The Vanishing Church and Faith Retention
My essay “How Do Our Kids Stay Christian?” has been included in Mere Orthodoxy‘s inaugural ebook, Spiritual Formation for the Family. If you become a member of MO you have access to this and all future ebooks. That essay was the origin of Keeping Kids Christian, which is published in one week! You can find it for pre-order with free shipping at BakerBookHouse.com; on pre-order and 40% off at Westminster Books (it was WTS Books’ promotional focus last week, which was cool and humbling); and for pre-order at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Christianbook.com.
Ryan Burge is the guru sociologist of religion who writes at Graphs about Religion. I’ve followed and appreciated his work for years now, and have read all of his books. His most recent is The Vanishing Church. It explores the decline of the mainline tradition and its central thesis is that the moderate sensibilities of mainline congregations couldn’t handle the increased polarization of American culture and that very sensibility is something desperately needed to moderate the most extreme impulses in our society, both religious and secular. It was classic Burge: lots of statistics that are easy to digest, the familiar recounting of the American religious landscape over the last 75 years, with the vulnerability of a pastor whose church shut its doors.
What left me scratching my head was how he contrasted mainline with evangelical sensibilities when it comes to Christian discipleship. Burge points out that while the mainline tradition welcomed doubters — people who truly had faith at the same time that they were skeptical of various spiritual claims — the evangelical tradition promoted certainty. As the mainline disappeared and evangelical Protestants remained relatively stable the places for doubters dissipated. Burge laments this, and provides lots of data to show that the posture of certainty among evangelicals dovetailed with, fed, and was fed by political polarization.
He also points out that over time that evangelicals have grown more strident. Why? Because religious faith has become optional and those who opt to stay religious are more committed. When it is costly to stay religious, those who stay are invested. Burge uses a culinary analogy of a reduction sauce: A cook puts a lot of liquid into a pot along with herbs and spices as they bring it to a simmer. At this point the broth would have little flavor, but as time goes on and the liquid evaporates as steam, the remaining broth has a more intense flavor. Less liquid left, more powerful flavor remaining. That’s what happened to American evangelicals. And that intensity also comes not just from remaining in the church, but having to hold onto the faith in a world where opposing values are constantly being thrown at it. You not only have to opt into the faith, you have to do so in the face of culturally-approved alternatives. And so evangelicals became more strict, intense, and less moderate than their mainline peers.
Burge sees this as a bad thing, and recommends how to dial down the intensity. His advice on how to be reasonable are solid lessons from the mainline (acknowledge when your beliefs are fringe, understand that the perfect is the enemy of the good, don’t dehumanize others). However, he seems to miss that in his culinary analogy that the moderate mainline was the flavorless water! The doubter-skeptic as a faith-posture is unlikely to remain committed to the faith when that faith is socially optional. The mainline worked as a redoubt for the skeptic when America was socially mainline and Christian, but it burned off precisely because it failed to form people who grew up committed to the faith. When faith is optional, the weakly committed opt out.
The stridency of evangelicals and their marriage to a particular approach to partisan politics may be a bad thing, and biblical loci such as the Sermon on the Mount and the fruit of the Spirit have something to say about that, but the problem is not the intensification. Rather, that intensification is absolutely necessary for the faith to be passed down to the next generation. The evangelicals who stayed evangelical did so because Christian faith was not an accessory, but something that formed their entire identity. Again, the Bible offers a number of correctives to deformed, strident identities, but the problem is the deformation, not the intensification.
Or to put it another way: any future for the moderate mainline needs to mimic the full-life formation approach of the evangelical movement. Burge never actually argues that churches shouldn’t pursue full-life formation, and would probably agree that’s a good thing. But it’s not possible to have the mainline, moderated approach to belief, behavior, and belonging and have a faith tradition that endures. The faith is passed down when kids believe that there is something to opt into and that faith is worth holding instead of abandoning it for rivals. It can be a friendly, relaxed faith, but it must be one that shapes the entirety of life in both behavior and belief. And that belief, no matter how humble, must be deep and confident. Otherwise it will burn off when it comes into contact with alternatives. Faith retention requires an intensification of faith formation.
