The New York Times‘ contrarian wunderkind Ross Douthat wonders aloud: Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved?, against the backdrop of the collapse in the membership of the Episcopal Church.
The most successful Christian bodies have often been politically conservative but theologically shallow, preaching a gospel of health and wealth rather than the full New Testament message.
But if conservative Christianity has often been compromised, liberal Christianity has simply collapsed. Practically every denomination — Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian — that has tried to adapt itself to contemporary liberal values has seen an Episcopal-style plunge in church attendance. Within the Catholic Church, too, the most progressive-minded religious orders have often failed to generate the vocations necessary to sustain themselves.
Both religious and secular liberals have been loath to recognize this crisis. Leaders of liberal churches have alternated between a Monty Python-esque “it’s just a flesh wound!” bravado and a weird self-righteousness about their looming extinction. (In a 2006 interview, the Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop explained that her communion’s members valued “the stewardship of the earth” too highly to reproduce themselves.)
Progressive christian guru Diana Butler Bass asks a different question: Can Christianity Be Saved? A Response to Ross Douthat. Bass points out that liberal churches are not the only denominations in decline, pointing to the Southern Baptist Convention, the Missouri Synod Lutherans and the Roman Catholic Church, the first two of which have lost members in recent years, with the third maintaining its numbers only through largely hispanic immigration. Bass thinks that the liberal churches may have got there first but that conservative churches are not that far behind. Nevertheless, despite discouraging numbers, she believes there is vitality in liberal churches:
Unexpectedly, liberal Christianity is–in some congregations at least–undergoing renewal. A grass-roots affair to be sure, sputtering along in local churches, prompted by good pastors doing hard work and theologians mostly unknown to the larger culture. Some local congregations are growing, having seriously re-engaged practices of theological reflection, hospitality, prayer, worship, doing justice, and Christian formation. A recent study from Hartford Institute for Religion Research discovered that liberal congregations actually display higher levels of spiritual vitality than do conservative ones, noting that these findings were “counter-intuitive” to the usual narrative of American church life.
There is more than a little historical irony in this. A quiet renewal is occurring, but the denominational structures have yet to adjust their institutions to the recovery of practical wisdom that is remaking local congregations. And the media continues to fixate on big pastors and big churches with conservative followings as the center-point of American religion, ignoring the passion and goodness of the old liberal tradition that is once again finding its heart. Yet, the accepted story of conservative growth and liberal decline is a twentieth century tale, at odds with what the surveys, data, and best research says what is happening now.
A focus on membership statistics is not entirely out of order, of course, as a chronically empty building with stained-glass windows can hardly be said to be a church by anyone’s definition. Nevertheless, an ecclesiastical populism that simply panders to the crowd scarcely makes for satisfactory church life either. It seems to me that both conservative and liberal churches are caught up in similar games, even if their strategies are quite different.
Conservative churches generally maintain the purity of the gospel message, that is, the focus on the person and work of Jesus Christ, better than do liberal churches, but they too easily cast off the historic creeds, confessions and liturgies that have shaped the church down through the ages. The church itself is no longer an authoritative institution bearing the keys of the kingdom; it is rather a gathering of spiritually like-minded individuals who prefer to worship a certain way – a way which, not so incidentally, mimics much of contemporary popular culture. Litur-tainment, if you will. Worship itself is differentiated according to market share, with traditional, contemporary and blended worship services catering to a variety of tastes at what might be called an ecclesiastical smorgasbord.
Liberal churches tend to overuse such buzzwords as “inclusive,” “open,” “affirming” and “safe,” playing down confessional distinctives and much of the content of the gospel message itself as summarized in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. Gone, very largely, is the call to repent and to live a biblically obedient way of life – apart, of course, from voting for the received politically correct causes. Liberals rather implausibly stake a claim to occupy the “mainline” of protestantism, although their version of the faith is increasingly distant from the historic mainstream of the christian faith itself, as J. Gresham Machen observed already nearly a century ago. In other words, the understanding of what constitutes the mainline is historically shallow and is based on the primacy of subjective experience and preferences over biblical revelation. Jesus Christ may be held up, but more as an ethical example than as actual Redeemer from sin and death.
Thus far, the liberal approach has succeeded in emptying the pews, despite the rhetoric of inclusivity. As it turns out, a church whose message is indistinguishable from that of the larger culture and refrains from calling to repentance and conversion quickly finds itself becoming redundant. Why bother getting up early on sunday morning for such thin spiritual gruel? Bass may be correct in noting the presence of vitality in some liberal congregations. But mere liveliness can be found in a variety of settings, including workplaces and garden clubs. It’s not an argument for the church as such.
The “conservative” approach may be winning more people at present, but long-term prospects remain in doubt. Many of today’s most successful mega-churches are heirs of the 19th-century “New Measures” revivalism of Charles Finney which places an emphasis on the use of clever techniques, including the notorious Anxious Bench, to elicit huge numbers of “conversions.” If Michael Horton‘s analysis is correct, Finney himself appears to have held to a moral example view of Christ’s atonement. The “conservatives” may be standing unknowingly on the same shaky ground that is failing to support the liberals.
What if the church were to subordinate concern for numbers, budgets, and social and political causes to the primary imperative of biblical faithfulness? What if it were to place its concern for bringing in converts within the larger context of the call to live the new life in the power of the Holy Spirit? The church might be smaller or larger than it is today. Its members would not be ignoring social and political issues; in fact they might increase their engagement with these. But they would do so along lines that recognize the clear authority of God’s written word over the whole of life. They would be pursuing not just personal moral effort, nor social justice as understood in a narrowly ideological sense. They would seek instead to advance the kingdom in all its fulness through unwavering fidelity to the cause of Christ, consisting of properly oriented – dare I say “converted” – labour, leisure, liturgy and life.
July 16th, 2012 | 6:27 pm | #1
“Conservative churches generally maintain the purity of the gospel message, that is, the focus on the person and work of Jesus Christ, better than do liberal churches…”
“Gone, very largely, is the call to repent and to live a biblically obedient way of life…”
I don’t see any warrants for either of these statements.
Moreover, I think part of the problem in inter-church discussion is the equivocation on the word “biblical,” a word that I’ve become increasingly annoyed by. You could use the Bible to justify a lot of things, as it’s been done in the past. We all seem to have different takes on “Biblical,” and as such I think the right place to start is a discussion of what that means to the Christian life, not leveling accusations of anti-Biblicalism at those you disagree with.
July 16th, 2012 | 8:50 pm | #2
Both camps are missing the big picture. It is not that liberals are declining or that conservatives are thriving. What is being missed is that the religious culture of the West where we found room for both liberal and conservatives expressions (a church on every corner) is collapsing all around us. The social cost of not “going to church” has evaporated and many people are simply abandoning organized religion and rightly so. So-called conservative churches may be declining more slowly than liberal groups that seem bent on rushing headlong over the cliff to extinction but they are heading the same direction.
Amidst all the doom and gloom, those who follow Christ should see hope. As cultural Christianity with its religious trappings, rituals, liturgies, clericalism and all the rest is in her death throes, the church can finally start to function as a peculiar, distinct, called out people who break free from the largely empty formalism that has been the hallmark of Western civil religion for centuries. We should certainly expect to see persecution as a result, actual persecution and not the silly fights over Ten Commandments monuments on public land, but that is a sign that the church is finally being who she is called to be, just as the lack of persecution we so often give thanks for is a sign of an utter lack of faithfulness. It is in times like these that we would be wise to look to the Anabaptists to see what life is like when being faithful runs counter to the prevailing culture.
The future of Christianity in the West is not going to marked by fights over “liberal” versus “conservative”. Those sort of fights are the marks of a religion that has too much power, too much money, too much prestige and is too comfortable with the world it is supposed to reach. Our future is one where preaching the Gospel is going to happen outside of pulpits and have a real cost, a future where picking up our cross daily actually means something. I am afraid that most of the church has its collective heads in the sand, desperately clinging to the crumbling religious foundations and not preparing to minister in a culture where “Christianity” is no longer the religion of choice. Rather than hand-wringing over declining “membership” we should be preparing and equipping the church right now for the very different landscape we face in the very near future. Alas those with a vested interest in the status quo are more concerned with clinging to the past than preparing for the future which is precisely why very few “leaders” in the church are really leading at all.
July 16th, 2012 | 10:18 pm | #3
Any Christian is going to have a very limited scope of intimacy with the message, general ethos, faithfulness, spirit, Biblical maturity and ministry of any particular church due to our own inability to be knowledgeable of more than a few churches to an extent to really know them thoroughly. Therefore, any writer who suggests that he or she can generalize about the deficiencies in the church, liberal or conservative, is misguided.
If anyone is qualified to make insightful diagnoses of churches, then that qualification means that he or she will truly be involved and intimate of only one local parish. How many “mega-churches” can you be familiar with to make judgements on their maturity or discipleship or whether they preach repentance? How many small Southern churches can a person visit enough to make judgments about how conservative churches are being faithful or unfaithful.
I can really only speak about my church where I visit every Sunday, attend Bible studies and prayer groups. The other churches are in God’s hands, and yeah I believe there are still devoted Christians in all of those “liberal” churches even though I cling to the gospel preached in my conservative church. I strongly disagree with innovative teachings on sexuality and will make my Biblical case, but how do I know that they are not people born again but deceived? And if so, I am called to pray earnestly for them as my brothers and sisters in Christ.
July 17th, 2012 | 9:12 am | #4
I had a look at the declining memberships of the mainline denominations, and the increase in Catholics and other “traditionalist” religions here:
The Decline And Increase Of Mainstream Religions In The USA: With Pictures! http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=5910
July 17th, 2012 | 9:47 am | #5
Mr. Briggs:
Thank you for a fascinating post. I am curious about the graphs for the Presbyterians, which show a huge spike in both membership and churches somewhere around 1990, followed by a precipitous decline. Do you know what the spike represents? Does it represent the merger of the old UPCUSA and the PCUS, followed by massive defections from the combined PCUSA? Did you follow both of the predecessor denominations or only the northern body? Thanks again.
July 17th, 2012 | 3:43 pm | #6
David K,
There is something drastically wrong with the data set used by ARDA for the PCUSA. The merger between the old UP and PCUS was in 1983. At that time the UP had about 2.34 million members and the PCUS another ~815,000 resulting in a total membership of around 3.1 million with about 11,600 congregations.
By 1998 (the earliest denominational data I could find in a quick search) the PC(USA) reported 2.6 million members and around 11,300 congregations. And the trend has been downward ever since with the latest numbers (for 2011) at 1.95 million members and around 10,700 congregations.
In other words the ARDA data mistakenly adds nearly a million members to the proper PC(USA) membership totals in 1990 and maintains the error throughout the remainder of the statistics. Can’t really say where the mistake came from…
July 17th, 2012 | 8:53 pm | #7
David K,
I’d trust David C’s guess more than the original data.
The site from which the data arose compiles its statistics from multiple sources, which increases the chance for error, especially in smaller denominations.
It might be fun to add all the different Presbyterian denominations together; probably be safer.
July 17th, 2012 | 9:55 pm | #8
David K, William,
Just to follow up, I wanted to say that my numbers in the post above were not just a guess but from the PCUSA website — (the denomination in which I am a pastor) drawn from an abstract of membership statistics from 1998 to 2008. Since then I have found another resource which analyzes, in depth the changes in membership from 1983-2008. You can find it at http://www.pcusa.org/resource/comparative-statistics-2008-presbyterian-church-us/.
The “membership” section of the report begins: “Between 1983 and 2008, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) had a net loss of almost 1,000,000 members, dropping from 3,131,228 to 2,140,165.” ARDA’s PC(USA) numbers simply go off the rails in 1990….
July 20th, 2012 | 7:03 am | #9
[...] Koyzis responds at Evangel. Thus far, the liberal approach has succeeded in emptying the pews, despite the rhetoric [...]
July 23rd, 2012 | 3:26 pm | #10
[...] David Koyzis response [...]
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