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IN 1998, John Shelby Spong, then the reliably controversial Episcopal bishop of Newark, published a book entitled “Why Christianity Must Change or Die.” Spong was a uniquely radical figure — during his career, he dismissed almost every element of traditional Christian faith as so much superstition — but most recent leaders of the Episcopal Church have shared his premise. Thus their church has spent the last several decades changing and then changing some more, from a sedate pillar of the WASP establishment into one of the most self-consciously progressive Christian bodies in the United States.
As a result, today the Episcopal Church looks roughly how Roman Catholicism would look if Pope Francis suddenly adopted every reform ever urged on the Vatican by liberal pundits and theologians. It still has priests and bishops, altars and stained-glass windows. But it is flexible to the point of indifference on dogma, friendly to sexual liberation in almost every form, willing to blend Christianity with other faiths, and eager to downplay theology entirely in favor of secular political causes.
Yet instead of attracting a younger, more open-minded demographic with these changes, the Episcopal Church’s dying has proceeded apace. Last week, while the church’s House of Bishops was approving a rite to bless same-sex unions, Episcopalian church attendance figures for 2000-10 circulated in the religion blogosphere. They showed something between a decline and a collapse: In the last decade, average Sunday attendance dropped 23 percent, and not a single Episcopal diocese in the country saw churchgoing increase.
This decline is the latest chapter in a story dating to the 1960s. The trends unleashed in that era — not only the sexual revolution, but also consumerism and materialism, multiculturalism and relativism — threw all of American Christianity into crisis, and ushered in decades of debate over how to keep the nation’s churches relevant and vital.
Traditional believers, both Protestant and Catholic, have not necessarily thrived in this environment. 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.)
Liberal commentators, meanwhile, consistently hail these forms of Christianity as a model for the future without reckoning with their decline. Few of the outraged critiques of the Vatican’s investigation of progressive nuns mentioned the fact that Rome had intervened because otherwise the orders in question were likely to disappear in a generation. Fewer still noted the consequences of this eclipse: Because progressive Catholicism has failed to inspire a new generation of sisters, Catholic hospitals across the country are passing into the hands of more bottom-line-focused administrators, with inevitable consequences for how they serve the poor.
But if liberals need to come to terms with these failures, religious conservatives should not be smug about them. The defining idea of liberal Christianity — that faith should spur social reform as well as personal conversion — has been an immensely positive force in our national life. No one should wish for its extinction, or for a world where Christianity becomes the exclusive property of the political right.
What should be wished for, instead, is that liberal Christianity recovers a religious reason for its own existence. As the liberal Protestant scholar Gary Dorrien has pointed out, the Christianity that animated causes such as the Social Gospel and the civil rights movement was much more dogmatic than present-day liberal faith. Its leaders had a “deep grounding in Bible study, family devotions, personal prayer and worship.” They argued for progressive reform in the context of “a personal transcendent God ... the divinity of Christ, the need of personal redemption and the importance of Christian missions.”
Today, by contrast, the leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism. Which suggests that per haps they should pause, amid their frantic renovations, and consider not just what they would change about historic Christianity, but what they would defend and offer uncompromisingly to the world.
Absent such a reconsideration, their fate is nearly certain: they will change, and change, and die.
Today, by contrast, the leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism. Which suggests that perhaps they should pause, amid their frantic renovations, and consider not just what they would change about historic Christianity, but what they would defend and offer uncompromisingly to the world.
Absent such a reconsideration, their fate is nearly certain: they will change, and change, and die.
Fascinating. As a former evangelical Christian I have always wondered -- both before and after my deconversion -- why anyone would bother with liberal Christianity when it seemingly has no value proposition beyond that offered by, say, the Loyal Order of Moose or the Masonic Temple -- or, with much less esoterica and ritual and expense, your neighborhood community meeting house or involvement in any number of secular charities and non-profit organizations. Or some forms of local politics or community service, even.
This is not to say that a liberal religion can't offer anything attractive. Universalism has grown 15% in the past decade, and oddly, it seems to be growing fastest in the South. But unlike Episcopalians, they have a strategy: seek out and appeal to the "nones", those with no specific religious identification. Buddhism, while not a religion in the ordinary sense as most flavors of it do not worship god(s), offers a philosophy of mind and living that is very helpful to some, particularly the anxious and others who are wound rather too tightly for their own good. By some estimates Buddhism has added 170% to its U.S. adherents during the first decade of this century.
Fascinating. As a former evangelical Christian I have always wondered -- both before and after my deconversion -- why anyone would bother with liberal Christianity when it seemingly has no value proposition beyond that offered by, say, the Loyal Order of Moose or the Masonic Temple -- or, with much less esoterica and ritual and expense, your neighborhood community meeting house or involvement in any number of secular charities and non-profit organizations. Or some forms of local politics or community service, even.
This is not to say that a liberal religion can't offer anything attractive. Universalism has grown 15% in the past decade, and oddly, it seems to be growing fastest in the South. But unlike Episcopalians, they have a strategy: seek out and appeal to the "nones", those with no specific religious identification. Buddhism, while not a religion in the ordinary sense as most flavors of it do not worship god(s), offers a philosophy of mind and living that is very helpful to some, particularly the anxious and others who are wound rather too tightly for their own good. By some estimates Buddhism has added 170% to its U.S. adherents during the first decade of this century.
Overall, the kind of anti-dogmatic, anti-hierarchal spiritual searchers whose journeys some see as a potential template for the Christian (and, indeed, Western religious) future are mostly doing their searching as individuals, rather than as members of the liberal churches and congregations that keep trying to roll out a welcome mat for them.
Overall, the kind of anti-dogmatic, anti-hierarchal spiritual searchers whose journeys some see as a potential template for the Christian (and, indeed, Western religious) future are mostly doing their searching as individuals, rather than as members of the liberal churches and congregations that keep trying to roll out a welcome mat for them.
I agree that anti-dogmatic, anti-hierarchical people tend to arrive at their own conclusions and arrangements, but there is no reason they could not, as part of those arrangements, affiliate with other like-minded people in some church-like social setting. It's just that it would not be recognizable as Christianity, particularly to a literalist / evangelical / fundamentalist. The fact that it would have some "churchiness" to it -- meeting on Sunday mornings according to some sort of quasi-liturgy, conducting weddings and funerals, organizing community service in the name of some higher power, however vaguely defined -- doesn't really constitute Christianity. More of a post-Christianity, and that would appeal to a shrinking minority of people I should think.
As you ably point out, why bother to take what is essentially a secular organization and put some theistic trappings on it? The only reason I can think of is that an exclusively secular organization would not be likely to encourage people to explore their "spirituality", however freely, and that focus seems important to some people. As someone who feels his spirituality has been sufficiently plumbed and that it has yielded very little, I don't really give a fig -- but I can see how some would not be able to let go of that.
While it is understandable that attempts to change the church(s) with the times has resulted in conservative intransigence - after all conservatism is what is taught from the pulpit - in the end Liberal Christianity is what I believe will be the only one left, because it will be the only one with any credibility in future years.
See Lord Jesus requires faith and obedience and trust to be eternally saved.....But as some turn to the fallen belief systems of liberalism , then they compromise their belief in truth , and turn their back to God in bias to the liberalism ideas .....And then when they turn to the ideas of the Greater Critics of Jesus , then Jesus will not be able to bring them the salvation which they will need to have Eternal Life . ....Where Jesus will pass them off with the world , and if they never forsake their fallen belief and repent of these beliefs , then they will be lost to God ...... So what wrong with liberalism? ...Liberalism is under the spiritual authority of the seven-headed, ten-horned, ten crowned dragon fallen angel , which blasphemes God and His worship by rejecting the seven virtues of Righteousness of Christ, and rejecting the ten commandments of God with victory ..... So God has a hard time being in unity which people under the authority of this beast.... Basically
I'm curious? Which heads get the extra horns? And since there more crowns than heads does each horn get it's own crown?
(sigh) Actually the seven headed, ten-horned ten-crowned dragon is imagery from The Revelation and is a synonym for "the beast" or "the antichrist". This bogeyman has been variously identified with the Roman Catholic Church, one world government, and other horrors that seem to the person making the connection to be of ... well, Biblical proportions. But this is the first time I've seen such symbolic capital wasted on something so vague and un-scary as ... liberal Christianity. But then again, it does make a back-handed kind of sense to a hyper-conservative Christian in an "it's extra evil because it seems so benign" sense. Still, I would have used up something like one of his evil spirits that look like seahorses for such piffle as liberal Christianity.
(sigh) Actually the seven headed, ten-horned ten-crowned dragon is imagery from The Revelation and is a synonym for "the beast" or "the antichrist". This bogeyman has been variously identified with the Roman Catholic Church, one world government, and other horrors that seem to the person making the connection to be of ... well, Biblical proportions. But this is the first time I've seen such symbolic capital wasted on something so vague and un-scary as ... liberal Christianity. But then again, it does make a back-handed kind of sense to a hyper-conservative Christian in an "it's extra evil because it seems so benign" sense. Still, I would have used up something like one of his evil spirits that look like seahorses for such piffle as liberal Christianity.
I wonder how the one eyed one horned flying purple people eater fits in?
Why would anyone WANT to save it? I never understood the idea of giving lip service to a creed merely to belong to a social organization. If you don't actually believe in the faith...why bother?
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