http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/opinion/sunday/douthat-can-liberal-christianity-be-saved.html?_r=1
Can Liberal
Christianity Be Saved?
By ROSS DOUTHAT
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 Benedict
XVI 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 2005 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.
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