Economy, Terror Boosting Religion

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Margaret O’Donnell doesn’t consider herself a lapsed Catholic. After all, the assistant at a Los Angeles trade association is a believer and attends Mass during Christmas and other holy days.

But her attendance at Sunday worship services had become spotty in recent years. By her own admission, she had decided she could “do it herself” when it came to religion.

All that changed Sept. 11 after witnessing the horrifying attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Feeling “an incredible sense of loss” she took herself to the Holy Family Church in South Pasadena the next Sunday.

She now plans to attend service regularly.

“I felt like I should have been doing it all along, but this kind of opened your eyes that it’s there for you,” said O’Donnell, a thirty-something single. “I felt better when I left.”

O’Donnell was far from alone. The South Pasadena church reported attendance far higher than average, as did Protestant, Jewish, Islamic and other religious bodies. In some instances twice as much.

But even prior to the terrorist attacks there was evidence that church attendance was rising, and not just at the Pentecostal churches that for a decade or more have been the nation’s fastest growing.

The Rev. Donald Colhour, senior minister at Wilshire Christian Church, a mainline Protestant church in the mid-Wilshire area, has seen his congregation grow from 28 to 160 members over the last four years.

He believes that people may be rediscovering church, at least partly because of a kind of hangover from years of spiraling materialism.

“That’s (one of the things) I preach on. Keeping a human face on our technology. Providing an ethical guideline to live by. Reducing our materialistic outlook,” Colhour said.

Overall, the number of people who say they attend church has risen over the last decade from under to over 35 percent, said Philip Amerson, president of the Claremont School of Theology.

He thinks that Baby Boomers and their children are trying to fill a spiritual hunger that a generation had tossed aside in its uprooting of traditional values during the 1960s.

Eric Brown, communications director for The Center for a New American Dream, a Maryland-based group with a religious component that encourages people to consume less, thinks the terrorist attack is causing deep soul searching about consumerism.

“On the day when everything goes crazy, I can’t imagine people would think they should have spent more time at the mall,” he said.

Of course, that raises the question as to whether the rising church attendance seen in recent weeks will be lasting, or decline as the memory of the terrorist attacks fades or as the economy picks up steam.

Monsignor Clement Connolly, of Holy Family Church, suspects it will take hold. “I think there is a wonder and sense of intensity here that I have never seen before,” he said. “I think some of it will go on for a long time.”

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