Dropping Back In : A Growing Number of Baby Boomers Are Discovering There’s No Place Like Church

Michael Barlow awoke early one Sunday morning in the mid-’60s and decided he had better things to do than go to church--”like sleep,” he said.

From then on, his Sunday mornings were free. “It was almost a classic loss of faith due to sex and rock ‘n’ roll,” he later observed.

But today, at 40, Barlow would sooner turn down a brunch date with his Hollywood cronies than miss Sunday morning church services. A vice president of production at Orion Pictures, Barlow said he finds church to be “a real tonic.”

He is not alone in his turnabout.

Barlow’s generation rejected organized religion on such a scale it was “unprecedented in all of American history,” said Benton Johnson, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Now the baby boomers, people in their late 20s to early 40s, are drifting slowly back to mainline churches.

A study conducted by the Center for Social and Religious Research at the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut showed that regular worship attendance increased by 10% in the years 1974 to 1984 among the older set of baby boomers, those born from 1945 to 1955.

While sociologists are still working to explain the trend, a major reason for the reinhabitation of the pews--in this city, at least--is that yuppies are finding that church feels like home.

Barlow’s wife, Irene Webb, said: “The church gave us a family, since both of us are far away from our families.”

The Rev. Linda Nepstead, associate pastor of Westwood Presbyterian Church, was one of several church officials who commented on this aspect of the return to church. “We see a lot of people who are looking desperately for community in the big city,” she said.

And Father Fred Fenton of St. Augustine by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Santa Monica said people like the Barlows are attracted to his congregation because “a community where you have an opportunity to talk about things that matter is sort of hard to find in Southern California.”

A vice president at the William Morris Agency, Webb said she derives familial pleasure from a particular Sunday morning ritual at St. Augustine’s. In a tradition known as “passing the peace,” churchgoers greet people to the left and right of them with hugs and the words “Peace be with you.”

Said Webb: “That feels real good when the rest of your life is dealing with aggressive people who have the attitude, ‘What have you done for me lately?’ ”

Phillip Hammond, a professor of religious studies and sociology at UC Santa Barbara, defines a yuppie as someone who is mobile, transient and essentially solo.

Said Hammond, 57: “I imagine this is the generation that is the first to face squarely up to the fact that most of us are alone.”

Yet most young adults harbor memories of a cozier time--and some of those memories have to do with church. Mary Trudeau-Mottola, young adult minster at St. Martin of Touris Catholic Church in Brentwood, recalled the “sense of belonging” in her family’s parish when she was a child.

Trudeau-Mottola remembered the time a parishioner family’s van blew up while the family was on vacation. One child died, and two others and their mother were severely burned. Members of Trudeau-Mottola’s church supported the family throughout the tragedy and helped the disfigured children readjust to school.

“How can you measure how much that means?” Trudeau-Mottola asked. “And how can you imagine leading a life where you don’t have that kind of support in a crisis time?”

Yet, as Trudeau-Mottola said, many people come to St. Martin of Touris precisely because they don’t have access to that sort of friendship circle.

“They come here because they have just moved here and know no one in town, except at their job, if they have a job. Or they have broken up with someone and are hurting.”

Indeed, for those who are looking for a one-to-one connection, “a church or synagogue is still the best place to meet someone in our society,” said Michael Medved, president of the Pacific Jewish Center in Venice. He said in his community there have been 67 weddings in the last seven years.

When it comes to reclaiming ‘60s church drop-outs, “we seem to have hit on something that really works here,” said Nepstead of the Westwood Presbyterian Church. She said at least 80% of the congregation is comprised of affluent professionals in their 30s and 40s.

The Westwood church woos the well-educated, UCLA-adjacent congregation by offering food for their minds as well as their souls, she said. But along with the intellectual sermons there is another lure--services “steeped in tradition.

“In our worship services, people find the same components they experienced in church services in the Midwest when they were growing up,” Nepstead said, specifying elements like recitation of the Lord’s Prayer and ancient creeds.

“We speak the language of (the parishioners’) childhood,” she said.

Nepstead, 36, went through the typical baby boomer progression, from childhood church-going to rebellion against organized religion during her college years at the University of Michigan. “Church just seemed to be irrelevant. Everything was irrelevant then,” she said with a laugh.

She said she temporarily replaced religion with politics, dope smoking and popular psychology, as did her friends. “I knew no one who went to church in that era of my life.”

Once out of school, Nepstead taught school, worked in corporate real estate, and trained to be a marriage and family counselor. She said that before entering the seminary, she confronted “a real barren emptiness in my life.”

Donald Miller, associate professor of religion at the USC School of Religion, said that when people like Nepstead eventually do come back to church, one thing they are hoping to do is reconnect with an earlier, more idealistic part of themselves. “A socially active church symbolizes some connection with a social conscience awakened in the ‘60s,” Miller said.

Many churches popular with the baby boomers offer a convenient way to tap into current causes. Irene Webb said that at St. Augustine’s on a Sunday morning, for instance, churchgoers can stop by card tables set up outside the church and sign petitions, or volunteer to help shelter the homeless, curtail child abuse, or fight AIDS.

For those who are slaves to competitive careers, the church offers the twin benefits of an easy outlet for social activism, and a kind of time-out from a graceless world.

Paul Hall, 39, has attended St. Augustine’s by-the-Sea Episcopal Church for 13 years. (He is married and has a daughter.) A segment producer for “The Late Show” on the Fox network, he said that in his business, “you can get real desensitized to reality.”

Moral Dilemma

“All the time I’ve been in the (television) business, going to church has been my moment to retreat. It’s a leveler. It’s a chance to turn off the burners.”

Yet, returnees to church are finding it isn’t necessarily easy to integrate traditional values with “blazing careers,” as one pastor put it.

Nepstead said many of the people she counsels at Westwood Presbyterian “are struggling to live out their faith in the workplace.” She said members of her congregation tell her that they are often expected to set aside their church-based ethics for the good of the deal or the sale.

Even transgressions such as pilfering paper clips or legal pads can present a moral dilemma for church members, she said.

Michael Medved would argue that this reborn sense of ethics is one of the pluses of a return to traditional church-going.

The future yuppies of America were raised on “bland, mild, non-demanding religion,” said Medved, who in addition to his work at the Pacific Jewish Center is a writer and movie critic (he co-hosts the Lifetime cable-TV show, “Sneak Previews.”)

He argues that religion was less exciting a presence in the lives of the baby boomers’ parents than it was for their parents before them. No wonder, then, that an entire generation got the idea that church attendance was drudgery.

“We were taught religion with one of the elements missing,” Medved said. That element is the “thou shalts.”

Medved believes people want to be made to live up to certain standards. He feels New Age beliefs will prove ultimately unsatisfying for many because “they offer the feel-good transcendence of religion, but with none of the rigor.”

Return to Judaism

Liz Danziger, 33, a member of Medved’s religious community, said that she came back to Judaism precisely because of these guidelines it provides. She found out “what a sound system for living it is,” she said.

For instance, she said, if she is dissatisfied with the work of a repairman, she only has to look to her Jewish heritage for a clue to how to approach the problem: “The Torah instructs people to give other people the benefit of the doubt.”

The repairman might still be questioned, but without accusation on Danziger’s part.

As a child, Danziger didn’t believe Judaism had the answers to the big questions of life. So in her teens, Danziger went looking for a discipline that was more compelling. She said she wound up eventually in a doctor’s office with orthopedic problems resulting from her efforts to hold a Zen meditation pose for extended periods.

‘Divine Intervention’

Soon after this episode of what she wryly refers to as “divine intervention,” Danziger said she felt a “powerful sense of guidance” that she should once again explore her Jewish origins.

Author Danziger (her most recent book, published by Harcourt Brace, is “Winning by Letting Go”) and her husband, an electronics engineer, are regular synagogue-goers these days, and are raising their 15-month-old son in the Jewish tradition.

It’s no accident that many of the returnees to religion--people like Danziger, and Irene Webb and Michael Barlow--have young children. As Michael Medved said, the experience of becoming a parent for the first time “perforce pushes you in the direction of thinking about God.”

Medved is 39 and has a 15-month-old daughter. He said that seeing his baby--”this soulful little blob of protoplasm”--for the first time reminded him of the old saying: There are no atheists in a foxhole. “I think one could just as well say there are no atheists in the delivery room,” he said.

In years past, one sure way to make Michael Barlow and Irene Webb squirm would have been to invite them out socially on a Sunday morning.

Webb said that the couple had to come up with some convincing excuses in those days to cover for the fact that they were diligently going to church. “We were basically hiding it,” she said.

Nowadays, however, Webb talks about her beliefs more freely at the office, and sometimes even makes a new business contact at church.

Barlow said, “Two or there years ago there might have been a little teasing or one of those awed silences” if he talked about church at work. “Now I’m making references to it. I think a lot of the prejudices have been washed away in the last two years.”