A prime cause of ecclesiastical malaise in the twenty-first century is the appreciation, sometimes the outright admiration, that Christian churches show for the mores and modes of the secular culture: the arts, academia, politics, journalism, the entertainment industry. Especially is this true at the priestly and ministerial level, where political and economic sympathies closely correspond to those usually found in the universities, the arts, and the media. Ministers are, in cultural terms, verbalists, wielders of words, talkers, and writers. They relate well to other verbalists, less well to sweat-of-the-brow types like the merchants and engineers and homemakers who, on Sundays, gaze back at them from the pews.
Between pulpit and pew a gap of sorts perpetually exists, a function of the fundamentally different outlooks of the ministering and the ministered-to. Lately the gap seems more cultural than anything else, a matter of politics and what modern people call their “lifestyles.” At the start of the present cultural struggle, the impulse among many American Christians was strenuously to resist. As time passed, resistance waned. Thoughtful souls began to wonder whether the culture might be right about the things it once seemed monumentally wrong about.
Was it possible (was it not certain!) that the Lord was doing a new thing, without the applause He deserved from his own representatives on earth? As more and more Christians conformed their outlooks to those of the secular culture, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention—a fellowship comparatively untroubled by cultural trends—acknowledged that “culture has transformed us into its own image.”
The declining participation in Christian worship during the past forty years isn’t due wholly to Starbucks and Sunday morning talk shows. It stems as well, depending on what church we’re talking about, from growing irritation over projects and obsessions better suited to political than theological remediation. A first-rate example would be climate change; another, abolition of capital punishment.
Hand in hand with the tendency to mingle cultural and religious mores comes comparative indifference to certain landmarks of Christian belief and action—the uniqueness of the Christian revelation; an explicit call (from Christ, actually) to make disciples of all; the duty to name and rebuke sin; monogamous heterosexual relationships as the Christian standard; divine authority (e.g., Holy Scripture) as dispositive in worldly matters. Such notions as these could seem unwise or unworthy to Christians afraid of pressing “exclusivist” claims on a pluralistic society. Why, no, that wouldn’t be attractive at all in an age of radical individualism and moral “choice,” coupled, curiously, with a form of moral absolutism about certain ideals, the whole hatched in the insurrections of circa 1965-1973 against war, capitalism, parents, moral restraints, college deans, and the social order of the day. The Methodists over time bought in; likewise the Presbyterians; many Catholics as well; some Baptists. And did we ever buy in—we Episcopalians.
Ah. I hadn’t previously mentioned it. Well, then: Episcopalian I have been for nearly all my adult life. (My youth was Methodist, as was my wife’s.) Episcopalian my family and I remain for at least—a nice semi-poetic word here—the nonce. My enterprise, between these covers, concerns “mainline” American churches broadly, the Episcopal Church more narrowly—the Episcopal Church as a lens for viewing and coming possibly to understand better the present diminished state of American Christianity. I do not mean diminished in sublime importance under the aspect of eternity. I mean diminished in terms of unity and effectiveness in ministry and witness. A church struggling to understand its nature and purpose is a church radically impaired in the eternal contest over human allegiances.
Not all of American Christianity is impaired. Even non-Christians know that. Churches of all sorts thrive in all sorts of places. Roman Catholicism, which benefits from the presence of America’s large Latin American immigrant population, continues to grow, as does the Pentecostal persuasion. Mormons, generally regarded as outside regular Christianity due to certain of their beliefs and interpretations, outnumber Episcopalians and Presbyterians put together. Many an individual “Bible” church, unaffiliated, often as not, with a particular denomination, and specializing in recreational as well as spiritual outreach, hums with energy. Of a Sunday morning, cars overflow their parking lots and spill onto the neighborhood streets.
If only the same could be said of the so-called mainline denominations: United Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Congregationalists! It is strange to observe the present tribulations of these bodies, which so recently constituted America’s “Protestant establishment,” awash in members and money. No longer.
Consider the United Methodists, down to 7.9 million members in 2008, compared with more than 11 million in the late 1960s. Consider the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, off 1.58 percent from the previous year, and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.), down 2.36 percent. Think of my Episcopalians: off 4.15 percent for the year; reduced in overall numbers by more than a third from their mid-sixties peak. Ponder the United Church of Christ, the Congregationalists, down 1.2 percent to barely a million members; less than a fifth of the booming Mormon population. The same Pew Forum survey that showed such airy indifference to doctrinal p’s and q’s asserted that barely three fifths of mainline Christians find religion “very important,” with a mere 26 percent committed to weekly church attendance. Nearly a quarter of mainliners told the pollsters they go to church “a few times a year”—just often enough, apparently, to keep the driving directions fixed in memory. Writing in First Things, Joseph Bottum has gone so far as to declare the old “Protestant America”—that nation forged by the combined witness of the major Protestant denominations—to be dead beyond the power of resuscitation.
For the tribulations of the mainline denominations, no single explanation, no single set of explanations, can fit every case, not in this large and various republic, and in this eclectic time, so accommodative of so many varied outlooks and aspirations. Some of the perplexity, for instance, is demographic—a sociological matter, one might say. One indisputable reason for the shrunken number of Episcopalians is that Episcopalians have a very low birth rate. We take in this point appreciatively. Then a question intrudes: Why do Episcopalians have a very low birth rate? Has it to do with the present beliefs and attitudes of Episcopalians, shaped by their own current theology?
I put it forth as truism that eventually everything gets back to beliefs. Beliefs form and shape actions. Actions (as whose mother has not reminded him?) have consequences. It is mainly of beliefs that we must talk in trying to sort out the woes of contemporary mainline Christianity. What beliefs, then—the doctrinal ones? Of course. Partly. Yet beliefs come in all sizes and varieties, having to do with dinner plans and political preferences as well as with the relationship between faith and works and the efficacy of infant baptism. We will talk about belief, generically. But in what context?
The context of one particular church, the Episcopal Church. I will in some sense talk of all the mainline churches by talking of one. That is my project. We need first to understand, insofar as space permits, the context in which American Christianity functions. That context is the culture of the twenty-first century, not only its religious and spiritual side, but also—perhaps just as often—its secular side, whether understood as disdainful of religion or merely detached from questions of origin and destiny.
I think we best understand the “mainliners” as cultural chameleons, melting so completely into the secular culture as sometimes to vanish from view, except when enduring in-house embroilments over the speed or extent of the vanishing process. On the one hand, chameleon-like behavior is nothing new in Christian annals: less the exception, perhaps, than the rule. On the other hand, the present culture—so louche, so free form, so resistant to notions of truth and constancy—sets out ghastly traps for the bumbling.
That is one side of the matter. There is another, more imposing