Nobody Wants to Be Christian

source: flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/rockandrollfreak/)

Nobody wants to be a Christian anymore. Nobody I know, anyway. And I do include myself in this. I can't blame anyone for steering clear of this religion. Why would you want to align yourself with something so broken, so harmful, and so depressing to inhabit as the church?

The church in the United States, though it remains wildly diverse and plural and takes many shapes and forms (some of which are truly lovely), is still, by and large, fouled. Whether by reality or reputation (when reputation so shapes reality), the church is a polluted space. Corrupt. Scandalous. Selfish. Ignorant. Narcissicistic. Belligerent. Ugly. And when it is not these things--when the local forms of church are solid, humane, well-led, the church is often worse than harmful: it's uninteresting. 

It's not just Donald Trump. Yes, it's ghastly that the majority of white evangelical Jesus-followers overwhelmingly support a morally-bankrupt man to lead our nation. But support for this president is not a canary in the coal mine signaling the decline of American Christianity; it is, rather, one inevitable outcome of a course the church has been charting for more than a generation. It is not just the evangelical church, either. Mainline Protestantism, Roman Catholicism and other traditions are also witting and unwitting co-conspirators in the decline of American Christianity. The American church as a wholeis broken; something so vast cannot break overnight. It has been degrading, over time, into its current place of spiritual irrelevance.

I feel confident in my dire diagnosis because of one, plain, incontrovertible fact: nobody I know wants to be a Christian. Very few of my friends (and I'll now own up to being a part of an educated, liberal social circle) want anything to do with church. When I look at my own closest friends, few have chosen a formal religious affiliation. They do not choose to belong to congregations; they do not attend weekly services. Few have daily prayer or contemplative practices (though many own a yoga mat). 

They don't want to be religious and what's worse for those of us who choose religion is that they don't miss it. They do have lives of meaning. My friends are lovely people. They think. They read and they are engaged in their communities. They try to love their neighbors. They see beauty around them. They care for their parents and partners and kids. They are decent. They are funny. They give and receive love. All of this without help from organized religion. That, and they have their Sundays mornings free.

The traditions they have rejected are some of the most beautiful in the world: Congregationalism, Reformed Judaism, the Catholic church. If they wanted to, they could find excellent congregations in the major metropolitan areas in which they live. But they don't want to. Religion, they have decided, just isn't worth it. Is there a harder gut-punch to a religious leader than that? Someone who has considered your tradition, evaluated it, and said, "thanks, but I like my life better without you."

My friends aren't unique. Americans are leaving organized religion in record numbers. The media have taken notice of the startling and sudden rise of these "nones" (the name given to those of us who claim no religious affiliation). In 2015, 23% of Americans identified as non-religious, which may not sound like a lot, but that number is up from 16% in just 8 years! Non-affiliation with religion is highest among young Americans (so-called "millennials"), at 37%. 78% of "nones" say that they left the religion in which they were raised. But there are also in this group an an increasing number of Americans who were not raised in religious communities and don't participate as adults.

Why is this happening? Why now? This sudden decline in religious participation in America (or rise in non-participation) is the subject of intense study in academic circles and soon a consensus will emerge, I'm sure. But those of us who lead religious communities can tell you exactly what's going on. We are on the "front lines" of religious dis-affiliation. Every day, we're trying to get people to come to our churches and keep the ones who are already there. And all of us--even those in "growing" churches, see what's happening. There are two reasons people leave religion: 1) it's corrupt and 2) it's boring.

Religious corruption in itself is not new. Snake-oil salesmen and false prophets have been around forever (they're in the Bible). But my peers grew up in the 80s during the age of high-publicity religious scandals, like those that de-throned Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker. For us, the dishonesty of religious leaders is not just a joke, it's a truism. It's the default. We expect religious leaders to be frauds. Religious leaders measure shockingly low on indicators of social trust: just over half of Americans think we're trustworthy.

It's not just the high-profile televangelist scandals that have eroded trust in religious leaders. It's deeper than that. There is a more insidious kind of degradation of trust that stems from a lack of religious integrity. More specifically, the inability of religious leaders--and the institutions we run--to conform our lives to the tradition to which we profess our allegiance. We fail to embrace the uncomfortable, alienating aspects of our tradition. And here, I'm not thinking about standing in judgement of homosexuality or taking hard lines on alcohol use or divorce. I'm thinking of Jesus' teachings about money, or about power, or about living a life in solidarity with those who are marginalized. When religious leaders choose lives of comfort over lives of faithfulness to the whole and hard tradition, it is a slow kind of corruption of the tradition itself. Over time, the cumulative effect of faithlessness is that the tradition itself loses touch with the inconvenient parts of its message. They fade into the background. What is left of the tradition looks like a social club--a group that hangs out together, builds expensive buildings for itself, teaches a self-selected, self-serving version of truth, and treats the outside world with indifference or disdain. 

When churches and their leaders can't offer a compelling word to the world about humility and powerlessness, when we can't offer a visible alternative to a might-makes-right ethos, when we have nothing to say to capitalism that values the rich and dismisses the poor, when our intellectual life is shriveled and our community engagement is self-interested, we become indistinguishable from any other secular group. Frankly, I don't blame anyone for not wanting to be a Christian. When I look around at much of the Christian world, I don't want to be one, either.

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This the first of a series of posts in which I am working out ideas for a longer essay on the kind of church to which I would like to belong and the kind of Christian practice that I dream about for myself and for my great-great grandchildren.