To my longtime friends, Steve and Caroline. You will have to settle for this blogpost since we didn't have time to discuss things in person during our last visit.
Religiously conservative Christianity is roughly facing the same fate that the Republican challengers to Trump's Republican and Hillary Clinton's campaigns suffered. That fate is failure and the reason will be the same. As guardians for the old status quo, status quo Republicans and Democrats found it too difficult to acknowledge their own failures and sins. That failure to admit their faults was why Mitt Romney's well stated opposition to Trump was translated into 'WAH WA WA WAH WA WA' to Trump's supporters and others who knew that the status quo had failed them. The same occurred for many people when Hillary Clinton campaigned.
Since religiously conservative Christianity has been a strong supporter of the old status quo in the West, especially in America, it is now facing the same challenges that the old status quo is facing. And those who are challenging it, are listening for confessions of wrongdoing before pronouncing their verdict and punitive sentences.
Such has occurred before in Church history. In the pre-revolutionary times of France, Russia, and Spain when the dominant branch of the Church supported those with wealth and power, the Church, and the Gospel itself, was understandably portrayed as the enemy of the people. Thus when those respective revolutions came, the Church and the Gospel unnecessarily suffered for having aligned itself with wealth and power.
Now instead of national revolutions, the Church is being held accountable by Post Modernism. Post Modernism holds to an outcome-based truth system that says if the tenets of a group lead to abuse, those tenets must be false. And since Christianity has so strongly aligned itself with Western Civilization and a dominant part of that civilization visited exploitation and oppression over other peoples via colonialism and imperialism, Christianity is being given one more chance to distance itself from the Western Civilization. But it is not.
In America, religiously conservative Christianity has become strong supporters of patriotism and business--again, power and wealth. We should note that that patriotism expresses great fondness for the past, especially America's founding. But that fondness strongly interferes with people experiencing a full, emotional connection to America's atrocities of ethnically cleansing Native Americans from the land and of teaching and practicing white supremacy as seen in slavery and Jim Crow. Thus, though America's faults are acknowledged, they are not given their full due by those adhering to patriotism. And by not distancing itself from past sins, Christianity's teachings are being heard as 'WAH WA WA WAH WA WA' by more and more people.
In addition, religiously conservative Christianity has not owned up to its history of marginalizing the LGBT community. Unfortunately, too many religiously conservative Christian leaders have conflated correctly promoting Biblical Christian morals on Church members with doing the same on all members of society regardless of their religious beliefs. That caused those leaders to marginalize the LGBT community in society for centuries in our nation's history. For those younger Christians who know decent and trustworthy people from the LGBT community and have them as friends, that marginalization has created so much dissonance that more and more younger Christians feel compelled to believe that homosexuality is an biblically acceptable sexual orientation.
In short, religiously conservative Christianity suffers from misplaced loyalties and a misplaced spirituality. The misplaced loyalties can be ascertained, for the most part, from what was written above. Those misplaced loyalties include patriotism, Capitalism, political conservatism, economic conservatism, social conservatism, and white supremacy. That is not to say that all religiously conservative Christians will hold to all of those loyalties, but they do experience a tendency to hold to the loyalties from that list to varying degrees.
When, for the religiously conservative Christian, those loyalties become strong enough, syncretisms are produced. A syncretism is what we get when we pound a square peg into a round hole as one attempts to merge two or more ideas that do not fit together. Neither the peg nor the the hole escape change from the violence of the pounding. And so as the peg of those loyalties appear, and 'appear' is the operative word here, to come more in line with what the hole of the Scriptures teach, what is often overlooked is that the hole of what the Scriptures teach has also changed and it resembles less and less what they originally taught. In the mean time, the shapes of the peg and the hole develop a closer resemblance. And if we add our natural tendency to want to be flattered, we see a natural tendency to conflate what the Scriptures teach with how we were raised and taught while we were children.
So much for the misplaced loyalties. There is another problem that religiously conservative Christianity faces that has yet to be mentioned. That is the misplaced spirituality found in many religiously conservative Christian circles. For it seems, at least to me, what has been often identified as the religiously conservative Christian response to changes in the old status quo, in actuality, is evidence of an authoritarian personality type epidemic in the conservative Church.
Now we should note that we religiously conservative Christians are very vulnerable to embracing an authoritarian personality type. Why? It is because of all of the authority structures we are taught to accept. With those multiple structures comes a growing inability to turn off the authority switch as we relate to society. When we can't turn off that authority switch, we look to either rule over others or to submit to them. And since we share society with many unbelievers, many of whom we look at as being a moral threat, we look to rule over society rather than to share society with others as equals.
And so, in line with those who fall prey to an authoritarian personality type, we become hostile and aggressive toward those who challenge the traditions of the old status quo as we expect others to submit to what we submit to. We also hold on to an overly negative of view of those who don't hold to our religious convictions. We also look for strong leaders who can exercise power over those who do not want to conform. We hold to overly simple, black-white views of the world despite the complexities that many issues we face in the world contain. And we generally don't like new lifestyles or creative responses to new situations because we look too much to the past for our understanding of current life and how to solve today's problems.
Simply adhering to and defending Biblical and other familiar traditions and questioning what is new does not mean that we have embraced an authoritarian personality type. Instead, it is how we respond to challenges and defend Biblical and other traditions. When we respond with hostility and aggression, we are looking to suppress changes practiced by others and thus to rule over them. On he other hand, when we respond to challenges with questions, we are looking to see what in the new can help as well as hurt us. We are not looking to either accept or reject all that is new. Instead, we are often looking to pursue wisdom by combining what is valid from what is new along with what is valid from what is old in terms of how we should navigate an ever changing world. In other words, we are pursuing wisdom.
Our misplaced loyalties as well as misplaced spirituality has hurt our witness before the world. It has understandably caused many outside the faith to not even want to listen to those of us who hold to the faith. Thus, religiously conservative Christianity is going the way of the old status quo simply because it has identified itself with it too strongly. And all of that has contributed significantly to the decline of religiously conservative Christianity in America and in the West.
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