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first off, the kind of emphasis on "faith" above as an individual drama involving the believer and some god is a very protestant way of thinking about christianity. catholicism is less about this, and more about the collective rituals of belief--and in that you can see how its internal practices mapped onto a whole range of other social functions.
the main driver behind the loosening of the hold of organized christianity on folk may have little really to do with "faith"--which seems to me only one dimension of such appeal as these organizations have---it may have to do with social mobility--not so much up/down the class ladder as physical mobility. you know, cars and highways and the ease with which folk move about, change cities, change social networks....
think about catholic parishes in urban residential neighborhoods.
it is rare now to find families that have lived for more than one generation in the same neighborhood.
this was not the case before world war 2.
and before world war 2, catholic churches tended to be very dominant in what were catholic neighborhoods--and the populations of these neighborhoods would have been in the main stable across two or three generations (more or less)--so the parish would be a kind of natural horizon of life in the neighborhood. this would hold for questions of faith--if your family was catholic, you would simply go to mass. it would be a ritual that was as much social as it was religious--the gathering of the catholic population of a nieghborhood every week in one place meant that it was a space where the community could see itself, interact with itself as a community, etc.--so the religious identification would be blurred into social identification--and the position of the church relied upon both.
the church was alot more important than simply being an elective community--it provided lots of social services, from education to fraternal organizations (knight of columbus, say--and so these were also social and political systems that served complicated social functions that went way beyond questions of faith) to mechanisms for the monitor and control mechanisms for forms of "deviance" (like the famous homes for wayward girls)to distribution of goods and shelter to the poor, to neighborhood social functions like dinners and festivals...the church was a fundamental space within which civic life unfolded...church organizations were spaces where the social and economic hierarchies of neighborhoods were arrayed and reproduced and adjusted...so they served a myriad secular functions, a myriad functions that were organizationally catholic but functionally more neutral...and these were directly linked into city politics.
i dont know if there was a particular moment when things changed---but by the mid-1970s, the patterns of residency had become very different than they were, with turnover in populations becoming the rule--mobility, changes in the lengths of time folk expect to stay in one place, the breakup of formerly homogenous neighborhoods---all of which would be linked to changes in the basic economic organization in the states, the rise of managerial capitalism (shorthand)....
if you think about the above and line it up with the effects of increased population mobility, you could infer that one result would be the weakening of the hold and meaning of many of the social functions of the church and its various organizations. one effect would be the collapsing back of the sense of community onto the relatively weak problem of faith--weak in the sense that it was always only an aspect of an aspect of the range of social functions that churches once served. it is not irrelevant, the question of faith, but it is limited in import (think about any church group and how it is arrayed differentially around questions of committment, its waxing and waning etc.)--and maybe the reduction of a church to a matter of faith--that is to a faith-based elective community--is a pretty tenuous to weak way to sell a church over time.
so maybe the main changes that explain the fracturing of the hold of organized christianity has little to do with its doctrinal content and more to do with shifts in the functions that are filled by churches as social institutions.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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