Who the Unchurched Really Are

Most evangelism programs, church growth tactics, and other attempts to reach the “unchurched” concentrate on Millennials, young urbanites, college types, and the suburban middle class. But, as Robert Putnam reminds us, the demographic that is the most unchurched is the working class, the lower income non-college-educated folks. A big segment of these blue-collar workers has just stopped going to church. They are also, with the personal and family problems that Putnam documents, arguably, most in need of ministry. This is ironic, since the working class used to be the biggest supporters of conservative Christianity. And yet, I’m unaware of any concerted effort to reach them, other than individual pastors in these communities doing what they can.I’m as middle class as they come, but I have a lot of affinity with these folks, having grown up in rural Oklahoma and working on jobs that for me were temporary ways of paying for school but for them were their permanent livelihoods. They are typically good-natured, hard-working, and admirable in many ways. But I can see in my old friends–more accurately, the adult children of those friends–the break-down that Putnam documents.

So many young men and women in this slice of the culture are just not getting married, showing no interest in it, being content to live together in serial relationships. The men are fathering children, but have little to do with them. The women choose to have children without bothering with a husband, but then they have to work multiple jobs to provide for them while often leaving them more or less on their own.

The individuals often derided as “red necks,” listen to country music rather than rap, metal, or other art forms criticized for their baleful influence. They never went to college to learn from a left wing professor about postmodernism and how morality is culturally relative. But they are as postmodernist and relativist as they can be. They are, arguably, casualties of contemporary thought, living out its consequences, but without the social capital that college graduates have that allows them to live a stable life despite their ideology. Keep reading

Also see
Social Capital and the Opportunity Gap