‘Rural Revival’? Inside the Surprising Catholic Convert Spike in America’s Heartland
Rural dioceses are experiencing new signs of life and deserve to be as much a part of the ‘Catholic revival’ conversation as their big-city counterparts.
America’s apparent Catholic revival appears strongest among the college-educated but may be leaving working-class people behind.
Does this also mean that the Catholic convert numbers are the highest in major metropolitan areas where the white-collar demographic tends to congregate, while more blue-collar rural dioceses are stagnating?
The answer, paradoxically, is No.
Leading up to Easter, the Register collected data on total conversions in dioceses across the country and compared the numbers to last year. While some dioceses that include major metros made the top 10 for percentage increase in conversions — St. Petersburg (84%) and Kansas City-St. Joseph (70%) — the list is dominated by more sparsely populated rural dioceses.
None of the top three dioceses — Norwich, Connecticut (112%), Pueblo, Colorado (105%), or Rapid City, South Dakota (96%) — have a metro area with more than 300,000 people. And in total, six of the top 10 don’t include a metro area of 1 million people.
Additional data collected by Hallow was consistent with the pattern, with rural dioceses like Duluth, Minnesota (145%), Gaylord, Michigan (100%), and Altoona-Johnstown, Pennsylvania (83%), well above the national average increase of 38%, according to the prayer app company’s analysis.
Part of the explanation is that the same dynamic of white-collar conversions happening across the nation is playing out in an even more concentrated way in the smaller-sized cities that often serve as rural diocesan hubs.
For instance, in the Diocese of Duluth, Communications Director Dean Lavato noted that much of the diocese’s conversion boom is concentrated in Duluth itself, a metro area with a population of 280,000. Growth in the more remote reaches of the diocese, which covers northeast Minnesota and includes a region well-known for its mining, forestry and blue-collar grit, has been slower going.
“It’s still mostly college-educated people,” said Lavato of the diocese’s nation-leading conversion spike. “In some of the mining towns and blue-collar areas — [hearing] from our pastors who have gone there not familiar with that environment — it’s just a more difficult demographic to reach.”
But that’s not the case everywhere. In several rural dioceses across the country, local Catholic leaders shared that inroads are being made with the working-class demographic in a way that appears distinct from urban centers. As a result, it appears that rural diocesan crops of converts this past Easter included a higher rate of blue-collar people than might be typical in an urban or suburban environment.
“I’m seeing a lot [of conversions] with pretty much any walk of life,” said Father Daniel Belken of the Diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau in Missouri, who leads a parish in New Hamburg, an unincorporated community of 218 people. “The uptick was across the board; it wasn’t just in any demographic.”
Fertile Soil for Faith
Part of rural dioceses’ relatively stronger traction with the working class might be related to the distinction between farm work and blue-collar work more generally.
Life on the farm — common in many of the rural dioceses where conversions shot up — may simply be conducive to the life of faith in a way that the factory floor or construction job site isn’t.
My sense is that people in a rural setting often, but certainly not always, have a greater sense of our reliance on God’s fatherly care and concern for us,” said Bishop Donald DeGrood of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, who grew up on a farm in Minnesota. “For example, when a farmer is experiencing a drought, as many of my flock certainly have over the years and decades, their inability to control the situation on their own is very apparent, and many of them naturally turn to prayer.”
Jim Ennis, director of Catholic Rural Life, a nonprofit that promotes the Catholic faith in the American countryside, sees evidence of the Church’s growth in agricultural communities all the time. He points to packed Masses and retreats he has attended in rural dioceses across the country: Sioux Falls; Lincoln, Nebraska; Salina, Kansas; and Saginaw, Michigan; among others.
“I can tell you story after story,” he said. “In rural communities especially, there’s just this deep yearning.”
Catholic leaders in rural dioceses cite smaller, more responsive communities as another advantage that the Church might have in the countryside in terms of attracting new converts.
“[Subsidiarity] is not just a good idea,” said Father Nicholas Ginnetti of the Diocese of Steubenville, Ohio, referring to a principle of Catholic social teaching that things should be handled at the most localized level possible. “It’s a principle of reality.”
Father Ginnetti, who serves as the diocesan vocations director, shared how the tighter-knit nature of rural ministry plays out at the parish he serves in Cambridge, Ohio, population 10,000.
One recent convert Father Ginnetti knows is a coal miner who had no prior faith background but was drawn to Catholicism in part because he saw its emphasis on virtue as a way to better himself for the sake of his family. He found the small local parish, was able to do a one-on-one Order of Christian Initiation of Adults (OCIA) program that fit with his irregular work schedule, and entered the Church along with his wife and children. His oldest son is now training to be an altar server.
“That’s just not something you will ever find in a mega parish,” said Father Ginnetti. “And that’s the kind of thing that really creates a solid foundation.”
Small, intimate community is just one of the factors boosting belief in rural dioceses.
“Religion is just more important in small, rural parts of America,” said Ryan Burge, a demographer of religion who worked for 20 years as a small-town Baptist pastor in Illinois. “The church is much more central to communities in small towns and rural areas than it is in suburban and urban areas. In small towns, the two social organizations are the schools and the churches.”
He adds that the difference is exacerbated by self-selection. Believers are more apt to prefer small-town life while the irreligious often move out of rural areas and into the cities. The longer this plays out, the stronger rural dioceses become relative to urban ones.
A Rural Advantage?
It’s not just that rural dioceses experienced a greater-than-average spike in converts this past year. According to data from the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, it’s that the faith in the U.S. countryside is already strong.
Of the top 10 dioceses for recent priestly ordinations per Catholic, only Wichita, Kansas, and Jackson, Mississippi, contain a metro area with more than 400,000. The cities with the highest Mass attendance all fall below that threshold too: Lafayette, Louisiana; Lafayette, Indiana; and Bismarck, North Dakota.
Looking at adult baptisms and receptions into full communion per 1,000 Catholics, largely rural dioceses in the American heartland again top the list: Tulsa, Oklahoma (7.4), Lexington, Kentucky (7.1), and Knoxville, Tennessee (6.8). Nashville (metro population 2.2 million) bucks the trend with 8.1 conversions per 1,000 Catholics.
Father Belken has seen the trend of self-sorting in action. Many of the faithful Catholics he knows “don’t necessarily want to live in the big, big cities,” he said. “Whenever [families] look and say, ‘Where do I want to raise a family?’ it tends to be out here because they feel like it’s less chaotic, it’s more peaceful, it’s more relaxed, and it’s much more centered on values that we would consider a part of our Catholic faith.”
The phenomenon may be a product of the wider trend of geographic sorting based on politics that has been playing out in America for years. At a time when the Church’s countercultural stances on abortion, contraception and marriage fall on the right of the political spectrum, conservatives, and by extension rural people, are more likely to be receptive to the Church’s message.
Online Reach
While the growth in the Church in rural America encompasses all types, it’s impossible not to notice the youthfulness.
Father Jarrod Lies, who grew up in a big working-class family in Wichita, has been “floored” by the amount of young families he has seen at Mass recently. “It was clear to me that there was a family revival happening,” he said. “It’s not all about OCIA, but [also] the people returning to active life of faith.”
And in some rural dioceses, young people are coming into the Church even apart from family connections.
“We’re seeing youth come in whose families aren’t even Catholic. I think that’s a huge statement,” said Lavato in Duluth. “There are some teens who come in, [and] just from friends or from the internet, are being drawn to the Church.”
Lavato and others point to the reach of online evangelists like Father Mike Schmitz, a priest of the Duluth Diocese. In the past, rural communities had less access to top evangelists and inspiring speakers. The internet, though, has narrowed that gap.
“In a different era, they wouldn’t have had that ability to know the faith or to hear it explained,” said Bishop Jeffrey Walsh, whose Diocese of Gaylord includes the smallest city in the country with a cathedral. “That goes a long way to what helps people discern and see the truth of what the Catholic Church believes.”
That’s a discernment that seems to be playing out especially in the American countryside.
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