In his most recent book, In and Out of Church: The Moral Arc of Spiritual Change in America, Steven Tipton takes up important questions about the decades-long decline in church attendance among Protestants, the rise and growth of religious nones, especially among adults under age forty and the permutations of the spiritual but not religious identities among Americans. In pursuing these question, Tipton follows a long line of critical scholarship about American religion and congregational life that began with Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney’s American Mainline Religion and runs through Roof’s and Robert Wuthnow’s studies of spiritual seeking as well as other scholarship about change and vitality among American congregations, a host of studies of new forms of conservative Protestantism and megachurches, and recent studies of religions nones. Footnote ¹

From 2017 through 2022, Tipton collected qualitative data in four congregations in the Silicon Valley and the Metro Atlanta region. Along with six years of participant observation in the four churches, Tipton conducted formal interviews with eighty people and engaged in informal conversations with more than two hundred others. His findings mirror those of his predecessors regarding the many factors that push Americans away from congregations and others that pull them toward what he calls “selective participation” (15), “liminal” membership (13), or “perennial” visiting (27). The push factors include the lure of religious freedom and freedom of conscience, individualism and anti-institutionalism, and the inability of churches to compete for the hearts and minds of millennials, and their parents and grandparents. The pull factors include the search for meaning and community, especially the desire to belong or contribute to something larger than the self, the need to provide some sort of moral foundation for children, and the felt imperative to find, develop, or complete a self that is relentlessly divided and compartmentalized.

Tipton organized the book in a somewhat unconventional way. Rather than present his data as a whole, he selected a small number of “exemplary” congregations and individuals on whom to report (x). This strategy has the virtue of providing the reader with very rich information about each case. In chapter 3, for example, Tipton paints a vivid picture of the religious lives of the individuals and their family members as their faith and spirituality change and develop across generations. Similarly, in chapters 4 and 5, Tipton relates in great detail the ways in which different congregations are retooling worship, outreach, and services to demonstrate that church is relevant, important, and potentially life-giving to skeptical or indifferent younger adults. However, Tipton does not identify the criteria he used to select these exemplary cases nor explain what makes them similar or different from the others. Doing so would have given readers a more complete understanding of how unique or common the faith trajectories of his respondents are and how these four congregations compare to other churches trying to respond to the newest wave of de-churching.

Following a short introductory chapter in which he presents the main themes and underlying rationale of the book, Tipton begins his analysis in chapter 2 by summarizing the current state of knowledge about religiosity and attendance from a host of surveys (for example, the General Social Survey and Pew Research Center surveys). Tipton carefully reviews the scholarly literature that reports on these surveys to identify the rate and extent of Americans’ exodus from organized religion and their adoption of relatively individualistic forms of spirituality. He further describes the demographic trends of the change in religiousness. He also zeroes in on the anti-organizational causes of the decline, noting that people often leave church by simply drifting away because churches “‘focus too much on rules,’ act ‘too concerned with money and power,’ and get ‘too involved with politics,’ while failing to ‘meet the spiritual needs of people’” (9). At the same time, the unchurched recognize the important role of religious bodies for building community and providing a way to make sense of one’s experiences. Surprisingly, these sentiments are more widely shared by the churched and unchurched, and Tipton concludes that “churched and unchurched Americans do not turn out to be mutually exclusive, homogenous social groups holding internally consistent moral views that contradict one another” (13).

In chapter 3, Tipton deftly explores the religious and spiritual journeys of four multi-generational families, tracing experiences from grandparents to grandchildren. Although the specific details of the four familial accounts vary, Tipton identifies several commonalities that drive religious seeking and intermittent participation in religious bodies: the search across generations for community and moral purpose, a desire to experience the sacred, and a concern that children are given a moral education that will anchor them as adults. He notes that for many of his interviewees, parenting is a critical moment in which faith and religious seeking must be addressed, and many seem to find that participating in a religious community “provides an experiential threshold and practical baseline for the freedom of choice and conscientious responsibility” that they hope their children will exercise as they enter adulthood (38).

If one has read social scientific work on spirituality and religious switching, the stories in chapter 3 are familiar, yet Tipton’s extensive family religious histories makes them come alive in a unique way. He also shows how religious seeking is driven by concerns about religious freedom—not just freedom from or freedom for religion, but “freedom in” religion (82). This is a less common way to think about religious freedom, but it is nonetheless important because it illustrates a central claim he makes: religious communities are sites where individuals find or experience freedom to be their authentic selves and organize their lives so they are morally coherent and meaningful.

Tipton turns to in-depth profiles of the four exemplary congregations in chapters 4 and 5 to illustrate how some churches are creatively responding to the sharp rise in disaffiliation, rejection of organized religion, and the search for religious meaning among young Americans. Tipton does not provide how-to solutions but instead offers a “why-so landscape of insight and practice true to bodies of worship and care that actually respond to the hopes and fears of those at the threshold of adulthood and beyond” (127). Tipton focuses chapter 4 on one mainline Protestant congregation in the Silicon Valley that has adopted the evangelical seeker-style popularized by megachurches such as Willow Creek Community Church or Saddleback Community Church. The account of Alto Church is familiar, but again rich in details that offer the reader a comprehensive look into one innovative church. The key insight about religious vitality from this example is how the church prioritizes belonging over belief. It makes church a place of welcome by removing creedal or doctrinal requirements for participation. Its worship and programs are aimed to demonstrate how Christianity and participation in loving Christian community can help people manage the intensity, uncertainty, and ultra-competitiveness of the high-tech world of northern California. The three Atlanta congregations profiled in chapter 5 similarly emphasize belonging over belief, but they do so by adapting worship and community service to the changing demographics of their neighborhoods, and they seek to connect generations in worship and service rather than adopt the age-graded structure of Alto Church.

In the final chapter, Tipton summarizes the strategy of placing belonging before believing and behaving in the following way: “They [the four churches] concentrate on the shared spiritual experience heartwarming revival and moving worship … they offer care for souls scarred by fire-and-brimstone judgement … they open up engaging dialogue for minds moved by religious questioning and curiosity in the present and put off by partisan politics and apocalypse preached from the pulpit” (212). He offers a spirited defense of congregations because they are one of the few institutions, perhaps the only one, that may be able to anchor the multiplex and buffered self to a moral community and the transcendent.

Although much of the book focuses on churches and the spiritual and religious journey towards, in, and away from church. Those reading from the field of law will note that Tipton integrates this rich descriptive narrative with judicious observations about the nature of the American legal traditions about freedom of religion and freedom of conscience. He also describes people’s challenges managing the church-society relationship in a country in which they are formally separated but often tightly yoked in practice, and he even discusses how the present study offers new ways to think about how contemporary congregations simultaneously embody attributes of church, sect, and mysticism. Throughout the book, Tipton’s references to instrumental and expressive individualism and the difficult work of cultivating a moral self harken back to his early writing, with Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, and Ann Swidler, in Habits of the Heart and The Good Society, two books that have been influential for scholars and readers in both law and religion, thus placing his newest book in a long-running conversation about the role of religion in promoting the moral order of America.Footnote ² The subtitle of the book includes the phrase, “the moral arc of spiritual change,” and while the precise meaning of that phrase is not clear, it seems like he is referring to the passage from faith to doubt and disaffiliation and then back to some form of faith. This passage to a new form of faith is more likely to be liminal, selective, and uncertain, but buttressed by caring communities who emphasize the journey rather than the outcome. Tipton is an astute observer of the American religious and moral landscape, and with this the book he provides a welcome update about signs of religious organizational vitality amidst dire proclamations about its pending demise.