As a preacher and a pundit I have long been making the case that the decline of the church, in particular the mainline churches, a.k.a. liberal Protestantism, is a big deal. It matters a lot, and not just to those institutions and the people who are part of them. It matters to our whole society.
Lately I have been finding allies in strange place, i.e. among those who once celebrated the decline of the church. One is the Brookings Institution scholar, author and contributor to the Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch. A self-described atheistic, gay, Jew (an ethnic rather than religious identity in his case), Rauch wrote in 2003 hailing the decline of religion and churches in America. Like many at that time (the “New Atheists”), he felt the church would not be missed, and that America would be better off without it.
“In 2003, I celebrated the rise of secularism,” said Rauch in a recent podcast. “I said, this is a great thing. We’re moving past those dogmatic, divisive, religious ideas and becoming a secular society like Scandinavia, and we’ll be more enlightened and less divided. And that is not how it worked out.” Now, Rauch says, “I couldn’t have been more wrong.” You can find the Good Faith podcast interview here. I strongly urge you to listen to it.
Did Rauch convert? Has he swung to the right in politics and religion? Not at all; he remains an atheist, whose world-view is that of a “scientific materialist.” But as a scholar and cultural analyst he has come to realize that Christianity has been “a load-bearing wall in our democracy, and it’s caving in. That’s causing all kinds of ancillary problems.”
Rauch goes on to say, “We are seeing a crisis of governability throughout the Western “developed” world. And it looks like three things are behind that. One is social media, the fragmenting of reality, fake news and all of that. The second is a global migration crisis, which governments have not figured out how to deal with. “And the third is the collapse of religion. As a kind of bulwark, answering questions for people on why they are here. What’s the difference between right and wrong?”
I would add a little additional context. While we have seen the caving in of the load-bearing wall of mainline or liberal Protestantism — for which those institutions and their leaders themselves bear some of the responsibility — the U.S. is hardly now a secular utopia. Into the vacuum have rushed many alternate spiritualities, some relatively benign and some pernicious, but few which have the depth or complexity required to accomplish social and moral formation. Meanwhile, many believers in Christianity’s more conservative wings have morphed into a fear-driven, identitarian movement, one that has proven ripe for authoritarian take-over.
What Rauch does in his new book, Cross-Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain With Democracy, is track the way that what might be described as the core of a generously orthodox Christianity maps with civic virtues needed for democracy to survive.
“Christians,” says Rauch, “tell me that if you had to summarize your faith standing on one leg, in three phrases, it would be number one, forgive each other. Number two, be like Jesus. And number three, don’t be afraid.”
“Jesus,” said Rauch, “is like no thinker who preceded him and no thinker who came after him. But directionally, these three map very well onto the Republican virtues that our founders said the country needs.
“‘Don’t be afraid,’ maps on to, you’re going to lose elections, don’t panic. It’s not the end of the world. Keep going. You might even learn something and improve as a result.
“’Be like Jesus,’ translates into, all men are created equal, including the smallest and the lowest, and a society is judged by how it protects the least of these. That’s core liberal doctrine. Human beings are always ends in themselves. They’re never means to end. That’s core Jesus and that’s core liberal democracy.
“And then ‘forgive each other.’ That translates into forbearance. Sometimes you win elections, but the point of politics and winning is not to crush the other side. The point is to remember that they’re still citizens. You’re going to be sharing the country with them. Treat them the way you will want to be treated by them when the wheel turns and they’re in charge. And so I’m looking at the teachings of Jesus as Christianity, as I understand them, and I’m looking at the teachings of James Madison.
“And I’m saying Christianity, the faith Christianity, not just because it’s a faith or because it’s a religion or because people need God in their lives. I’m not saying that. I’m saying the peculiar doctrines of Christianity are what our country needs to heal right now.” That final line is pretty amazing. “The peculiar doctrines of Christianity are what our country needs in order to heal right now.” That also happens to be true.
For a long time now the educated elites of America, especially in places like Seattle where I live, have dismissed Christianity and churches. “The cultured despisers of religion,” so-called. Like Rauch in his earlier iteration, many have claimed that if we could just get rid of religion, we’d all be better off. While I would make allowances for those who have hurt by toxic churches and false shepherds (and sadly there have been many), “let religion disappear and we will all live happily ever after,” is a breathtakingly simplistic and shallow argument.
As a writer for many years in public spaces like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Crosscut, Post Alley, and various newspaper and magazines, I’ve heard ad nauseam from the self-professedly “modern,” “enlightened,” “open-minded” and reflexively anti-religious. And high-status people, knowing I was a minister, would say condescending things like, “Oh, if I were ever to belong to a church, it would be one like yours.” (But I have no intention of doing that!) As Bill Gates III, who was raised in Seattle’s University Congregational Church, famously said, “I have better things to do on a Sunday morning than go to church.”
Both smug indifference and reflexive hostility made church-going problematic for more liberal, educated people, which has contributed to the problems we’re now facing. Even if recent studies show church decline may have plateaued for now, the chickens have already come home to roost.
As for the part churches and their leaders have themselves played in this, Marilynne Robinson has written of an internal collapse of faith and confidence. In an essay titled “Awakenings,” the Pulitizer Prize winning novelist, discussed the profound Calvinist theological sensibility and language which Abraham Lincoln employed to give meaning to the tragedy and suffering of the American Civil War.
Of this theological tradition, she remarked, “I no longer see much trace of it in America today.” She continued, “I am not speaking here of changed demographics. When I say Calvinism has faded, I am speaking of the uncoerced abandonment by the so-called mainline churches of their origins, theology, culture, and tradition . . . What has taken the place of Calvinism in the mainline churches? With all due respect, not much.”
Perhaps a new generation will be more humble and receptive to what Rauch and others, like Derek Thompson, another onetime celebrant of secularism who has come to question his earlier views. One can only hope. Meanwhile, I give thanks for all those Christians and church people of a generous, liberal, spirit who have hung in there when it hasn’t been easy to do so. May your tribe increase!
I see Dreher on the right play this game as well. It basically boils down to:
Dreher: You need Jesus!
Me : Why?
Dreher: Without a shared system of moral belief (insert cynical reference to MLK) then there is no agreement to what is good and what is evil!
Me: Dude, when everyone lived in Christendom and went to church they were a murderin and rapin like mad. If anything, many of those trendlines went in the right direction when lockstep religion died. Not saying its related, but it’s hardly a truism that loving the Jesus makes anyone better. Give me a break. Plus you’ve disappeared the majority of religions which are non-christian or islamic.
Dreher: When people have no direction or purpose coming from the Jesus, then they will do evil. If you don’t like the religious right, you really won’t like the non-religious right.
Me: So…your defense of religion is that if people aren’t able to shove it down our throats like in the good ol’ days then they’ll shove a jackboot in our face? You do realize that’s the same thing right? And not exactly a positive pitch for the religion of “truth and beauty”. Also, you’re arguing the sociological utility of a universal belief system…it could just as easily be the Great Green Arglbargle who sneezes out the universe, and we now all live in fear of the coming of the great handkerchief. (thanks Douglas Adams)
Dreher: But Christianity is true and beautiful!
Me: Unsupported opinion, already addressed. You still haven’t made a coherent point.
Dreher: (Utility argument repeated)
Me: You know swapping utility and true and beautiful to counter the counter argument of each is logically invalid.
Dreher: Bans person from discussion board.
You can make the sociological argument, but the implications that if people of religious mentality can’t get cultural dominance they’ll go Trumpian Jackboot doesn’t say what I think you want it to say.
A casual search for other assessments of this book turned up a whole lot of podcasts and the like. Looks like Rauch caught a wave here. And found one actual review … wherein he reportedly points rather to the Mormons as a possible source of inspiration.
America’s demise is certainly going to be due its citizens’ inability to deal with the problems of their own nature, and perhaps that does in principle seem like a matter for spiritual guidance. But, sorry, no – it has had plenty of chances with little to show for it.
Our deepest and perhaps fatal moral wound came with slavery. You can find your Calvinists and others opposing it — and supporting it. But where was the moral foundation that should have guided our then thoroughly Christian nation? The best they could do seems to have been to fire up the typical religious tribalism and leave us with the aftermath of a bloody civil war, and a race problem that just changed its terms.
Everywhere in that history you can find Christians showing us the way – and a Christian nation ignoring them. Christianity’s peculiar doctrines have never saved us from ourselves, and have more often just reinforced our moral failings. As a moral foundation, it’s all hat and no cattle, and the difference between the Protestant and Catholic is just that the Protestants have bigger hats.
Today’s “Sharp Christianity, the Church of Fear”, as he puts it, is not even trying. I don’t know if it’s supposed to exhibit those peculiar doctrines, but it’s not even seriously pretending, and maybe that’s what Rauch is up to here, trying to blunt the worst of the impending theocracy. But don’t expect rest of us to think that means Christianity is actually the good news it says it is.
It feels like this sort of boils down to an absence of authoritative arbiters of morality, in a society and an environment that increasingly seems to support people believing whatever they want (both their choice of supernatural beings, and their choice of moral/ethical imperatives).
Religion serves that purpose, but it can also be problematic when people comply with the moral code because of the threat of eternal damnation, or simply “because I told you so!” At some point the leaders of every religion declare the very idea of questioning their edicts to be inherently sinful — either by citing their own infallible nature, or by invoking righteous indignation at anyone who dares to question their authority at all. Then religion just becomes one more tool for the powerful to control the masses.
Secular societies, on the other hand, seem to be based on the premise that an open, educated society that values free speech and civic discourse will eventually arrive at a consensus on moral and ethical norms. History has not proven that to be true. Unfortunately, those societies’ leaders all eventually seem to figure out that their own education is a competitive advantage in a system with limited resources — and they both limit access to a quality education and sow propaganda and misinformation to ensure that a consensus is never reached.
So both systems fail society; they just fail in slightly different ways. I still hold out hope that there is a way for a society to build consensus on a moral code that doesn’t require belief in supernatural beings and “miracles,” nor in infallible authoritarian leaders.