Church Members

Arthur E. Holt, professor of sociology at Chicago Theological Seminary, wished to trace down to actual statistics the obvious facts that in proportion to total numbers far fewer workingmen, especially union men, belong to churches than do professional and business men. To do this he prepared a table showing the proportions of different men groups in Chicago's total men population and in Chicago's Church rosters. His table and conclusions he printed last week in The Christian, Disciples of Christ magazine:

IN CHICAGO IN CHURCH

5.4%.... Professional men..... % 9.0

8.6 .....Businessmen ......6.8

21.0 ....Clerical men.... 31.7

20.6....Skilled manual laborers....17.3

36.7..Unskilled manual laborers..18.1

Professor Holt's analysis:

"From this comparative table it appears that while wage earners make 77% of Chicago's total gainfully employed population, they comprise 67% of the gainfully employed church members. It would appear that professional people join the church in greater proportion to their total numbers than any other vocational class; that clerical workers come next, that skilled workers follow; then comes the businessman, and last, with about the same general average as the business man, comes the unskilled worker. . . ."

His conclusions:

"Union membership, instead of being a bar to church membership, stabilizes the laborer and increases the chances that he will participate in community organizations, the church included.

"The greatest enemy to church membership is not affiliation with union labor but the disorganization in personal life which comes from the migratory tendency of the unattached laborer.

"There does not seem to be any great revolt of organized labor against the religious organizations. The church membership is fairly representative of society as a whole."

A nonclerical interpretation would indicate that the Chicago church-member situation jibes with empirical fact: church membership is a social phenomenon; the professional man belongs for church contacts, just as he more blatantly belongs to Rotary, Kiwanis, Lions, Odd Fellows, Elks, Masons, Knights of Columbus, B'nai B'rith, Ku Klux Klan, International Bible Students, etc.; the clerk and the businessman aspire to the same social security and economic advantages; the working man seeks his security in his unions, in preference to churches, which he considers "controlled" normally by the rich. The acknowledged membership situation is pragmatically so and striving to make churchgoing more religious than social may be the cathartic for U. S. churches, which are losing members at the rate of 500,000 a year (see below).