The Empty Pew and the Unread Paper
Both journalism and organized religion are facing a crisis of engagement. The reason is the same, and so is the solution.
I went to synagogue this week to observe Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. As I sat in my pew with my wife, my son, and my fellow congregants, I couldn’t help but think that both journalism and organized religion are dying in very similar ways.
The central insight here stems from my own experience with both institutions growing up in the 70s and 80s. News, for example, was a shared activity in my house.
The Way We Were
On Sundays, my parents and siblings and I all gathered around the newspaper on our laps, and everyone claimed the section they wanted most. For the grownups, this was probably the front page and the local section, but for me it might have been the comics or the sports section. I still remember reading the latest copy of Life magazine, lying on our living room carpet, and being transported by the pictures.
The rule in our house was no TV at the dining room table, with one exception—the news. Since we always ate together, that meant on Sundays we all watched golf (story for another time) and then 60 Minutes. On weeknights, it was Sue Simons and Chuck Scarborough on WNBC. The point is, we read and watched and even listened to the news together.
The same can be said of the way we did religion. The son of a Conservative rabbi, my family was something of a hybrid “Conservadox.” We were Conservative in our ideology, which meant we believed in women rabbis and egalitarian services, but we were Orthodox in our practice: observant, kosher, and consistent.
We went to synagogue every Saturday as a family. We walked the (nearly one-mile) route, rain or shine or heat. When we arrived, we sat in our seats, prayed, and participated together. My siblings and I didn’t just learn the traditions from school. We learned by watching my parents, and by watching the other adults and children at synagogue. We learned when to stand and when to sit, when to sing out and when to pray softly. It wasn’t taught, it was osmosis. Watching my father’s face when he got to certain prayers, or my mother’s body language, told me more than enough about what it meant to be Jewish.
A Shift From Participation to Consumption
It’s no surprise that both institutions are now confronted by the same fundamental problem. If the social technologies that enabled them, from the family dinner table to the bricks-and-mortar synagogue, have fundamentally changed, how do you keep from becoming irrelevant?
The central change, as I see it, is the shift from active participation to passive consumption.
An excellent example is how, for many people going to synagogue has become too much like watching TV. Folks sit and they listen. They listen to the rabbi speak, the cantor sing. They watch prayers scroll on the screen, the Hebrew transliterated in English. They are told when to sit and when to stand, by the rabbi. In too many cases, children are denied the chance to learn Judaism by doing, by watching their parents, and by doing themselves.
This isn’t just anecdotal. The numbers confirm it.
According to a 2020 Pew Research Center survey of Jewish Americans, just 20% say they attend religious services at least once a month. The generational divide is even more stark: 40% of young Jewish adults now describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated.
Journalism is in the throes of a similar crisis of engagement, caused by a collapse of trust and a balkanization of the audience.
Pew also shows that Americans’ trust in national news organizations has fallen off a cliff. People’s default behavior is to go to sources that reflect and reinforce their worldview, rather than turn to outlets that others in their community share.
At the heart of both trends is the collapse of those shared experiences that once bound us together.
The once bedrock family dinner, the hub of both news consumption and conversation, has declined by more than 30% in the past three decades. The story breaks down along class lines: 61% of Americans who went to college had a regular family dinner growing up, but that number drops to just 38% for those who did not.
The Path Forward
This isn’t a pair of distinct trends. These are symptoms of the same phenomenon, a broader shift in how Americans build and maintain community. Both journalism and organized religion were built on shared rituals and shared physical spaces that are no longer the default gathering hubs of our lives.
Which means the strategic challenge for leadership in both fields (and frankly, in any field trying to create community) is the same:
How do you move an audience from being passive consumers back to being active participants?
The first step, it seems to me, is to acknowledge that producing a great product, whether a well-reported article or an inspiring sermon, is no longer enough.
The work now is to design an experience that brings people together, that promotes connection and conversation, and that makes them feel like they have some ownership. It’s not enough to broadcast a message. The real work is to build a table people want to gather around. That table may still be physical, but it almost certainly has to be digital.
The question is no longer just “what do we have to say?” but “what can we do, together?”
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