The Future Story of American Christianity

No doubt you’ve heard stories of people defecting from the Christian faith. Get used to it. You are going to hear many more. Hordes of people who grew up in the American church — many who were quite devout — are going to hang it up never to return. I, like others, think that it will eventually happen by the millions. Most of what you know of as Christianity in America will end, and you can’t stop it either.*

Sure, you can blame the New Atheism, the gays,  the rising tide of secularism, or multi-culturalism if you want. But most of the blame rests squarely with churches, probably much like the one to which you belong (I know, I know, not YOUR church). Churches and church leadership are responsible for it, and they are simply unprepared to handle what is coming. They’ll eventually wake up to it, but whatever they do will be too little, too late. The train has already left the station. The best we can hope for is to mitigate the damage. 

I call it “damage”, but most of the damage won’t happen to true Christianity. It will, however, deal a sharp blow to cultural Christianity and those churches who have relied so long and so heavily on the advantages of an assumed religion in an affluent society. Many people who have claimed Christianity due to social pressures are going to simply walk away once the social pressures are gone.

Some of you want some proof of what I’m saying here. As you sit in a congregation of 10,000+ next Sunday morning, what I’m saying will sound very unlikely. The empire seems to big to fail. But this mentality is precisely the main reason that it will fail — particularly the Evangelical empire. We have been moving merrily along thinking that we could manipulate and gimmick people into building our empire. And these strategies have worked to get people in, but they won’t keep them in. For all of the slickness of presentation and marketing skills that we have honed over the years, the strategies employed by those who are against our attempts at power, prestige, and organization are much more effective. So while it may seem impossible to you that a crowd of thousands will dwindle away, you haven’t considered all of the people who have already left. The percentage of people identifying themselves with Christianity is going down, and there’s no reason at this point to think that it will trend upward. Cultural Christianity will soon be gone.

It may be easy for me to say “Good ridance” to cultural Christianity, but I think we’ll miss it more than we realize. We’ll miss its money, and all the great stuff it bought us (in my case, cultural Christianity funded most of my seminary education). We’ll miss its political power to legislate our morality on unbelievers, and the social freedom it gave us to tell people that we’re Christians with little to no impugnity so long as we didn’t take the whole thing too seriously. We’ll miss the way it let us claim Christ in the cute, fun way! Wasn’t it — to borrow a popular phrase in worship services these days — awesome?!

All of the foregoing (the money, the power, the large gatherings, the entertainment) are things which much of the church has confused with biblical, authentic Christianity. But it is in fact another religion that has run along side of Christianity and at times made it hard to distinguish the two by calling itself “Christianity” and calling its message “the gospel”. But it’s all going away (for the most part anyway). Once it is gone and we look around at what we’re left with, there will be an awareness that we really did have it coming to us and that it was well-deserved. Yet, I’m optimistic that in retrospect the remaining church will see that what died, in fact, needed to die. It wasn’t worth saving because it wasn’t really Christianity anyway. Ultimately, though it will be a difficult world for those who remain, it will be beneficial to the church. I’m not so wide-eyed as to think that it will yield a church free of problems with authentic Christians throughout, but it will be a more intentional church, a more thoughtful church, a serving church, a church far less politically hungry, and a church ready to hear the gospel again.

Lament it if you will — or even deny it — but it’s coming. It’s already started. Our church growth methods won’t stop it. The Emerging Church (are those guys even around anymore?) won’t stop it. Reformed theology won’t stop it. Liturgical worship won’t stop it. And the reason is simple: you can’t sustain what is unsustainable. Churches that want to transform Jesus into a hipster doofus, or make him the ultimate male in a paperback novel for middle-aged divorcees, or champion him as the power to make all your suburbanite dreams come true of being a great co-worker, husband, father, T-ball coach, and backyard grillmaster simply need to die.** They aren’t preaching Christ and their religion isn’t Christianity. It’s a perverted, warped, bizarro Christianity. It’s purely artificial.

But the result is that there are people who in their zeal to walk away from these churches, walk away from Christ. It’s true that some of those put off by these churches look for more authentic expressions of the Christian faith, but I think the bulk of them never do. They either find it comforting that they no longer have to busy their minds with all of the doctrine, the prayers, the rules, the formulas, the ridiculous trinkets, the lingo, and the politicking, or they simply aren’t aware of what other Christian options are out there and so they move on.

Once churches notice that people are leaving, they will eventually get out the apologetics books. They’ll quote lots of C. S. Lewis, they’ll maybe even hold debates with atheists. They’ll talk about how obvious Christianity is and how certain we can be with our mountain of evidence, under which we can bury any unbeliever. They’ll think that this is the way to stave off the death of their brand. But I don’t think apologetics will be of much use. Why? Two reasons. One, it will be too late. Two, and more importantly, apologetics only works well in defense of true Christianity. It can’t just be tacked on to an artificial church with an artificial gospel. For all the defense that these groups will make, the problem remains with what is being defended. There is a defense for true Christianity, but there is simply no defense for an artificial one. To put it in marketing terms, a company with a faulty product can try to defend it by attacking the claims of those who are pointing out the defects. But when the defects are clearly present, the consumer won’t stay confused forever about whose claims they should believe. Eventually the claims of the critics are going to resonate with their own experience. Clever ways of deflecting criticism doesn’t work when you’ve got a terrible product with a high price and the market is full of competition. So the problem isn’t the naysayers. The problem lies with the faulty product they are naysaying and with the people who continue to turn out this product.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the naysayers are the friends of better expressions of Christianity. But if you read the likes of Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett, you’ll notice that most of the brands of Christianity in their crosshairs are the same ones I’m talking about here. They’re easy targets, and New Atheism is thriving on them. Artificial Christianity has been their biggest missionary. Dawkins and the like have a much harder time raising ire against more authentic forms of Christianity, and I think they know it. So it’s not that they we should view them as friends of the church, but we must admit that some of their criticism is deserved and on target.

So what do we do?

I think the first thing to do is recognize what’s coming and stop pretending it isn’t already happening.

After that the best we can do is assist in the death of what is the source of the problem. Call a spade a spade on this, and stop defending a caricature of the church and of Christ. I think there’s credibility to be gained among people who are questioning the legitimacy of Christianity and on the verge of walking away from Christ when a group can clearly point to what these people have experienced and draw a stark contrast between the Christian faith and practice taught in Scripture and the shallow, power-drunk knock-off they’ve been a part of. Telling them that what they see isn’t really there only makes it worse. So long as there is confusion of the two in people’s minds artificial Christianity will cause a lot of unnecessary damage to authentic Christianity.

Also, we have to trust that Christ is Lord of his church. One can neither build nor destroy what is truly his church. He has promised to build his church, and he has promised that no other power will prevail against it (Matthew 16:18). These promises free me to acknowledge what is coming without fret. Christ knows far better than I what to do with his church and how she’ll survive so I’ll leave it to him. We can’t look at a false religion in decline and use it as a reason to wonder if the promises of Christ are true. They are. We may even see Christ carrying out an aspect of that promise when a perversion of the church collapses.

Third, the temptation toward arrogance is great. It  is very easy to assume that we’re always on the side of the gospel while others are not. But the reality is that we are all prone to commoditize the gospel, to try to harness it, package it, twist it, tweak it, or give it some flair of our own. So we must be very careful of identifying our group as the one, true church as we herald the demise of those not saying what we’re saying. A friend of mine pointed out to me recently that part of the reality of unbelievers and believers existing together in a community we call the visible church is that believers can be unaware of ways in which their thinking about the gospel has been influenced by unbelievers. None of us should think we have a corner on the gospel. What we can do is continue to return the word of God and the sacraments and ask that he would keep us in the faith, guard us from error, and allow us to hear the gospel again and again. We can do these things and all the while still tell others, “I’m sorry, but you are perverting the gospel. You’re calling it something that it is not.” This is not the arrogant part. The arrogance comes in when you think that you and your little group is immuned to error, and stop worrying that it could happen to you.

Lastly, I think of the Old Testament prophets. Even though they knew that judgment was coming they still called for people to repent and turn back. Regardless of what is coming, this shouldn’t stop us from calling those involved in artificial Christianity to repent and confess a true gospel. Of course, doing so relies on us carrying out the aforementioned task of making the contrast clear between what is artificial and what is authentic when others are busy distorting the line between the two.

Beyond this, I’m not sure what else there is to do, but Christ has it well under control.

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*Much of my thinking in this area has been influenced by Michael Spencer’s writing on internetmonk.com. Of course, any error of mine is solely my responsibility.

*Without interrupting the flow of the sentence, I want to add to the list of churches that need to – and will eventually – die: There are the churches that preach Jesus as the way to get a Rolex on your wrist. There are the churches that preach Jesus as the grand politician who will heal our land if our people will just turn back to him (and of course turning back to him is synonymous with voting down gay marriage, overturning Roe v. Wade, and closing up strip clubs). There are the churches who have a fetish for celebrity demagogue pastors who thrive on throngs of people kissing their ass and watching them scramble to work their way up the chain. Nearly everything that goes on in these churches is carefully orchestrated toward their end (no pun intended).