Another interesting article in a US National publication. I am only doing this because it is shows exactly what I have been saying for so many years - the Western Church is lost. All of the complaints here you need to rethink in terms of: what has brought a decline in the faith but more so what would led someone to think the church is not where it should be ...
The number may vary but the trend line is consistent: The Christian
church is in decline. From church attendance to those who identify as
Christian, all numbers are heading south.
Is Christianity the
new middle class? Has it become an amorphous term to describe something
that most assume they understand but carries no real meaning?
There are myriad reasons for Christianity's downward trajectory. My focus is the public face of Christianity.
Ironically, it has become a faith defined more by its willingness to exclude.
If
one reads the Gospel narratives, the teachings of Jesus clearly
indicate love, inconvenient love, is at the epicenter of the faith.
Observers of the faith are placed in a paradoxical bind in that its
difficulty is rooted in its simplicity -- the simplicity to love
burdened by the difficulty to achieve it.
As a result,
Christianity is dominated, at least in America, by an ethos of
oversimplification that seeks not a self-reflective inconvenient love,
but one that places its focus on the other.
Historically,
Christianity's post Enlightenment participation in the public square is a
mixed bag. The church was on both sides of slavery, the Civil War,
women's suffrage, Jim Crow segregation, the Holocaust, and South African
Apartheid.
We've recently witnessed for profit corporations
hiding behind the veneer of the amorphous term Christianity seeking laws
that come uncomfortably close to the type of dehumanization that
necessitated the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The Religious Freedom
Restoration Act, which some describe as a law that opens the door to
discriminate against same-sex couples, while others offer that it would
give people more freedom to follow the dictates of their faith.
Evangelical
leader, Franklin Graham is calling on Christians to boycott
gay-friendly corporations. Graham recently announced that he is moving
all the bank accounts for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association out
of Wells Fargo because of its ad featuring a lesbian couple.
However
these issues are adjudicated in the short term, the long term prospects
can only do additional harm to the public face of a faith already in
decline.
A nation committed to a "more perfect union" must to
some degree be in a constant state of flux. History has proven
unequivocally the trite use of biblical justification is a less than
worthy adversary when one decides to drink from the well of equality
that was originally dug by the Founders.
Moreover, it is a
mistake to compare Christianity's recent public efforts with those of
the Civil Rights Movement of the '60s. The purpose of that movement was
not to move the country to the limited contours of its particular
doctrine, but rather to move the nation toward the promises it already
made to all of its citizens.
The viewpoint that is deemed in the
best interest of the church in its private morality cannot be the
rationale that justifies denying the civil rights of individuals in the
public morality.
The primary failing within much of American
Christianity's latest pursuits in the public arena is its inability to
see where its faith and the Constitution coalesce.
The Bible does
not offer a commandment to "like" something, but it does command that
one love. Doesn't that suggest that in the Christian tradition one must
embrace the arduous task of loving that which they may not like?
Likewise,
the Constitution was not written based on what the majority approves. I
would argue the barometer for one's support of the Constitution is to
embrace the concept of something that involves a specific issue they may
philosophically oppose.
Both are difficult endeavors. It is
understandable that one would advocate for a simpler path. But an honest
examination suggests no such path is available. Even if it were, it is
unable to make the individual better.
The Christian church at its
best is an institution that offers guidance through the complexities of
the human condition, humbled by the reality that there are some
questions for which "I don't know" is the only appropriate response.
Failing to pursue this valiant undertaking creates an arrogance that
undermines its best intentions.
And any religion defined by its
worst attributes of its own making can only look in the mirror to seek
the guilty party for its demise.
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