Piety is devotion and reverence, most often toward God or religious practice, shown through worship, prayer, and faithful observance. The word comes from the Latin pietas. For the Romans it meant more than religion: it was dutiful loyalty to the gods, to one’s family (especially parents), and to one’s country. Virgil’s “pious Aeneas” is the classic example. That older sense survives in phrases like “filial piety,” meaning devotion to one’s parents. The word can also be used disapprovingly to mean a show of virtue or conventional righteousness, as in “empty pieties.”
Being pious has never been a goal of mine or a standard to which I feel compelled to hold myself. That makes me like many Americans of my generation. In the U.S., the biggest change in religious affiliation in the last 50 years has been the rise of the religiously unaffiliated (“nones”). In the early 1970s, roughly 90% of Americans identified as Christian and only about 5–7% claimed no religion. Today, Pew’s most recent Religious Landscape Study puts Christians at about 62%, nones at about 29%, and other faiths (Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and others) at around 7%. Most of the decline came from Protestants, especially mainline denominations like Methodists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians, which shrank sharply. Evangelical Protestantism held up better for a long time. Catholics have fallen more modestly, to around 19–20%, partly cushioned by immigration. The sharpest drop came from the 1990s through the late 2010s and was heavily generational, since younger cohorts are far less likely to affiliate. One notable recent finding is that the decline appears to have leveled off since around 2019–2020. Globally the picture is mixed. Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and parts of East Asia secularized much like the U.S. or further. Christianity’s center of gravity shifted toward sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, and Islam grew fastest, mainly because of younger populations and higher birth rates. Measures of belief and practice, such as attendance and prayer, have generally fallen faster than affiliation labels.
I started life as a Catholic and got appropriately baptized. But living in Costa Rica caused my mother to shift us into a Presbyterian community, which we kept as we moved to Wisconsin. So, I did my time in Sunday School and learned the basics. When we moved to Rome during my high school years, my mother enrolled me in Notre Dame Prep, an all-boys Catholic school run by Brothers of the Holy Cross. My sisters were sent to Marymount, where the nuns looked after them. But we were still not designated at Catholics even though the priests, nuns and brothers were all around us.
My kids were all baptized Catholic, not by dint of my doing, but because my first two wives were Catholic and thought it was the way to go. I’m not sure I cared too much one way or the other. I haven’t spent any time thinking about religion over the years, hence my sense that I am not particularly pious. They say people get religion as they age. But that happens less than the age gap in surveys suggests. Older adults are clearly more religious than younger ones on almost every measure, but much of that gap is generational rather than a result of aging. People born in the 1940s were raised in a more religious era and have largely stayed that way, while younger cohorts started out less religious and haven’t “caught up” as they aged. Given my history, that hasn’t happened at all. That said, longitudinal studies that follow the same people over decades do find a real, modest aging effect. A common pattern is a dip in religious involvement in the late teens and twenties, a partial return with marriage and children, and a gradual rise in later life. The late-life increase shows up most in private spirituality, such as prayer, reflection, and thinking about meaning and mortality, rather than in formal attendance. Attendance often falls again in very old age because of health and mobility limits. The usual explanations are greater awareness of mortality, experiences of loss, more time after retirement, and religion’s role as a source of community and coping. Many people don’t turn religious late in life so much as reconnect with, or think more seriously about, beliefs they already held. That tracks very well with my own experience….but maybe not altogether.
Whenever the movie The Two Popes comes on the streaming movie list, Kim and I joke that I am always compelled to watch it. For some strange reason, I seem driven to think about religious issues. I’m not sure I understand why. Today I had some free time in lower Manhattan, and I found myself walking over to Trinity Church at the top of Wall Street. I’ve walked by Trinity Church thousands of times and I’ve never felt the need to go inside. This morning that changed and I found myself waiting until they opened at 8:30 AM and going in and sitting in the church pensively for no particular reason. I took a picture of the stainless windows and sat in there, looking around at the naves and the architecture. One of the reasons I think I did this is because I happen to be listening on Audible to Ken Follett’s book Pillars of the Earth. It is epic novel about cathedral building in England in the middle ages. It’s topic I find fascinating and it’s not the first book I’ve read or listened to on the topic of religion in the middle ages or even on the building in cathedrals. One of the most interesting books I read in recent years was How the Irish Saved Civilization. That’s the story of how Saint Patrick and his monks preserved numerous manuscripts at the start of the dark ages and thereby kept the knowledge base that scholars believe might otherwise have been lost. I found that a fascinating story for some reason.
So, for some reason, as I’ve gotten older, and as I have more time, and I reflect more about life, I’m actually thinking that I might be getting a little more pious, not necessarily in terms of my fervor for Christ or Christianity or even thinking about God, but rather thinking about the impact that religion has on mankind and the importance of its role in the cultural evolution of our society. I get a strange sense of peace sitting in a church like Trinity Church, so without overthinking it, I’m just going to say that like Buddy, who’s leash declares that he’s “Selectively Social”, I declare myself to be “Selectively Pious”.