The State Of The Conservative Church In America

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.




 

Why Conservative Christianity Stuggles With Both Evangelism And Social Justice

A couple of months ago, Cathy Lynn Grossman wrote an article that was based on the Pew Research Center's latest report on the religious demographics of America. The Pew report was entitled America's Changing Religious Landscape.  Grossman's article (click here) basically said that Christianity is losing its grip on America. Yes, it is still the top dog (70% of the people are affiliated with some sort of what is classified as Christian faith). But, according to the latest statistics, it lost 8% of its adherents between the years 2007 to 2014. And the biggest reasons for the losses have to do with a generation gap and politics.

Now the 8% loss for those in the Christian faiths were not across the board. Evangelicals lost a smaller percentage of people than the Catholic Church, the Mainline Church. In addition, the percentage of Evangelicals who were also minorities increased during that time. While the Catholic Church overall lost believers because their number of converts was low.

During the same time period, there was an increase in the percentage of people who both belonged to different faiths or those who didn't have any faith at all. The latter group was called the 'Nones.'

There were other statistics but there was no real exploration why the numbers changed the way they did other than what was expressed above. So this post, rather than critiquing Grossman's article, will theorize as to why Christianity, especially Evangelicals have lost believers as reported.

It is the contention of this blog that what is hurting Evangelicalism in terms of numbers is also what is preventing it from addressing social justice issues. Considering one of the reasons cited was because of the political identity most associated with Evangelicalism, what will be said here may have more credence than what might be expected for this blog.

This blog is going to propose the following hypothesis. There are 3 reasons why Evangelicals struggle with both evangelism and social justice today. Those reasons point to the fact that Evangelicalism struggles with controlling its authoritarian tendencies, with limiting its penchant for syncretism, and overuse of deduction in interpreting reality.

We should note that despite how many of our relationships are described in the Bible, authority plays a big role in how we get along with others. God has authority over all of us regardless of what we believe. The Church is to submit to Christ. The husband is the head of the wife. Children need to obey their parents. Employees need to listen to their employers. We are all suppose to submit to the government. Thus, when it comes to relating to each other and those who are different from us in society, we Evangelicals have the most difficult time with turning that authority switch off. That inability to appropriately react to others as equals rather than as superiors or inferiors can be called authoritarianism.

There are a number of traits of those who are authoritarian (click here). Here we should note that while it takes 5 narcissistic traits to qualify a person as being narcissistic, authoritarianism shares 4 traits with narcissism. This might suggest that authoritarianism and narcissism are at least somewhat related. And if that is the case, then we Evangelicals could obtain a big enough reason for cooling our authoritarian jets.

What we should note here with regard to the subject at hand is this, those who are authoritarian test truth by looking at the credentials of the the source. So if the source belongs to an approved list of authority figures, the authoritarian will tend to accept what the source says without testing it. The correlative to that is if the source does not have adequate credentials, then what is said by that source can be discarded. And what can destroy the credentials of a source is previous disagreements. So those who believe that some adaptation to evolution provides the best possible explanation for how we got here have all but lost their authority to speak on all other subjects. Or suppose a person accuses the U.S. of being terrorist state, that person, according to many American Evangelicals has some kind of liberal and that means someone who knows nothing.

We should also note that Americans Evangelicals embrace a syncretism consisting of the Christian faith and certain American traits and beliefs. Those Americanisms consists of the belief in rugged individualism, American Capitalism, and American Exceptionalism. Now syncretism occurs when one tries to force together two belief systems that have parts that don't go together. In other words, syncretism occurs when one tries to pound a square peg into a round hole. Certainly, if one hits the peg hard enough for a long enough period of time, one can get the peg to fit in the hole. But one cannot do that without doing damage to both the peg and the hole. So when one tries to merge Americanisms with the Christian faith, yes, you might modify some Americanisms. At the same time, you can no longer avoid doing damage to what the Christian faith says for itself.

Now the syncretism mentioned above does not necessarily hinder us from promoting social justice and evangelizing by itself. What it needs is the misapplication of the belief in Sola Scripture. Sola Scriptura is the Christian belief in the authority of the Scriptures to be the ultimate judge on all matters pertaining to doctrine and living life. But not only are does this belief say that the Scriptures are the ultimate authority on doctrine and life, it says that the Scriptures alone can serve as such the only judge. The Scriptures alone.

The misapplication of Sola Scriptura comes when we believe that we have nothing to learn about life, especially the lives of others, outside of the Scriptures. This misapplication occurs when we apply our deductive powers to the Scriptures to interpret all of life before living it. And this is most irritating when we interpret all of life for the life of others without listening to what others have to say for themselves.

So if we combine the syncretisms mentioned above with the belief that we only need to read the Scriptures in order to learn about every part of life, we begin to believe that we can deduce what life is all about from our reading of the Scriptures as well as from applying the Americanisms that have been joined to the Christian faith. And thus those Americanisms, like what we have read in the Scriptures, become both unassailable and sources of ultimate authority in interpreting reality. \

The short of it is this, when we combine authoritarianism, the syncretisms mentioned above, and the misapplication of Sola Scriptura describe beforehand, we end up with religiously conservative Christians who are more than willing to talk, but absolutely refuse to listen. Thus, we find too many religiously conservative Christians who believe that they have the gift of teaching, but are unable to learn. Of course the refusal to listen and the inability to learn depends on whom we are listening too. We can easily listen to and learn from approved of Christian teachers and fellow church goers. But when it comes to the outside world,  too many of us religiously conservative Christians have the learning disability of intentional deafness.

Thus, when the world comes to us religiously conservative Christians and says here are our problems, too many of us confidently say 'NO'! Your problems are because you haven't listened to us. And the same procedure occurs when the world, while trying to work with us to find solutions to its problems.

Thus, we end up talking down to others. Such communication assumes a hierarchy that too many of us have eagerly embraced and that is repulsive to postmodernists as well as educated and thinking people. To apply a Martin Luther King Jr. quote, we Evangelicals who have embraced authoritarianism, the syncretism of Americanisms with the Christian faith, and have misapplied the basic principle of Sola Scriptura, believe that we have become the fount of all wisdom and thus have no need to consult with others. It is this not listening to others that prevents us from not only understanding what social injustices have occurred in the world and not knowing how to share the Gospel with them, it has caused us to burn the bridges of credibility necessary for us to become witnesses especially to those who are significantly different from us in other ways than our faith.