The Crisis in Christianity

Christianity today is in a state of crisis – especially in the West. This observation is hardly new. Europe and the United States have been getting less Christian for decades. In Europe the churches are a shadow of their former selves. State churches have been virtually evacuated, leaving only a few parishioners in each building. Evangelical and charismatic churches are doing better; yet their numbers are still quite small compared to the rest of the population.

In the U.S. as well, the church’s influence is shrinking. Denominations that were once the pillars of American society are now shrinking and closing all the time. Enter almost any mainline church on a given Sunday morning, and the pews are filled with grey heads. Even the churches that claim to be “multigenerational” have virtually no one from my generation. The millennial remains elusive – we are “leaving [the] church in droves” (Daniel Burke, cnn.com, 5.14.2015).

But this isn’t just a question of numbers. The church is confused in its spirit and mission too. What is the purpose of the church today, and what is its message? One hopes, of course, that this message will ultimately be the same one it has always proclaimed – that God became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, healing the breach between God and humanity, and then overcame sin, death and the forces of darkness, thus undoing the very evil that humanity brought into the world, forgiving our debts and making us whole again. But how should this truth be proclaimed?

THE PROGRESSIVE CRISIS

Different churches have tried to answer this question in different ways. Some have decided that the key, really, is to update the gospel, make it more palatable for modern times. They have gone forth boldly (and recklessly) in pursuit of “demythologizing” projects, attempting to release the gospel from its archaic, ancient shell, to get to the real heart of things, the kernel, which – God be praised! – in fact conforms to current cultural zeitgeists, and is amenable to even the most reductionist scientific paradigms.

This seems to be the project of contemporary progressive evangelicals, and has been a theological mainstay of the mainline churches and progressive Catholics for a century or more, and especially in the last fifty years.

I do want to honor the honest conflicts and convictions and struggles for faith that those who subscribe to these theologies undergo. But the project thus far has been, to be honest, a disaster for the faith; and the struggles of those who promote it seem to me tragic.

The faith, stripped of its essentials, of the confession of a personal, interventionist Creator who becomes a human being and undoes our sins, thus fulfilling the promises made to Abraham – the faith stripped of these beautiful elements always ends up uncompelling for most, and especially for anyone not raised Christian.

The problem is that, if the paradigm of classical Christianity disappears, then it is really impossible to say just why I should care about God or His love and forgiveness. Millennials are not arrogant or thankless or stupid: most who left the church have simply seen the logical outcome of the milquetoast Christianity they were taught.

After all, even those among them who do care about the love of God do not need to go to church to feel that love. Why should I become part of a faith and church with so many obvious problems just to hear vague confirmations of God’s love?

And why should I want such an odd and outdated institution to tell me about how God forgives me? I know that I am not perfect, but no one is – why should I be held to a standard that no one (least of all churchgoers) lives up to? If I have led a decent life, then I am not consumed by guilt.

Many in the mainline denominations still want to believe that somehow everyone needs the relief of hearing that their sins are forgiven. But this is wrong. Some do need this; but many do not. For many, their sins do not haunt them in the wee hours of the night; and if they do need reconciliation, they do not need it through a pastor.

The fact is that my mainline friends need this because they grew up Christian. For those who did not grow up Christian recognize no such need in themselves. Of course, they are in need of God’s forgiveness, but unless they have descended to the depths of depravity, they usually will not sense this from day to day.

Bringing people to such an honest place with themselves requires coming before the living God – and this sense tends to disappear the more one demythologizes, stripping God of all but a few anthropocentric powers.

But what is left after the high stakes of sin’s condemnation disappear? The answer seems to be: moralism and activism. The former is undoubtedly tired and attracts almost no one who is not already self-righteously religious. And the clergy are no longer convincing as teachers of morals either. Controversies and scandals have destroyed their authority .

The latter, activism, is a more appealing option; there we see real passion, real commitment, real love for something beyond ourselves – something so lacking in most run-of-the-mill churches. But this activist solution has risks. There is the inherent risk of becoming prideful in one’s activism. There is, moreover, the risk of replacing the living person of Jesus Christ with a social ideal. One can fall into the sort of “social gospel” where Jesus Christ becomes, not the end of our lives, but the means to a social end.

This social ideal is not only a danger for the activist. It also happens in far more conventional churches who are hardly looking to shake things up. These churches conflate the gospel, not with a future, perhaps utopian, ideal, but rather see the church as essential to maintaining the current status quo. The church is here seen as a pillar of society, and its main function is to keep that society intact – to maintain its morals, preserve its social rituals, and hence preserve an essential part of its identity. This, also, is a form of “social gospel,” if a far less provocative one.

A CRITIQUE

The real problem at the heart of all politicizing, demythologizing attempts to rescue the gospel is the very same problem that Albert Schweitzer noted back in 1906 when he decisively critiqued the work of The Quest for the Historical Jesus. Schweitzer showed that every scholar who attempted to recover a supposed “historical” Jesus, one who could be excavated from all the mythical overlay of the New Testament, ended up finding a Jesus who looked remarkably like themselves. This Jesus and his concerns – again, God be praised! – were in fact a mirror image of the scholar and their concerns.

I fear this happens in any and all attempts to get “back behind” the words of the New Testament. We end up simply externalizing our own ideals – wrenching them from our breast and placing them in the Good Book for all to see. We then show this forth as the great truth of Scripture, the “real thing” that the Bible is about.

But everyone around us knows, in the back of their mind, that we have not really “found” anything but the same ideals that are already all around us. Of course, we convince ourselves that these are not the ideals all around us – after all, there is a rival (conservative/liberal/whatever) side out there! The whole world stands for this other idea, and yet we stand with the few, the poor, the marginalized, the screwed-over – and therefore we are the ones who are with Jesus! But, in fact, what we stand for is one side of a cultural and political war – and everyone besides us knows it.

Therefore, rightly, no one is convinced that we got these great insights from God; they know well that we have been convinced by our experience, and then simply found confirmations of our experience in Scripture. And so the people do not go to us, nor to Scripture, but to the world at large – a big portion of which is saying exactly the same thing.

THE CONSERVATIVE CRISIS

Others have decided that Christianity must, in one sense or another, double down on fundamental doctrines (especially the disputed ones), the gospel message (especially its harsh aspects), Christian morals (especially its sexual elements), and on Scripture (especially where it conflicts with science). Christians must retreat and rebuild – they must build bulwarks, barriers, unbreachable barricades of airtight doctrine and evangelical fervor to fend off the wicked influences of the secular world.

This was the policy, in general, of conservative Christians of all stripes. Conservative evangelicals were the most infamous for their creation of – and retreat into – a “traditional” subculture that preserved the mores of a certain kind of historical Protestant witness. But conservative Catholics did this too, as they sent their children to old-fashioned Catholic schools and consumed largely Catholic media. East Orthodoxy did this as well, to a degree, preserving itself as an immigrant church and culture over against popular American life.

Overall, this culture did manage to succeed in protecting many fundamentals of the Christian faith. But the price was a certain kind of intellectual and cultural (and perhaps even spiritual) “ghettoization”: these Christians, who were so distrustful of the wider secular consciousness in all its forms, became largely unaware of the greater world around them. They could not keep up with intellectual advancements (indeed, they did not want to); and they kept aloof from various cultural movements and reforms.

This could be a very good thing at times, because it helped these Christians retain Biblical values that were largely renounced elsewhere. But it also left them incapable of understanding important justice movements and intellectual ideas. This has made conservative Christians far less effective critics of secular culture than they otherwise might be, and caused intellectual stagnation that has taken some time to overcome (though this is being overcome today).

This insularity was in large part due to the fundamentalist side of conservative Christianity. This movement fought a long and hard battle against the “updates” of modernism – but in so doing they also redefined orthodoxy. Six-day creationism, never before a standard of Christian orthodoxy, became a pillar of faith for many. Biblical inerrancy was defined by the Chicago Statement of 1978 in a way that few of the original reformers (not to mention church fathers and mothers) would have recognized. Penal substitution became the only acceptable view of the atonement.

For Catholics, Thomism became the proper Catholic philosophy par excellence, and with it an Aristotelian worldview. After Vatican II, Tridentine Catholicism was valorized. In East Orthodoxy, certain thinkers came to see the ancient church as offering the final deposit for all intellectual and spiritual matters; no further development of doctrine could seriously happen. Six-day creationism was also demanded, and literal aerial tollhouses were proclaimed as though they were doctrine. More could be listed.

This put the immense strain on these traditions. These doctrines were difficult and taxing – if not outright impossible, in some cases – to defend to the wider, modern world. This certainly helped in making the intellectual world of conservative Christianity ever more insular. Moreover, it made “historical Christianity” appear ever more narrow – for its definition of “orthodoxy” became something that not even most past Christians could meet.

This fundamentalist legacy has had its effect on conservative Christianity, but it does not represent the whole of Christian conservatism – indeed, it does not even represent the whole of Protestant conservatism. Many fundamentalists grew tired of their churches’ constant cultural retreat and decided to once again start evangelizing the world.

Beginning largely with the revivals of Billy Graham, this movement (later dubbed “evangelicalism”) emphasized the core of the gospel, the experience of conversion and the life of faith over obsession with doctrine – though they retained an emphasis on “classical” fundamentals of the faith. This brought conservative Christianity back into a substantial interaction with the wider world (and also saved many souls!), but it was not really an intellectual movement. In many quarters, it took unfortunately took on an anti-intellectual tone.

After this, crusading Christians of a different kind began to enter the realm of politics. They wanted to move out of retreat mode, not by hosting revivals or becoming modernists, but by winning political battles intended to take back the country for godliness.

Undoubtedly, this movement (what many now think of as “evangelicalism”) correctly saw that America had moved in a post-Christian direction, and were shaken by this fact. Even if many in the country had been heterodox before, the U.S. had nonetheless been Christian as a whole, and its obedience to God’s commands (they believed) had been fundamental to the country’s success. Not anymore. Liberal disobedience to God abounded.

However, most in this movement had a deep faith that there remained a silenced “moral majority” – a large swath of unspoken-for Bible-believing Christians who made up a majority of the American heartland. With this belief and the assistance of many churches, they showed that everyday conservative Christians in America could be a formidable political force, and they won considerable political battles.

A SECOND CRITIQUE

Yet this movement was also deeply alienating for just about anyone outside of conservative Christianity. This alienation deepened as this evangelical crowd became explicitly identified with the Bush administration and its neoconservative politics. Whatever one might think of Bush or neoconservatism, it is safe to say that in this era any real awareness of the separation between evangelicals and the wider culture had largely faded away. Evangelicals now no longer saw themselves as a counterculture, but as the true American culture, fighting against the false, anti-American values of elites in universities, cities, and Washington D.C.

This sense, unsurprisingly, led to a worrisome form of nationalism. This is not because the universality of Christ’s church entails a love for globalism, as many progressive Christians are wont to claim; but it is because evangelicals stopped being able to properly distinguish between the mission of the church and the mission of the state. The gospel became synonymous with American democracy, which must be spread abroad with evangelistic fervor. Evangelicals, interestingly, had built their own form of the social gospel – and the Jesus they constructed was every bit as much an idealization of worldly values as was the progressive Jesus.

Younger evangelicals have rebelled against this error, and rightly so. But where they are going is hard to say. Right now, I think, their path looks far too similar to mainline Christianity. This move may be understandable in context, but it will not work in the long run. One idol should not be replaced by another in the Christian church. We must find a new way forward. Finding that way is the purpose (that is, the hope and prayer) of this blog.

As I say this, however, let me be absolutely clear about one thing: it is true that the gospel has social consequences. The Scriptures command Christians to do good in the world, to fight for justice, etc., in light of God’s will. I am not promoting quietism here. Furthermore, I believe that Christians of good will can come to different conclusions about many social issues.

What I am writing against is not the idea of doing good and pursuing justice in light and in consequence of the gospel; rather, I am critiquing the tendency of the church to reduce the gospel to social action, or to identify the kingdom of God with justice here and now. The church should not necessarily stand aloof from politics; but it also should not see its mission as primarily political. Christianity is a faith where spiritual revolution results in a changed world.

THE POST-CHRISTIAN EXODUS

But what of those baby boomers and millennials who together have left the church in droves? Clergy speculate about the reason for their exodus. Predictably, progressives are convinced that it is the harmful message of the conservative church that leads people to leave the fold; and conservatives think God has forsaken the church due to its apostasy.

Each side can muster evidence for its belief: progressives look to those who truly have been hurt by the church, people among their own ranks, to confirm their answer; and conservatives see the attendance at liberal churches declining while conservatives stay steady or grow – and thus confirm their hypothesis.

And yet each side’s case is flawed. Studies show that most people who leave the church do not feel anger towards the body they grew up in; rather, they feel indifferent (see The Apathy Generation from greymatterresearch.com). Moreover, most of the people who left – and did not return – belonged to liberal, mainline churches, and not to conservative ones (Daniel Burke, cnn.com, 5.14.2015). This makes the progressives’ hypothesis very unlikely.

But the conservatives’ belief in the mainline church’s God-forsakenness fails to take account of the brilliant success of myriad heresies – not the least of which, the infamous “prosperity gospel,” is perhaps the most successful form of “Christianity” today. If we take numbers as God’s reward for faithfulness, then we end up with some disturbing results – not to mention an unscriptural notion of “success”.

So why, then, do we see this massive exodus from the church? I believe that it is due to something very few people want to acknowledge: a failure to articulate the gospel message in a way that is Biblical, orthodox and compelling for people in the latter twentieth and twenty-first century (Michael Lipka, pewresearch.org, 8.24.2016).

This failure has led many of the today’s “nones” – those who check “none” when surveyed about their religious affiliation – to seek satisfying spiritual answers elsewhere: in humanism, Buddhism, certain Hindu spiritual practices, and various forms of “New Age” spirituality. Such belief systems, especially in the ways they are embraced by seekers and skeptics, definitely have their fair share of problems; but today they are for many, many people more satisfying than Christianity.

WHAT NOW?

How should Christians respond to this? We cannot respond with fear, with mockery (fear’s close cousin), or with despair. We must recognize this problem, admit to it, and take on the task. We cannot continue to avoid it.

We must take on the hard task of digging deep into the spirit, into the foundations, into the creative possibilities of our tradition to find resources for deep, historical, Biblical Christian renewal in the twenty-first century. There is no easy way around this. It is hard work, and we must commit to it for the long haul. But the gifts and encouragement we receive from the Spirit will make it more than worthwhile.

My purpose with this blog is to offer my own contribution to this great mission. I want to try, in my own way, to offer the kind of Christian vision we might need going forward – a vision that incorporates the Bible, historic orthodoxy, ancient and contemporary philosophy, modern science, and a deeply Christological, cosmological spirituality wherein we learn to contemplate Christ in all things. And I hope to articulate this vision in a way that is inviting and accessible to those who are seekers and skeptics (as I once was), as well as to those Christians who are trying, like me, to think through their faith. In the next post, I will describe some of the foundations of this site’s vision.

DAN TATE is a writer and blogger at Christ & Cosmos. A former atheist, he’s been surprised and amazed by the God of all things, and he’s passionate about sharing the gospel in ways that respond to contemporary concerns about theology, philosophy, spiritual practice, science, art, and more. A lifelong writer hailing from Upstate New York, he has a B.A. from Allegheny College, an M.A. from Syracuse University, and an M. Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary.