America’s Fleeting Spiritual Revival

Out of the horror would come the hope, the restoration. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, an America that had moved away from organized religion would find its way back as one nation, stunned and indivisible, under God.

That, at least, was what many of America’s clergy thought would happen. They weren’t whistling in the dark: In the days after the terrorist attacks on America, people of all faiths--and no faiths--seemed to edge back toward the country’s spiritual roots. The mainstream media, of all things, were broadcasting locations of church services.

But today, the Sunday before the anniversary of the 11th, Pastor Doug Webster is lamenting the American epiphany that didn’t last.

“It was not a long-lasting commitment and connection to the church,” he says. Webster heads the 400-member Mountain View Church that meets at Capo Valley High School in Mission Viejo, but his assessment reflects that of the Barna Research Group, a respected market research company that tracks trends in Christianity.

Barna has found that nine of 10 Americans say the Sept. 11 attacks had “no lasting impact on their faith” and that people’s religious beliefs “have gone unchanged” in the last year.

What hurts Webster, whose church began 5 1/2 years ago with 20 people, is that he so vividly remembers how vital religion seemed to people last Sept. 11.

Adults and youngsters alike told him then they needed assurance and guidance. “People said, ‘Tell me this God you’ve been talking about on the Sundays I’ve been in church is still a big enough God to be in charge,’ ” Webster says. In the next breath, he says, they told him they wanted more than canned theological answers--they wanted him to sit with them “as an authentic presence of someone who still has faith.”

Heady stuff for ministers. “It’s why we ministry people suit up and show up,” Webster says of being able to help people in a crisis. “There was a great hunger for hope.”

On the 16th, the first Sunday after the terrorist attacks, the church was packed. “It was one of the most powerful worship experiences I’ve ever had in my life, as a pastor and as a believer,” Webster says.

Through that day of songs, prayers and sermons--with many in the congregation openly weeping--Webster welcomed regulars, semi-regulars and “prodigals” who hadn’t been in church for a long time. “I walked away that day thinking ‘I can’t imagine that we won’t have a thousand people next week because of the powerful human experience we had together.’ ”

It wasn’t to be.

In fact, Webster thinks the church may have lost as many fringe attenders--their perhaps already-shaky faith crushed by Sept. 11 events--as it gained new ones.

But as Webster, 42, sits in his Las Flores home and discusses the last year, it isn’t with recrimination at those who came but didn’t stay.

“I’m well aware of human nature,” he says, philosophically. “That’s my business, in a way. But it really saddens me not to see a more spiritual response ... of more people. I’m not saying there hasn’t been some, but we went back to business as usual more quickly than I thought we would.”

Webster is an evangelizer, so he needs no lectures about how the secular society also has a hold on people. Or that, as the images of tragedies 3,000 miles away began to recede, relatively well-off Southern Californians may not have wanted spiritual sustenance as badly as they first thought.

Which, to an evangelist, only means there’s more work to do.

“With the hurt [that the spiritual surge didn’t last], there is great hope,” Webster says. “With the disappointment that more didn’t stay longer and that every one of our churches didn’t double in size is the hope that there have been some changed lives.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Readers may reach Parsons at (714) 966-7821 or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or at dana.parsons@latimes.com.