Ross Douthat/Dianne Butler: Is Liberal Christianity Actually the Future

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/is-liberal-christianity-actually-the-future/

 

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July 25, 2012, 4:15 pm

Is Liberal Christianity Actually The Future?

One of the more interesting responses to my column on liberal Christianity came from the Huffington Post’s Diana Butler Bass, whose new book, “Christianity After Religion,” considers many of the same trends I take up in “Bad Religion” but sees a spiritual awakening (or at least the possibility of one) where I see decline and disarray. Here is Bass, putting the waning of liberal churches in what she considers the proper context:

Forty years later, in 2012, liberal churches are not the only ones declining. It is true that progressive religious bodies started to decline in the 1960s. However, conservative denominations are now experiencing the same. For example, the Southern Baptist Convention, one of America’s most conservative churches, has for a dozen years struggled with membership loss and overall erosion in programming, staffing, and budgets. Many smaller conservative denominations, such as the Missouri Synod Lutherans, are under pressure by loss. The Roman Catholic Church, a body that has moved in markedly conservative directions and of which Mr. Douthat is a member, is straining as members leave in droves. By 2008, one in ten Americans considered him- or herself a former Roman Catholic. On the surface, Catholic membership numbers seem steady. But this is a function of Catholic immigration from Latin America. If one factors out immigrants, American Catholicism matches the membership decline of any liberal Protestant denomination. Decline is not exclusive to the Episcopal Church, nor to liberal denominations–it is a reality facing the whole of American Christianity.
Douthat points out that the Episcopal Church has declined 23% in the last decade, identifying the loss as a sign of its theological infidelity. In the last decade, however, as conservative denominations lost members, their leaders have not equated the loss with unfaithfulness. Instead, they refer to declines as demographic “blips,” waning evangelism, or the impact of secular culture. Membership decline has no inherent theological meaning for either liberals or conservatives. Decline only means, as Gallup pointed out in a just-released survey, that Americans have lost confidence in all forms of institutional religion.
The real question is not “Can liberal Christianity be saved?” The real question is: Can Christianity be saved?

Or maybe they’re both real, and distinct, questions. Bass is right to see a broader ebbing of traditional Christian faith and a broader weakening of Christian institutions as the most important religious story of our times. She’s right that there’s no evidence that “infidelity” to Christian orthodoxy directly explains church decline: Many of the most successful preachers and religious bodies in the United States are offering messages that diverge in stark and significant ways (See Osteen, Joel, among many other figures) from the doctrines that Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and many Protestants have traditionally held in common. And (as I said in the column), she’s right that there’s no reason for conservative Christians to feel remotely smug about the likely fate of bodies like the Episcopal Church. Overall, “can Christianity be saved?” is a question that American believers of every political and theological persuasion should be wrestling with today.

But with all of that said, the distinctiveness of the liberal churches’s decline —its depth, duration and seeming irreversibility — remains an incontrovertible fact. Yes, two generations after the Episcopalians and United Methodists and other bodies like them entered a long swoon, denominations like the Southern Baptists are experiencing some reversals, and the post-1970s evangelical revival seems to have hit a kind of demographic ceiling. But it would take literally decades of decline for conservative churches to come close to sharing liberal Protestantism’s current sickness-unto-death. Consider the following statistics (taken from Rodney Stark’s “The Churching of America”): In 1940, for every 1,000 churchgoers in the United States, 224 belonged to one of four major Mainline bodies (United Methodists, PCUSA Presbyterians, Episcopalians and Congregationalists), while 77 were Southern Baptists. By 2000, the Southern Baptist share of the churchgoing population equalled the share of those four more liberal churches combined — not because SBC growth was extraordinary (though it was significant), but because the liberal churches’ decline was so astonishingly steep. The fact that the SBC has struggled in the period since those numbers were published tells us something important about the challenges facing even conservative churches. But five years of declining membership is simply not the same thing as a multigenerational (and perhaps accelerating) collapse.

What’s more, Bass stacks the deck somewhat by comparing liberal and conservative denominations, since much of conservative evangelicalism’s post-1960s gains were concentrated in nondenominational churches rather than bodies like the SBC, and the growth of nondenominational congregations continues apace today. Some of these congregations, it’s true, are more theologically and politically liberal than the evangelical norm, in the style of “emergent church” figures like Brian McLaren and hip pastors like Rob Bell, and to the extent that liberal Christianity seems to have any kind of future at the moment it’s more likely to be found in the liberal wing of evangelicalism than in the faded Mainline. But overall, most of the vitality and growth in American Protestantism is still concentrated in congregations that are culturally and politically conservative, if not necessarily orthodox or theologically rigorous. And meanwhile, alongside the nondenominational category, the other fast-growing form of American Christianity is of course Mormonism — which obviously isn’t an orthodox form of the faith, but clearly isn’t anything like a self-consciously liberal or progressive form of Christianity either. (Per Stark’s numbers again: In 1940, there were roughly three Episcopalians for every Mormon; now it’s roughly the reverse.)

On the Catholic front, Bass is right that if you screen out Latino growth and only look at white mass attendance, Roman Catholicism has seen declines in churchgoing comparable to some Mainline denominations. But many leaders of the institutional Catholic Church in the United States went all-in for the liberal project in the 1960s and 1970s, and so at least some of Catholicism’s post-’60s decline is part of the same story of liberal Christian failure that’s visible in the Episcopal/Methodist/Presbyterian dégringolade. Again, this isn’t a case for conservative Catholic triumphalism, especially given the way the sex abuse scandal — the causes of which cut across the liberal/conservative divide within the church — seems to have killed off any hope for a real springtime of evangelization in the West for the foreseeable future. But such complicating factors notwithstanding, in both Protestantism and Catholicism the overall story continues to offer fewer consolations for liberal Christians than Bass’s analysis suggests.

Unless, of course, the very steepness of the liberal churches’ decline could prove to be a source of future strength, on the theory that it’s easier to rebuild (or at least see the landscape around you afresh) when you’ve been razed to your foundations. This is Bass’s provocative contention:

Liberal Christians experienced this decline sooner than their conservative kin, thus giving them a longer, more sustained opportunity to explore what faith might mean to twenty-first century people. Introspective liberal churchgoers returned to the core of the Christian vision: Jesus’ command to “Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.” As a result, a sort of neo-liberal Christianity has quietly taken root across the old Protestant denominations–a form of faith that cares for one’s neighbor, the common good, and fosters equality, but is, at the same time, a transformative personal faith that is warm, experiential, generous, and thoughtful. This new expression of Christianity maintains the historic liberal passion for serving others but embraces Jesus’ injunction that a vibrant love for God is the basis for a meaningful life. These Christians link spirituality with social justice as a path of peace and biblical faith.

Provocative, but again not quite persuasive. The kind of “neo-liberal” vibrancy that Bass describes certainly exists in some precincts, and perhaps it has a brighter future than current trends suggest. But those trends, anecdotal counter-examples notwithstanding, are still eroding progressive-minded communities faster than they’re restoring or creating them. Overall, the kind of anti-dogmatic, anti-hierarchal spiritual searchers whose journeys Bass sees 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.

As I tried to argue in my own book, this individualism has consequences that liberal Christians as well more traditional believers should find more worrying than cheering: Consequences for local community (because it’s harder to care for your neighbor when you don’t have a congregation around you to provide resources and support), consequences for society as a whole (because the declining institutional churches leaves a void that our insolvent government is unlikely to effectively fill, no matter how many elections the Democratic Party wins), and consequences for private morality (because an individualistic faith is more likely to encourage solipsism and narcissism, in which the voice of the ego is mistaken for the voice of the divine). Like many religious progressives, Bass has great hopes for Christianity after organized religion, Christianity after the institutional church. But I feel like we already know what that Christianity looks like: It’s the self-satisfied, self-regarding, all-too-American faith that Christian Smith and others have encountered when they survey today’s teenagers and young adults, which conceives of God as part divine butler, part cosmic therapist, and which jettisons the more challenging aspects of Christianity that the traditional churches and denominations, for all their many sins and follies, at least tried to hand down to us intact.