What Happened in 1972?

Both the United States and Great Britain experienced a revival of religious participation in the 1950s, and a decline in the 1960s. A poll in 1939 found that 41 per cent of Americans claimed to have attended church or synagogue during the previous week. By 1955 the figure was 49 percent, gradually declining between 1959 and 1971, when the figure was 40%. In Britain in the 1950s patterns of religious participation were different. Churchgoing was less important than participation in ecclesiastical rites of passage, and Sunday Schools for children. All of the major Protestant denominations saw a post-war increase in the percentage of British children aged 5-14 enrolled in Sunday School, reaching a peak in the 1950s. The number of infant baptisms in the Church of England per 1,000 live births declined in the late 1930s and early 1940s, but rebounded after the war to reach a post-war peak of 672 in 1950.

In both Britain and the United States the 1960s was a period of religious decline however religious participation is measured. The 1960s, though, turned out to be a watershed decade in the history of European Christianity, perhaps as important as the 1790s and the 1520s. The slow decline that was evident in the late 1950s and early 1960s became a steep decline in all forms of religious participation, a crisis of religion not only in Great Britain but throughout Europe. About 1972, however, patterns of religious participation took a very different turn in the United States. Church attendance began to grow and religious participation, especially by young people, was on the rise. This paper outlines a set of long and short-term explanations for the divergent paths of recent British and American religious history.