Читать книгу Mortal Follies - William Murchison - Страница 6

Prelude

YOU MIGHT SAY WE HUMANS HARDLY EVER NOTICE PEAKS—financial, political, cultural, physical, and so on—until we find ourselves descending from them: down, down, into strange valleys, step by step, sometimes head over heels. Once, it was bright, blazing noon; suddenly, clouds and darkness gather.

A particularly brilliant example of such a peak is America’s golden summer of 1929, on the eve of the stock market crash—a summer when, as the discerning (if, alas, largely forgotten) novelist John P. Marquand related, “the only clouds on the horizon were the roseate prophecies of an even more roseate future.” Then, like a thunderclap—

We will understand this peak and valley business, if we take the trouble to think about it, as the universal human experience, sometimes stated as, “You win some, you lose some.” One difficulty, for many, lies in watching that experience play itself out in relation to the church of God, whose walls are widely assumed to shelter the eternal, the lasting, and the true—the things of heaven—from ordinary human give-and-take and interference.

Can the church, like any ordinary institution, both soar and fall? We know that it can. We have watched its descents and plunges, its slumbers and snoozes, for as long as there has been a church—something like two thousand years now.

Early in the twenty-first century after Christ, in the United States of America, as in Western Europe, we are watching another of those ecclesiastical plunges: down, down, from confidence, mission, and a gratifying sense of general acceptance, into disorder of the most disheartening sort. Whereas the United States remains, broadly speaking, a religious nation—one of the world’s most religious nations—more and more of the religious decide for themselves what to believe, what store to set by those beliefs, such as they are, and what the terms of human life ought to be. A 2007 survey by the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life, released in 2008, declares that most religiously committed Americans take “a non-dogmatic approach to faith,” persuaded as they are that their own religion isn’t the only way to salvation. A gently pluralistic view of things: calm and democratic, if not precisely, in conventional terms, religious.

On abortion, as surveys have shown for years, a majority of Americans reject, in whole or in part, Christian teachings on the sacred character of an unborn life: in which rejection various Christians, not a few of them ministers, join with gusto. Marriage and marriage relationships, once deemed subject to divine regulation, have fallen under secular domination—so much so that many public officials have undertaken to define marriage in new ways, discovering no reason it should not apply to couples of the same sex. Often, in the century’s first decade, to take in the news was to get the notion that the defining isssue for American Christians was the suitability, or the disgrace, of marriage rights for homosexuals.

The idea that public schools could or should allude to God in describing the work of creation is in many modern eyes scandalous and un-American. For that matter, paganism, heresy, and outright atheism have been winning respectful hearings, not least on bestseller lists. The new century was but a few years old before authors such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens began reaping lucrative rewards on account of excoriating God, declaring him either imaginary or irrelevant. Surely a sign of anxiety, if not of something more serious, concerning our old sacred commitments was the furor several years ago over the novel and movie The Da Vinci Code, a sort of feminist fantasy about a conspiracy to suppress the discovery of—shh!—the “truth” about that celebrity couple, Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

Another reminder of the withdrawing religious tide is the semi-civil war that seems to break out every December. The issue: whether a modern American should bite his tongue before wishing another American a merry Christmas. No one fifty years earlier could possibly have foreseen such an odd and jarring circumstance.

A new vogue commences meanwhile. Christians identified by the media as “progressive” have taken to emphasizing environmental and “justice” issues over moral issues once understood as central to Christian witness: abortion, for instance.

Who is to blame, assuming “blame” is the right word? Various Christians couldn’t be better pleased by what they see as Christianity’s spirit-led growth into new ways of understanding God and His revelation. They might recognize the church’s present journey as a descent from the peak of that ecclesiastical prosperity which marked the 1950s. Just as likely, they would say, fine (if not cool)—high time an old church joined the modern world.

And speaking of “about time,” I need to declare my present purpose, my rationale for tugging at the reader’s sleeve. It is, broadly speaking, to talk about the ravages that modern times have wrought upon Christianity in the United States. More narrowly, it is to speak of how often, how extensively, and with what dismal results, the churches themselves have egged on the ravagers.

No one, I grant, fully reforms a church from outside it, though kings and potentates have tried. For a church to change at its deeper levels, the consent and encouragement of the church itself must be had. If modern American churches are divided against themselves, if human occasions and human hopes no longer depend as they once did on the church’s blessing and guidance, if popular entertainment increasingly criticizes or derides churches and the people inside them, if society thumbs its nose at churches and hints we’d be as well off without them, then the churches can hardly exempt themselves from responsibility.

A prime cause of ecclesiastical malaise in the twenty-first century is the appreciation, sometimes the outright admiration, that Christian churches show for the mores and modes of the secular culture: the arts, academia, politics, journalism, the entertainment industry. Especially is this true at the priestly and ministerial level, where political and economic sympathies closely correspond to those usually found in the universities, the arts, and the media. Ministers are, in cultural terms, verbalists, wielders of words, talkers, and writers. They relate well to other verbalists, less well to sweat-of-the-brow types like the merchants and engineers and homemakers who, on Sundays, gaze back at them from the pews.

Between pulpit and pew a gap of sorts perpetually exists, a function of the fundamentally different outlooks of the ministering and the ministered-to. Lately the gap seems more cultural than anything else, a matter of politics and what modern people call their “lifestyles.” At the start of the present cultural struggle, the impulse among many American Christians was strenuously to resist. As time passed, resistance waned. Thoughtful souls began to wonder whether the culture might be right about the things it once seemed monumentally wrong about.

Was it possible (was it not certain!) that the Lord was doing a new thing, without the applause He deserved from his own representatives on earth? As more and more Christians conformed their outlooks to those of the secular culture, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention—a fellowship comparatively untroubled by cultural trends—acknowledged that “culture has transformed us into its own image.”

The declining participation in Christian worship during the past forty years isn’t due wholly to Starbucks and Sunday morning talk shows. It stems as well, depending on what church we’re talking about, from growing irritation over projects and obsessions better suited to political than theological remediation. A first-rate example would be climate change; another, abolition of capital punishment.

Hand in hand with the tendency to mingle cultural and religious mores comes comparative indifference to certain landmarks of Christian belief and action—the uniqueness of the Christian revelation; an explicit call (from Christ, actually) to make disciples of all; the duty to name and rebuke sin; monogamous heterosexual relationships as the Christian standard; divine authority (e.g., Holy Scripture) as dispositive in worldly matters. Such notions as these could seem unwise or unworthy to Christians afraid of pressing “exclusivist” claims on a pluralistic society. Why, no, that wouldn’t be attractive at all in an age of radical individualism and moral “choice,” coupled, curiously, with a form of moral absolutism about certain ideals, the whole hatched in the insurrections of circa 1965-1973 against war, capitalism, parents, moral restraints, college deans, and the social order of the day. The Methodists over time bought in; likewise the Presbyterians; many Catholics as well; some Baptists. And did we ever buy in—we Episcopalians.

Ah. I hadn’t previously mentioned it. Well, then: Episcopalian I have been for nearly all my adult life. (My youth was Methodist, as was my wife’s.) Episcopalian my family and I remain for at least—a nice semi-poetic word here—the nonce. My enterprise, between these covers, concerns “mainline” American churches broadly, the Episcopal Church more narrowly—the Episcopal Church as a lens for viewing and coming possibly to understand better the present diminished state of American Christianity. I do not mean diminished in sublime importance under the aspect of eternity. I mean diminished in terms of unity and effectiveness in ministry and witness. A church struggling to understand its nature and purpose is a church radically impaired in the eternal contest over human allegiances.

Not all of American Christianity is impaired. Even non-Christians know that. Churches of all sorts thrive in all sorts of places. Roman Catholicism, which benefits from the presence of America’s large Latin American immigrant population, continues to grow, as does the Pentecostal persuasion. Mormons, generally regarded as outside regular Christianity due to certain of their beliefs and interpretations, outnumber Episcopalians and Presbyterians put together. Many an individual “Bible” church, unaffiliated, often as not, with a particular denomination, and specializing in recreational as well as spiritual outreach, hums with energy. Of a Sunday morning, cars overflow their parking lots and spill onto the neighborhood streets.

If only the same could be said of the so-called mainline denominations: United Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Congregationalists! It is strange to observe the present tribulations of these bodies, which so recently constituted America’s “Protestant establishment,” awash in members and money. No longer.

Consider the United Methodists, down to 7.9 million members in 2008, compared with more than 11 million in the late 1960s. Consider the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, off 1.58 percent from the previous year, and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.), down 2.36 percent. Think of my Episcopalians: off 4.15 percent for the year; reduced in overall numbers by more than a third from their mid-sixties peak. Ponder the United Church of Christ, the Congregationalists, down 1.2 percent to barely a million members; less than a fifth of the booming Mormon population. The same Pew Forum survey that showed such airy indifference to doctrinal p’s and q’s asserted that barely three fifths of mainline Christians find religion “very important,” with a mere 26 percent committed to weekly church attendance. Nearly a quarter of mainliners told the pollsters they go to church “a few times a year”—just often enough, apparently, to keep the driving directions fixed in memory. Writing in First Things, Joseph Bottum has gone so far as to declare the old “Protestant America”—that nation forged by the combined witness of the major Protestant denominations—to be dead beyond the power of resuscitation.

For the tribulations of the mainline denominations, no single explanation, no single set of explanations, can fit every case, not in this large and various republic, and in this eclectic time, so accommodative of so many varied outlooks and aspirations. Some of the perplexity, for instance, is demographic—a sociological matter, one might say. One indisputable reason for the shrunken number of Episcopalians is that Episcopalians have a very low birth rate. We take in this point appreciatively. Then a question intrudes: Why do Episcopalians have a very low birth rate? Has it to do with the present beliefs and attitudes of Episcopalians, shaped by their own current theology?

I put it forth as truism that eventually everything gets back to beliefs. Beliefs form and shape actions. Actions (as whose mother has not reminded him?) have consequences. It is mainly of beliefs that we must talk in trying to sort out the woes of contemporary mainline Christianity. What beliefs, then—the doctrinal ones? Of course. Partly. Yet beliefs come in all sizes and varieties, having to do with dinner plans and political preferences as well as with the relationship between faith and works and the efficacy of infant baptism. We will talk about belief, generically. But in what context?

The context of one particular church, the Episcopal Church. I will in some sense talk of all the mainline churches by talking of one. That is my project. We need first to understand, insofar as space permits, the context in which American Christianity functions. That context is the culture of the twenty-first century, not only its religious and spiritual side, but also—perhaps just as often—its secular side, whether understood as disdainful of religion or merely detached from questions of origin and destiny.

I think we best understand the “mainliners” as cultural chameleons, melting so completely into the secular culture as sometimes to vanish from view, except when enduring in-house embroilments over the speed or extent of the vanishing process. On the one hand, chameleon-like behavior is nothing new in Christian annals: less the exception, perhaps, than the rule. On the other hand, the present culture—so louche, so free form, so resistant to notions of truth and constancy—sets out ghastly traps for the bumbling.

That is one side of the matter. There is another, more imposing side. A culture of emptiness invites—dares—others to fill it. To precisely this task the Christians of the Roman world addressed themselves, with vast and enduring success. It can’t happen again? Who says so, apart from the Christian chameleons for whom the cultural norms of the twenty-first century seem warm and comforting enough, worth sucking on as bitter winds howl?

It’s oh, so true. One chameleon, after a while, will begin to look like the rest. How much in that event do we gain by inquiry into the almost complete disappearance of the Episcopal Church into the cultural woodwork? More than one might casually suppose, I’m prepared to argue.

Part of the delight, if one can call it that, of examining the Episcopalians proceeds from their prodigious prominence in American history, their inherent attractiveness to many minds outside the fold, and, last, to their newly realized gift for imaging, and blowing up to poster size, the aggravations of the religious moment. We are like Walt Whitman—large, containing multitudes.