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.
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