The Great Evangelical Decline

I found this article very interesting concerning the decline of many protestant denominations in North America.

Christine Wicker: The great evangelical decline

 Sunday, June 1, 2008

Christine Wicker is the author of “The Fall of the Evangelical Nation:
The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church.” Her e-mail address is
christine@christinewicker.com.

What Baptist leaders have known for years is finally public: The
Southern Baptist Convention is a denomination in decline. Half of the
SBC’s 43,000 churches will have shut their doors by 2030 if current
trends continue.

And unless God provides a miracle, the trends will continue. They are
longstanding and deeply rooted. The denomination’s growth rate has
been declining since the 1950s. The conservative/fundamentalist
takeover 30 years ago was supposed to turn the trend around; it didn’t
make a bit of difference.

Leaders said it did. Reporters and politicians believed it did. But
the numbers kept going down until, finally, they have become obvious
to everyone.

Evangelical faith has been dropping since 1900, when 42 percent of the
U.S. claimed that distinction. Every year, Religious Right
evangelicals, such as those who lead the Southern Baptists, are a
smaller proportion of the country. Every year, their core values are
violated more flagrantly by the media, scientific discovery and
mainstream behavior. Every election, politicians promise to serve them
and then don’t because evangelicals lack the power to make them.

What all this means is that we were duped. All the hype proclaiming an
evangelical resurgence was merely that – hype, a furious shout from a
faith losing its grip, manipulation by a relatively small group of
dedicated, focused, political power-seekers.

The long decline of Southern Baptist faith is critical to the entire
evangelical movement because the Southern Baptist Convention, which
claims 16 million members, is the biggest evangelical denomination in
the country, almost six times as large as the next biggest
predominately white evangelical denomination.

The second-largest evangelical group, the National Association of
Evangelicals, has claimed 30 million members. Their churches actually
have 7.6 million, tops. Most of those are having the same problems the
Baptists are having.

As the true picture of evangelicals’ problems has developed, panicked
leaders are splitting into camps. Some say that the church is lax,
soft, sold out. That what’s needed is an even bigger dose of the
medicine that the SBC fundamentalist takeover delivered. More
authority, more strict interpretations of the Bible, more sermons
about sin and suffering and sacrifice, more rigor about who is and who
isn’t getting to go to heaven. They argue that Christianity-lite is
the problem. Get back to the Bible, they say, which means proclaiming
more confidently that the only interpretation is Truth, and anyone who
doesn’t agree with it will surely go to hell.

A growing number of dedicated Southern Baptists believe the Bible’s
truth is a Calvinist one. They reject the traditional Baptist idea
that any human can choose to be saved in favor of predestination, the
idea that only those whose names are already written in the Book of
the Lamb will go to heaven. Kick out the unregenerates, they say. That
will fix the problem.

Still others say the problem is image. Evangelicals have been seen as
mean-spirited and narrow. Caring about the environment and giving more
attention to the poor and needy will turn it around. Get out of
politics, they say. Play down abortion and gay rights. That will fix
the problem.

But none of these ideas will halt the increasing irrelevance of
evangelical faith to the great majority of the U.S. population.
Evangelical faith is being attacked inside and outside its churches by
forces that won’t be stopped by new biblical rigor or an image makeover.

I’ll give you just three of those many forces.

One is Alcoholics Anonymous and all its 12-step offspring – the
creation of two Christian men who wanted to help alcoholics. They
modeled AA on the teachings of Jesus and the ideas of philosopher
William James. Instead of asking alcoholics to be saved, they asked
them to call on a god of their own understanding. Sometimes leaders
illustrated the freedom of that definition by saying, “That door knob
over there might be your god.”

They included 12 steps based on Christian principles that are never
identified as Christian and include no Bible verses. They eschewed
guilt and any talk of sinfulness. Repentance was directed at specific
people who had been harmed. There was no doctrine, no institution, no
demand for monetary support.

Tens of millions of addicts and other troubled people used this “door
knob god” to build new lives. They learned that they didn’t have to
read the Bible, attend church or follow a preacher’s rules to engage a
divine power that could heal them.

Nothing like that kind of open-ended faith had ever been experienced
before. And so the role of the church as interpreter of God’s truth
and the Bible as its sole repository lost power with millions.

The second attack came within the church as American evangelicals
themselves became less willing to proclaim that they are the only ones
saved. That idea had seemed reasonable when people lived in fairly
homogeneous groups. “The other” was unknown, seemed inferior and
appeared unlikely to have God’s blessing. Since few people had much to
do with foreigners – except in times of war, when they were trying to
kill them, or from behind a tourist’s camera, when they were making
souvenirs of them – “our way is the only way” seemed reasonable.

But international travel, business and communication have changed
that. So have huge waves of immigration. Now “the other” is likely to
be your son-in-law or grandchild.

The idea that only one little part of one kind of religion has the
only way to God has begun to seem more and more unlikely. It has begun
to seem rude. Un-Christian, even. And evangelicals, who don’t like
being boorish any more than anyone else, have become less and less
willing to relegate their neighbors to hell.

So we have a completely formless god of great power and instant
accessibility romping around, rescuing millions whom everyone else had
given up on. Then we have more Christians getting squeamish about
proclaiming hegemony over heaven.

And along comes The Pill. It’s merely one of the insidious attacks
science has launched against traditional religious faith, but it is
surely the most successful. Nothing in history has changed human
relations as much as that little white pill.

The curse God laid on Eve wasn’t quite so ironclad anymore. Skip
forward a few decades, and couples started delaying marriage until
their late 20s, 30s or even 40s. But that pill meant there was less
pressure to abstain from sex until the wedding.

So hardly anyone did. Some single couples who slept together or lived
together and simply kept quiet about it kept coming to church, but
millions of others slept in Sunday mornings. Evangelical leaders
resolutely hewed to the abstinence standard at least formally,
resulting in little more than extra hypocrisy.

That didn’t matter much. Hypocrisy has always flourished, and it
hasn’t killed the church yet. But evangelicals’ failure to grapple
with change meant the church was no help in a world where people were
expected to sleep together long before marriage and desperately sought
guidance about when and with whom.

Evangelical leaders defend their stance by claiming that God doesn’t
change and that neither does sin. But sin does change. Slavery wasn’t
sin once. Now it is. Taking a wife and a concubine wasn’t sin once.
Now it is.

And God – or our understanding of what God is, which is all we
actually have – changes, too. When societies change, their
interpretations of God change. Their readings of the Scripture shift.
Human understandings are remolded so that faith can remain vital and
effective during new times.

Whether evangelical intransigence is pleasing to God isn’t anything
that humans can ever be absolutely sure of. If it is pleasing to him,
God may send a great revival that will sweep the country and restore
them to their place of predominance.

Such revivals have happened before. They could happen again.

But I’ve named only three of the ways that evangelical faith has come
to seem less useful, necessary and vital to those who might benefit
from its teachings. Evangelical faith is failing in so many other ways
that a growing number of Christians believe a New Reformation is needed.

If they are correct, the Southern Baptist Convention is unlikely to
lead that reformation. Let’s hope it is at least around to participate.

Christine Wicker is the author of “The Fall of the Evangelical Nation:
The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church.” Her e-mail address is
christine@christinewicker.com.