Ross Douthat offers a generous and lengthy response to my earlier post on his exchange with Yuval Levin.
He’s right that the growth of evangelicalism has likely hit a plateau and hasn’t compensated for the decline of the mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic churches. A higher proportion of people are unchurched now than previously. One of the causes, he suggests, is the public face that conservative churches offer potential congregants:
I agree with Knippenberg that it’s rare to find political agitation per se dominating the everyday life of a successful congregation. But I’ve spent enough time in churches both liberal-leaning and conservative to see the ways in which a more general orientation toward activism that’s almost entirely external to the life of the congregation — whether it’s “social justice” ministries, pro-life activity, or some combination thereof — can define and limit the public identity of the church in ways that turns off potential congregants, while also leaving the church’s internal culture weaker and thinner than it needs to be. This tendency is part of what undid liberal Protestantism in the 1970s and 1980s, and I think it’s a significant problem for both conservative Catholicism and Protestantism today.
Certainly the evidence offered by Unchristian suggests that from the outside, the appearance of “culture wars” homogeneity and non-relativism (which seems to some to be harshly judgmental) may be off-putting. And while relational evangelism might begin to dismantle the simple stereotypes, I remember well enough my own unchurched days to know that there can be a lot of resistance to building those stereotypes. Where I live, one of the great reasons to go to church or to return to church is childrearing. Parents who give some thought to the spiritual needs of their children are often willing to swallow some of their rationalist pride and put off (pardon me) reading the Times first thing Sunday morning. Or the dim perception of something missing in one’s life becomes much more vivid when there are kids involved. With fewer people having kids and more of those kids born out of wedlock, there are fewer folks with this reason to roll out of bed on Sunday morning and more who may be embarrassed to sit in a pew without the appropriate mate. (On this latter point, by the way, my experience is that conservative churches are more than willing to welcome single parents.) If, by the way, I’m right that children pull people into or back into churches, this may be one of the explanations for why the Belmonters, who are more likely to be married with children, are also more likely to go to church than are the residents of Fishtown.
With respect to another point I made, I feel to need to offer a clarification in response to Douthat:
But the very fact that Knippenberg writes about the idea of Ivy League-educated clergy as though he’s writing about ministers from Nigeria or Vietnam — as a group that would have to be “imported” into American Christianity from outside — says something troubling about precisely the “coming apart,” elites-versus-masses phenomenon that started this whole discussion. I have no doubt that on a congregation-by-congregation, pastor-by-pastor basis, Calvin College grads make better ministers than the typical Harvardian. But if the problem is an overall downward trend in the cultural influence of the churches, then perhaps those Calvin and Wheaton and Florida State pastors could use some reinforcements — not just from Harvard and Penn, but from the broader range of top-100 colleges and universities. If the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few, then even Ivy Leaguers might have something to contribute.
In the first place, I was talking not about our preachers, but about our elders. I certainly don’t disagree that we should encourage as many talented people who have a heart for the ministry to enter it, but in many churches (not just in congregational ones, like my Presbyterian church) there’s a significant role for lay leadership. What’s more, when it comes to entering into relationships where we hold one another accountable and exhibiting morally exemplary character, “book learning” (well, with the exception of one Book) strikes me as not the most important consideration. Sure, I wouldn’t turn my nose up at C.S. Lewis, let alone the Apostle Paul, but I’m pretty happy with the kind of good people that show up in almost any church. More of them would be fine, regardless of their academic credentials. And, yes, it’s very helpful to have have sophisticated folks to defend them, when necessary, from both cultured despisers and charlatans.
In the second place, Douthat himself mentioned the gap between the superzips and the rest of the country. I spent a good bit of my life either actually or culturally on the two coasts, and used to bore my acquaintances here in Atlanta with how inferior it was to Toronto, Boston, and Washington, among others. If what Douthat is urging is that more people like (the younger) me leave the elite enclaves for flyover country, it should be at least as much because they have much to learn (above all, humility) as because their talents are needed. Indeed, if they have a heart for ministry or service, churches in the superzips need them too.
In sum: yes, emphatically yes, let’s have more people doing God’s work everywhere, even people with elite educations. I’m not sure that this is a restoration of the status quo ante (I eagerly await his book ), but it’s certainly worth praying for.
One last point and then I’m done. Part of the problem that Douthat is pointing to is the relatively new geography of class. Alan Ehrenhalt’s The Lost City is a wonderful description of the way things used to be, before the people with the wherewithal didn’t always choose to leave the problems of their communities behind. Leaving aside the other ways in which moral authority has been weakened, there was a time when it was at least relatively widely distributed across the landscape. Marginal white communities have certainly suffered from the flight of the middle class to the suburbs; marginal African-American communities have suffered at least as much, if not more. And once those relationships and structures of moral authority have crumbled, they’re pretty hard to rebuild. Consider what happens to the churches when their congregations flee. The church in which my wife grew up (in a working-class town outside Atlanta) is a good example. The congregation is a bare shadow of what is was 40 years ago; they lack the means to maintain the whole physical plant; some people remain faithful congregants, though they no longer live nearby, which means that their energies are present in church only on Sundays; and while the congregation certainly tries to reach out to its new neighbors, the efforts are rarely very successful. The churches that are “organically” connected to the neighborhood certainly can’t afford to take over the physical plant, so they struggle in storefronts and modest buildings. Perhaps they will one day “grow up” as this church did, but, fearing that the successful people in the community will leave for greener pastures, I have my doubts. And there are other ways in which the experience of the generation that built my wife’s home church are unlikely to be duplicated. Not to make this post longer than it already is, I’ll mention just one consideration. Was not the Tocquevillian “habit of associating” more widespread and alive in 1912 than it is in 2012? Wouldn’t it have been more plausible back then for working class and lower middle class people (together with some of their more prosperous neighbors) to join together to build a church than it would be now?
What’s changed?
March 16th, 2012 | 11:27 am
It is not “non-relativism” that turns people off from attending church and it is not their “rationalistic pride” that keeps them in bed on Sunday mornings. When people say church is “too political” they’re not usually thinking of the social justice advocacy.
What turns people off is the obnoxious, arrogant, uncivil, aggressive, uncharitable behavior of the congregants. Not the doctrine, the style. When people say religious people are “too political”, they mean the personal styles of the noisiest church members are invariably redolent of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Bill Donohue and Newt Gingrich. Too many churchy people spend too much time listening to conservative political discourse, and it infects their own style of discourse.
In the last few decades, the conservative movement has adopted a vituperative, sadistic, bullying tone which normal people find very off-putting. It doesn’t convince, and it’s not intended to: it’s just intended to silence. And it does; normal people stay in bed and skip it. They don’t want their children to behave that way, so they try not to expose them to grown-ups who do.
Attributing somebody’s disagreement with one’s own opinions to their intellectual inadequacy, their self-interest, their immaturity, or their sex drive, deliberately misunderstanding the substance of their argument, inflating the importance of minor points, usually taken out of context, hyperbole, guilt by association, shouting people down, interrupting them to invite the audience to laugh at what they’re saying: These things are kind of funny on talk-TV. They can rally the base for an election. But as evangelization techniques, they’re pretty counter-productive.
We can go on telling ourselves that people don’t come to church because they’re too dumb, too lazy, too rationalistic, too hedonistic, too materialistic etc. if it makes us happy. But if we really want them to come to church, a lot of us are going to have to change our personal styles. We can keep the doctrines, though; most people kind of like the doctrines.
March 16th, 2012 | 12:40 pm
“[T]he personal styles of the noisiest church members are invariably redolent of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Bill Donohue and Newt Gingrich. Too many churchy people spend too much time listening to conservative political discourse, and it infects their own style of discourse.”
Then of course, there is the much more civilized and tolerant discourse of Bill Maher, Rachel Maddow, Kieth Olbermann, and Jeneane Garafolo. Mr. Pot, meet Mr. Kettle. Are you suggesting that that style of discourse bears no relationship to the collapse of liberal protestanitsm? Isn’t there something in the Bible about motes and beams in eyes?
March 16th, 2012 | 12:54 pm
Hi Joseph,
What is the purpose of going to church?
Is it to learn the message of scripture? Then the sermon taught must include scripture. Is it to worship God through songs of praise? Then being entertained by choir, or with canned/ or on stage rock & roll top 40 CCR tunes misses the mark. If it’s fellowship we are after then: Is church just a social club after the sermon, pot luck maybe?
I have not attended church too regularly since my youth, yet I have read the Bible through more than a few times. The thing I find striking is how when I do go to church, and engage in discussion of scriptural points with regular attending members, is the near Biblical illiteracy outside something Paul said, or what the latest “Bible study workbook”, or Christian psychology author says. In churches that claim Protestant roots, how many in the congregation have read or even heard of Foxes book of Martyrs, the benchmark of Christian history?
It kind of reminds me of how most the proponents of Democracy, haven’t yet, and most likely would refuse to, read about Socrates, Democracies most ardent defender, in Plato.
March 16th, 2012 | 4:34 pm
Felapton -
I too have noticed this about the conservative movement in recent years. I especially see it in conservative bloggers using profanity and being vulgar in general. One right-leaning blog I came across attacked Rahm Emanuel for having taken ballet classes and how he was apparently a “queer” for doing so (in reality, Emanuel being into ballet is the only decent thing you could say about him).
The “Internet tough guys” almost always seem to be right-of-center as well.
Fred –
Yes, Maher, Maddow, Olbermann, and Garafolo are also unpleasant, but I know that about them already and expect it, nor have they ever claimed to speak for decency and Christianity.
March 16th, 2012 | 8:00 pm
Jeremy, I am not a big fan of Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly or Ann Coulter. Gingrich has had some major accomplishments but is a deeply flawed human being. But to be fair, I have never heard any of them claim to speak for Christianity nor have I met any Christians (and I live in the Bible belt) who felt any of those men spoke for them or for Christianity in general. That is simply a red herring. The point is that it is extremely hypocritical of partisan liberals to blame all uncivil discourse on conservative rhetoric. In fact, I would argue that our present state of incivility has its origins in the anti-war movement and militant offshoots of the civil rights movement (both predominantly movements of the left) in the 1960s. Is it just coincidence that the 1960s was also the beginning of the precipitous decline in the liberal mainline Protestant churches and of the rise of conservative Evangelical churches? I think not.
March 16th, 2012 | 10:28 pm
One thing that’s changed is the loss of ethnic identity. You say that rich and poor cooperated in the past, not arguing with that, but there was far less cooperation among different, even seemingly similar ethnicities. We’ve heard the stories of black kids getting beaten up, back in the day, for going into a white neighborhood. In some places an Irishman could have got beat up for going into a Lithuanian neighborhood.
We’re, obviously, better off without that. But in the process, we have lost something. Churches were often built as an expression of ethnic identity. A Polish church had pictures of Polish saints; it was a place for immigrants to preserve their heritage. I think there was something more to this than being simply a social club (although it may have been that too).
Polish churches (I use Poland as an example) use a specific style of architecture developed over the centuries, and rising out of the culture and local genius of the Polish people. It is of course liturgically valid to have a Greco-Roman or modernist church in Poland, but these aesthetic systems do not lend themselves as well to the nurturing of a community of believers rooted in a specific place. Conversely, it’s harder for a church in the United States to feel natural, in the way a Polish style church feels natural, at home, in Poland. It is perhaps most natural to explicitly recognize the foreignness of churches in the US, as Spanish mission style architecture does.
The reasons why some of these churches were abandoned is complex. It was partly due to a desire for upward mobility, and it was partly, let’s be frank, due to racial agitation (at times legitimate, but at times violent and excessive) by arrivals from the South. The decline of manufacturing in cities also played a role.
Looking specifically at particular churches fallen into neglect during the 20th c., I think the future looks good in some ways. Gentrification is a controversial process, it often leads to the poor being forced out into suburban, rather than urban, ghettos, but at least some of the architectural treasures of the turn of the century can be recovered. (I hope that didn’t sound totally insensitive, just trying to be positive.) For example, St. John Cantius is a magnificent, beautiful church, built around the turn of the century and then neglected. It now has its own religious order, whose mission is a “restoration of the sense of the sacred,” and leans toward a Tridentine liturgy. It probably helps that it’s in a “hip and cool” neighborhood. A similar church, the Shrine of Christ the King, damaged also during the 20th c., has a similar mission but less success.
The question of how to create community in the United States is a tough one. On on the hand, you don’t want to strip people of their ancestral heritage. On the other hand, you don’t want ethnic (I use the term as applying to the English and Germans, as well as the Polish and Filipinos) identity to completely overrule, such that fellow Christians cannot recognize one another. Perhaps it’s an opportune moment to recall the “Roman” in “Roman Catholic.”
(As for Emanuel, he served in the Israeli army, which, whatever your political viewpoint, takes some courage. A bit odd, however, for an American mayor, perhaps. But don’t worry, it’s “business as usual” here in Chicago for the Democrats. Emanuel recently had a ridiculous photo-op praising Little Village (a formerly Polish and Czech and now largely Mexican area) as the “Second Magnificent Mile.” Seems he forgot to mention the alderman’s father there was convicted of selling fake ID’s to illegal immigrants. It’s hard to build communities when the rule of law doesn’t apply to Democratic voters. Ok, I’m done.)
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