Essay by Rev. Gretta Vosper
February 28, 2019
For many progressive Christians, our ability to remain in the communities we love is dependent upon our willingness to translate what we hear, sing, and say on Sunday morning. Much of the “content” of a weekly service continues to use the language of traditional Christianity and privilege the very rituals and artifacts which progressives no longer accept literally. While the late Marcus Borg challenged clergy and congregants to learn the stories behind Christian language and traditions as a way of becoming comfortable with their continued use, there is no evidence that doing so has helped stave off the losses Christianity has experienced over the past decades. Rather, it seems that those who try to manage the weekly calisthenics of interpretation often find it too much of an unwelcome challenge to sit, week after week after week, in the communities that have so richly supported their well-being.
That’s a problem. A big problem.
Who’s to blame?
As someone currently being identified as responsible for further decline in The United Church of Canada (UCC), I have found that following the numbers has been oddly soothing. Those numbers, I am relieved to say, do not lay the failure of the UCC on my shoulders. That’s partly because my denomination began losing massive numbers of participants year over year when I was five years old; blaming a child for that is just cruel. The other de-shouldering of my responsibility is shown in any graph of the UCC’s statistics: decline has continued in a fairly straight line since the day I entered Sunday School (and no, I don’t think we can pin that coincidence on me, either). That day did mark, however, the highest membership the UCC would ever see. By the time I was ordained, it had already lost a full quarter of its membership. I haven’t checked the statistics of the more liberal, mainline churches in America, but I expect the trends would be roughly similar though much later in appearance.
In their book Leaving Christianity[i], Stuart Macdonald and Brian Clarke, theological professors at the Presbyterian and United Church seminaries in Toronto, explore Christianity’s decline in Canada over the past seventy years. They use census data, statistics kept by denominations, and numbers they’ve teased out from under otherwise monolithic categories like “Protestant”, or “Christian”. And – surprise, surprise – they find that every single iteration of Protestant Christianity in Canada is and has been on the decline since the 1960s. (Yes, even the evangelicals are losing ground.)
In the post-war boom, wealth accumulated rapidly here in Canada as it did in most Western democracies, including the United States. And, like other Western democracies, Canada shoved that wealth into social benefits like public education, health care, and a thickly woven social safety net. As a result, secularization began to grow as populations drifted away from religion. A statistical curve, starting with the small segment that was willing to self-identify as secular in the 1960s, has swept inexorably upward since to the numbers that now, in many cases, describe the fastest growing “religious” demographic. Every democracy that has supported social welfare has seen a corresponding decline in theism, the belief that there is a supernatural, interventionist divine being.
The Exceptional Americans
The US never fully transferred responsibility for social welfare away from religion and into the hands of public institutions, though. As a result, it remains caught in a feedback loop created by socioeconomic risk and religiosity. The fewer social protections a society has, the greater its dependence upon belief in a divine protector. The greater a society’s dependence upon a divine protector – the theistic, interventionist god like the one Christians call God – the more vulnerable its socioeconomic condition remains. It is circular.
With limited social supports, the American middle class remains as vulnerable as the poor, and the wealthy have every good reason to keep them that way. They manage this by forcing wedge issues considered important to religion (like sexuality or abortion rights) into the political spotlight, thereby reinforcing theistic solidarity. There’s nothing like a good wedge issue to keep the attention of the masses away from their own social welfare. And so, the loop continues to hold.
In the US, even as economic growth continued into the 1980s, the country doubled down on “The American Dream,” as individualistic an economic program as humans have ever dreamt up. Rather than investing its wealth in public institutions that would create and sustain social welfare, Americans invested in a corporatism that rewarded personal achievement and refused support to those unable to compete well enough to “earn” financial security. The result has been a continuing investment in the narrative of traditional theism because few have felt secure enough to walk away from or question the promises of its belief system.
Neither scientific knowledge nor economic security exists in the US to a degree that would increase secularity. Still, there has been a rapid rise of those who claim no religious affiliation, the Nones. The growth of this category suggests there is another factor in the secularization of the States. And there is. Beginning in the 1960s (I was a kid, remember; not to blame!), the rise of the “me” generation spurred corporate investment to feed the growing monster. Corporate messaging welded “worth” to material possessions, and invited consumers to shift their sense of security from religion to material self-worth. If you dress, party, and vacation like the stars, and drive the most impressive car you can afford, it doesn’t matter what your real financial situation is; you can look like you’re living The American Dream, the ultimate test of your personal self-worth. The US should have remained highly religious because of its lack of a social safety net but adding the pressure of corporate messaging created a new crack in religion’s armor, and through it, the new demographic, the Nones, squeezed its way into the mainstream.[ii] It appears that the trend is unlikely to slow down.
It is true that Canadians have been leaving Christianity longer than have our American counterparts. We are one of those Western countries increasingly secularized since the 1960s, where the United States took longer to find that trajectory. Still, that the trajectory exists, is so strong in most Western democracies, and is escalating in America, gives Christian denominations and their congregations cause for concern. Even highly polarizing wedge issues may not be enough to force large segments of the population back into the pews. The rapid increase in economic disparity, however, may continue to feed the religiosity of those who still believe but do not attend.[iii]
Mysteries overcome
In 1964, just as I started Sunday School, my denomination began providing laity with the fruits of contemporary Christian scholarship. Preachers started telling their congregations what the traditional words and rituals of Christianity really meant: God, salvation, communion, the stories of Jesus, …, all became transparent through closer examination, their mysteries overcome with the bald truth of contemporary scholarship. Whole families were introduced to a Jesus that may or may not have been born in a stable or bodily resurrected, a Bible that proved to be contradictory and required much more critical exploration than anyone had previously thought permissible, and preaching that demanded a systematic re-evaluation of traditional theological concepts.
In the Church of England, and at the same time, Bishop John T. Robinson published Honest to God, a book that continues to inform and support progressive clergy in their beliefs and their work to this day. Also at the same time, the Anglican Church in Canada contracted with Pierre Berton to write its annual Lenten study for 1965. The Comfortable Pew provided an opportunity for Anglicans to explore the more demanding aspects of Christianity – justice and compassion – over the theological rigidity to which such studies had usually appealed. Before Berton had penned a single word, the book had sold over fifty thousand copies going on to become a bestseller in both Canada and the United States.
Coupled with the growing social security that supported post-war generations, Christian literacy – by which I mean a critical understanding of Christianity similar to that presented by Bishop Spong and other biblically literate scholars – undermined the need for a protective divine being. The coincidence of that education and the losses that began to appear in the mid-1960s and continue to this day, is too great to ignore. Participation in Sunday morning activities that focus on worshipping a divine being make little sense to those who have braved the exploration of Christianity and its roots.
Eroded belief, eroded adoration
Almost thirty years ago, Bishop Spong wrote, “What the mind cannot believe the heart can finally never adore.” Is it not likely that denominations and congregations began losing numbers at precisely the time their clergy began educating their communities about the shallow root system that had supported their beliefs? Honest clergy, in their impulse to expose the truth behind the curtain, began dismantling traditional belief, making it easier for minds to reject Christianity or hearts to embrace what they formerly adored without question. Is it not reasonable to think that congregants, educated to see the Bible as a human construction, God as something other than the traditionally-built superbeing wrapped in clouds in the Sistine Chapel, and Jesus as a human who had a way with words and the power to inspire, found the dissonance simply too great to maintain?
Over the past many decades, progressive clergy have been teaching and preaching the Christianity of critical scholarship that has been explored in theological seminaries for over half a century. They neglected, however, to wrestle with the implications of that truth for the people in their pews. Removing traditional “fear of God” theology from our sermons, we granted congregants permission to leave, and many did. But by refusing to shift our language and liturgy away from the worship of a deity we could no longer defend to the core challenges of a vibrant Christianity – justice and compassion – we gave them a reason to leave, even if it took them decades to act on it.
There are good reasons not to resurrect participation in Christianity, most of which go to the troubling reinforcement of the prejudices of the Christian right through the continued use of the language of belief by the Christian left. But there are far more and better reasons to create or resurrect communities that act like church. We are not e.v.e.r. going to return to the kind of participation we enjoyed half a century ago; we shouldn’t even want to. But wherever we let our eyes linger, we see the need for work to be done that might make life more bearable for those in our own families of faith, our communities, our nations, and our world. We who do church know how that work can be done. With that knowledge, however, also comes the responsibility to do it.
~ Rev. Gretta Vosper
Read online here
About the Author
The Rev. Gretta Vosper is a United Church of Canada minister who is an atheist. Her best-selling books include With or Without God: Why The Way We Live is More Important Than What We Believe, and Amen: What Prayer Can Mean in a World Beyond Belief. She has also published three books of poetry and prayers.
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[i] Brian Clarke and Stuart Macdonald, Leaving Christianity: Changing Allegiances in Canada since 1945, (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017)
[ii] For more information on these and other trends in secularity, look for Atheism and Secularity, Vol. 1, Issues, Concepts, and Definitions, Edited by Phil Zuckerman, (Praeger, Santa Barbara, 2010).
[iii] Although high numbers of Americans say they believe in God, the number who say they attend church regularly remains at about 40%. That number, however, is highly suspect; researchers have shown survey participants to regularly over report. They estimate the actual number, since the late 1990s, is probably closer to 20%, leaving about 60% of those who say they believe in God without congregational support.
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