Modern Christians often refer to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire as an example of what happens to a nation consumed by moral decay. When that historic example of national degeneration is brought up, what we fail to notice is that Rome’s greatest decline and its eventual fall came after the Imperial Cult (that is, the worship of the Emperor) was replaced by Christianity. The decline of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Christian faith progressed in tandem. Things are not always as they seem or as we would like for them to be.
So to get back to my original question: Why is the percentage of Believers shrinking in America on such a dramatic scale? The first question that should be asked is, what is shrinking? Two decades ago, was it really true that 86% of Americans were Christians? By what definition?
I do not want to go around using a litmus test to determine who among my neighbors is a bona fide Believer in Jesus Christ. I will leave that to God’s discretion in the final judgment. As Jesus said, don’t mess up the wheat crop by tearing the tares out now – wait until the wheat is harvested and then sort them out.
Without saying who is and who is not a true Christian, it is possible to extrapolate that, of the number of people who call themselves Christians, a high percentage are so in name only. As the overall numbers decline and Christianity loses its popularity, we will see an even greater decline in the number of claimants. True believers will always acknowledge their faith. But those who are “Christians” for cultural identification purposes or for convenience sake only will find it less culturally appropriate and convenient to be so identified. As a result, we will likely see an even more rapid decline in the percentage in the coming decades.
Does that mean that the Christian faith is really declining? No, it only means that Christianity as the dominant culture is declining. But what might seem bad for the faith could be a very good thing. The bloated, controlling burden that being a culture’s faith requires of us has left us as Believers far adrift from the robust faith of the New Testament Church.
I have never advocated abandoning our culture and moving into Christian ghettoes as some promote. But at the same time, the American Civil Religion of the 1950s was, I firmly believe, a significant contributing factor in any impotence we as a People of Faith have experienced in the half-century since.
Go back to the first half of the Twentieth Century. It was a time of great cultural and economic progress in America on many fronts. The Church, as is always true, had its strengths and weaknesses. But on the whole the American Church was, sadly, in a time of retreat.
From the time of Finney’s revivals until late in the 19th Century, American Evangelicalism had been experiencing great revival and was in the forefront of much social change, including the abolition of slavery, the right of women to vote, the priority of serving the poor, and the promotion of child labor laws. Finney’s revivals in particular greatly fueled and funded the antislavery cause and women’s rights.
But then around 1900, the devastating Fundamentalist-Modernist split occurred, the great divide in which some Evangelicals took correct doctrine and went into defense mode on every front. For decades after, theologically conservative Christians fled the public square, reversing their fight to liberate blacks and women, for example. When we talk about that 1950s “Christian nation” feeling, what we are really talking about is a theologically liberal or lukewarm faith that had as its defining feature a very low common denominator of “God and Country” and usually not in that order. What we look back at as a moral high ground in American history was neither morally high nor very solid ground when it came to faith.
2009-04-22
Authenticity & the decline of American Christianity – Part II
What are we to make of the recent study showing that Americans who claim to be Christian have declined from 86% to 76% of the total population? If anything, the report of such a decline in Christian faith in America is very helpful news indeed.
Much energy has been consumed by American Evangelicals in trying to shore up and preserve an American Christian culture that in many ways was anything but Christian. Perhaps if we lose something not wholly legitimate, we will learn to refocus our energies on advancing the true faith instead of preserving an unreasonable facsimile thereof.
Take for example the very popular notion that crime and violence have increased dramatically in America since the “Golden Age” of the 1950s. Increased for whom? The other day I was sitting in a meeting of white Christian men and someone brought up the race riots of the latter 1960s. No question they actually did happen. Many urban blacks, for a variety of reasons, had by the mid-1960s begun to give up on the nonviolent reforms and methods extolled by Martin Luther King Jr. and in the process destroyed many of American’s inner cities over a couple of short, hot summers. It was a scary time for whites and blacks alike.
But why is it that this gentleman in my meeting did not also mention the race riots of the 1950s and early 1960s? Is it of any significance that the perpetrators of those earlier riots were white? Those race riots are lost to the collective white American memory. How quickly we forget.
Here is the historical catch. There was a strong culture of crime and violence in our nation for years leading up to the Civil Rights movement of the mid-Twentieth Century. Over long and wearying decades, thousands upon thousands of blacks were lynched, raped and abused; homes, businesses and churches were destroyed; and nonwhites were denied even the simple gospel message, a crime of eternal significance perpetrated by mostly “Godly” or at least church-going white Believers. On this last point, major US denominations purposefully chose to neglect American black neighborhoods while they were mounting foreign missions efforts to reach “darkest Africa.”
We talk about rule of law today particularly in the context of illegal immigration. If we don’t adhere to the principle of rule of law, so goes the reasoning, our nation will be destroyed. Tell that to any person of color over the age of 50 who cannot wipe out the scary memories of an endemic lack of rule of law that festered in this nation for generations, often under the sign of the cross and the sanction of the church.
The other day coming out of Sunday service, I drove to an exit of the parking lot where a sign stated, “No left turn.” My daughter pointed out that the car in front of us, which was also leaving the church service, was turning left. And then we noticed that a bumper sticker on the car promoted rule of law in regards to illegal aliens. My thirteen year old immediate saw the blatant hypocrisy in that situation. I jokingly told her the driver must be an unbeliever. Rule of law is a selectively applied principle by even the most devout among us.
Slavery, whatever we think about it in regards to our own national history, was constitutionally legal for the 80 years prior to its being abolished in the mid-1860s. The widespread lynchings, torture, rape and oppression of blacks from the Civil War down through the Twentieth Century, a century of lawlessness, were not. So when I hear someone say that American society is deteriorating, I always want to ask, “For whom?”
Yes, there are signs of decay in our nation, but there are also signs of great moral progress. Blacks still live in fear in some neighborhoods, but whites generally no longer terrorize blacks as they did for centuries in this nation. A man of color was just elected President of the United States without incident – a feat that would have been considered inconceivable fifty years ago.
Much energy has been consumed by American Evangelicals in trying to shore up and preserve an American Christian culture that in many ways was anything but Christian. Perhaps if we lose something not wholly legitimate, we will learn to refocus our energies on advancing the true faith instead of preserving an unreasonable facsimile thereof.
Take for example the very popular notion that crime and violence have increased dramatically in America since the “Golden Age” of the 1950s. Increased for whom? The other day I was sitting in a meeting of white Christian men and someone brought up the race riots of the latter 1960s. No question they actually did happen. Many urban blacks, for a variety of reasons, had by the mid-1960s begun to give up on the nonviolent reforms and methods extolled by Martin Luther King Jr. and in the process destroyed many of American’s inner cities over a couple of short, hot summers. It was a scary time for whites and blacks alike.
But why is it that this gentleman in my meeting did not also mention the race riots of the 1950s and early 1960s? Is it of any significance that the perpetrators of those earlier riots were white? Those race riots are lost to the collective white American memory. How quickly we forget.
Here is the historical catch. There was a strong culture of crime and violence in our nation for years leading up to the Civil Rights movement of the mid-Twentieth Century. Over long and wearying decades, thousands upon thousands of blacks were lynched, raped and abused; homes, businesses and churches were destroyed; and nonwhites were denied even the simple gospel message, a crime of eternal significance perpetrated by mostly “Godly” or at least church-going white Believers. On this last point, major US denominations purposefully chose to neglect American black neighborhoods while they were mounting foreign missions efforts to reach “darkest Africa.”
We talk about rule of law today particularly in the context of illegal immigration. If we don’t adhere to the principle of rule of law, so goes the reasoning, our nation will be destroyed. Tell that to any person of color over the age of 50 who cannot wipe out the scary memories of an endemic lack of rule of law that festered in this nation for generations, often under the sign of the cross and the sanction of the church.
The other day coming out of Sunday service, I drove to an exit of the parking lot where a sign stated, “No left turn.” My daughter pointed out that the car in front of us, which was also leaving the church service, was turning left. And then we noticed that a bumper sticker on the car promoted rule of law in regards to illegal aliens. My thirteen year old immediate saw the blatant hypocrisy in that situation. I jokingly told her the driver must be an unbeliever. Rule of law is a selectively applied principle by even the most devout among us.
Slavery, whatever we think about it in regards to our own national history, was constitutionally legal for the 80 years prior to its being abolished in the mid-1860s. The widespread lynchings, torture, rape and oppression of blacks from the Civil War down through the Twentieth Century, a century of lawlessness, were not. So when I hear someone say that American society is deteriorating, I always want to ask, “For whom?”
Yes, there are signs of decay in our nation, but there are also signs of great moral progress. Blacks still live in fear in some neighborhoods, but whites generally no longer terrorize blacks as they did for centuries in this nation. A man of color was just elected President of the United States without incident – a feat that would have been considered inconceivable fifty years ago.
2009-04-15
Authenticity & the decline of American Christianity – Part I
A recent study is causing a great amount of alarm and soul searching in the American church. The study, reported in Newsweek, found that the number of self-identified Christians has shrunk rather significantly – from 86% to 76% – in the past two decades. Notwithstanding that the overwhelming majority of Americans still claim to be of the Christian faith, the trend is cause for great concern among the remaining Believers.
Whenever reports like this come out, twice the number of suspects are routinely rounded up (to paraphrase a famous line from that old classic, Casablanca). Blame in the case of spiritual decline has been placed at the feet of all sorts of culprits, from the 1963 ban on school prayer to creeping socialism. The trouble with a panic approach to systemic problems is that other much more plausible causes are overlooked.
Americans love statistics. Throw a few stats into any argument and you can sustain the silliest of reasoning because we like to think that figures prove scientific expertise. As with most anything else, statistics need to be both verified and clarified as to what they are really saying. I recall a well educated and monied family in the church I attended as a boy blaming strange weather patterns on the astronauts landing on the moon that summer. Their lofty logic completely escaped my lesser brain.
In the case of the decline of the Christian faith in America, do these stats mean that this is a newly developing problem? No. This decline is only newly surfacing evidence of a trend that began long before it became outwardly evident. Given that people tend to report changes after they have already taken place, the dip in actual faith identification most likely started a couple of decades earlier (meaning forty years ago) with the religious ground actually beginning to shift generations before that.
Do these stats readily identify the causes? Definitely not. In the 1960s, many American neighborhoods experienced what was called “white flight.” White people were alarmed that blacks were moving in and “taking over” entire neighborhoods. What was really happening was that when a single house in a previously “white only” neighborhood was bought by a black family, other whites would suddenly sell out of fear, causing a rapid exodus and a resulting lowering of housing prices, making those homes affordable for lower income families, often nonwhite, also to move in. In short order the neighborhood had become highly mixed or even all-black, though even a small percentage of blacks gave the perception that the neighborhood had gone “black.” Blacks didn’t invade as much as whites fled.
Such cause-effect relationship confusion reminds me of the old story about the boy tormenting his cat. The boy’s mother told the boy to stop pulling the cat’s tail, to which the boy replied, “I’m not doing the pulling, the cat is; I’m just holding on.” Yeah, right.
The influence of atheists and secularists in our nation is still more like moss than some invasive species – they only “take over” where faith “plants” have died out. An increase in the number of atheists or unbelievers or people of other religions does not indicate the infidels are moving in and taking over our uniquely special American “neighborhood.” In reality, a high percentage of immigrants in recent years, especially of Latin origin, are strong Christian faith-oriented. Newsweek reported, for example, that the percentage of professing Muslims is still very minimal.
Contrary to popular hype, we are not being infiltrated. Rather, the loss of faith is a problem in our own Christian backyard.
Whenever reports like this come out, twice the number of suspects are routinely rounded up (to paraphrase a famous line from that old classic, Casablanca). Blame in the case of spiritual decline has been placed at the feet of all sorts of culprits, from the 1963 ban on school prayer to creeping socialism. The trouble with a panic approach to systemic problems is that other much more plausible causes are overlooked.
Americans love statistics. Throw a few stats into any argument and you can sustain the silliest of reasoning because we like to think that figures prove scientific expertise. As with most anything else, statistics need to be both verified and clarified as to what they are really saying. I recall a well educated and monied family in the church I attended as a boy blaming strange weather patterns on the astronauts landing on the moon that summer. Their lofty logic completely escaped my lesser brain.
In the case of the decline of the Christian faith in America, do these stats mean that this is a newly developing problem? No. This decline is only newly surfacing evidence of a trend that began long before it became outwardly evident. Given that people tend to report changes after they have already taken place, the dip in actual faith identification most likely started a couple of decades earlier (meaning forty years ago) with the religious ground actually beginning to shift generations before that.
Do these stats readily identify the causes? Definitely not. In the 1960s, many American neighborhoods experienced what was called “white flight.” White people were alarmed that blacks were moving in and “taking over” entire neighborhoods. What was really happening was that when a single house in a previously “white only” neighborhood was bought by a black family, other whites would suddenly sell out of fear, causing a rapid exodus and a resulting lowering of housing prices, making those homes affordable for lower income families, often nonwhite, also to move in. In short order the neighborhood had become highly mixed or even all-black, though even a small percentage of blacks gave the perception that the neighborhood had gone “black.” Blacks didn’t invade as much as whites fled.
Such cause-effect relationship confusion reminds me of the old story about the boy tormenting his cat. The boy’s mother told the boy to stop pulling the cat’s tail, to which the boy replied, “I’m not doing the pulling, the cat is; I’m just holding on.” Yeah, right.
The influence of atheists and secularists in our nation is still more like moss than some invasive species – they only “take over” where faith “plants” have died out. An increase in the number of atheists or unbelievers or people of other religions does not indicate the infidels are moving in and taking over our uniquely special American “neighborhood.” In reality, a high percentage of immigrants in recent years, especially of Latin origin, are strong Christian faith-oriented. Newsweek reported, for example, that the percentage of professing Muslims is still very minimal.
Contrary to popular hype, we are not being infiltrated. Rather, the loss of faith is a problem in our own Christian backyard.
2009-04-08
Authenticity and the 9th – Part VI
It is an intriguing story, the one about Adam and Eve in the Garden. Adam and Eve were tempted to disobey God and they did. Then the sin was compounded as they bore false witness against each other and even the serpent. But, you say, the serpent really did tempt Eve and Eve did tempt Adam.
The false witness comes in that both of them were putting the blame on someone else. The devil made me do it. My spouse made me do it. In saying such things we lie about our own culpability in the crime. We think we are saying the truth when we are really saying more by what we are not saying. Truth-telling becomes a lie when the larger picture is hidden in order that the blame will rest on another.
What happens as a result of this sin? Adam and Eve have to leave the garden. Eve has to experience pain in child birth and they have weeds and back trouble when they garden. At a more fundamental level, a deep, dark separation has fallen between God and them. And between each other.
Adam and Eve are ashamed, embarrassed around each other so much so that they want to put clothes on, a thought they haven’t had until then. In their physical nakedness, they feel emotionally vulnerable – because they can no longer fully trust each other. They haven’t yet discovered forgiveness and they can’t go back to innocence. It is a painful moment of self-discovery. They have no where to go to relieve the glare of self-disclosure, so they hide behind fig leaves and trees and each other and the serpent. In reality they are hiding from themselves and it doesn’t work.
What did God really intend in the Creation? That we as people would live in trust and openness with one another. That we would not second guess each other’s motives. That we would believe the best in each other, treating one another as innocent until proven guilty.
Instead, in our woundedness, we lash out at each other and close the doors of our hearts so that we cannot be harmed any more, not realizing that in closing the doors we shut the pain inside of ourselves where it festers and grows like a cancer eating our very innards away. The day Adam and Eve shut the door on their hearts from God and from each other, that was the day they started to die.
Truth telling is not just about not lying. It is about living in integrity before God and one another – and with ourselves. It means waking up and realizing that we must and can face ourselves as we really are, believing that if God can accept us just as we are, so can we. The key is in being honest. That is what it means when the Old Testament prophet, Micah, wrote that we are to “walk humbly with our God.” Humbleness is honesty at its best.
When we accept the truth about ourselves, we can accept the truth about others. One of my favorite stories from World War II is of the Jewish witness on the stand in the Nazi war crimes trials. The witness in facing his tormenter broke down. The judge stopped the proceedings and apologized to the witness that this was so painful, whereupon the witness replied that he wasn’t crying because of the pain this man had inflicted on him. He was crying because he had suddenly realized that the accused was merely a human like himself, and if so then he, the witness, was as capable of these heinous crimes as the Nazi was.
Such a revelation didn’t make the Nazi innocent, but it changed the dynamics of the trial for that witness. He was back in the garden able to stand emotionally naked before his tormenter, the courtroom and his Maker.
The false witness comes in that both of them were putting the blame on someone else. The devil made me do it. My spouse made me do it. In saying such things we lie about our own culpability in the crime. We think we are saying the truth when we are really saying more by what we are not saying. Truth-telling becomes a lie when the larger picture is hidden in order that the blame will rest on another.
What happens as a result of this sin? Adam and Eve have to leave the garden. Eve has to experience pain in child birth and they have weeds and back trouble when they garden. At a more fundamental level, a deep, dark separation has fallen between God and them. And between each other.
Adam and Eve are ashamed, embarrassed around each other so much so that they want to put clothes on, a thought they haven’t had until then. In their physical nakedness, they feel emotionally vulnerable – because they can no longer fully trust each other. They haven’t yet discovered forgiveness and they can’t go back to innocence. It is a painful moment of self-discovery. They have no where to go to relieve the glare of self-disclosure, so they hide behind fig leaves and trees and each other and the serpent. In reality they are hiding from themselves and it doesn’t work.
What did God really intend in the Creation? That we as people would live in trust and openness with one another. That we would not second guess each other’s motives. That we would believe the best in each other, treating one another as innocent until proven guilty.
Instead, in our woundedness, we lash out at each other and close the doors of our hearts so that we cannot be harmed any more, not realizing that in closing the doors we shut the pain inside of ourselves where it festers and grows like a cancer eating our very innards away. The day Adam and Eve shut the door on their hearts from God and from each other, that was the day they started to die.
Truth telling is not just about not lying. It is about living in integrity before God and one another – and with ourselves. It means waking up and realizing that we must and can face ourselves as we really are, believing that if God can accept us just as we are, so can we. The key is in being honest. That is what it means when the Old Testament prophet, Micah, wrote that we are to “walk humbly with our God.” Humbleness is honesty at its best.
When we accept the truth about ourselves, we can accept the truth about others. One of my favorite stories from World War II is of the Jewish witness on the stand in the Nazi war crimes trials. The witness in facing his tormenter broke down. The judge stopped the proceedings and apologized to the witness that this was so painful, whereupon the witness replied that he wasn’t crying because of the pain this man had inflicted on him. He was crying because he had suddenly realized that the accused was merely a human like himself, and if so then he, the witness, was as capable of these heinous crimes as the Nazi was.
Such a revelation didn’t make the Nazi innocent, but it changed the dynamics of the trial for that witness. He was back in the garden able to stand emotionally naked before his tormenter, the courtroom and his Maker.
2009-04-01
Authenticity and the 9th – Part V
Today happens to be April Fool’s Day, a day for playing hopefully harmless tricks on other people, particularly verbal tricks. My mother, who was concerned that I not break the 9th Commandment even for a holiday, tried to teach me to say an April Fool’s joke as a question instead of a statement. Not only did that make me look like a fool at school, it was a bit of a muddy stream ethically, because planting a question of untruth in someone’s mind can be the same as making an untrue statement.
Regardless of what we do with April Fool’s Day, lying is certainly in the sin category in Scriptures. One of the Bible verses kids learn early on is the one about all liars landing in hell. Of course, true to form, it is usually remembered better when someone else is doing the lying.
As we’ve been discussing, the 9th Commandment is about a particular form of lying: bearing false witness against a neighbor. This commandment does have broad ranging application and it does speak to the whole concept of truth-telling.
Truth is a holistic seam in an individual. We struggle with someone who is honest to us but lies to someone else. Just as with gossip. How do we know that person won’t treat me like she does other people? If a man cheats on his wife, we say about politicians, how do we know he won’t cheat on his constituency or his country?
Giving offense to other people is a natural hazard of living, unless we all live as hermits. While we want to practice the habit of confession with those among whom we live so that even unintended harms do not fester, we have to accept that we are not perfect and that we are going to make mistakes. Yet such an acknowledgement is a far cry from, as the Apostle Paul warns, sinning on purpose.
Truth be told, everyone lives with mixed motives. To admit this does not deny altruistic feelings. All we humans can and should aspire to greatness, perfection even. But to deny that our motives are impure is to lie for sure. Similar to what happens when we claim we are humble.
The Scriptural remedy for dealing with our mixed innards is the practice of mutual accountability. One-way accountability doesn’t even work between parents and children. It turns into a “do as I say, not as I do” model that invariably reaps a “did as I did” memoir.
At the societal level, we call mutual accountability “checks and balances.” We have these checks and balances built into our social framework at every level precisely because we know we as humans are not perfect.
Even Jesus as God in the flesh cried out for accountability. Much of the time Jesus did or said something that is recorded, someone witnessed the action – usually one of his close disciples. And that action got passed on to others and eventually written down in what we call the four Gospels. But what about the stories of Jesus when he was alone, when no other human was around?
The classic solo story is his temptation by the devil in the desert. How did his followers know about this story in order to write it down? In fact, it was recorded in more than one Gospel. I believe that Jesus told his disciples that he was tempted and even the nature of his temptations – at least as much as we have recorded.
Then there is that time when, without realizing what he was doing, Peter tempted Jesus to avoid the cross. Jesus reacted as strongly as he did at any one time, telling Satan to back off. Satan was tempting Jesus through Peter at that point and Jesus wouldn’t accept it. What strikes me is that Jesus reacted stronger then than if that had come from someone other than in his inner circle. The temptation was stronger when voiced through a friend.
Even Jesus – especially Jesus – understood the power of mutual accountability. He practiced what he preached. He wanted and needed his disciples to understand and affirm his mission. He wanted them in the garden that night, sticking close by him as he wrestled one last time with the temptation to avoid the cross.
If Jesus cried out for accountability, so should we. Not one-way accountability that stands over us like some prison guard, but mutual accountability that affirms our commonness before the Cross.
Regardless of what we do with April Fool’s Day, lying is certainly in the sin category in Scriptures. One of the Bible verses kids learn early on is the one about all liars landing in hell. Of course, true to form, it is usually remembered better when someone else is doing the lying.
As we’ve been discussing, the 9th Commandment is about a particular form of lying: bearing false witness against a neighbor. This commandment does have broad ranging application and it does speak to the whole concept of truth-telling.
Truth is a holistic seam in an individual. We struggle with someone who is honest to us but lies to someone else. Just as with gossip. How do we know that person won’t treat me like she does other people? If a man cheats on his wife, we say about politicians, how do we know he won’t cheat on his constituency or his country?
Giving offense to other people is a natural hazard of living, unless we all live as hermits. While we want to practice the habit of confession with those among whom we live so that even unintended harms do not fester, we have to accept that we are not perfect and that we are going to make mistakes. Yet such an acknowledgement is a far cry from, as the Apostle Paul warns, sinning on purpose.
Truth be told, everyone lives with mixed motives. To admit this does not deny altruistic feelings. All we humans can and should aspire to greatness, perfection even. But to deny that our motives are impure is to lie for sure. Similar to what happens when we claim we are humble.
The Scriptural remedy for dealing with our mixed innards is the practice of mutual accountability. One-way accountability doesn’t even work between parents and children. It turns into a “do as I say, not as I do” model that invariably reaps a “did as I did” memoir.
At the societal level, we call mutual accountability “checks and balances.” We have these checks and balances built into our social framework at every level precisely because we know we as humans are not perfect.
Even Jesus as God in the flesh cried out for accountability. Much of the time Jesus did or said something that is recorded, someone witnessed the action – usually one of his close disciples. And that action got passed on to others and eventually written down in what we call the four Gospels. But what about the stories of Jesus when he was alone, when no other human was around?
The classic solo story is his temptation by the devil in the desert. How did his followers know about this story in order to write it down? In fact, it was recorded in more than one Gospel. I believe that Jesus told his disciples that he was tempted and even the nature of his temptations – at least as much as we have recorded.
Then there is that time when, without realizing what he was doing, Peter tempted Jesus to avoid the cross. Jesus reacted as strongly as he did at any one time, telling Satan to back off. Satan was tempting Jesus through Peter at that point and Jesus wouldn’t accept it. What strikes me is that Jesus reacted stronger then than if that had come from someone other than in his inner circle. The temptation was stronger when voiced through a friend.
Even Jesus – especially Jesus – understood the power of mutual accountability. He practiced what he preached. He wanted and needed his disciples to understand and affirm his mission. He wanted them in the garden that night, sticking close by him as he wrestled one last time with the temptation to avoid the cross.
If Jesus cried out for accountability, so should we. Not one-way accountability that stands over us like some prison guard, but mutual accountability that affirms our commonness before the Cross.
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