America Doesn’t Face a Crisis of Faith, but a Crisis of Religion

According to recent surveys, some 87 percent of American say they believe in God, but trust in religious institutions is at an all-time low, and regular attendance at religious services has been steadily decreasing. Yuval Levin sees these data as suggestive of a broader collapse of faith in institutions, to which he in turn attributes many of our political and social ills. And while many churches and synagogues have tried to fix the problem by “making their religious orders less demanding,” and “emphasizing broad commitments to justice and deemphasizing specific strictures on personal behavior”—thus rendering themselves more attractive—Levin believes that by doing so they only aggravate the problems they hope to solve.