"Running Downhill"

Drearily dishonest is the average U. S. Protestant minister. He pads his church membership list by about 25%. Of the names he keeps on it, 8% are those of dead people. On an average Sunday he preaches to a house 70% empty. On that Sunday nine out of every ten people in the U. S. either go to a Catholic church or go to none.*

Such facts were reported in Manhattan last week to the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies. They were based on a survey of 1,000 Congregational & Christian Churches made by a Commission on Church Attendance headed by that famed and pious statistician, Roger Ward Babson. Bullish on U. S. domestic economy, Statistician Babson is decidedly bearish on the state of U. S. religion.

Mr. Babson's survey, based entirely on Congregational figures, shows that U. S. Protestant church attendance reached its peak in 1880, has since been "running downhill." In 1921 Protestant churches signed up 1,710,000 new members, in 1935 only 990,000. Although other church statisticians have arranged their figures to indicate that total U. S. church membership keeps abreast of the increase in U. S. population, Roger Babson declares that while 12% of the population attended Protestant churches in 1930, the rate was down to 10.8% last year. Dejected by his findings, good Congregationalist Babson concluded through his spokesman-secretary: "If church attendance continues to peter out, our mission societies and all our other church organizations will go overboard. To save the church our laymen must go to church."

*Since the Catholic Church claims only 20,500,000 of the U. S.'s 127,785,000 inhabitants as members, and since Protestant attendance is estimated at less than 14,000,000, indication is that only one citizen in four is a church-goer.

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