Oops dat! The declining churches of the West

"What progressivist Christianity gets backwards is that cooperating with the culture was never what filled the pews, it was preaching a message people could get nowhere else. If the message in the church is the same one you hear outside, why would people bother to go inside?"


It is almost an understandable mistake. Quite a few churches have aligned themselves with the zeitgeist, making common cause with popular culture by putting the Christian spin on secular attempts to help the poor, the downtrodden and the maligned, to care for the planet, help people feel good about themselves, and move toward a better world in the sense of progressive improvement of human culture. Church membership numbers have declined as the church has realigned, which surprises many people. In the former century or so, the church was aligned with several influential cultural ideas. Church membership was reliably high. Did changing to keep up with the times, when the cultural climate changed, cause a decline?

It is easy to make the mistake of getting things exactly backwards. "Putting the cart before the horse" is an old cliche to describe it. In the study of logic, one speaks of mistaken implication. Rain implies that there are clouds, but not the reverse. There are many clouds without rain.

What progressivist Christianity gets backwards is that cooperating with the culture was never what filled the pews, it was preaching a message people could get nowhere else. If the message in the church is the same one you hear outside, why would people bother to go inside? The churches were filled when formerly we were culturally more aligned because the culture more nearly aligned with us. We were the ones pressing the culture toward personal accountability, moral skepticism rather than the embrace of every claim as an equal one, a sexual ethic, children being seen as blessings and not as burdens on society and the environment, the sanctity of life of the old, the young, and the unborn, and more. When the pendulum of culture swings away from these good things, we should not swing with it.

Of course, an ethically Christian cultural teaching is of no ultimate use to people even if they follow it and do social good with it, unless they hear the next lesson. The lesson behind that one is Christ's message. "Come to me, you who labor and are heavy laden, and you will find rest for your souls." There, and not merely in secular progress, is the answer we hold forth. That is not to say that we should not strive on behalf of the downtrodden; plainly we should, but we ought to keep first things first. Our secular responsibilities form only a part of our eternally significant message for the world. The earthly responsibilities grow out of the heavenly message, but not the reverse. Start with Christianity and you find yourself led to responsibility toward humanity in general and the disadvantaged in particular, but starting from human problems and the desire to address them with human solutions does not inversely lead you to Christ.