thentherewere12

My son was raised in the Church. Like many in his generation raised in Christian families, he has rejected the faith. Saying that is really unfair, in that what he has continued to embrace is the ethic of that faith, and in many way that should be enough. Unfortunately, for those of us actively pursuing a loving, living God, who demands submitted recognition, striving for His ethic isn’t enough to bring you into the right relationship with eternity, so as much as I might admire what he is doing with his life (and I am very proud of him), I agonize over his eternal destiny. I know there are multiple things that have led him away from his childhood faith, and I hate those things.

The things that have been isolated as major influences on leaving the faith distill down into 2 major ones: the Church’s marriage to Donald Trump and its opposition to the outworking of the sexual Revolution, specifically the issue of gay marriage. There is no question that Evangelicals have decided that they will overlook Trump’s many moral failures because of his ability to lead the Church into success in the political realm. Packing the Supreme Court to insure the revocation of abortion laws was more important than the character of the Nation’s leader, who paid prostitutes for their services. The assumption was that somehow there was only a choice between those two things and Donald Trump, that no one else could guide the nation into a revocation of its responsibility to take care of the unborn but him.

Sexual issues are harder. When gay men were seen as perverted monsters hiding in the shadows and lesbians were butch dykes with short haircuts and tattoos, it was easier to throw stereotypical words and accusations at them. Unfortunately, the sexual Revolution freed people to safely pursue their sexual identity, and it was our friendly neighbor whose roommate was actually his/her partner, not some neighborhood pervert, who was homosexual. That messed up the picture we had in our mind, which we thought aligned with what the Bible said about homosexuality, which soon was to be expanded into a whole family of sexual practices. What had been obvious when we threw words like fag and homo around wasn’t clear at all, and especially to those who had come into their sexual identities with friends and relatives who blurred the image of those making these sexual choices. It was not at all evident that the “alphabet”community was populated by a gaggle of sinners destined for hell. This was especially hard when those practicing homosexual behavior wanted to get married, which separated them for the promiscuous lifestyle which had made judging that community easier.

My son’s roommate, an exceptional and highly moral young man, was gay. How did Biblical passages condemning homosexuality apply to Mike? How could young men like my son submit to a God who condemned kids like Mike? Not only did we want the next generation to esteem a man of such low moral standards as Donald Trump, we wanted them to do it while condemning substantially better people who were in love with, and wanted to marry, same sex partners. It was all too much for a whole generation of people to accept, so they fled out of our churches, giving up on religion forever, embracing a vague sense of spirituality, whose amorphous set of values could encompass a plethora of beliefs. Trump and Homosexuality. The two hills an entire generation died on, while my generation looked on, self righteously demanding that they conform to our understanding of how our faith translated into the political and sexual realm. It was a tragedy of unparalleled dimension, and it left the pews of Churches in America occupied by Grey haired Republicans, driving out droves of grey haired Democrats. What a mess.

So the Church in the United States is in free fall. We have moved into a time of post modern thinking, which means that the bread and butter of the Judeo-Christian world and the absolutism that has been the foundation of Western Civilization is no longer authoritative.

Truth is a matter of perspective and belief system. With the loss of Absolutes, there can be no single position to take on any issue. The idea of universal benevolence is a great concept, but the history of mankind is fraught with more war than cooperation. The pagan gods valued power and war more than humility and self sacrifice. When Russia rejected its Church and tried to institute a worker’s paradise, greed and corruption won out. Stalin murdered millions and enslaves whole ethnic groups in brutal gulags. When he died, neighbor spied on neighbor and enemies of the state were jailed or poisoned. Pol Pot wanted to start Cambodia over, from the beginning, without foreign influence, and bodies stacked up in the rice paddies. Mao wanted a Cultural Revolution and millions died and more were displaced and re-educated. Man’s history outside of the influence of humanist religion ain’t so good.

Post modern thinking and the idea of consensus at any cost has led to rapid changes in the culture’s view of once universally rejected ideas and policies, the two most pressing ones today being abortion and human sexuality. No more dark alleys hiding subterranean abortion facilities – abortion is available in most of the States. Sex is displayed everywhere and available 24/7, in any variety you want. Being gay is but the first step on a path through every conceivable sexual definition and orientation, ending with the ability to change your gender. And maybe can marry anyone – the family has been redefined in a plethora of ways.

All this has not happened without resistance. A culture war has erupted, and the Church has been politicized on both sides of that war. In fact most outspoken Christians have mostly been brought into the Republican Party, which is battling against wokeism, a term that defines the attack on absolutes that has accompanied post modernism. Fewer Christians line up on the other side of woke.

It’s all so exhausting. Theologian Tim Keller has divided the ministry of the Church into 4 sections: ministry to the poor, restoration of the disenfranchised, protector of life (the abortion battle) and advocate for the family (made up of a man/woman Union). The Republican Party has built a political platform around pro life and pro family. Christians on the Left focus on the poor and disenfranchised, often ignoring abortion and sexual Revolution. Republican Christians often forget about the poor and disenfranchised. No one seems interested in everything.

Schisms and politics. People are leaving in droves. And we are fighting over which one of the two ministries we will ignore and about getting in bed exclusively with one Party. And who arrives – in. By 2016 – a politician despisnhbh ed by many. He woos the Church. Christians find community and meaning in political rallies. Donald Trump, a man of low moral character, is the darling of Evangelicals. Christians didn’t need Jesus, get have Donald. And millions jump ship. If Christianity is Donald Trump, I’m not interested. Well guess what? For millions Christianity IS Trump.

In 1970, 92% of Americans said they believed in God. We have always been a religious nation, having been settled by refugees, many trying to escape persecution in the nations they came from. The American Frontier was tamed by the Church, which battled with the saloon for the soul of the people taking the nation.

There were reasons Americans believed in God in 1970. We had been embroiled in a Cold War against Communism since 1950, and many had come to believe the nation was on the Eve of Destruction. Moreover, the Jesus Revolution was in full force in 1970. The Baby Boomers may have rejected the cultural values of their parents, but they kept some if their religious ones.

By 2018, the Jesus Movement was a distant memory, psychiatry and self help had taken the place of prayer, and belief in God was down to 65%. What’s more those who knew they were agnostics, atheists and nones had gone from 17% to 26%. Ominously, belief in God had stratified, with each generation becoming less and less interested in God and less and less likely to go to Church.

Before Covid, 45% went to Church monthly, but we know that only 17.7% are attending on Sundays in 2022. 34% of Americans never go to Church. 33% of those born after 2000 have no religious affiliation, and only 8% attend church regularly.

The church in America is dying. 40% of Catholics have considered leaving their faith in the last three years, primarily because of the priest sex abuse scandal. The Christian Church is booming in South America, Africa and Asia, and Christians from those regions are now sending missionaries to the United States.

Anecdotally, as a convert to Christianity in 1971, members of my booming Protestant Church routinely gathered together twice a week, and members seldom missed a service. Two of my children continue at the same Church, now a third the size of what it was in the 1980s. They attend Church twice a month. Their children attend less often, and have little interest in greater involvement with the Church. The pattern is obvious and disappointing.

Knowing that the bottom is falling out, what is the Church doing to continue to be viable 50 years from now? Aside from the moral crisis which has afflicted the entire Church (Catholic and Protestant) this Century, what factors are killing the Church, and how can they be reversed.

The title of this blog is Then there were 12, and, without giving it away completely, it’s about the decline and fall of Christianity in America. That means that it’s a bit too soon to say that now there are no Christians in the United States. Suffice to say that there are fewer.

As I look back at mileposts along this path, I think about This Morning on CBS, a stalwart on that network for the better part of 40 years. It’s no accident that the show runs from 10-11:30 on Sundays, time traditionally reserved for Church, or at least to Church on TV. Well, fewer people go to Church today, and Sunday Morning is a resounding success. What’s more, its success has shown TV stations that Sunday mornings can be advertising cash cows, and religious programming has been forced out, cast into the outer darkness of TBN, a network eschewed by many Christians or Christian “seekers”. TBN is what Marshall McLuhan called “hot communication”, which slaps viewers in the face with the least subtle and attractive parts of Christianity, boring or alienating all but the most faithful and least intelligent.

More ominously, you can tell Church services have fewer attendees. Church parking lots are emptier; there are fewer traffic delays in front of mega churches, and Sunday brunch restaurants are jammed. If you happen to go to religious services, less people are there, and those who are there are older. Anecdotally, in my Church, which I attend infrequently, attendance went from 300 people a service in 1995 to less than 100 today. I’m told that membership is actually up and giving is robust, but if you don’t go, both of those things are probably going to decrease over time.

Before we breakdown the specific numbers, the most relevant one seems to be that on any given Sunday, only 17.7% of Americans attend a religious service. However many people claim to believe in God or say they are Christian or say they go to services, only just under 18 actually attend Church. I don’t think we fully understand how much of this is to Covid restrictions, but the trend was moving downward before the epidemic virtually closed our places of worship.

What follows next are the raw figures, which are skewed unfortunately by the “halo effect” – no one wants others to know they are closet atheists or that they don’t go to Church as often as they say they do. People may not hold faith as closely as they think they should, and certainly not as much as they want others to think they do. Raw numbers come next.

I don’t want to argue if Catholics are Christians, something that some Protestant believe. Before its embrace of ecumenicalism in the 1960s, the Catholic Church viewed Protestants as outside the real Church. Although the difference between the two can be viewed as being substantial, both Protestants and Catholics aspire to worship the same God, Jesus Christ. In a world which increasingly is at war with Christianity, we should be very careful who we call our enemy. Faith in Jesus is what matters, specifically that He died on the cross to pay the price for our sin, and whether you demonstrate your faith in that by praying the sinner’s pray at the altar or by abiding by the Holy Sacraments, Jesus is at the heart of both branches of the Christian tree. Jesus embraces those who seek Him, however they do that.

And Catholic Christians are leaving parishes in America as quickly as Protestants are leaving churches. Whether those parishes were touched by the charismatic revival that impacted many or not, the Church has declined drastically since the 1980s. There have been a number of Popes during that time, but whether the Pope was a political activist like John Paul II or a social activist like Pope Francis, none of them has stopped Catholicism from dying in the United States.

I’ll discuss the reasons for the decline of Christianity in America later. Many of those reasons equally affect Protestants and Catholics, but the Catholic church has been uniquely impacted by a crippling scandal – sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests. Celibacy is an ancient Christian practice that the Catholic Church has demanded of its priests. Although an anachronism during the sexual Revolution that started in America in the 1960s, most never questioned the legitimacy of those who took that vow. Priests hold a powerful position in Catholic parishes. They are presented as an embodiment of Jesus Himself. Parents joyfully release their children to priests, fully trusting them. In the late part of the 20th Century, it was discovered that many priests had sexually abused those children, shattering the idea that men representing God were trustworthy. What’s worse, it was discovered that Church officials had in many cases known about the abuse and covered it up, transferring abusers from parish to parish, leaving a trail of damaged youth in their wake.

If this wasn’t catastrophic enough, things got even worse when those who had been abused sued the Catholic Church. At this point, it was revealed that the Church had already paid what could only be described as hush money to some who had more privately demanded compensation. When massive settlements were awarded to those who had been abused, it became apparent that the Catholic Church had vast amounts of money with which to pay many of these settlements. People were aware that churches didn’t pay taxes, but they didn’t know the amount of money the Church actually had, or that it often used that money in ways that had nothing to do with meeting the needs of parishioners . This was a one-two punch for many American Catholics, who abandoned the Church in horror. If Christianity had a meaningful place in society because it provided a moral compass, that function came into doubt. A doubt that would spill into the 21st Century.

When does losing your balance become a trip, then a stumble, and finally a fall? And how many times can you go through the whole process a second time, then a third, and a fourth, until you realize that walking is no longer an option without a cane, a walker, then finally a wheelchair?

American Protestant Christianity was headed for a wheelchair 100 years ago, when mainline denominations split over what those departing viewed as Fundamentals of the faith. Without those Fundamentals, the mainline denominations declined over the next fifty years, replacing the life enriching exuberance of those who left with good works, important, significant, but emotionally uninspiring.

Those who departed splintered into a myriad of denominations and sub denominations, always with a tendency to value independence in hearing a particular message from the Holy Spirit. Those groups fell into two general classes over this past Century, those who felt the Christian message could never be appealing to those outside the Church, and those who adapted a fundamentalist view of Biblical inerrancy and miracles to fit into a cultural form more closely resembling the world in which they lived.

Both groups flourished throughout the 20th Century, but increasingly those who held to views which separated them from the activities of the culture became more assimilated, and increasingly the difference between these groups was a developing conflict about theological purity. Although both groups held mostly to the same general beliefs about the Divinity of Jesus and the Biblical narrative, pressure in the culture to conform to changing attitudes about sex and gender roles inched these culturally assimilated believers towards positions regarding these changes that seemed to be outside what was taught by the Bible they said was infallible.

Some of this drift was hidden by a mini revival in Protestant Christianity during the turbulent 1960s and 70s, when mainline denominations showed some life during a renewed emphasis on the ministry of the Holy Spirit, during a so called charismatic movement, which, ironically, although it benefitted all those holding to traditional Christian theology, caused separation among those who had battled over cultural accommodation in the past, but now battled over the validity of the movement itself.

The renewal of that period was spurred on by a new found emphasis on teaching that Jesus was coming back to the earth, to rule and deliver the planet from the precipice of nuclear war and ecological disaster. Unfortunately, He didn’t come back, and there began a decline in Christian faith that has continued to this day, accelerated over the past ten years in a way no one could have imagined during the heady times of the Charismatic Revival.