One Hundred Years of Secularization and Pluralization in the Midwest

One Hundred Years of Secularization and Pluralization in the Midwest Daniel G. Hummel (bio) Sociologist Robert Wuthnow begins Remaking the Heartland (2010) by explaining that his assumptions of Midwest decline and stagnation—shared by many Americans—were mistaken. In fact, he writes the region has "undergone a strong, positive transformation since the 1950s" that rivals any other geographic area in the United States.1 In the following paragraphs I leave aside a normative evaluation of religion in the Midwest over the past century, but I do affirm Wuthnow's broader insight that modern trends in U.S. history are definitely present, even leading, in the Midwest, too, and religion is a case in point. From the vantage point of the 2020s, the usual sociological markers of religion have declined precipitously in the Midwest over the last century as they have elsewhere in the United States. While Gallup measured membership in houses of worship (church, synagogue, or mosque) in 1937 at 73 percent, in 2020 the number dipped below 50 percent for the first time. Fully one quarter of all U.S. adults now identify with no religious affiliation, and weekly attendance to a house of worship hovers in the low-30s percent.2 While the religious data we do have on the Midwest in many ways fulfills its stereotype as the average of all American traits, the region is also unique. According to a Public Religion Research Institute religious survey in 2020, the Midwest remains notable for its concentration of White mainline Protestants and Catholics, as well as for dense pockets of White evangelicals in the lower Midwest and Native Americans in the Upper Midwest.3 Certain cities remain key locations or headquarters for religious communities: St. Paul, MN (Catholics), Grand Rapids, MI (evangelicals), Detroit, MI (Black Protestants), and Dearborn, MI (Muslims), to name just a few. End Page 85 The trends are strong, but the landscape is dense. Two broader trends have received increasing scholarly attention and capture much of how the religious landscape of the Midwest has changed over the last century: secularization and pluralization.4 These are well-documented phenomena writ large that I will trace in brief below, highlighting some of the recent scholarship by historians, ethnographers, and sociologists that interpret those trends through a Midwestern lens.5 Secularization As a case study in secularization, we could do worse than anchor our conversation in Midwest universities. Even granting the "bubble" of culture that surrounds many universities—no less so in the Midwest6—public R1 universities have also become crucial institutions in American society, bringing together young and old, public and private interests, politics, culture, education, and, yes, religion. Not only has the historiography of higher education emphasized this theme, but universities and colleges have become major economic, cultural, and social institutions across the Midwest.7 The growth of higher education in the Midwest has been dramatic, from the gargantuan schools in the Big Ten Academic Alliance (Ohio State University leading with more than fifty thousand employees and more than sixty thousand students enrolled at its Columbus campus), to the expansion of large private research universities including the University of Chicago, Marquette University, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Notre Dame, to other nationally-recognized religious colleges and universities such as Wheaton College (Wheaton, IL) and Calvin University (Grand Rapids, MI). All told, nearly five million of the nation's 16.9 million higher education students are in the Midwest.8 Broader twentieth-century trends of secularization in U.S. society were anticipated by universities and colleges. Many of the region's religious (or one-time religious) schools date to the nineteenth century. Public universities like the University of Wisconsin, founded in 1848, was not "secular" but "non-sectarian:" promoting a general Protestant morality and ethics rather than a specific Protestant tradition. In the case of both sectarian religious schools and non-sectarian public schools, both shed these official identities in various measures and eventually eliminated any type of religious instruction by the early twentieth century. Yet as religion declined in these institutions, it often found energy among End Page 86 students. The 1920s at UW is an interesting reference point. In 1928...