangelical distrust in the GOP primaries to secular and liberal prejudice in the general election.

Little is off limits in American politics.

Already, the not-so-subtle intimations of GOP candidates about Romney’s electability and rumblings from Democratic and liberal sources about his “weirdness” appear to many analysts to be attempts to reap political gains by exploiting anti-Mormon attitudes and fears.

Americans have been always suspicious of presidential candidates perceived to hold weak or unorthodox religious values, according to authors Corwin Smidt, Kevin den Dulk, Bryan Froehle, James Penning, Steven Monsma and Douglas Koopman in their new book, “The Disappearing God Gap? Religion in the 2008 Presidential Election.”

“In fact,” the researchers write, “the average voter’s insistence that presidential candidates must be religious — and religious in a mainstream way  — is something akin to what political scientists call a ‘standing decision,’ a nonnegotiable starting point for many voters in considering candidates for office.”

Click Here to See a Distribution Map of Mormons in the United States

The outsiders

Members of other once-persecuted religious groups such as Jews and Catholics may have moved into the religious mainstream, but that acceptance is still denied members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

In the 2006 Faith Matters Survey, respondents expressed relatively warm feelings toward Jews, Catholics and Mainline Protestants. Mormons, however, stood out for their unpopularity.  They ranked below evangelicals and people who are not religious, Robert Putnam and David Campbell reported in their book “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us.”

And while Mormons have ascended into Congress and top state positions, the   uneasiness many Americans feel about them is magnified when it comes to the nation’s highest office.

In the 2007 Religion and Public Life Survey, a quarter of respondents said they would be less likely to vote for a presidential candidate who is Mormon. In a June Gallup Poll, 22 percent of Americans said they would not support a Mormon for president.

“It’s because it’s the presidency” that Romney’s faith matters so much, Campbell, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame, said in an interview. “His religion is a liability, but it will not necessarily doom him.”

Not that his opponents will shy away from using Romney’s religion against him.

Attacks from the left and right

Just how politically vulnerable he is because of his religion was indicated in a mid-November poll by the Pew Research Center. Nearly two-thirds of respondents said Mormonism is very different from their own religion, and about a quarter of respondents used negative terms such as “cult.” “polygamy” or “strange” when asked to give a one-word impression of the Mormon religion.

Few analysts expect Romney’s foes on either side of the political aisle to resist exploiting this perceived weakness.

GOP contenders have been criticized for what some consider their relative silence on the topic of anti-Mormonism. They also seem to introduce the subject in roundabout ways such as raising doubts about Romney’s “electability” in states with large populations of evangelical Christians.

On the Democratic side, a recent article in Politico reported that President Barack Obama’s aides and advisers are planning a personal assault on Romney. Part of the plan is to portray Romney as “weird” – a word the authors said was used repeatedly by Obama’s advisers in asbout a dozen interviews. Some analysts view the term as a subtle code word to reinforce anti-Mormon concerns.

Whether Romney wins or loses, Campbell said, one likely positive outcome is that anti-Mormon attitudes and fears will be aired and addressed, and in the long run there will be greater understanding. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints may no longer seem so “foreign” to other citizens.

That may be of little consolation to Romney, however. To paraphrase the line from “The Godfather” when Al Pacino’s character is contemplating a double murder, the former governor may want to keep in mind: “It’s not personal, Mitt. It’s strictly politics.”

Click Here to Compare Mormons to Adherents of Other Denominations on Survey Questions

The multiple health benefits of an active faith life tend to stop at four-course Shabbat meals and church supper tables groaning with fried meat, biscuits and gravy, new research shows.

In one study of some 5,500 women and men ages 45 to 84, participants were more likely to be obese the more religiously active they were. Each step of the way, from those never attending worship to those attending weekly, greater religious activity was associated with significantly higher rates of obesity.

And in a separate study of a predominantly Orthodox Jewish community in Chicago, more than half of adult respondents were overweight, including 24 percent who were obese. Even more troubling, 26 percent of the children in the study were obese, twice the rate found in the general population.

The integral role food plays in many religious rituals and social functions and a desire not to stigmatize overweight members are among the reasons researchers offer for this anomaly in findings related to religion and health.

The only sermons that would get less approval than those asking members to cut back on eating would be those asking for money, said Shanna Granstra, a Baylor University researcher studying religion and obesity.

“It’s a difficult issue to tackle,” she said. “Food is almost like sex, especially considering how obsessed our culture is with food.”

Full plates

Religious activity is generally associated with good physical and mental health.

Six major studies of mortality risks in the last 10 years found frequent worship attenders were anywhere from 18 percent to 35 percent less likely than non-attenders to have died during the time period studied, says researcher George Fitchett of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.

Rising obesity rates, however, are a notable exception to the generally positive record, Fitchett said. He presented his findings on religion and obesity at the recent joint meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and the Religious Research Association in Milwaukee.

People who attended services or otherwise participated in organized religion weekly were 62 percent more like to be obese than those who never participated, according to data from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis of adults ages 45 to 84 sponsored by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

In a separate study of 2,500 healthy women and men, researchers following up with participants 18 years later found 32 percent of frequent worship attenders became obese. In comparison, just 22 percent of non-attenders became obese, Fitchett reported. The data was taken from the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults study funded by the heart and lung institute.

Solving the problem is not going to be easy, researchers say.

A full table, either at a church supper or a Sabbath meal, is symbolic to many of “God’s blessing to us that we can have this bounty,” Fitchett says.

The researchers who studied the Jewish community in Chicago found many participants did not perceive their weight to be a problem. For example, 70 percent of parents of obese children said that their child was about the right weight or underweight, researchers reported in the Journal of Community Health.

There is also a sense that religious leaders have to pick their battles.

Unhealthy eating is lower on the list of pastoral concerns, researchers say, than problems like drug and alcohol abuse, which have greater potential for destroying the lives of individuals, families and other members of the community.

Granstra says some religious leaders may think: “We’ve taken away everything else, it’s hard to take away this one acceptable vice.”

Overcoming stigmas

Perhaps the most difficult challenge in addressing obesity is how to bring up the subject without offending or stigmatizing overweight people in the pews.

Obese white women already are far less likely than healthy-weight women to attend religious services, Granstra found in her research using data from the Portraits of American Life Study.

Maureen Benjamins of the Sinai Urban Health Institute in Chicago, a lead researcher in the community health survey in Chicago, suggests focusing on “a positive, pro-social message” that everyone can benefit from physical activity and healthier eating habits.

“If you keep it at that general level, you don’t have to worry about people being stigmatized,” she said in an interview.

Religious groups also may want to consider offering workout classes and nutrition seminars to all members so no one feels singled out, researchers say, instead of addressing the topic from the pulpit.

And it would not hurt to offer more fruits and vegetables as alternatives at congregational meals, Fitchett says.

Given all the protective health effects of religious participation, and the social value of community meals, however, don’t expect donuts to disappear from Sunday morning coffee hours or latkes to be left off of Shabbat plates.

There is a time for every indulgence under heaven.

There are times when research findings are so obvious they are almost beyond questioning. So it is puzzling that growing evidence showing the importance of congregations cultivating the spiritual lives of the faithful is so routinely ignored.

Puzzling, and damaging to the health of many of the nation’s churches, especially those most in need of revival.

Even though research shows  spiritually alive churches are the most likely to grow, the percentage of U.S. congregations reporting high spiritual vitality declined from 43 percent in 2005 to 28 percent in 2010, according to the latest Faith Communities Today survey.

The drop was accompanied by a decline in the emphasis given to spiritual practices such as prayer and scripture reading across nearly all groups aside from white evangelicals and congregations with 1,000 or more attenders.

The most notable slide occurred among white mainline Protestant denominations, which have been aging and losing members faster than any other major religious group.

The reasons are varied: Declining financial health in the recession saps morale; aging memberships are less likely to embrace new forms of worship; some denominations have shifted emphasis away from personal piety toward social service programs.

It’s not, however, because they don’t know any better.

Spiritual and religious

Study after study shows what may appear to outside observers to be simple common sense: A major reason people attend religious congregations is to deepen their faith lives and draw closer to God.

The U.S. Congregational Life Survey found the percentage of weekly worshippers who reported growing in faith through their congregation was twice as high as the percentage of more infrequent attenders who experienced similar spiritual growth.

The survey also indicated that “grassroots evangelists,” those who feel at ease sharing their faith with others and invite people to worship, were far more likely to strongly agree their spiritual needs are being met in the congregation and to practice devotional activities every day or most days.

“Worshippers in strong congregations also regularly spend time on their own praying, reading Scripture or using other materials to help them better understand and deepen their faith,” survey researchers reported. “In other words, congregations where people spend time on their own cultivating their faith tend to have extraordinary worship as well. They’re bookend strengths.”

In a survey of megachurches, the No. 1 reason people gave for moving from a spectator to an active participant in their congregation was this:  “I responded to an inward sense of call or spiritual prompting,” researchers Scott Thumma of Hartford Seminary and Warren Bird of the Leadership Network reported in their new book, “The Other 80 Percent: Turning Your Church’s Spectators Into Active Participants.”

And the No. 1 reason people participated less in their congregation in the past two years?  It was a tie between “had less time” and their faith had “gotten weaker,” according to a separate survey of parish profile inventories offered by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research.

“Surveys of church people clearly indicate an important reality about people who are highly committed: The most involved are the most likely to say they are spiritually fulfilled, to acknowledge spiritual growth and to express satisfaction with their journey of faith. There is a strong, unmistakable relationship between the two,” Thumma and Bird wrote.

Even the hardest to reach groups in the contemporary religious marketplace —  young adults — appear open to approaches emphasizing spiritual growth.

Researchers Christian Smith and Patricia Snell of the University of Notre Dame examined results from the National Study of Youth and Religion in their book “Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults.” They found factors that do predict high levels of commitment include frequent prayer and Scripture reading, personal religious experiences and highly religious parents.

Yet spiritual sustenance is often what people both young and old are not getting from their congregations.

The gap widens

In 2000, about three quarters of white mainline congregations from denominations such as the Episcopal Church and the United Church of Christ reported giving a great deal of emphasis to spiritual practices. By 2010, less than two-thirds, or 63 percent, emphasized practices like prayer and scripture reading, according to the Faith Communities Today survey,

By comparison, the percentage of white evangelical congregations giving a great deal of emphasis to spiritual practices rose slightly, from 90 percent to 91 percent.

It is difficult for many congregations today to remain spiritually vital amid  decreasing financial health as a result of  the recession and shrinking worship attendance in a time when religious observance is more of a choice than an obligation.

The loss of morale creates an environment where many say: “It doesn’t feel as if God is in this place,” said David Roozen, a lead researcher of the Faith Communities Today survey.

But part of the issue is also the choices many church leaders have made to place greater emphasis on social service programs or church committee work than on promoting spiritual growth.

There is evidence that going back to the 1960s and 1970s many mainline Protestant leaders “took faith for granted” while emphasizing other programs, Roozen said.

But activities such as prayer, worship and scripture reading are integral to the faith of people of all ages, researchers say.

“If they’re going to go (to church), why they want to be there, I think, is for religion,” Roozen said. “They want to connect with God and a community that connects with God.”

The mystery is why that is so hard to understand.

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The choice, he said, was often between having clergy hanging on to pastorates rather than depend on charity or providing pensions “which will place the clergy and their dependants in a position of far greater buoyancy, cheer, and dignity; which will enable men of weakening powers to give place to those younger and stronger; which will keep our parishes manned with vigor.”

Today, nearly a century after his article in the Harvard Theological Review, the religious community faces a renewed challenge in a continuing recession to meet the needs of older clergy while making room for younger leaders.

Like their secular counterparts, many clergy who devoted their attention to less temporal matters than financial planning now find themselves amid shrinking church budgets and a poor economy being forced to work beyond traditional retirement ages.

It is an especially critical issue in smaller churches that still do not set aside money for clergy retirement. In a 2008 study of Church of Christ clergy in Texas, just a quarter of respondents said they had plans to fully retire.

But it is also a burden for larger, mainline Protestant denominations. As memberships shrink and many older clergy find it financially untenable to retire, even fewer younger clergy are able to find work.

In the United Methodist Church, the nation’s largest mainline Protestant denomination, the percentage of elders younger than 35 fell precipitously from 25 percent in 1956 to 5 percent in 2010.

The optimists’ perspective of the coming retirement crunch facing U.S. churches is that many older clergy will have the income to leave full-time positions, but the health and sense of vocation to serve smaller rural and urban churches unable to afford full-time clergy.

The pessimists’ perspective is that many spiritual leaders, financially ill-prepared for retirement, will stay on in pastorates as long as they can, exacerbating the clergy age gap and impeding efforts for denominational revitalization.

There is evidence to support both viewpoints. What is not in dispute, however, is that clergy are getting older.

Rethinking job guarantees

The percentage of people in congregations led by someone age 50 or younger declined from 49 percent in 1998 to 42 percent in 2007, what researchers for the National Congregations Study called “a remarkable change in only nine years.”

The clergy age gap is particularly noticeable in mainline churches. From 1998 to 2006-2007, the average age of clergy in white, mainline Protestant denominations increased from 48 to 57, the congregations study found.

In The United Methodist Church, the median age of elders is 55, up from 50 in 2000 and 45 in 1973, according to a report from the Lewis Center for Church Leadership.  In 2010, for the first time ever, more than half of active United Methodist elders were in the age group 55 to 72.

Thus, the challenges facing many churches are even greater than those facing other sectors of society adjusting to our graying baby boom population.  The first wave of U.S. boomers turned 65 this year.  In  2010, according to the census, there were more than 16 million U.S. citizens between the ages of 60-64, an increase of around 60 percent since 1990.

In recent years, denominations have stepped up efforts to both provide financial planning for clergy and to assist them in the difficult transition to retirement.

And some churches are considering even stronger measures to ease out clergy they no longer consider productive.

The United Methodist Church, for instance, is expected to consider at its 2012 General Conference whether it can continue to offer guaranteed jobs for elders.

‘Can’t afford to’

But not all clergy are able to retire.

Many churches do not set aside funds for clergy to retire. Eighty-seven percent of mainline Protestant pastoral leaders reported in a 2001 survey that their congregations contributed to their pensions, but just 28 percent of clergy from historic black denominations reported similar assistance.

A survey of Korean pastors in Southern California revealed that only three of 10 pastors reported receiving retirement help.

“It is amazing that only a small number of churches consider their pastors retirement seriously and provide help into their golden years,” Gyoungsin Park and Ilene Smith-Bezijan of Azusa Pacific University wrote in a 2009 article on “Pastors’ Retirement: Crisis Beyond the Shrinking of Social Security” in the Journal of Religion, Spirituality and Aging.

In the 2008 study of Church of Christ clergy in Texas, 27 percent of respondents said they had no plans to retire.

“The money is not there to do so,” “Can’t afford to, bad financial planning and four kids” and “Medical expenses are too high” were among the reasons given. Researchers James Knapp and Jennifer Hicks of Southeastern Oklahoma State University and Charles Pruett of Abilene Christian University reported the findings in the Journal of Religion, Spirituality and Aging.

Even among denominations providing clergy pensions, there is concern about financially unprepared clergy being able to retire, particularly as a troubled economy threatens their savings.

“I hear lots of ministers who say, ‘I’m getting close to that age. I’ve really lost my zeal for it, but I’m not able to retire financially’,” said the Rev. Marcia Myers, director of the Office of Vocation for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

But she also takes encouragement from many people who entered ministry as a second career who are still full of enthusiasm. And she takes heart in the experiences of older clergy who are helping to keep smaller urban and rural churches open and vital by serving them on a part-time or interim basis.

So how can churches struggling themselves in an uncertain economy assure financial security for older pastors while making room for younger clergy?

It will not be easy, as Lawrence pointed out in his 1914 essay.  Then, as now, the church, along with businesses and state and federal governments, finds itself facing this crisis in part because of a lack of attention to the financial, demographic, political and moral dimensions that have made this a difficult issue to confront.

The challenge can no longer be avoided.

“The conditions of modern life and the demands for efficiency are pressing the question of salaried workers and wage earners. Salaries and wages are not large enough to enable them to lay up sufficient money for old age,” Lawrence said before issuing a challenge to the church that resonates today: “The need is great; the practical difficulties are great; we shall gain nothing by blinking at them.”

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Late-night talk-show hosts may ridicule candidates such as Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann for mixing faith and politics. But a major new study finds many religious Americans prefer God’s hand, rather than the federal government, guiding the economy.

Not even the prolonged recession and continued high unemployment has shaken their faith.  More than half of Americans who are convinced God has a plan for their lives still strongly believe that, “Anything is possible for those who work hard,” according to the 2010 Baylor Religion Survey.

Surprisingly, this belief and other endorsements of free-market economics are not   the refrains of the rich.  These views are more likely to be held by Americans with lower levels of income and education, the random survey of 1,714 adults last fall found. Forty-one percent of respondents said they strongly believe God has a plan for them, but just 17 percent of respondents with incomes of more than $100,000 held those beliefs.

The continued faith in a conservative American Dream also may have an impact on the larger debates that have gridlocked government over whether to respond to the recession with less or more government intervention to revive the economy and meet the needs of struggling Americans.

There are large blocs of people who may not be sympathetic to government doing more to meet the needs of the poor and long-term unemployed, according to the Baylor survey.

More than half of respondents who strongly believe God has a plan for them said:  “The government does too much.”  Only 21 percent of respondents who are sure God is not guiding their lives found government too intrusive.

“In today’s United States with high levels of unemployment and vastly expanding wealth inequality, belief in God’s plan sustains belief in the fairness of our economic system and our ability to eschew government assistance to stem the tide of our economic woes,” Baylor researchers said in their report on “The Values and Beliefs of the American Public.”

Explore Previous Editions of the Baylor Survey in the ARDA’s Data Archive

Prophets and profits

This faith in the economic system does not seem to be coming from the pulpit.

Less than one in five respondents said their place of worship encourages participants to start a business or make a profit in business.

Aspects of personal faith, however, were a critical motivation for belief in the American Dream, the study indicated.

Fifty-four percent of respondents who strongly believe God has a plan for them also strongly agreed that hard work makes anything possible. In contrast, less than a quarter of respondents who said God does not have a plan for them placed such faith in hard work alone.

In a similar finding, 39 percent of respondents confident of God’s plan for them strongly agreed that success is achieved by ability rather than luck;  just 17 percent who strongly disagree God has a plan for them would make that claim.

These beliefs matter, from the workplace to public policy debates.

View Some Other Survey Questions Concerning the Role of Government

Left behind

It may seem counterintuitive that less well-off Americans would embrace the American Dream at a time when the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. But past research has suggested that people with lower incomes are more likely to rely on God in times of trouble and employ faith as a means to overcome adversity.

The Baylor survey indicated there are benefits on the job for strong adherents of divine intervention and traditional beliefs.

Working adults who believe in the literal truth of the Bible were more than twice as likely as those who do not take Scriptures literally to pursue excellence in their work because of their faith.

Persons who “absolutely” believe in heaven and hell overwhelmingly agreed that the organization they work for has a great deal of personal meaning to them. The majority of people who hold those beliefs also are always or often motivated by their faith to pursue excellence, researchers reported.

But the findings also raise questions about what will happen to those left behind in these hard times.

Fifty-three percent of respondents who said they strongly believe God has a plan for them also strongly agreed that “the government does too much” and that “able-bodied people who are out of work shouldn’t receive unemployment checks.” Just 21 percent of those convinced God does not have a plan for them strongly agreed with those statements.

Some find “bitter irony” in the fact many less well-off Americans embrace attitudes that can be viewed as demonizing the poor as wastrels, but conservative economic policy seems to have become an article of faith for many less-educated religious believers, said Baylor sociologist Paul Froese.

“They tend to understand government as a profane object which stands in opposition to many of the paths God has laid for us,” he said.

So politicians such as Perry and Bachmann advance their agenda of lower taxes and less government regulation by invoking God as active in the lives of individuals and the nation, Froese said.

The idea that God, not government, will provide the guiding hand for the nation’s economy is a message that strikes a chord with many believers.

As the election heats up, expect more political rhetoric that associates God with less government and more talk of “values” voters who embrace free-market economics with religious devotion, Froese said in a presentation for the recent meeting of the Religion Newswriters Association.

How people define the American Dream, and, in part, whether they believe  God blesses America with more economic equality and more social services or less government and less regulation, promises to be a key issue in the 2012 election.

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Now the leaders of popular uprisings in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere face the challenging task of protecting hard-won freedoms in the face of diverse demands from political, regional, secular and religious constituencies.

When it comes to guaranteeing freedom of religion, the lesson from extensive global research is that it matters much less what nations say in their constitutions than what they are prepared to do to enforce those laws.

In a world plagued by religious persecution and conflict, more than nine in 10 nations with populations of more than 2 million provide for religious freedom in their constitutions. Yet such protections alone do not predict whether there will be government restrictions on religion, say sociologists Roger Finke and Robert Martin of Pennsylvania State University.

What does matter is if nations have an independent judiciary that can support those freedoms despite political and social pressures, Finke and Martin reported at the recent annual meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion in Las Vegas.

That is the case whether the majority belief system is Islam, Christianity, Hinduism or state-sponsored atheism. Just how widespread the threats to religious freedom are throughout the world also were made clear at the sociology gathering in a separate study of attitudes toward Islam in five Western European nations.

More than half of the respondents from the former East Germany and France said practicing the Islamic faith must be severely restricted. So did more than a third of the respondents from Denmark, the Netherlands and the former West Germany. Portugal was notably more accepting, but still one in five respondents advocated severe restrictions, Alexander Yendell of the University of Munster in Germany reported.

Explore Nations’ National Profiles

Free to be like me

What the almost universal lip service to religious freedom often means in practice is that people should be free to play by the rules of the group in power.

Know Nothing politicians and Protestant leaders such as Lyman Beecher vilified U.S. Catholics in the 19th century for posing a threat to democracy by establishing their own schools. That the public school system was, in practice, a Protestant school system, was not questioned.

Researchers also discovered contradictions in the notion of religious freedom in theory and practice in the 2010 University of Munster study of more than 1,000 respondents from five Western European nations.

Consider these findings:

• More than four in five respondents from all countries expressed respect for freedom of belief, and at least three quarters from each country agreed with the statement “We must respect all religions.”
• Less than half of the respondents from Germany, Denmark and France approve of the construction of minarets. Only in Denmark and the Netherlands did a slim majority believe girls should be allowed to wear a head scarf to school if it is part of their religious tradition. In France, where the practice is prohibited, fewer than 10 percent supported the right of students to wear head scarves.
• The idea that “Muslims must adapt to our culture” was backed by majorities from 73 percent of respondents in Portugal to 90 percent of respondents in the Netherlands.

In their study on global religious freedom, Martin and Finke found that a perceived threat from a different culture was a major factor in predicting government restrictions on religion. Nations sharing at least one border with a country with a different “civilization,” — think Pakistan and India, for example — tend to have greater restrictions.

Other statistically significant predictors of repression include state favoritism of one belief system and the presence of religious social movements that seek religious hegemony or campaign against other traditions, said Martin and Finke, who also is director of the Association of Religion Data Archives and president of the Association for the Sociology of Religion.

Explore Where Nations Rank on Religious Freedoms

Getting to know you

There is hope for change.

Even if you do not start out loving them, getting to know your neighbor goes a long way to limiting prejudice, research has found.

The University of Munster study indicated that having personal contact with Muslims was strongly related to favorable attitudes toward Islam in every country. For example, in the former West Germany, 38 percent of respondents who reported a lot of contact with Muslims reported very positive attitudes; only 1 percent of respondents who had no contact held very positive attitudes toward Muslims.

In the 2002-2003 Religion and Diversity Survey, 90 percent of respondents said they would welcome Christians becoming a stronger presence in the United States, but less than six in 10 said they would be as supportive of Hindus, Buddhists or Muslims.

Yet when people met across faith lines, the experiences were mostly positive, according to the U.S. survey. About two-thirds of respondents said their contacts with Muslims were mostly pleasant; 6 percent said they were mostly unpleasant. Three-quarters said their contacts with Buddhists were mostly pleasant, with 3 percent saying they were mostly unpleasant.

The problem is contact is still limited. In the Religion and Diversity Survey, less than a quarter of respondents said they have had more than a little contact with Buddhists, Hindus or Muslims.

In the European study, less than 10 percent of the respondents said they had a lot of contact with Muslims. As a seeming consequence, the study showed what comes to many of their minds when they think of Islam are discrimination against women, fanaticism and, somewhat ironically, narrow-mindedness. What does not come to their minds are notions of Muslims as peaceful and tolerant.

Repression based on ignorance is a universal barrier to freedom.

It is not just in Egypt and Libya, but it is in nations from the United States to France that the time to start talking to one another to preserve religious freedom and reduce religious conflict and persecution is right now.

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Secular activists have said for centuries that the more people know, the less they will believe in religion. The Catholic hierarchy and Catholic schools continue to struggle over the university’s role in balancing academic freedom and propagating the faith. The tension between overt hostility and treating religion as a valid subject of academic inquiry remains palpable at many public universities.

Yet the question remains: Does higher education lead to a loss of faith?

The answer, as indicated in a new study published in the latest issue of the journal Sociology of Religion, may be as complex as the American religious landscape.

Mainline Protestants are more likely to view the Bible as a book of fables as they receive college diplomas, the study found. And the religiously unaffiliated, a growing percentage of the U.S. population, are far less likely than any of the other groups to pray or hold traditional beliefs as they acquire advanced degrees.

However, evangelicals, black Protestants and Catholics appear to become more religious the more steps they climb on the academic ladder, according to the study, which analyzed data from the 1972-2006 General Social Survey.

“Education does not uniformly decrease religiosity,” said researchers Michael McFarland of the University of Texas at Austin and Bradley Wright and David Weakliem of the University of Connecticut. “Once religious tradition is taken into account, a different picture emerges.”

Mixed grades

Several surveys on education and religion have found mixed results.

For example, in the 2006 Portraits of American Life Study, 58 percent of respondents with bachelor’s degrees said religion or religious faith was very important to them personally. The percentage was just slightly below the 62 percent of high school graduates who attributed similar levels of importance to religion.

But there are greater variations on some questions of belief and practice: Seventy-one percent of high school graduates, compared to 58 percent of college graduates, told the 2007 Baylor Religion Survey that they have no doubt that God exists.

In their study, McFarland, Wright and Weakliem found that educational advances predicted increased attendance at religious services, decreased levels of prayer, increased inclination to view the Bible as a book of fables and decreased inclination to view the Bible as the literal word of God.

Within those findings, however, there were substantial differences related to religious traditions.

For instance, evangelical and black Protestants with secondary degrees were likely to pray more often than their fellow members with less education.

And all respondents with college educations were less likely to view the Bible as the literal word of God, but Catholics, evangelicals and black Protestants with increased education were more likely to view the Bible as being inspired by God. At the same time, mainline Protestants and unaffiliated respondents with higher degrees were more likely to view the Bible as a book of fables than as being inspired by God.

In short, the researchers reported: “Increased education for mainline Protestants and the nonaffiliated may have created a loss of belief, but for evangelicals, Catholics and black Protestants, it may have altered the nature of belief.”

Earthly rewards

The results may have burst some bubbles surrounding religion and higher education, but the researchers were not surprised.

They argued that evangelicals, black Protestants and Catholics would be more likely to find positive effects from higher education because their religious beliefs and tradition are a bigger part of their identity and would tend to buffer them from outside influences.

Their relatively higher incomes and potential to be bigger givers along with professional skill sets that can meet congregational needs may also make them more valued, particularly in churches with relatively fewer highly educated members.
“Individuals who are valuable to the congregation will likely become more involved in the religious community and become more religious over time,” the researchers said.

Mainline Protestants, in contrast, would be more likely to have negative influences on religion from higher education since they are more diverse in their beliefs and more accommodating toward modern life, the researchers said. At the same time, individuals with more education and higher incomes would tend to be less unique, and less highly valued, in mainline congregations.

Overall, however, “The main contribution of this study is that education does not uniformly decrease religiosity,” the researchers said.

They are not alone in challenging long-held assumptions that attending college  necessarily undermines religious faith.

“In general, research in this area reveals that attending college does not, as was previously thought, inevitably lead to apostasy; in fact, recent work suggests that college may actually have the effect of preserving belief among some students,” Damon Mayrl and Freeden Oeur wrote in the June 2009 issue of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, based on their analsyis of social scientific studies on religion and higher education.

Scholars agree further study is needed to better determine the relation between religion and higher education.

But so far, the latest research indicates those who assume religion will slowly wind down as higher education rates increase are mistaken.

“Based on the data that is out there, something else has to be going on,” McFarland said. “There are a lot of highly educated people who are very devout.”

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