Solving the problem of challenges to religious faith in the 21st century Very thoughtful article by a professor at the University of North Carolina about declines in membership in the SBC and other Evangelical groups. Still, it misses something basic about the issue, which is crucial: exactly why is Christianity losing popular appeal? This refers to willingness of people to listen to and think about the Christian message when they hear it. Less and less people are open to any such thing. Clearly this is a trend, and you can always find many exceptions, but looking at the overall picture... What I want to say next must be prefaced with a statement about personal values. To me it is a good thing when Evangelical and most other churches flourish. And this includes Jews and Judaism. The world is a better place when this is true. People's lives may be transformed for the better, and often are, and some people become noble in the process and act as lights in the darkness for whole communities. Which is one major reason why I want to be counted as a Christian myself and why I am concerned about church membership declines. However, there is far more to the story. And things could become worse or even go from worse to 'worser' in not too much time. This is serious. There are, from my vantage, two basic problems. Actually you could enumerate maybe ten problems of consequence but these two seem to me to be pivotal. They are : (1) The growing disconnect between many claims in the Bible, hence in Christian faith, the many stories in the Bible that have mythic character, and what is intellectually acceptable in the modern world. Along with this is inability to accept as "divine" a good number of passages in the Bible that have God commanding immoral actions, like genocide, as was the case with respect to the people of Jericho. (2) The pervasive power of the media in shaping consciousness on the part of the non-reading public, which is most of the public. There always are exceptions but most of what Hollywood produces, and most entertainment on television, consists of crap, essentially worthless garbage peddled as "the latest thing," exciting, shocking, engaging, thrilling, and so forth. But almost all of it when looking at the productions offered, is intellectually valueless. And by "intellectual" what is not meant is academic erudition, but simply intelligent, thoughtful, mentally challenging, and maybe contrarian. Neither of these problems can possibly be successfully addressed through means of traditional religion. Everyone knows this but it can almost be said that hardly anyone acts accordingly. There is too much investment in traditional religion, too many dollars, endowments, etc, and the reputations of multitudes are connected directly to traditional faiths. But we have reached a place where radical change is necessary -or else face the prospect of fatal decline. Ironically this is not at all true if you look at the "third world" and at newly emerging modern economies, in fact the opposite is the case. Christianity is growing like gang busters in parts of Asia and huge swaths of Africa, and is undergoing renewal in places like Brazil and possibly the Philippines. But the global North is the issue here, not the global South where a good alternative to Islam is needed and this is a crucial matter, and where the newly affluent are seeking a new philosophy of life that makes sense for the 21st century. America is in a different place. ----- The dilemma is that, on the one hand, it is important to keep some parts of traditional faith alive or even to expand them. We all should want the results of that faith in the form of real-life people who are good and decent, who care for others, who form and nurture families, who speak out for justice, and who seek to inculcate a strong sense of conscience in everyone affected by their message. OTOH, anyone who is educated understands that all kinds of suppositions in the Bible are wildly implausible, far more than the impossibility in Joshua of the sun standing still in the sky, there are dozens or even hundreds of examples where people are right to be incredulous, and these kinds of disconnects simply cannot be tolerated by contemporary men and women. And, to say the least, educated elites long ago abandoned almost all Biblical literalism -even when, in cases, literalism does make the best sense, such as the now demonstrable fact that most of Biblical morality is necessary for a functional society. Maybe there also needs to be a third factor : How, in trying to reconcile all of this, can one have a faith that is vital in life, that is inspirational, that motivates great efforts for the good, that gives life purpose and meaning, and that does what any good religion does, provides you with a refuge in time of trouble? And at the same time be utterly truthful. These issues have been preoccupying me recently and I still am searching for better answers than have occurred to me so far. What is clear is that these things are interrelated, they need to be solved together, otherwise no solution can be effective beyond some minimum. And I should also add that Christian faith must be rethought thoroughly. Saint-Simon had it right way back in 1825 , we need a "New Christianity," not just a refurbishment of Christianity that mostly just modifies things around the edges. And this decidedly does not say that a new Christianity can possibly be identified with hip media presentations, or lively songs, or glitzy editions of the Bible. Maybe those are good things, but in any case they all are superficial. It has to be existential, meaningful in the sense of "life or death." And it cannot be reductionist the way that most "liberal" churches are today, who reduce Christian faith to concern for the marginalized in society and little else, and to hell with Jesus. Nor can it be uncritical, so much feel good kumbaya where in the name of interfaith dialogue major and irreconcilable differences are swept under the rug and it is verboten to even discuss them, let alone argue against them. For me this kind of "New Christianity" must be as ecumenical as it can be made, in part Buddhist, Zoroastrian, etc, including the best parts of Hindu philosophy even if I have little use for Hindu mythology, plus a restoration of the best elements of ancient religion, specifically Mesopotamian religion more than all the others since it is so closely related to the Bible. And it needs to be agnostic in all cases where not knowing must be admitted for the sake of honesty. But it must also reflect the best of modern scholarship, modern insights given us by the behavioral sciences, and modern ways of conceiving problem solving, I'm thinking of management, marketing, communications, and so forth. How to make this actually happen is the real question. I'm working on it. Billy ================================= Daily Beast June 1, 2014 Did the Southern Baptist ‘Conservative Resurgence’ Fail? By : Molly Worthen America’s largest Protestant denomination cracked down on moderates when the culture wars hit, arguing that liberalism led to decline. Now they’re hemorrhaging members just like everyone else. It’s hard to overstate the importance of soul-winning to Southern Baptists. So they’ve been hit hard by the news that the evangelical denomination’s slump in membership and baptisms _has continued for the seventh year in a row_ (http://www.star-telegram.com/2014/05/28/5854811/southern-baptist-membership-declines.html?rh=1) . “I am grieved we are clearly losing our evangelistic effectiveness,” _said Thom Rainer_ (http://blog.lifeway.com/newsroom/2014/05/28/sbc-leaders-lament-lack-of-evangelistic-passion-evidenced-by-annual- report/) , president of Lifeway Christian Resources and former dean of the Billy Graham School of Missions and Evangelism at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville. The troubles of the Southern Baptist Convention offer an interesting window into the long-term prospects of Christianity in America—partly because the Southern Baptists have been fretting about those prospects louder than almost anyone else. Don’t all Christians think it’s important to redeem sinners? Yes, but the act of conversion is the heart of the Southern Baptist brand. They are “baptists,” after all, called to persuade the unconverted that Christ is their lord and savior, then dunk them to seal the deal (a mere sprinkling doesn’t cut it). _Over 73 percent_ (http://www.sbc.net/aboutus/acloserlook.asp) of the funds that congregations donate to the national SBC organization goes to support evangelistic work. Believers give most of this money during funding drives named for two of the church’s greatest heroes: the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering and the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering. Moon, born in 1840, was a 4’3” dynamo who mastered a half dozen languages, never married, and devoted her life to evangelizing in China. Armstrong stayed stateside and led the foundation of the Women’s Missionary Union. (In the 19th century, missionary work was one of the few vocations open to middle-class women who wanted to work outside the home.) The denomination had _nearly 5,000_ (http://www.imb.org/main/give/page.asp?StoryID=5523&;) professional missionaries in the field as of 2012, and many thousands more Southern Baptists participate in short-term mission trips each year. More importantly, the evangelistic ethos is supposed to infuse everyday life. The Southern Baptist Convention of Texas, for example, offers its members a “Game Plan” of different strategies and tools for proselytizing everyone from students and athletes to Muslims and agnostics, including helpful conversation starters like the “_Evangecube_ (http://www.sbtcwebstore.com/products/evangecube) ” (a Rubik’s Cube with images of Jesus). There’ s no doubt that when the SBC convenes for its annual meeting later this month in Baltimore, church leaders will be discussing why all of these resources and tactics are falling short. Last year the denomination summoned a team of pastors and church officials to form the Task Force on SBC Evangelistic Impact and Declining Baptisms.The Task Force’s report confirmed that the denomination’s baptism rates _plateaued in the 1950s_ (http://www.bpnews.net/pdf/SBCTaskForceReport.pdf) , stayed constant for the next few decades, and had been inching downward for the past six years. Among the churches that reported statistics in 2012, 25 percent baptized no one at all that year. The report proposed a time-honored solution: pray for spiritual revival; encourage pastors to lead by example with more personal evangelizing; and gear church activities and education toward “multiplying disciples who know how to grow in Christ and lead others to Christ”—especially among the younger generation. This is more or less the same plan that theologian Jonathan Edwards _followed_ (http://www.revival-library.org/catalogues/miscellanies/prayer/edwards.html) in the 1730s when he sensed that his Northampton, Massachusetts congregation was drifting from God. He got the spiritual awakening he prayed for. A string of revivals later known as the Great Awakening blazed up and down the eastern seaboard—although scholars suspect that many of these new converts soon backslid into their unregenerate ways. The Task Force report is a blend of modern bureaucratese and the old Judeo-Christian tradition of the jeremiad. “We need a sense of brokenness and repentance over the spiritual climate of our churches and our nation,” the authors write. Woe to you who have fallen away from the righteousness of your ancestors! Repent, be saved, and preach the true faith! Religious leaders have always had an interest in preaching a story of decline. It’s tough to prod your congregation into action if they think everything is swell. So is this decline real? The short answer is yes—the social and intellectual authority of churches is a shadow of what it once was. That doesn’t mean that Jonathan Edwards wouldn’t recognize many of the challenges today’s evangelicals face. He, too, worried about how to keep teenagers from leaving church and succumbing to the temptations of the world, and how to persuade non-believers (in his case, the Indian tribes of New England) that Christianity was true. Effective evangelism has always required careful negotiation with the surrounding culture. Lottie Moon learned Chinese and ditched her Southern belle dresses for indigenous attire. Centuries before her, Jesuit missionaries fashioned crucifixes with the Buddha, rather than Jesus, at the center. Since the time of the Apostles, Christians have argued over how much compromise is too much: when does cross-cultural translation or embrace of worldly knowledge cross the line into heresy? In the early decades of the twentieth century, American liberals and fundamentalists fought over missionary tactics abroad as well as the accommodation of secular learning and culture at home. When liberal mainline denominations began to shrink in the 1960s, conservative Southern Baptists and other evangelicals took this as proof that God had abandoned churches that a dulterated his Word with Darwinism, progressive politics, and permissive sexual mores. In a book called _The Churching of America_ (http://www.amazon.com/The-Churching-America-1776-2005-Religious/dp/0813535530) (1992) sociologists Rodney Stark and Roger Finke argued that in the American religious “free market,” the churches that grow are the strictest, most demanding churches, the ones that permit no “free riders,” require members to live in constant tension with the wider world and promise a big payoff for sticking to the one Truth. “Humans want their religion to be sufficiently potent, vivid, and compelling so that it can offer them rewards of great magnitude,” the authors wrote. By contrast, those religious communities that concede too much to the world are bound to decline. The truth was that for many decades the SBC was a big tent with room for a range of theological inclinations, political opinions, and worship styles. After all, Baptists believe in “soul liberty”: ultimately, your beliefs are between you and God. But as the culture wars hit the South with full force in the 1960s and 1970s, conservative leaders conspired to tighten the reins on their denomination. By the 1990s they had driven most moderates out of the convention and enforced a regime of biblical inerrancy and traditional gender ideology—a worldview that, if Stark and Finke were correct, should have set the SBC on a path for boundless growth. Except it hasn’t. True, the conservative SBC revolution has produced a vanguard of impressive young leaders: charismatic, handsome pastors like Birmingham’s David Platt and Charlotte’s Steven Furtick (whose Elevation Church has recently taken heat for planting volunteers to come forward for _“ spontaneous” baptisms_ (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/02/26/is-anyone-really-surprised-by-elevation-churchs-spontaneous-baptisms/) ). J.D. Greear leads The Summit Church down the road from me in Durham, North Carolina. These pastors wear stylish jeans and wireless mics; they usually have gorgeous wives and children, numerous advanced degrees, and personal websites. Their megachurches are growing, spilling over onto satellite campuses where congregants can watch their pastor-gurus by streaming video. They combine conservative theology with a trendy Mac-user ethos that shows you can be both a cool Millennial and a Christian culture warrior. My classes at the University of North Carolina are full of students with Summit Church stickers plastered on their laptops and water bottles. But these poster-children of the SBC’s future can’t make those gloomy national statistics go away. Stark’s and Finke’s book was panned by historians, largely because they cherry-picked statistics to divide American churches into “winners” and “losers” without nuanced attention to historical context. If you step back and assess the big picture, few conservative churches are growing anymore (the Assemblies of God is, but by _less than 2 percent per year)._ (http://agchurches.org/Sitefiles/Default/RSS/AG.org%20TOP/AG%20Statistical%20Reports/2012/Online%20Stats%202012.pdf) Evangelicals’ recent strategies—ranging from a hipster makeover to appeal to the Millennial crowd to the _mistaken hope_ (http://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/young-latinos-leave-catholicism-no-religious-affiliation-n99041) that millions of Latinos are leaving Catholicism and becoming conservative Protestants—cannot hold off the world-historical forces of secularization. As the historian David Hollinger _has argued_ (http://www.christiancentury.org/article/2012-06/culture-changers) , even if liberal churches have lost the battle for butts in the pews, the steady advance of civil rights, the sexual revolution, and gay liberation suggests that they are winning the wider culture. You’ve probably heard that the United States has been the exception to the decline of organized religion in the developed West over the last 200 years, and that’s true. But American exceptionalism has merely delayed secularization, not halted it. Poll numbers—_rising numbers of “nones”_ (http://www.pewforum.org/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise/) who say they have no religious affiliation; _slowly falling rates_ (http://www.gallup.com/poll/166613/four-report-attending-church-last-week.aspx) of church attendance—suggest that even if Americans continue to believe that life has a supernatural dimension, many may be drifting out of institutionalized worship. Traditional religious organizations are losing their grip on the public sphere and their influence in the lives of individuals. “All things considered, I think that religion is slowing down, in decline … everything is clearly going in the decline direction,” _said_ (http://www.dukechronicle.com/articles/2011/08/31/q-mark-chaves) Duke University sociologist Mark Chaves, who has written _one of the best synthetic studies_ (http://www.amazon.com/American-Religion-Contemporary-Mark-Chaves/dp/0691146853/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1401482741&sr=8- 1&keywords=mark+chaves+trends) of the polling data on contemporary American religion. Thoughtful Christian leaders have already begun to recognize this. But realism doesn’t mean shrugging off the obligations of the Great Commission or ceding victory in the culture wars to liberals. Jesus called his followers to “make disciples of all the nations,” not just the United States. Conservative evangelicals are preaching abroad with a renewed zeal, buoyed by the hope that traditional ideas about gender roles and biblical authority still reign outside the West, and that already “reverse missionaries” from the Global South are beginning to _plant churches and save souls_ (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/magazine/12churches-t.html?pagewanted=all) in American Babylon. Christianity has been around for 2,000 years. Over the centuries, the faith’ s center of gravity has shifted many times: from Palestine and Northern Africa to Rome and Byzantium; from Western Europe to America. The Southern Baptist experience is more proof that Americans’ term at the helm of Christ’ s ship may be nearing an end, and the sailing is more squally than ever. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
[RC] Solving the problem of challenges to religious faith in the 21st ceentury
BILROJ via Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community Mon, 02 Jun 2014 13:25:37 -0700
- [RC] So... BILROJ via Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
- Re... Dr. Ernie Prabhakar
