On The Christian Church and Its Current
Decline
©Thomas Calnan Sorenson 2020. All
rights reserved. The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New
Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian
Education on the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used
by permission. All rights reserved.
Religion is in decline
among us today. It has been for at least the last fifty years or so. All
religions are in decline, but in this piece I will focus on the Christian
religion. It used to be the dominant religion in my country, The United States
of America, and it is the religion I know best. For the first three hundred
years or so of European occupation of North America it seemed that almost
everyone self-identified as Christian, primarily as either Protestant of some
variety or Roman Catholic. Today it is far less true than it used to be. Here
in the Pacific Northwest of the United States we live in what some have called
“the none zone” because in public opinion polling so many people answer “None”
when asked about religious affiliation. Some of us however continue to identify
with one religious tradition or another, the relevant traditions being
primarily Christian. Some of us even practice our religion. A much smaller
number of us, your humble author included, have even become professionals of
one sort or another in our respective religious traditions. Many of us who
remain committed to religious faith find it hard to understand why so many
people have not. Life without faith just doesn’t make sense to us. Indeed, it
doesn’t even seem really to be possible. Even it it’s possible it certainly
seems pointless to us. I hope here to examine the questions first of what religion
is, what its value is, and why it has declined to precipitously among us. It’s
a daunting task. Here’s the best I can do with it.
We must begin by
considering just what we mean by the word religion. Some might define their
religion as a tradition or even an institution that knows and proclaims “the
truth.” Yet there are so many religions in the world all of which have
something about them that they believe to be true that knowing some truth can
hardly define religion. Besides, there are non—or even anti-religious people
and organizations that also proclaim what they consider to be truth. So we
certainly must look elsewhere for a definition of religion.
What do traditions or
institutions what self-identify as religious have in common? Not much perhaps
except this. They all claim to have some particular relationship with some
reality understood as other than our normal reality and as transcendent of that
reality. A religion may understand that transcendent other in personal terms as
Judaism and Christianity usually do or as utterly impersonal as most forms of
Buddhism do. A religion may call the transcendent other God, or Brahma, or
Nirvana. Islam refers to it as Allah, but that word is basically just the
Arabic word for God. Religions relate to the transcendent other in myriad ways,
but they all relate to it in one way or another. So we begin our definition of
religion by saying that a religion is a group of people and/or institutions
that relate in one way or another with some transcendent reality that is other
than the reality we experience, most of the time at least, here on earth.
Another way to put it is
to say that religions are in one way or another expressions of spirituality.
Spirituality is precisely the way we humans relate to that which is more than
us. Many religious traditions call that transcendent other Spirit. All humans
relate to Spirit in one way or another even if that relationship is the
negative one of denial. Thus every human has a spirituality. Some of them
aren’t aware that they have one and might object to being told that they do,
but they do.
In our time many people
draw a sharp distinction between spirituality and religion. They say they’re
“spiritual but not religious.” They mean, I think, that they at least claim to
have a relationship with Spirit that they experience somehow here in this life
but not in a church. In my part of the world many people experience Spirit in
the mountains, by the lakes and rivers, on the shore of or in a boat on Puget Sound.
I get that experience. I’ve felt that connection with God in nature. Still I
always want to ask these folks if the deer are going to visit them in the
hospital or give them a shoulder to cry on when a loved one dies, but never
mind. These folks think of religion as something other than spirituality. That
they do is not their fault, it’s the fault of the churches that have been so
very successful in driving people away in part at least because they do not
give people an experience of the Spirit. Yet the distinction between
spirituality and religion is ultimately a false one. A church ceases to be a
church when it does not maintain, cultivate, and share an experience of Spirit,
that is, of God. A religion is precisely an experience of connection with the
transcendent other.
Yet there is more to the
definition of religion than that. All religions have in common that they
understand and live their relationship with the transcendent other in ways
particular to identity as a religion. Every religion has a foundational story.
For Judaism it is the Exodus. For Christianity it is the story of the birth,
life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. For Islam it is
the story of Mohammad and the creation of the Koran. Every religion conveys its
understanding of the transcendent other through its foundational story.
Religions develop from
their foundational story. They develop institutions that hold, preserve, and
convey those stories to subsequent generations. Even within our faith tradition
those institutions can vary greatly. Christianity gives us both the imperial
grandeur of the Vatican and the simple, leaderless meeting of the Quakers. To
be recognizable as a religion a faith tradition must have at least some basic form
of organization.
Religions have systems of
belief that consist of a collection of symbols and myths through which they
convey their understanding of the transcendent other. Many people of faith
object these days to having their particular faith system described as
consisting of symbols and myths. In our world today that objection arises
primarily from the popular understanding of a myth as something people think is
true that isn’t true. That however is not the technical definition of myth in
this context. I’ll have more to say about symbols and myths below. For now just
understand that a myth is a story about God or the people’s relationship with
God whose truth lies not in factual accuracy but in the way it connects people
to their faith and to their God. A myth points beyond itself to the
transcendent other and connects the people with it.[1]
In my faith tradition, Christianity, the myths are the stories about Jesus
Christ in the New Testament along with the Jewish stories of the Old Testament,
which are also foundational for Christianity. The primary Christian symbol is
the cross. Other symbols include the bread and wine of the Eucharist and the
water of baptism.
A religion then is an
institution of some sort grounded in foundational myths that express the religion’s
understanding of the transcendent other. They are spiritual institutions
because their primary legitimate function is to connect people with that
transcendent other however the particular religion may name and understand it.
A religion has a worldly form and expression. Its institutions are human
creations as are its myths and symbols however much the religion may insist
that they are of divine not human origin. Thus no religion is infallible. A
religion is an attempt by mortal humans to express an experience and
understanding of that which utterly transcends the human. It is perhaps an
expectation that some religion is more than that that leads so many people to
be disappointed with or even disillusioned and to leave the religion
altogether.
Religions often become
identified with the people of a particular culture or nation. Most (though not
all) Arabs are Muslims. Most (though not all) Poles and Irish are Roman
Catholic. Historically the Orthodox Christian churches have become closely
identified with a particular people that the two can hardly be distinguished.
At least before the Communist era to be Russian was to be Russian Orthodox at
least for most of the Russian people. As I write these words I am listening to
a recording of the convent choir of the Holy Trinity St. Sergius Monastery not
far outside Moscow, the most sacred of Russian Orthodox institutions. The music
is both profoundly Orthodox and distinctly Russian at the same time. The close
identity of a particular religion with a particular people can have the
unfortunate consequence of diluting the faith the religion embodies, but it
also explains why so many people of faith adhere to the religion that
characterizes their own culture.
I’ll use my own United
States of America as an example. Although American culture has never identified
with a particular church the way Russia identified with the Russian Orthodox
Church, and although it simply is not true that the United States was
established as a specifically Christian nation as many conservative American
Christians contend, historically most US people of European heritage and most
US people of African heritage have self-identified as Christian. They have
identified themselves as members of many different Christian
churches—Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Congregational, Roman
Catholic, and others—but most of them have thought of themselves as Christian.
Membership in a particular Christian church often passes through one’s family,
though that was certainly more true in the past than it is today. A person was
Methodist, for example, because her parents were Methodist. For some of us
that’s still true. I am ordained in the United Church of Christ rather than in
some other denomination in large part because my mother grew up in the UCC’s
Congregationalist predecessor denomination, and to the limited extent that I
was raised in a church it was my mother’s Congregational church. Today
denomination switching is more common than it used to be among Christians, but
with exceptions when Christians switch faith traditions they usually switch
from one Christian denomination to another. Some people become Christians
though they were not raised in any faith tradition or in a non-Christian faith,
though those numbers are certainly smaller than the numbers of people who are
Christian because they were raised as Christian.
Now, all of that may be
what religion is and explain in part how people become part of one, but there
is a more basic question that we need to address. We can state that question in
various ways. Why have a religion at all? What good is it? What does it do for
us? What do we get out of it? This question in whatever form we ask it is hard
to answer for people who are not active and faithful members of one religion or
another. One of the powerful truths about religion is that what it gives us
cannot truly be experienced from the outside. Religion comes alive for us and
bestows its blessings on us only when we embrace it, open ourselves to its
truth and its power, and actively participate in its rituals and other
practices. If you really want to know “why religion” go check one out. Give it
a chance See if you come to feel what it is giving its people. That’s truly the
only way to know why religion.
That being said there are
nonetheless observations about human nature and religion that speak to why
human beings have religions at all. While it certainly is possible for
individual humans to ignore this fact or even deny it, any openminded
examination of what it is to be human reveals that we humans have an innate longing
for connection with something greater than ourselves. We strive toward the
transcendent. People of all times and places experience the presence of the
transcendent in the temporal. We know that that is true because every human
culture has and in the past has had a system of myths and symbols through which
it seeks or has sought to describe, make
sense of, and communicate that longing and that experience. Religious symbols
and myths are human creations, but they aren’t just made up flights of fancy with
no grounding in human reality. They wouldn’t take root and survive for any
length of time at all if they were. Some of the great theologians of the
twentieth century including Paul Tillich and Karl Rahner developed complex
understandings and expressions of that human longing for connection with the
transcendent. Karl Barth also recognized that longing, though he thought all
movement to satisfy it had to come from God’s side of the relationship not the
human one. The important point for us here is only that to be human is to long
for transcendence, to reach for that which is beyond our limitations and our
failings however much individual humans may deny that reality.
A big part of the answer
to our question of why religion is that religion is grounded in, expresses, and
at best even satisfies that foundational human longing. It is precisely the
legitimate function of religion to respond to and seek to satisfy that human
longing for connection with the transcendent other. Many religions, perhaps all
religions, go about doing more than that. They teach people what to believe and
how to live. Sometimes they do totally illegitimate things like telling people
who’s saved and who isn’t or telling people who to hate. For all that, if it is
truly religious, everything a religion does is grounded in its quest to satisfy
its members longing for connection with the transcendent other.
Another part of the
answer to our question of why religion, at least here in the United States, has
to do with a major failing of our dominant culture today. We Americans live in
the most individualistic culture the world has ever known. Although we use the
word community all the time, we have debased it to mean any group of people
with some common identifying characteristic. We speak of the African-American
community, never mind that African-Americans are as diversified in their
opinions and lives as the rest of us are. We speak of the LGBTQ community,
never mind that the same is true of them. Community used to mean more than
that. It used to mean a group of people who lived at least parts of their lives
with each other. Community used to indicate a closeness, a caring for one
another in a way that it sadly no longer does.
Most Americans today lack
true community. We don’t much belong to secular voluntary organizations any
more. Most of us don’t live with extended family the way many Americans used
to. Our neighborhoods may have buildings called community centers, but most of
us live next door to people for years and never get to know them other perhaps
than to say hello and chat briefly from our adjoining driveways. Most
Americans, even those who claim a religious identity, don’t participate
actively in churches anymore. Most of us know a few other people. We know our
family. We know the people we work with, but that knowing rarely amounts to
true community any more.
A good religious
organization of any sort creates and fosters community, Members of a good
church or other local religious group know each other. Beyond that, they care
about and for each other. They may also care about and for people outside their
community, but first of all they care about and for each other. They share each
other’s joys and mourn each other’s losses. When one member of the community is
in need other members step in to help. Religious communities at their best can
be true communities in ways nothing else in our culture is. I’ve often said
that if people who are not part of a church knew what a good church can be and
do they’d go out and find one even if they believed none of its teachings.
Religious organizations can and to some extent do fill a gaping void in
American life today. They give their members a great gift, the gift of true
community.
Finally, in answer to our
question why religion let me say that a good religious community gives us
experiences that fulfill us in ways no other institution does or can. In good
religion we are made whole. We sometimes feel a joy deeper than any other joy
in our lives because it is a joy grounded in connection with the transcendent other.
We find hope and consolation in times of stress and loss. We find those things
even in the presence of death whether that of a loved one or our own impending
death. Those of us who have found those things in our religious faith can’t
imagine life without them. In the prayers, music, preaching, and sacraments of
our church we come alive and are grounded in life-fulfilling ways we find
nowhere else. I have found those things in the Christian church. Others find
them in other faith traditions. It doesn’t matter in what faith tradition you
find them. Not every religious institution will provide them, for as I said
above religious institutions are human and therefore fallible. Happily
religious institutions that do provide them are out there. It is well worth the
effort to find one.
Yet so many among us
never even think of making the effort to find one. As I noted at the beginning
of this piece, religion has been in steep decline among us for decades at least
and probably longer than that. I have experienced that decline in Christianity
and know a little about it in Judaism. Most Christian churches today are small
with a great any having fewer than one hundred members. Almost all of those
have financial problems. Many struggle to stay open. Many of them will close.
In the United States membership in a church used to be the norm and the social
expectation. People went to church on Sunday. It was just what you did. Ordained
clergypersons used to be honored members of society. Today we’re mostly seen as
odd. Clergypersons used to be able to make a decent living serving only one
church. Today a great many of us can’t. There is a vast literature available on
the decline of religion among us, although in my opinion much of gets the
explanations for it wrong. You won’t have any trouble finding it if you look
for it. I just want to take that decline as a given and move on to a consideration
of its actual causes.
To understand the most
fundamental cause of the decline of religion in the United States (and in
western Europe for that matter) we have to go back in European history at least
nearly four hundred years, back to the year 1637. That’s when a French
philosopher and mathematician names Rene Descartes first wrote the famous
phrase “I think, therefore I am.” To use a bit of an oversimplification,
Descartes’ famous if obscure conclusion marks the beginning of the European
Enlightenment. Descartes’ conclusion that he knew he exists because he
experienced himself thinking and could not doubt that he was the one doing the thinking,
hence “I think, therefore I am,” was the product of a purely rationalistic
exercise. It had nothing to do with faith. It had nothing to do with revealed
truth. Descartes had engaged in a purely rational process, a process of human
thought alone. In the decades and centuries that followed human reason rather
than tradition or revelation became the standard for all human truth. In the
early nineteenth century the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
went so far as to say that the rational is the real and the real is the
rational. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries European
thinkers reasoned their way to new understandings of economics, politics,
demographics, and societies. Human reason became the standard of proof in every
sphere of human activity.
In those years humans
also reasoned and experimented their way to radical new understandings of the
natural world. The Scientific Revolution that was a huge part of the
Enlightenment produced new understandings in the fields of chemistry, medicine,
physics, geology, astronomy, biology, and every other area of scientific
inquiry. The Scientific Revolution continues in our time when sometimes it
seems that some big new scientific discovery is announced every day.
Yet the revolutions in
human thinking brought about by rationalism and science produced a far more
radical shift in human thinking than mere new understandings across the gamut
of human knowledge. They brought about a revolutionary revision in what people
understood as truth. If it wasn’t narrowly rational is wasn’t true. More
importantly, truth got reduced to fact. Science played the lead role in this
transformation. Before the Scientific Revolution of course people knew that
there are facts that are true and important, but before the Scientific
Revolution truth was not limited to facts. People understood truths deeper than
mere facts. People understood myths and symbols as conveyers of deep spiritual
truths. Because they did, they didn’t convey truth merely by relating facts.
They conveyed truth much deeper than fact by telling stories, that is, by
creating myths that point beyond themselves to spiritual reality and spiritual
truth that simply cannot be reduced to fact.
Science however deals
only with facts. Yes, there are scientific theories, but they are theories
about facts in the natural world. They are abandoned if they are found not to
conform to the facts. Science deals with only one kind of truth—rational,
mathematical, factual truth. And what wonders it produces in that realm of
truth! Almost all of our lives are longer and healthier than human lives ever
were before because of science. We master our environment (for better and for
worse) more completely than humans ever have before. Even those of us who are
not scientists know truths about the natural world no one knew before the
explosion of scientific knowledge in the past few centuries. Matter consists of
invisible elements called atoms. At the subatomic level the distinction between
matter and energy disappears. The universe is enormous beyond our ability to
conceptualize it except in mathematical terms, and it is expanding at an ever
increasing rate. We plug electrical devices into the wall and things happen
that earlier generations of humans couldn’t even have imagined. The computer I’m
typing on right now is a good example. When we get sick we go to the doctor and
have the benefit of medical knowledge, procedures, and medications that expand
and improve nearly every day. The list of the wonders that have come to us from
science is nearly limitless.
Science is so spectacular
in its ability to disclose new factual truths that over time the people of the
western European cultures began to think of truth as nothing but facts. The
place where this reduction of truth to fact is both the most obvious and the
most pernicious is in the area of religion. Especially in the United States
popular religion (as opposed to the high theology of the scholars) began to
understand the Bible and other expressions of the Christian faith solely in terms
of fact. The most extreme example of that development is American Christian
Fundamentalism. Fundamentalist Christianity insists the everything in the Bible
is true, and by true it means factually true. It has no conception of mythic or
symbolic truth at all.
A good example of this
insistence on factual truth is the way conservative Christians treat the first
creation story in the Bible, Genesis 1:1-2:3, the famous six (actually seven)
days of creation story. As an account of factual events that story makes no
sense at all. For example, the text says that God created light, separated the
light from the darkness, and created day and night all on day one. God does not
create the sun in this story until day four. Scholars say that the reference to
light on day one before the creation of the sun represents some abstract,
divine light of the presence of God. Maybe, but day one also includes the
creation of day and night. As matters of fact the concepts day and night have
no meaning apart from the sun. The text next says that on day two God created a
dome in the sky to separate the waters from the waters. The cosmology of this
passage is that the earth exists in a bubble surrounded by water that is held
back by a solid fixture called a dome. We know that this cosmology is simply
factually false. That’s not how the universe is created. The first creation
story in Genesis is simply impossible as an account of factual truth.
Yet modern Fundamentalists
and other conservative Christians have adopted the Scientific Revolution’s
reduction of truth to fact and applied it to the Bible. For them if Genesis 1:1
to 2:3 Is not factually it isn’t true at all.[2]
So they do cognitive handsprings in a desperate attempt to hold on to factual
truth in the story. We know that the earth evolved into its present form and
that our species also evolved over a long period of time. These things did not
happen in a matter of days. So some biblical literalists say that “day” in this
story represents a geological period not a literal day, never mind that the
story simply doesn’t say that. These people want the two creation stories in
Genesis taught as fact in the public schools, so they dream up what they call “creation
science” in an attempt to present these stories as some kind of scientific
truth, which means some kind of factual truth.[3]
These attempts fail
utterly. Perhaps most importantly for our purposes here these churches seem to
be unaware of the truth that these stories were written a couple of millennia
at least before western European culture reduced truth to fact. They were
written (or told orally in the case of the story of Adam and Eve) by and for
people to whom it would never have occurred that only facts are true. I saw a
cartoon once that showed two men, obviously intended to be ancient Hebrews. One
of them was writing out a text and said the he had made a mistake. The other
man responded: “Don’t worry about it. Nobody’s going to take this stuff
literally anyway.” Certainly it never occurred to the biblical authors that
people would take their words literally, but that’s precisely what modern
conservative Christians do. Such is the power of Enlightenment rationalism and
scientific thinking.
Western culture’s
reduction of truth to fact plays a major role in the contemporary decline of
the Christian church. When taken as fact the Bible makes no sense at all. We
looked at that truth just now with regard to the first creation story in
Genesis. Other examples of factual impossibilities in the Bible are easy to
find. For example, Joshua did not make the sun stand still in the sky as Joshua
10:12-13 says he did. Yet understanding truth only as fact compels people to
accept the Bible’s factual inaccuracies and impossibilities as factually
accurate. A great many people today simply will not set aside their cognitive
faculty and forget what they know to be true simply to belong to some church.
They leave the church altogether rather than do so.
More significantly it
simply is true that Enlightenment rationalism and the scientific reduction of
truth to fact that so characterize our contemporary culture drive in the
direction of atheism. Many of the thinkers and writers of the Enlightenment
weren’t willing to give up belief in God altogether, but neither could they
reconcile reason and factual truth with the teachings of Christianity or with
the Bible. So they created a half-way house on the road to atheism that they
called Deism. Many of the so-called founding fathers of the United States,
Enlightenment men one and all, were Deists. Deism clung to a belief in God as
the Creator of all that is, but it saw that God only as the great clockmaker who
created the universe, set it to run according to the natural laws scientists
kept discovering, then stepped out of the picture to let those natural laws do
their thing. Deism, however, didn’t last long. By the early nineteenth century
thinkers including Comte and Marx had taken the final step to true atheism.
Enlightenment thinking leads to atheism because it elevates the human to the
status of the determiner of what’s true.
You may well be asking at
this point: So what? What does a development in human thinking from hundreds of
years ago have to do with the decline of Christianity today? Well, it actually
has a great deal to do with it because except for a few avantgarde thinkers who
are moving beyond the Enlightenment we are all children of the Enlightenment.
The ways in which we think were formed during the Enlightenment. Things that we
think are just the way everything is and always has been are products of the
Enlightenment. The inability so many people have today to think beyond the
limits of fact and the human comes from the Enlightenment. Even most
well-educated Americans are unaware of that truth because in good Enlightenment
fashion American education gets people learning facts and not much else. When I’ve
said in church some of what I’ve said here I’ve had intelligent, educated church
members ask me what the Enlightenment even is. Some confuse it with the very
different concept with the same English name in Buddhism. That’s how bad
American education is at teaching history and philosophy. We’re all children of
the Enlightenment. Ergo we give up any religion we may once have had and live
as at least functional atheists.
Enlightenment thinking is
a big part of the explanation of the current decline of Christianity, but it
isn’t all of the explanation. There are a lot of other factors at work in causing
that decline. I’ll cover a few of them here. Perhaps you can think of others.
One major factor in the decline is the gross failure of the churches to respond
constructively to changing circumstances and to offer contemporary people what
they need. I will discuss that failure under four rubrics:
1. The failure of the churches to teach
an alternative to Enlightenment thinking.
2. The church’s insistence that people’s
primary existential crisis today remains sin and guilt.
3. The ways in which the church so often
expects people to check their brains at the door and believe the impossible.
4. The way churches have demanded that
people accept and advocate policies that are far more conservative than most
Americans are.
The Enlightenment way of
thinking that so impedes the success of the churches today is not the only way
of thinking of which we humans are capable. I mentioned symbols and myth as the
language of faith above. Now I need to say a bit more about them, although not
as much as I said in my book Liberating Christianity cited above. Symbol
and myth are the necessary language of faith. They are that because human
language is incommensurate with the most profound subject and object of
religion, namely, God or more generally the transcendent other. I’ll use the
word God here for the sake of convenience. One of the defining characteristics
of God is God’s total otherness. Almost everything we humans are, God is not.
We are mortal, God is immortal. We are finite, God is infinite. We exist in a
world of time and space. God totally transcends time and space while
nonetheless being present in them. There are unavoidable limits to what we
humans can know and do. God is omniscient and omnipotent. We can be only in one
place at a time. God is omnipresent.
Now I just used human
language to state characteristics of God. So how can human language be incommensurate
with God? It is incommensurate with the task we undertake when we speak of God
because those statements I just made about God contain an unavoidable internal
contradiction. We must understand that God both is and is not each of the things
I just said God is. God is not the things we say God is because God is those
things in ways that utterly transcend the words we use to characterize God. Let
me use another characteristic of God in an attempt to make this point clear.
We Christians say that
God is love, a claim we find at 1 John 4:8b. We think we know what love is. We
have various understandings of it, but we do have understandings of it. The
statement “God is love” is both true and not true at the same time. It is true
in that God is love as commitment to and care of another, the other being in
God’s case us. The statement is not true because we cannot limit God to our
human understandings of love. One way I’ve heard that thought expressed is that
in the statement “God is love” God defines love, love doesn’t define God. If
God is truly God then God’s love so far transcends our human understanding of
love that can’t even really begin to comprehend it. Yes, sometimes we are
blessed enough to feel God’s love for us, but anything that we experience as
God’s love is in no way all there is to God’s love. It can’t be. Anselm of
Canterbury, more famous for his formulation of the problematic classical theory
of atonement, about which more below, once tried to define God as “that greater
than which nothing can be conceived.” No human definition of God is ever
completely satisfactory, but Anselm was on to something here. If we can
conceive of it, it isn’t God and it isn’t God’s. Any love we can imagine, any
love we can define or describe in our human words is not God’s love.
That’s why we can never
take words about God literally. They may be true the way “God is love” is true,
but they can never be the whole truth. When we swear in a witness at a trial
with a commitment that the witness will tell “the whole truth” we assume that telling
the whole truth is something a human being is capable of doing when speaking of
the words or acts of another human being. It is not something any of us can
ever do when speaking about God. God is too transcendent for that.
We can never speak the
whole truth about God, but we speak about God anyway. We feel compelled, some
of us, to do that which we know is impossible. We can do that impossible thing
only if we always remember that our words are symbols not facts. A symbol is
something out of ordinary existence that points beyond itself to a spiritual
reality of which we can get incomplete glimpses but can never fully envision or
comprehend. Paul Tillich taught that a symbol “participates” in that reality
toward which it points.[4]
I find it helpful to think of a symbol as a physical object that mediates
transcendent reality to us. It connects us with that reality. Sometimes when I
look at a cross as the central Christian symbol it’s almost like it carries me
through itself to God. I have experienced the symbols of the bread and wine of
the Eucharist the same way. The cross will never do that for me if I think of
it only as two pieces of wood one vertical and one horizontal. The elements of
the Eucharist will never do that for me if I think of them only the way I think
of them when I’m having bread and wine with a meal. They do their incredible
life-enhancing work only when I understand them as symbols.
The words we speak about
God function in the same way. They can point to God but cannot contain God.
They can mediate God to us, but they are not God and cannot confine God. The
foundational stories of our faith can function in the same way. They are myths
not symbols, but a myth is a story that functions like a symbol. Symbol and
myth are the language of faith. They bring God to us in powerful ways as long
as we don’t get trapped into thinking of them as mere accounts of fact.
Some Christians have
known of this other way of thinking for a long time. For more than the last one
hundred good Christian seminaries have taught it to their students. I learned
it by reading Tillich and the Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall, a student
of Tillich’s, before it ever occurred to me to go to seminary, but no professor
at the Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry, where I earned my
M.Div. degree, would ever disagree with it. Graduates of good Christian seminaries
like that one have known of this other way of speaking about faith for decades
and decades.
One of the great failings
of the Christian churches that goes a long way toward explaining their decline
is that for the most part those seminary students have not shared what they
learned about the language of faith (assuming that they learned it in the first
place, which not all of them have) with the members of the churches they went
on to serve.[5]
For the most part they have feared that telling their parishioners that the
Bible contains truth but that that truth isn’t factual truth would cause those
parishioners to lose their faith, leave the church, and stop contributing money
to it. They have let their people go on understanding the Bible as literally,
factually true. The result has been to drive more people from the church than
would have left when faced with a different way of understanding the faith.
The Bible makes no sense
as a collection of mere facts. As a collection of symbols and myths it can open
God to us. It can bring God into our lives not because it is the words of God,
which it certainly is not, but because it points beyond itself to the ultimate
reality that we call God. If only those seminary graduates had had the courage
to share that truth with their people. Had they done so the churches may well
not have gone into the decline that is their reality today.
Another failing of the
churches that accounts for some of their decline is related to their insistence
on understanding the Bible literally, by which they mean factually. There is no
way that an intelligent person using her God-given cognitive abilities can
accept that everything in the Bible is factually correct, a matter we commented
on earlier in this piece. That’s why many of us say that so many Christian
churches require people to “check their brains at the door” of the church.
Conservative Christian pastors refuse to apply knowledge that is freely
available to them to the Bible because, as one of them told me once, “then you
don’t know what to take literally.” So the turn off their brains, deny or
refuse to accept widely available information, and pretend to take everything
in the Bible literally. (I say pretend to because I can’t believe that they
actually do.)
Many Christian churches
have long insisted that many of the discoveries of contemporary science must be
wrong because they contradict some of these church’s understanding of one
biblical passage or another that they insist must be factually correct.
Geologists have reliably established that the earth is over four billion years
old. Far too many Christians far too publicly say that that finding must be
false because we can calculate the age of the earth from the Bible. When we do,
counting backwards from the time of Jesus, we find that the earth is only
something like six thousand years old. So they say reject modern science and
accept our phony calculation from the literally, factually true Bible.
Similarly far too many
Christians have far too publicly denied the modern science of evolutionary
biology and the findings of anthropologists that our species, homo sapiens,
evolved slowly over a long period of time. No, they say, the Bible says God
created us humans just as we are from the very beginning of creation. So the
geologists, biologists, and anthropologists must be wrong. Check your brain at
the door and accept our totally unspecific and perfectly absurd contentions
instead.
A great many people in
the world today are just too intelligent to do what so many churches demand of
them when it comes to scientific knowledge. We all know the story of Inherit
the Wind, the story of the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial in which the
character William Jennings Bryan makes a total fool of himself prosecuting a
school science teacher for the crime of teaching evolutionary biology. That’s
how many people today think of Christianity. It’s not their fault, it’s the
fault of the churches. The anti-scientific ravings of so many Christians have
driven an unknowable but undeniably large number of people out of the faith or
stopped them from ever considering adopting it in the first place.
Another failing of the
Christian churches is related to both their biblical literalism and their
rejection of the findings of the modern intellectual disciplines. Far too many
Christian churches far too publicly advocate and insist that their members
accept positions on several social issues that are simply far too conservative
for many people to accept. I will consider this failing of the Christian
churches with regard to three issues—gay rights, abortion, and the status of
women in both the church and in society.
The Christian churches
around the world have been and many remain appalling in the way they have
treated God’s LGBTQ people. They have called and many still call these beloved
children of God despicable sinners simply for being who God created them to be.
The churches that condemn gay people just for being gay claim to base their
condemnation on the very few biblical passages that mention and condemn
homosexual acts.[6] In
doing that they deny or at least ignore the contemporary understanding of homosexuality
as a natural variety of human sexuality, a concept that the world that produced
those few biblical passages completely lacked. In reality what they’re doing is
clinging to a cultural prejudice and papering it over by citing Leviticus 18:22
and a few other passages.
American culture has moved
beyond prejudice against gay people far more successfully than have most
Christian churches. In 2015, much to the surprise of most of us, the US Supreme
Court held that same gender couples have a constitutional right to marry. Yet
most churches, or at least significant parts of them, continue their old gay bashing
ways. Many good-hearted people reject the church for that reason alone.
Abortion is another
problematic issue for the churches. It is a hot button issue among us and has
been for along time. In 1973 the Supreme Court decided the case of Roe v.
Wade holding that the US Constitution creates a constitutional right to an
abortion. Conservative Christians have been trying to get that decision
overturned ever since. Getting judges and Supreme Court justices appointed who
might do that has led millions of these people to vote for politicians whose
economic policies are definitely not to these voters’ benefit. Both people who
demand that abortion be banned completely and people who say it must remain
legal are dug in deep. The opponents of abortion say that in every case no
matter the circumstances abortion is the murder of an unborn child (although
some of them rather inconsistently would allow an exception for cases of rape
or incest). Those who work to keep abortion legal say no one has the right to tell
any woman what she may or may not do with her own body. Compromise on the issue
of abortion being legal seems impossible.
Conservative churches
have made opposition to abortion a standard of faith. For them you can’t be
Christian or any kind of moral if you support a woman’s right to choose. Yet
polling shows that most Americans support the legality of abortion. They
recognize that there are countless situations in which terminating a pregnancy
is at least the lesser of two evils. They don’t believe that the state has any
business interfering in the very personal decision a woman makes when having an
abortion. The most visible face of Christianity among us insists that the state
has not only the right but the duty to interfere to stop all (or nearly all)
abortions. So the stance of many Christian churches on this issue becomes one
more that drives people out of the church.
Then there is the vital
though culturally conditioned issue of the role of women in society and in the
church. Far too many Christian churches, that is to say at least one Christian
church, work to preserve the power of men over women in both realms. One place
where that dynamic is easily visible is around the issue of the ordination of
women to Christian ministry as priests, pastors, chaplains, or to some other
ministry. The churches of a vast majority of Christians will not ordain women.
The largest Christian church of all, the Roman Catholic Church, will not ordain
women. Pope John Paul II of recent memory came very close to imposing
excommunication on any Catholic person who even discussed ordaining women.
Male only clergy is of
course an ancient Christian tradition. St. Paul mentions several women as
leaders of Christian churches, but no later than early in the second century CE
the churches excluded women from leadership positions and began the practice of
ordination, which was available only to men. No Christian church ordained a
woman until the nineteenth century. Many of the mainline Protestant
denominations were very slow to approve the ordination of women although most
if not all of them will ordain women today. The largest American Protestant
denomination, the very conservative Southern Baptist Convention, however, in recent
years in bad old Christian fashion has essentially excluded women from
leadership roles in the church.
The denial of ordination
to women makes women second class church members. Most people today support the
full equality of women both in the church and in society. The churches’
preservation of exclusive male power by refusing to ordain women is a
reactionary position. The churches who deny ordination to women claim biblical
warrant for their position. They also say that a woman can’t be a priest or
pastor because Jesus was a man, a position that has never made a lick of sense
to me. These churches disguise a cultural prejudice with a layer of shaky
biblical authority and theological argument. Most people today know better than
to deprive both women and the church itself of the blessings of having ordained
women in the pulpit or in other vital Christian ministries. That so many
churches don’t know better is one more thing that keeps people away from
Christianity.
Then there is the greatest
church scandal of our time or really of most any time, the child sex abuse
scandal in the Roman Catholic Church. A huge number of Roman Catholic priests
have committed unspeakable sins and crimes by sexually abusing young people who
they were charged with caring for an protecting. These men have grossly abused
the trust the church put in them. They have abused the trust and betrayed the
faith of the people. Until very recently, and I suppose in some places even
now, the Roman church reacted despicably when the charges of abuse started to
come to light. Bishop after bishop reacted to protect the church rather than
care for the victims. They covered up the offenses. They moved abusers from
parish to parish rather than remove them from all priestly duties and report
their crimes to secular law enforcement authorities.
It is perhaps unknown how
many people have left the Roman Catholic Church because of the priestly sex
abuse scandal, but that number must run into the millions. How, after all, can
one trust an institution whose officials committed such acts and that acted to
protect the institution and the abusers rather than the people? I know full
well that most Roman Catholic priests are decent men of faith who truly do care
about and for their people. Nonetheless, one priest abusing one child one time
is one priest and one time too many. I can hardly imagine what it must be like
to attend mass seeing a priest up there saying the sacred words of institution
in the Eucharist and wondering how many children that man has abused. The Roman
Catholic Church has an immense amount of work to do to recover from these reprehensible
acts by so many of its priests.
I am a Protestant pastor
not a Roman Catholic priest. We Protestant pastors however must acknowledge
that Protestant clergy too sometimes commit gross moral and ethical violations
up and including the sexual abuse of children. That being true, it is also true
that the Protestant churches have not been rocked by a child abuse scandal in
anything like the way the Roman Catholic Church has been. Yet we too experience
a certain amount of suspicion from the public. In a clergy ethics training I
attended a few years ago our trainer told a room full of UCC and Presbyterian
clergy that the people out there in the world consider us all to be child
molesters. I hope she overstated the matter. For me and for all the Protestant
pastors I know caring for the youngest of our people is both a great joy and a
major responsibility. Nonetheless, the Roman Catholic priestly child abuse
scandal is undeniably one of the reasons so many people have left Christian
churches both Catholic and Protestant.
There are many more
reasons for the decline of the church today. Here’s another one. Religion
thrives when it meets the actual needs of the people of its time and place. One
thing any religion must do if it is to survive is address the actual
existential dilemmas or crises of the people of that time and place. For most
of its existence at least since its establishment as the official state
religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE the Christian church in
western Europe and the cultures derived from western Europe has insisted that
everyone’s existential crisis is sin, guilt, and the hellish consequences the
church has told people unforgiven sin
brings with it. The church has told people that what they need to worry
about is what they must do to save their souls for a blissful eternity in
heaven rather than an eternity of torment in hell.[7]
I have had church people get very upset with me because I spend so little time
on that issue.
Making Christianity be
all about the eternal fate of souls is a cause of the decline of the church today
because most people in our time worry less about sin and damnation than they did
in the past. That doesn’t mean that they have no existential crisis. I just
means that their existential crisis is something other than fear of damnation
because of sin. Today more people are apt to worry more about whether their
life has any meaning at all than they are to worry about the eternal fate of
their soul. The church needs to know what keeps people up at night.
Christianity can respond powerfully to any existential crisis we may have, but
it will fail utterly if it keeps responding only to an existential crisis
people don’t really have and failing to respond to the one they do have. Sadly,
that is what most Christian churches have been doing for a very long time. No
wonder they are in such decline.
There is also an issue
around some very bad theology that may play a role in the decline of
Christianity among us. It has to do with the way the church has traditionally
addressed that issue of forgiveness of sin that it tells everyone is what they
need more than anything else. The issue of God’s forgiveness of sin in
Christianity has always been tied up with the meaning of Jesus Christ’s
miserable and unjust death. Theologians can identify three different so-called “soteriologies,”
that is, theologies of salvation, that explain the meaning of Christ’s death in
different ways. I won’t bother you with all of them. I’ll just say that in the
year 1107 CE Anselm of Canterbury, who I mentioned in another context above,
published his book Cur Deus Homo, which means “why God man” or “why did
God become human.” That book gives us a classic presentation of what theologians
call the classical theory of atonement. They also call it the theory of
substitutionary sacrificial atonement. This theory holds that Jesus’ suffering
and dying on the cross was a price that had to be paid to God before God could
or would forgive human sin. It says that the debt we humans owe to God is so
great that no human death could possibly pay it. So God became human in the
person of Jesus of Nazareth to pay that debt to God in God’s own person. All of
us Christians have heard talk of Jesus “paying the price for our sin.” That’s
what the classical theory of atonement says Jesus did. The classical theory of
atonement has so dominated western Christianity for so long that it has
practically swallowed the religion whole. Ask most people who know something
about Christianity both inside the churches and outside them what Christianity
is, and they will probably give you some version of the classical theory of
atonement.
A great many people today
find the classical theory of atonement not just unacceptable but downright
appalling. It says that God would not forgive sin unless God’s own Son suffered
horribly and died an unjust death. Feminist theologians call it cosmic child
abuse. It makes it impossible to believe that God ever forgave human sin before
Jesus’ suffering and death, never mind that the Hebrew Bible, the Christians’
Old Testament, is full of references to God forgiving sin centuries before
Jesus.
There is a much more
appealing soteriology. You can find suggestions of it in the writings of St.
Paul and of Martin Luther. It’s called theology of the cross.[8]
I won’t go into it in depth here. Briefly, it holds that in Jesus suffering and
dying on the cross, which is of course a fact of his life with which we must
come to terms, we see a demonstration of God’s unfailing love for and
solidarity with us by entering into the worst that human life can bring and
showing us how God is always present with us no matter what. I preached a
sermon on theology of the cross one Good Friday several years ago. A man not
from my congregation who attended told me afterwards that for the first time in
his life he felt like wearing a cross. The Christian churches could reach a new
audience if it would give up on the brutal classical theory of atonement and
preach the much gentler theology of the cross.
So there you have it. At
its best church is the most life-giving, life-sustaining institution we have.
When church is as it should be people find there a real connection with God.
The worship and other activities of the church satisfy people’s innate yearning
for connection both with God and with other people. In the church we can find
the community that so many of us lack. At its best church lifts us up, consoles
us, inspires us, and challenges us to lead better lives. A great many of us
cannot imagine life without it.
Yet the Christian church
today is experiencing a dramatic decline. That decline of the Christian
churches in our time is the result of two related factors. The first is the
radical transformation in human thought that took place in the European
Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution that came along with it. The second
is the churches’ failure to keep up with changing cultures and new ways of
thinking. The universal Christian church is declining because most of it is out
of step with the world God calls it to serve. It’s way past time for us to do
something about it.
[1]
For more on myths and symbols see below. See also Sorenson, Thomas C. Liberating
Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium, Wipf and
Stock, Eugene, Oregon, 2008, pp. Chapter 3.
[2]
For a discussion of how this account is true despite its being factually false
see Sorenson, Thomas Calnan, Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour
for Seeking Christians, Revised Edition, Volume Two, The Old Testament, Coffee
Press, Briarwood, NY, 2019, pp. 26-27.
[3]
Although it’s not really the subject of this essay I do need to debunk creation
science a bit. Creation science simply is not science. Science, in theory at
least, accepts no a priori truths. It sets out to establish what is true
through observation and experimentation. Creation science doesn’t do that.
Instead it begins with an a priori truth and tries to come up with something
that at least sounds scientific to prove it. Doing that simply is not science.
It is an attempt to turn something believed to be a revealed truth into a
scientific truth. It just doesn’t work.
[4]
See Tillich, Paul, Dynamics of Faith, Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1957,
p. 42.
[5]
Another part of this problem is that so many conservative Christian churches
don’t send people to seminaries at all, thinking of the great Christian
seminaries of the world as hotbeds of satanic liberalism or some such nonsense.
Those pastors invariably think of the language of faith as the language of
fact. Since they don’t know a different way of thinking about it they can’t
teach their people a different way of thinking about it.
[6]
For a more detailed discussion of Christianity and homosexuality see Liberating
Christianity, pp. 182-190. When I wrote those pages back in 2006 I called
homosexuality “the defining issue of our time.” Since then we have made much
progress toward equal rights and equal dignity in society for LGBTQ people.
More and more Protestant denominations have revised their thinking on the issue
and have begun to accept LGBTQ people into the full life of the church
including ordained ministry. My United Church of Christ ordained its first
openly gay clergyperson in 1973. Homosexuality may no longer be the defining
issue of our time.
[7] For
more on this issue and the significance of the establishment of the church in
the fourth century see my essay “On Apolitical Christianity” elsewhere on this
blog.
[8]
For much more on the classical theory of atonement and theology of the cross
see my Liberating Christianity, Chapters 8 and 9.
