“There is surely hope for you and your hope will not be cut off.” – Proverbs 23:18
I keep trying to understand how we got here.
My core beliefs are freedom and equality and leave me the fuck alone. Like I treat everybody else.
I believe in God and I believe She wants me to be free and equal and left the fuck alone. I believe that religiously.
Freedom to, not freedom from.
I am free to wear a mask. I am free to say Black Lives Matter.
Merry Christmas, everyone!!!
Today on the Bulwark you ran an article about Christianity, one that I felt was well reasoned and well written. However, it occurred to me that it has the same blind spot as many articles on the topic do: it fails to assign reason or blame for what is occurring in any way to Christians themselves. I do not mean about Trump, I mean in general, especially about the culture.
Some background. I grew up in a very conservative area. A very rural area, that over time became less rural as I aged through school. There was a rather large christian organization in my high school, and nearly two thirds of my school attended church on Sundays by my estimation. That isn’t to say that they enjoyed having to do it; in fact I would say of that group, less than half kept up with it after high school. Even in school, most people’s explanation for why they were a part of it came down to their parents wanting them to be there.
David French, a man who I respect even if I don’t always agree with him, said once that in the last sixty years, Christians gave up power and gained liberty. I would say that they feel this bargain to be a poor one, based on their actions.
And yet, across the spectrum, from firebrand evangelicals to more liberal religious scholars, there seems to be no reckoning with why Christians are now in this position. It isn’t as though one day we woke up and secularists had seized power and cast down pastors, forbidding them from preaching their beliefs. Over the last sixty years, fewer and fewer people in the United States have identified with Christianity, which matches a similar problem in Europe. But Christians, especially the intellectual set, act as though none of this had anything to do with Christianity or Christians themselves.
Indeed, when writing they all seem to immediately fall into the passive voice. The culture changed, Christianity became less popular, suddenly people weren’t as open to what they were saying, and they all act baffled as to why this is the case.
Now, I am too young to explain what happened in the 1960’s. I still see religious conservatives talk about that time as though it had anything to do with the present, which is odd because to most liberals today, the morals and views of the 1960’s liberals are practically anathema in terms of lgbtq rights and sexuality.
But again, we’re not here to talk about that. We are here to talk about why Christians have gone from a majority to a near minority, because they themselves refuse to reckon with the causes. Indeed, some would rather become like the amish and retreat from the world, as written in Rod Dreher in The Benedict Option. He can dress it up as a radical new form, but what he argues is that Christians just need to seal themselves away. That’s not dealing with the problems you have, that’s trying to escape from them.
For a religion based around the concept of forgiveness, there are many Christians who seem to act out of the belief that they do not require any. Forgiveness can only be attained if you’ve done something wrong. Indeed, part of realizing that you’re wrong is then changing the behavior. But for sixty years, Christians have refused to admit that they might be wrong about anything, even while the culture continues to move forward.
For example, when I was in high school, Christians were still arguing in the South about whether or not to teach creationism in schools. Yet I distinctly remember Christian families also objecting to adding Muslim and Jewish holidays to the calendar; religious liberty for me and not for thee is their way. But that was somewhat little compared to what came after 9/11.
Suddenly, Christians acted like there was a new crusade going on. Stories of ‘sharia law’ coming to the US were widely circulated, mosques were protested against, and muslims were discriminated against widely and openly. People who arguably considered themselves charitable, honest people acting like women choosing to wear a hijab was somehow a threat to their religious liberty. Again, religious liberty for me, and not for thee.
And it is not as though this has gotten better. Christians and their organizations have not had any great awakening to the fact that what they were doing, and are often still doing, is racism and bigotry. Instead, they dig in their heels, and act as though they are being assaulted.
Most liberals do not care about Christians in a general sense; most would be happy to leave them alone if they left everyone else alone. But they do not, and refuse to do so. They fight a war of dominance in a situation where they are a minority.
Take the fight over gay marriage for example: marriage is not a christian institution. Religions across the world have marriages. There was marriage before Judaism and Christianity even existed. In this country, as anyone who has been married can tell you, it’s a legal process, not a religious one. You do not need to go to a church to be considered married. You need to go before a judge and sign the paperwork. Thus, there is no reason marriage between two men or two women should be an affront to Christians, because no one is demanding or asking Christians to marry people against their beliefs. What they are asking is for the secular state to recognize other people’s rights. Rights that Christians seem dead set against allowing people to have, despite it not affecting them.
Speaking of rights, Christians have been on the wrong side of nearly ever civil rights discussion for the last sixty years. The same arguments used to try and stop gay marriage were used to try and stop interracial marriages, and were used to try and keep segregation going. In all cases, they were on the wrong side. And much like Trump, they live in a perpetual now where what they did before cases were settled doesn’t exist.
But speaking of marriage as an institution, it’s interesting that they talk about the ‘sanctity of marriage’ without talking about the widespread divorce rates. Half of all marriages end in divorce within five years. Meaning you can flip a coin each time someone is married to see if they’ll last half a decade. Nearly half of all the people I grew up with had divorced parents in high school; my own parents divorced after thirty years together. This isn’t an argument claiming people shouldn’t divorce, but it is one pointing out that there’s no ‘sanctity’ in marriage anymore.
There are times when secularists overreach with their actions, such as when they went after Masterpiece Cake Shop for refusing to bake a cake they wanted. It would be like trying to force a priest to officiate a wedding he didn’t agree with, which would be equally wrong. But these are outliers in a sea of Christian exceptions that no other religions get.
There is no reason why one person being a christian should allow them to decide what healthcare their employees get. Why does their religion get to dictate someone else’s lifestyle? We would rightly reject the notion of a Hindu business owner refusing to allow his employees to eat beef, so why would we accept refusing to grant people healthcare, which is many times more serious?
There is no reason why other people being Christians should affect people who are not trying to get married. Nor should it affect them when they are trying to adopt children. For all the talk of trying to keep Catholics from adopting, many states still won’t let gay couples adopt children, for no reason other than their relationship choices.
The truth of the matter is, Christians as an organization and institution have dedicated themselves to being the nagging mother, the one trying to be in everyone’s bedroom deciding what you can and cannot do, and they become incensed when you tell them to butt out. Christians, by and large, are not willing to cede control over other people in order to have their liberty defended. They will take power over liberty whenever possible.
Much is said about Christians feeling that they cannot speak about their beliefs. But what beliefs are they so ashamed about? No one cares if someone goes to church. They do care if someone starts citing a bible to defend their bigotry.
The single biggest driver of change in this country is the internet, along with social media. The ability for young people to see how other people live as they grow up has inoculated them to the bigotries that are baked into many traditional teachings. Christianity from its founding was always apart from all other things, priding the group over everything else. But social media has allowed young people to educate themselves and see the world differently. It allows them to see people differently. It allows them to see other races and sexualities as people, rather than as outsiders.
Christianity has not caught up with this. They resent being called bigots and reactionaries, but never ask why they are being called that. They allow their doctrines to be used by every vile organization one can think of, from today’s white nationalists to extremist religious groups like the Westboro Baptist Church. The face of a Christian today is not of pious, humble worshippers. It is of angry, aggrieved old people who actively wish for a return to the before times, when there were fewer minorities and gay people weren’t confident enough to walk openly.
Finally, we cannot discount the amount of immorality that has spread over the Christian community during the Trump administration, the most horrible of which are the family separations at the border. Kids are being put in cages, and pastors preach that this is their own fault, that the children should not have come, that this is righteous and good.
This is without saying the many, many reveals of the #metoo era, when religious organizations have been caught, over and over again, covering up for everything from rape to pedophilia. Are the people we are supposed to accept the word of God from the same people who are alright covering up rapists and pedophiles?
The truth is, Christianity, as an organization, is a termite infested house, one that is barely standing. But rather than clean house and take stock of what has happened and where they have gone wrong, Christians instead aim to make war on the culture, as though the culture is entirely out of their control. One of the interesting things about the concept of the culture war is that the only people who want to fight it are conservatives; for everyone else, it’s simply progress.
Without serious reflection, without serious character work on behalf of Christians themselves, the religion itself will cease to be a force in America, the way it has ceased to be a force in many other Western countries. Religions are durable things, but Christianity is more likely to go the way of Zoroastrianism than of Islam based on how the institution of Christianity acts on a regular basis.
It’s not enough for you to believe that you are good. You actually have to be good if you want to be seen as good. Without serious changes in Christianity as an organized faith, without serious reflection on what are considered acceptable beliefs to hold, it’s unlikely that Christianity will survive as a major force in America for another generation.
They can write all the articles they want about losing the culture war. If they don’t ask themselves why they are losing it, and what beliefs they are espousing that people are objecting to, then Christianity has no future, nor should it. A Christianity that cares more about keeping a thrice-married sexual assaulter in power than kids being stolen from their parents is not worth having around, no matter what we might think about the religion itself.
It has changed before. It can do so again, if the people who are preaching and believing are willing to do it.
Shawn Conway