Religious life won't be the same after downturn

In the September 28, 2009 article "Religious life won't be the same after downturn," Associated Press religion writer Rachel Zoll reports that the recession has strained the financial resources of churches and other religious organizations:

NEW YORK – Organized religion was already in trouble before the fall of 2008. Denominations were stagnating or shrinking, and congregations across faith groups were fretting about their finances.

The Great Recession made things worse.

It's further drained the financial resources of many congregations, seminaries and religious day schools. Some congregations have disappeared and schools have been closed. In areas hit hardest by the recession, worshippers have moved away to find jobs, leaving those who remain to minister to communities struggling with rising home foreclosures, unemployment and uncertainty.

Religion has a long history of drawing hope out of suffering, but there's little good news emerging from the recession. Long after the economy improves, the changes made today will have a profound effect on how people practice their faith, where they turn for help in times of stress and how they pass their beliefs to their children.

"In 2010, I think we're going to see 10 or 15 percent of congregations saying they're in serious financial trouble," says David Roozen, a lead researcher for the Faith Communities Today multi-faith survey, which measures congregational health annually. "With around 320,000 or 350,000 congregations, that's a hell of a lot of them."

The sense of community that holds together religious groups is broken when large numbers of people move to find work or if a ministry is forced to close.

"I'm really still in the mourning process," says Eve Fein, former head of the now-shuttered Morasha Jewish Day School in Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif.

The school, a center of religious life for students and their parents, had been relying on a sale of some of its property to stay afloat but land values dropped, forcing Morasha to shut down in June.

"I don't think any of us who were in it have really recovered," Fein says. "The school was 23 years old. I raised my kids there."

The news isn't uniformly bad. Communities in some areas are still moving ahead with plans for new congregations, schools and ministries, religious leaders say.

And many congregations say they found a renewed sense of purpose helping their suffering neighbors. Houses of worship became centers of support for the unemployed. Some congregants increased donations. At RockHarbor church in Costa Mesa, Calif., members responded so generously to word of a budget deficit that the church ended the fiscal year with a surplus.

"We're all a little dumbfounded," says Bryan Wilkins, the church business director. "We were hearing lots of stories about people being laid off, struggling financially and losing homes. It's truly amazing."

In the Great Depression, one of the bigger impacts was the loss of Jewish religious schools, which are key to continuing the faith from one generation to the next. Jonathan Sarna, a Brandeis University historian and author of "American Judaism," says enrollment in Jewish schools plummeted in some cities and many young Jews of that period didn't have a chance to study their religion.

Today, some parents, regardless of faith, can no longer afford the thousands of dollars in tuition it costs to send a child to a religious day school. Church officials fear these parents won't re-endroll their kids if family finances improve because it might be disruptive once they've settled into a new school.

Enrollment in one group of 120 Jewish community day schools is down by about 7 percent this academic year, according to Marc Kramer, executive director of RAVSAK, a network of the schools. A few schools lost as many as 30 percent of their students. Many of the hundreds of other Jewish day schools, which are affiliated with Reform, Conservative and Orthodox movements, are also in a financial crunch.

Kramer says 2009-10 will be a "make or break" year for Jewish education, partly because of the additional damage to endowments and donors from Bernard Madoff's colossal fraud.

Overall, U.S. Jewish groups are estimated to have lost about one-quarter of their wealth.

"It's going to be painful," Kramer says. "There will be some losses."

The Association for Christian Schools International, which represents about 3,800 private schools, says enrollment is down nationally by nearly 5 percent. About 200 Christian schools closed or merged in the last academic year, 50 more than the year before.

At least 80 members of the Association of Theological Schools, which represents graduate schools in North America, have seen their endowments drop by 20 percent or more.

The National Catholic Education Association is still measuring the toll on its schools, but expects grim news from the hardest hit states, after years of declining enrollment.

"Some schools that were on the brink — this whole recession has just intensified that," says Karen Ristau, president of the association.

Clergy in different communities say worship attendance has increased with people seeking comfort through difficult times, although no one is predicting a nationwide religious revival.

Americans for years have been moving away from belonging to a denomination and toward a general spirituality that may or may not involve regular churchgoing.

The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey found more people who call themselves "nondenominational Christians" and rising numbers who say they have no religion at all.

Before the stock market tanked last fall, only 19 percent of U.S. congregations described their finances as excellent, down from 31 percent in 2000, according to the 2008 Faith Communities Today poll.

Because of these trends, mainline Protestants were among the most vulnerable to the downturn. Their denominations had been losing members for decades and had been dividing over how they should interpret what the Bible says on gay relationships and other issues. National churches had been relying on endowments to help with operating costs, along with the generosity of an aging membership that had been giving in amounts large enough to mostly make up for departed brethren.

The meltdown destroyed that financial buffer.

The Episcopal Church, the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church and other mainline denominations were forced to cut jobs and their national budgets.

The damage was felt across Methodist life. As of the summer, more than half of the church's 62 U.S. regional districts, or annual conferences, reported they had budget deficits. Some sold property and buildings to continue their ministries. Two national Methodist boards cut more than 90 jobs. Fifty bishops took a voluntary pay cut. Annual conferences in hard-hit regions, such as Florida and Ohio, lost thousands of members as people moved to find work elsewhere.

"Many of these groups have such large endowments that they're not going away," Roozen says. "But I think there's no question that they're going to be smaller both as organizations and in membership."

Roman Catholic dioceses for years had been struggling with maintaining their aging churches, paying salaries and health insurance and funding settlements over clergy sex abuse. With the hit to investment income and a drop in donations, they are now freezing salaries, cutting ministries and staff. The Archdiocese of Detroit, at the heart of the meltdown, had a $14 million shortfall in a $42 million budget in the fiscal year that ended in June 2008.

Conservative Protestant groups, known for their entrepreneurial spirit and evangelizing, were not immune. The 16.2 million-member Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant group in the country, has had budget cuts in its North American Mission Board, at least three of its six seminaries and in its publishing and research arm.

Religious leaders say the next year or so will be key in determining which organizations survive the downturn intact. Even if the recession ends soon, religious fundraisers say the angst donors feel will not lift immediately, prolonging the difficulties for congregations, schools and ministries.

Meltdown's lasting cultural impact tough to gauge

In the September 27, 2009 article "Meltdown's lasting cultural impact tough to gauge," Associated Press national writer Jocelyn Noveck reports:

The economy is really bad, Jay Leno told his "Tonight Show" audience in March.

How bad?

"So bad that on 'Sesame Street,' they won't even talk about the letters A, I or G anymore."

Not that Leno was content to leave it at that. In fact, in eight months starting on Labor Day 2008, the comedian told no fewer than 863 jokes about the financial meltdown in his "Tonight Show" monologues, according to a Washington group that monitors such things.

Counting jokes is straightforward enough. It's a lot harder, of course, to gauge the more subtle ways in which the Great Recession has impacted our culture: How we interact, how we entertain ourselves, how we worship, what we wear and buy and read and watch.

One cultural message has been clear, and Leno's populist jokes reflect it: The country has been in no mood to celebrate ostentatious wealth, or those forces seen to have brought us to such a precarious place in our history.

But some historians say such a mood is in some ways cyclical, a phenomenon that has followed past recessions and then disappeared — until the next downturn.

"It's a critique that emerges periodically in our history, that consumption is corrupting," says Peter J. Kastor, a professor of history and American culture at Washington University in St. Louis. "Those concerns have been around since 1776." But, he says, we are a society of consumers, and that's what will ultimately prevail. Others agree.

"Certainly, you can see more critical attitudes toward conspicuous displays of wealth," says Bruce Schulman, a historian at Boston University. "And you can expect popular culture to reflect those attitudes. But we are a country that depends on consumption, and that's why I would not expect us to see really enduring cultural changes."

Perhaps that's also why some designers allowed themselves a little optimism at this month's Fashion Week shows in New York. The glitz of some previous spring seasons was gone, but in contrast to the more somber fall styles now in stores, one could spy some feathers and even a little tinsel from at least one influential label, Proenza Schouler.

"The last thing the world needs is another black pencil skirt," said Proenza's Lazaro Hernandez. "You want something that feels more joyful." And something different, he might have added, to bring women back to the stores and keep the industry afloat.

Designer clothes are, of course, accessible only to a few. One can't say the same for movies, which do well in times of economic distress because they're a relatively cheap, not to mention escapist, form of entertainment.

Indeed, Hollywood is coming off a huge summer in what's been a banner year, with revenues running at a record pace of $7.4 billion for the year, 7.8 percent ahead of 2008 ticket sales, according to box office tracker Hollywood.com.

Could the content of our films be impacted by the recession, just as the Great Depression fueled the popularity of Frank Capra's common-man-fights-corruption films? There's always a lag between current events and cinematic versions of them, because it takes time to get movies made. One upcoming film, though, promises a scathing look at the forces that contributed to the recession: Oliver Stone's "Wall Street 2," now filming, with Michael Douglas returning as Gordon Gekko, the voracious financier who uttered that famous line, "Greed is good."

As for comedy, look for Leno, David Letterman and others to continue to wring all the rueful jokes they can out of our economic woes. "Populist outrage is the undercurrent of all of it," says Dan Amundson, research director at the Center for Media and Public Affairs, which monitors the late-night shows. "Particularly for Leno, it's been a regular shtick." (A favorite Leno target has been AIG, the insurance giant bailed out by the government.)

The recession may also have changed the nature of our celebrity obsession. Take a look at your favorite celeb weekly these days, and the cover story will as likely be about a reality TV star, like Kate Gosselin of "Jon & Kate Plus 8," now famously split from her equally famous reality husband, as about a movie star or wealthy socialite like Paris Hilton.

"It brings the celebrity addiction down to our own level," says Samir Husni, director of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi. "It's a more serviceable fantasy. Not everyone can be Beyonce, but we can be Kate."

From celebrity worship to houses of worship: Though charity giving in America fell by 2 percent in 2008, forcing many groups to lay off staff, cut wages and eliminate programs, the same wasn't true of giving to religious organizations, which was actually up by 5.5 percent, according to a study by Giving USA.

And, in what could be called a further silver lining for religious institutions, many have sensed a renewed purpose in serving communities that need them more than ever.

"It's an opportunity for the church to be the church," says Susan DeLay, spokesperson for the Willow Creek megachurch outside Chicago, which has four campuses and a combined attendance of about 24,000 worshippers each week. "It's an affirmation of what God has called for the church to be. That's very satisfying."

Unlike some other churches in more hard-hit areas, attendance at Willow Creek has remained basically steady, while giving is down by 2 percent so far this year, DeLay says. Meanwhile, there's been a huge increase in demand for the church's services — such as the food pantry, where output is almost twice that of last year.

Demand has also gone up for the church's cars ministry, which gives donated cars to those in need, and for a career transition workshop. And also for premarital counseling, DeLay says: "It's interesting that people are eager to give their marriages the best chance."

Speaking of marriage, one might think the divorce rate would go up in times of economic difficulty. There are, however, no statistics yet available past 2007, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, which compiles the information from states.

Whether divorces are up or down, divorce attorneys say anecdotally that they're busy in court amending agreements because people's finances have changed, with some unable to keep up their financial obligations to their exes. Another product of both the recession and the collapse of the housing market: Some couples are staying together under the same roof, albeit unhappily, because they can't sell their homes or can't afford to divorce.

And then there are the more subtle effects of economic stress on family life, the lasting nature of which will likely depend on how long the recession itself lasts.

"Both as couples and as parents, adults under stress often forget to express the kind of daily appreciation of partners and children that makes family life go smoothly," says Stephanie Coontz, a professor of family studies at Evergreen State College in Washington state and the author of "Marriage, A History."

On the other hand, she notes, there may be long-range benefits from the economic meltdown, such as families learning to entertain and cook for themselves. They're figuring out how to spend time together, rather than money.

"When people can't afford to outsource family chores or pick up fast food, for example, they may rediscover the pleasures of doing some tasks as a family," she says.

"If the Great Depression is any guide, one long-term good result of this economic crisis could be to remind people that bad things can happen to good people, and that ultimately we are all in the same boat — or at least subject to the same tides."
___