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!important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6719484996 #yiv6719484996templateBody .yiv6719484996mcnTextContent, #yiv6719484996 #yiv6719484996templateBody .yiv6719484996mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6719484996 #yiv6719484996templateFooter .yiv6719484996mcnTextContent, #yiv6719484996 #yiv6719484996templateFooter .yiv6719484996mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } For many progressive Christians, our ability to remain in the communities we love is dependent upon our willingness to translate what we hear...
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Lost in Translation
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| 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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Question & Answer
Q: By C.R.
In researching different theologies of the Christian Faith, I came across your website. I read through your 8-points, but see nothing about faith in Jesus as the Christ, or His divinity. Does your organization have a ‘Christology’ or a Christological approach to the life of Christ. I’m just looking for some clarification.
A: By Kevin Thew Forrester, Ph.D.
Thanks for your question C. R.,
My sense is that faith is a matter of experience, in contrast with belief, which is a matter of the intellect. In the “age of belief” that has dominated Christianity since about the 4th century CE, these two have often been conflated. In effect, the result has been that an authentic sense of existential faith has faded into the background as we have become lost in the machinations and mazes of our credal minds.
Progressive Christianity and Spirituality, as I understand them, do not offer time- and culture-bound creeds demanding intellectual assent. This is not a new form of orthodoxy. Rather, it turns, or re-turns, the attention of our soul to personal, lived, direct experience that is in continual conversation with the wider community and with history; I say this because personal does not in any way mean isolated and/or individualistic. We also turn our attention to the heart and the body, recognizing the wisdom within these centers of the human soul (integral to Semitic spirituality), which have been traditionally marginalized in Christian theology and spirituality.
The first of the eight points articulated by Progressive Christianity is this: We... “Believe that following the path and teachings of Jesus can lead to an awareness and experience of the Sacred and the Oneness and Unity of all life.” Our focus is not a credal belief in Jesus. He is not an object. Rather, Jesus is a person, a Rabbi of the 1st Century, whose spiritual practice led to his realization that his true nature, his essence, is Belovedness, through and through. He matures into a diaphanous being of compassion – which is grace. The invitation that the life and teachings of Jesus presents to us is to realize that same truth about our own nature, our own essence. Jesus points us to us. To say that Jesus comes to realize that who he is is Love, is to say that he realizes his Christic nature. “Christ” simply means anointed, or graced, as the Presence of Beingness itself. His life invites us to discover the same truth about ourselves and all creation – Love is Boundless, because it is the very nature of Being. And so, the life of Jesus is an abiding invitation to discover that the sacred unity of Being is radically inclusive.
~ Kevin Thew Forrester, Ph.D.
Read and share online here
About the Author
Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D. is an Episcopal priest, a student of the Diamond Approach for over a decade, as well as a certified teacher of the Enneagram in the Narrative Tradition. He is the founder of the Healing Arts Center of St. Paul’s Church in Marquette, Michigan, and the author of five books, including “I Have Called You Friends“, “Holding Beauty in My Soul’s Arms“, and “My Heart is a Raging Volcano of Love for You” and “Beyond my Wants, Beyond my Fears: The Soul’s Journey into the Heartland“. Visit Kevin’s Blog: Essential Living: For The Soul’s Journey
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Rev. Michael Dowd’s guest sermon at Unitarian Universalist Metro Atlanta North on February 10, 2019. Three main points (with time codes):
01:13 – Point 1: The shape of time and the nature of joy and fulfillment
14:52 – Point 2: The color of God and the purpose of religion and science
21:29 – Point 3: The way of life and the necessity of humility and gratitude
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02:27 – List of Dowd’s 6-part creed
12:10 – List of 8 basic human needs (as identified by Dave Pollard, in his “Cultural Acedia” writings)
The Rev. Michael Dowd is a bestselling evolutionary storyteller, eco-theologian, and pro-future evangelist whose work has been featured in The New York Times, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Newsweek, Discover, and on national television. His book, Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World, was endorsed by 6 Nobel Prize-winning scientists, noted skeptics and atheists, and by dozens of religious leaders - read his full bio here.
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| Please continue to send us your feedback… we are listening. We aim to give voice to many different perspectives that are relevant and inspiring along this spiritually progressing path. We are not here to tell you what to believe or how to act. We are here to support your journey, to share and learn together.Thank you for being a part of this community! |
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Rise of Fundamentalism, Part II
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong on March 14, 2007
One of the things we need to embrace in order to understand the conflicts being waged in most of the main line churches today is that throughout most of human history, the average man or woman could neither read nor write. That is why the Church used art forms, like the Stations of the Cross, or music, like the various spirituals developed in the black church telling a story in song, to inform the people about the nature of the Christian faith. This fact also meant that when a challenge to perceived truth occurred, very few people ever heard about it or were disturbed by it. Therefore in the 16th century when a revolutionary view of the universe was developed by Copernicus, suggesting that the planet earth was not the center of creation, it was not a great problem for the Church since few people ever heard about it. A century later, however, when Galileo, who was a far more public figure, embraced the thought of Copernicus and began to discuss and write about his thinking publicly, he paid for his notoriety in a trial, which forced him to end his life as a heretic under house arrest. Why was this cosmological insight so upsetting? The answer to that was quite simple. If heaven is not just above the sky, then much of the content of the Bible, from the Tower of Babel to the story of Jesus’ ascension becomes nonsensical. With the rise of an educated class in the great universities of Europe the Church’s ability to control truth and to define the limits of the debate began to fade. In the 17th century Isaac Newton brought natural law into western consciousness and consequently contributed to the shrinking of the realms in which both miracle and magic were believed to occur.
Charles Darwin, once he made his trip to the Galapagos Islands in the 19th century, proceeded to challenge the Church’s understanding of human origins and correspondingly the accuracy of the creation story from the Book of Genesis. If human beings were not fallen from a pristine position of having been fashioned in God’s image, then the divine rescue that Jesus was said to have effected with his redemptive act of suffering and dying on the cross was a solution to an incorrect diagnosis.
In the early years of the 20th century when Sigmund Freud began to analyze the infantile elements in Christianity, the view of God as a heavenly parent figure was destabilized and much that was once called holy now appeared to be only neurotic. As a result organized religion in the western world went into a tailspin. Later in the middle years of that same 20th century, Albert Einstein confronted the world with the idea that both time and space were relative categories, and that since all people live inside time and space, every human articulation of truth was itself relative and not absolute. This meant that Christianity’s absolutist claims for infallible popes and inerrant Bibles could no longer be seriously entertained.
As each of these now largely undisputed insights began to enter, first the universities and, in time, the lowest levels of the public schools, their unavoidable truth was seen to challenge the presuppositions of the Christian faith and to set up a mighty struggle between religion and contemporary knowledge. We are still aware of some of the flash points of that struggle in the United States. There was the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925 when a young biology teacher named John Scopes was put on trial for violating a state statute forbidding the teaching of “godless evolution” to Tennessee children, since it was deemed to be contrary to “The Word of God.” The trial attracted national attention since it brought into that small town courtroom two very well known public figures: Williams Jennings Bryan, a three-time Democratic Party nominee for President (1896, 1900 and 1908) to defend the literal Bible and renowned trial lawyer and atheist, Clarence Darrow, to defend the young school teacher. Such semi-religious propositions as “creation science” and “intelligent design” are today the lingering residue of that battle. The current searing conflicts inside Christianity over the place of the Bible in determining what is to be the role and status of women and the place of homosexuals in both church and society are nothing more than one final gasp of this age old conflict. Not to see this is simply to be blind to history.
Click here to read full article.
~ John Shelby Spong
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