The Atlantic accidentally reveals Christianity’s growing irrelevance

Lately, The Atlantic is pushing hard on a particular narrative of American Christianity. It’s the same narrative we see in countless other places. It spins a story of Real True Christianity being subverted somehow—but poised to return in glorious triumph if only Real True Christians start living out their faith in the correct ways. One of their recent stories spins that narrative. Alas and alack, its author misses some extremely important truths—about both American Christianity itself and American culture.

At least it’s a somewhat-different bit of advice than what Christians normally get about how to revive their increasingly-irrelevant religion’s membership numbers and credibility levels.

First, let’s look at the writer of today’s OP about reviving Christianity

Today’s original post (OP) comes to us from Jake Meador. He’s a Christian, but not just any Christian. He’s the editor-in-chief of an extremist, right-wing, hardline, culture-warring, Calvinist evangelical site called Mere Orthodoxy. This site’s contributors are on a mission to make their flavor of Christianity the winner in America—and to ensure that flavor’s temporal dominance over Americans’ lives as well.

This is a particularly inbred flavor of Christianity, too. In fact, many of the names from Mere Orthodoxy also pop up in the documentary American Gospel, the site The Gospel Coalition (TGC), and TGC’s podcast Gospelbound, all of which spring from the same stances and beliefs. Once you learn these folks’ names, you’ll quickly see them blending together seamlessly from one project and site to the next. They exist in a completely self-reinforcing bubble, too, which is how they ended up featuring the advice of an odiously-toxic misogynist just a couple of months ago.

In today’s case, Jake Meador is not just the editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy. He’s also a regular contributor to Gospel Coalition. This is no sweet, mainline Christian aghast at what Bad Christians™ are doing to his religion. Rather, he’s part of the group that Christian would be talking about.

In the real world, legitimate writers happily disclose any personal and professional connections that could be viewed by readers as potential indications of bias or conflicts of interest. But the rules work very differently in Christianity. Therefore, Meador’s byline shows only his most recent published book and his title at Mere Orthodoxy.

The Great Dechurching will not solve anything going on in Christianity’s decline

Speaking of which, Meador is super-impressed with a recent book put out by some of his peers and colleagues over at TGC: The Great Dechurching. In a lot of ways, it’s the institutional equivalent of their previous book, Before You Lose Your Faith, which aimed squarely at individuals undergoing or considering deconstruction. This time around, its authors offer observations and advice aimed at church leaders desperate to increase the size and fervor of their flocks.

TGC has been busy promoting it, too. They’ve got a different podcast, As in Heaven, talking about it. That podcast has apparently devoted its third season to exploring the book’s main ideas. If I didn’t know evangelicals as well as I do, I’d only suspect this Atlantic post of being part of that publicity drive.

I was very unimpressed with Before You Lose Your Faith. This incredibly-flawed book failed to fulfill every one of its stated goals. Accordingly, I don’t have high expectations for this one.

In his Atlantic essay, Meador zeroed in on one of Dechurching’s main ideas:

The book raises an intriguing possibility: What if the problem isn’t that churches are asking too much of their members, but that they aren’t asking nearly enough?

“The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church,” The Atlantic, July 29, 2023 (archive)

You can just about hear these evangelicals desperately hoping Christians will cry out: Great Scott! It’s so obvious! We’ve gotten it all backward!

How this opposite-day reasoning works for Christianity

Christians, especially ones very impressed with their level of scholarship in their religion, love reversals. So does the New Testament, for that matter:

“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” (Matthew 5:5)

“So the last will be first, and the first will be last.” (Matthew 20:16)

“Say to Daughter Zion, ‘See, your king comes to you, gentle and riding on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.'” (Matthew 21:5)

[D]o you not know that the Lord’s people will judge the world? (1 Corinthians 6:2)

Humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will exalt you. (James 4:10)

In certain segments of Christianity, particularly the one inhabited by OP’s writer, reversals become a potent sign from the Almighty. The idea here is that Jesus deliberately sets his people up for failure, so when they succeed it’ll look extra-impressive to onlookers. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard a Christian talk about how absolutely unsuited they are for a particular divine calling, which must mean it’s really divine in nature. Or a wildly-unsuited Christian couple insist on marrying, since Jesus himself must have commanded such a pair to unite. (<— I’ve literally made this exact grievous error myself.)

So in Meador’s OP, churches aren’t losing people because they’re asking too much from the flocks. In reality, they’re asking too little, which is causing those flocks to value their membership too lightly.

Christianity is apparently suffering from the 21st century in general

Of course, Meador grants—as does Dechurching—that sex and abuse scandals “have driven people away.” However, Dechurching—and therefore Meador—thinks that Christianity came by its tanking affiliation rate for a very different reason:

The book suggests that the defining problem driving out most people who leave is … just how American life works in the 21st century. Contemporary America simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success. Such a system leaves precious little time or energy for forms of community that don’t contribute to one’s own professional life or, as one ages, the professional prospects of one’s children. Workism reigns in America, and because of it, community in America, religious community included, is a math problem that doesn’t add up.

“The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church,” The Atlantic, July 29, 2023 (archive)

And that’s correct, but not for the reason Meador and Dechurching think it is. He then offers a scenario Dechurching uses “to describe a typical evangelical dechurcher”:

[A] 30-something woman who grew up in a suburban megachurch, was heavily invested in a campus ministry while in college, then after graduating moved into a full-time job and began attending a young-adults group in a local church. In her 20s, she meets a guy who is less religiously engaged, they get married, and, at some point early in their marriage, after their first or second child is born, they stop going to church. [. . .]

Soon it actually sounds like it’d be harder to attend than to skip, even if some part of you still wants to go. The underlying challenge for many is that their lives are stretched like a rubber band about to snap—and church attendance ends up feeling like an item on a checklist that’s already too long.

“The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church,” The Atlantic, July 29, 2023 (archive)

And that is all also plausibly true, just not for the reason Meador and Dechurching imagine.

The Big Problem Here, according to Meador and Dechurching

You’ll be thrilled to know that Meador offers a solution to these scenarios from Dechurching:

In theory, the Christian Church could be an antidote to all that. What is more needed in our time than a community marked by sincere love, sharing what they have from each according to their ability and to each according to their need, eating together regularly, generously serving neighbors, and living lives of quiet virtue and prayer? A healthy church can be a safety net in the harsh American economy by offering its members material assistance in times of need: meals after a baby is born, money for rent after a layoff. [. . .]

But a vibrant, life-giving church requires more, not less, time and energy from its members. It asks people to prioritize one another over our career, to prioritize prayer and time reading scripture over accomplishment.

“The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church,” The Atlantic, July 29, 2023 (archive)

Unfortunately, Meador tells us, church-attending Christians don’t have any clue how to start acting that way. And that’s true, too, just not for the reason he imagines. He and Dechurched imagine that Christians just are not Jesusing hard enough:

The tragedy of American churches is that they have been so caught up in this same world that we now find they have nothing to offer these suffering people that can’t be more easily found somewhere else. American churches have too often been content to function as a kind of vaguely spiritual NGO, an organization of detached individuals who meet together for religious services that inspire them, provide practical life advice, or offer positive emotional experiences. Too often it has not been a community that through its preaching and living bears witness to another way to live. [. . .]

The difficulty is that many of the wounds and aches provoked by our current order aren’t of a sort that can be managed or life-hacked away. They are resolved only by changing one’s life, by becoming a radically different sort of person belonging to a radically different sort of community.

“The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church,” The Atlantic, July 29, 2023 (archive)

Then, Meador name-checks Bruderhof. This is a very Calvinist-sounding hardline communal sect based in Germany. Some years back, an equally hardline evangelical brought them up, so I looked into them. They alarmed me enough that I immediately archived that link.

Meador is super-impressed with what could very easily become an authoritarian nightmare made flesh—if it isn’t already. He’s not impressed enough to join them, of course. Just impressed enough to mention them as a perfect example of the kind of Christian church community he means:

This [Bruderhof] is, admittedly, an extreme example. But this community was thriving not because it found ways to scale down what it asked of its members but because it found a way to scale up what they provided to one another. Their way of living frees them from the treadmill of workism.

“The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church,” The Atlantic, July 29, 2023 (archive)

However, Meador graciously allows evangelicals to live separately on their own, as long as they provide the kind of communal experience that Bruderhof does.

And what this kind of cosmic shift would totally mean for Christianity

If church communities in America began acting the way Meador and Dechurched suggest, the results would be absolutely stunning, he promises:

We could be a witness to another way of life outside conventionally American measures of success. Churches could model better, truer sorts of communities, ones in which the hungry are fed, the weak are lifted up, and the proud are cast down.

“The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church,” The Atlantic, July 29, 2023 (archive)

Sure, Meador explains, such grandly-Jesusing churches wouldn’t acquire the wealth and power that so many modern churches want. But they’d be a lot closer to what he and Dechurched think Jesus wants his churches to look like.

He doesn’t need to state explicitly that this shift would also completely reverse Christianity’s decades-long decline in membership and credibility. It goes without saying.

I’m guessing he’d still want evangelicals to maintain their science denialism on several fronts, treat LGBT people like subhumans, trample human rights (particularly for women and LGBT folks), sneak indoctrination and religious propaganda into public schools, and enshrine their religious privilege into law before it’s too late to do it ever again. All of that has caused Gen Z to abandon Christianity in droves. Older generations often cite those causes as well, along with the scandals and abuses that Dechurched graciously concedes as valid reasons for disaffiliation.

Evangelicals will still be doing all of that, I suppose, while they’re also forming communes in churches.

The missing missing reason in this advice

But let’s backtrack a bit in the OP. Here is how Meador describes “workism” in America:

Contemporary America simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success. [. . .] Workism reigns in America, and because of it, community in America, religious community included, is a math problem that doesn’t add up.

“The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church,” The Atlantic, July 29, 2023 (archive)

Now, let’s ask the missing question—the one that neither Meador nor Dechurched has asked:

In all this denunciation of “workism” and rejection of communal ideals, what role has American evangelicalism played in that social evolution?

I know Meador knows about this question, because I’ve seen him asking about it in the past. In 2016, he wrote a good essay about the “crack-up” of evangelicals’ beloved complementarianism:

What is needed from complementarians, then, is not simply a grab bag of biblical texts, but a fairly radical critique of the entire post-war capitalist economy in America and a deep understanding of more family-friendly alternative economic models that once again make the home a place of good and productive work. Put another way, we cannot simply talk about marriage and the sexes and gender roles; we must talk about the place where those things are acted out. That, in turn, means we must recognize the ways that industrialism has destroyed the habitat in which families thrive and the ways in which evangelicals have been complicit in this desecration. This sort of critique, unfortunately, is absent from evangelical complementarian literature.

“The Evangelical Gender Crack-Up,” Mere Orthodoxy, June 14th, 2016 (archive)

It’s not absent at all, of course. Evangelicals bring it up all the time as a strawman so they can trample it with Bible verses and hand-waving idealism. As well, even back then you can see Meador’s insular worldview biting him in the butt:

So far as it goes, we can probably say that complementarianism served its intended purpose. Women’s ordination is a dead issue in much of American evangelicalism, which is highly unusual within the global context of evangelical Christianity. (UPDATE: If you’re Anglican or non-denominational don’t yell at me in the comments. Ted Olson, Betsy Howard, and Matt Miller have already corrected me on this. Duly noted. In these contexts “complementarian” is still useful, I gather. I was thinking primarily of the PCA and SBC when saying this as well as larger non-denominational networks like Acts 29.)

“The Evangelical Gender Crack-Up,” Mere Orthodoxy, June 14th, 2016 (archive)

Of course he was thinking primarily of those evangelical groups. They generally hold the exact same opinions and stances he does!

At any rate, Meador offered good questions—albeit no real suggestions—in his 2016 essay. He apparently had one idea to suggest in 2023, though.

The obvious solution to The Big Problem Here

By wildest coincidence, the suggestion Meador offers is the same exact one that Russell Moore offered in the exact same publication just a week ago. And that someone else suggested there in 2018. And that someone else did in 2021, too. The Atlantic has really gotten hooked on a feeling narrative about how Christianity went adrift—and how it can regain its previous course again.

Unfortunately, asking how Christians might have contributed to a situation wrecks that narrative. Even worse for Christians, the answer to that question reveals that Christians today are a lot like Christians in past ages, even in gauzily-imagined past golden ages.

Even in the New Testament’s cautionary tale of Ananias and Sapphira, we see Bruderhof’s communal ideal failing to materialize in the real world. In James 4, we get potent warnings of divine retribution for the hypocrisy that book’s writer perceived in the earliest Christians: Infighting, slander, adultery, boasting, pride, and possibly even murder! And in 2 Timothy 2:14-26, we get tantalizing hints of gossip, arguments, and doctrinal infighting. Even Paul apparently fought with Peter over various doctrines, and Peter likewise apparently hit the limits of his patience with the newest Apostle.

The truth becomes glaringly apparent once we ask that question: Just as Christians have never been particularly good at following their own rules, at no point in history have Christians actually managed to live within a communal ideal in anything but the smallest, most temporary scale without the situation erupting into hypocrisy, rigid regimentation, and power-grabs galore.

A real crisis driving Americans to prioritize

Not to be Captain Obvious here, but America’s in the middle of a crisis regarding financial security. As the upper classes have enjoyed greater proportional wealth in recent decades, the lower classes have struggled to make less money go further and further every year. Amid rumors of a looming recession, Forbes declared last year that the middle class is “at the end of an era” of relative plenty.

Even with minimum wage rising in many parts of the country, someone earning that little can’t afford a one-bedroom apartment in 93% of the counties within the United States, according to one recent report.

I suspect this new reality is part of what drove Meador to write that 2016 post: The evangelical complementarian ideal of one wage-earning husband supporting a wife and a passel of kids has been completely out of reach for most Americans for decades now.

And we can lay a lot of that trouble at the feet of evangelicals themselves.

Evangelicals have contributed mightily to ‘workism’ in America

Thanks to evangelicals’ decades-old marriage to Republican politics and policies, their bought-and-paid-for congresscritters have done their best to destroy workers’ protections and unions. Along with their general destruction of public education, Republican politicians even seek to bring back child labor to make absolutely certain that no children can get enough of an education to avoid their parents’ struggle bus.

It’s a dizzying all-out assault on the working and middle classes alike. But evangelicals don’t understand its source. For years now, religious leaders have taught their flocks that the assault comes not from within their own house, so to speak, but from people they don’t like. That’s one of the reasons that QAnon’s conspiracy theories could infect evangelicals’ minds so quickly and so easily. They are naturally predisposed to blame their outgroups and culture-war enemies for everything wrong in the world. Republicans were only too happy to push hard on that tendency.

Even Americans’ status as a post-truth society can be laid right at the feet of modern evangelicals.

Sidebar: WTAF with the overt Marxism?

As for Meador’s interesting use of the phrases “sharing what they have from each according to their ability and to each according to their need,” that is a Marxist idea. Literally, it comes to us straight from Karl Marx. It inspired Communism and socialism alike.

Evangelicals initially entered the culture war to fight Communism. The hardline ones have softened considerably on Communism as a huge affront to their Real True Christian ideals. They idolize Vladimir Putin as much as Donald Trump, and for similar reasons no doubt. But they still get very tetchy about anything that smacks of socialism. And they still use “marxist” as a snarl word to describe any culture-war idea they hate.

It’s beyond bizarre to see one of these guys drawing upon a Marx quote to sell his communal ideal to his fellow hardline evangelicals.

Christianity is just on the wrong end of the supply and demand equation, and ‘workism’ has nothing to do with it

As a result of all of these forces squeezing them on all sides, Americans have had to make big changes in how we spend our time and resources. For years now, I’ve seen close friends and family working out their budgets to the $5 mark. As each year gets harder, they drop one more nonessential service or pleasure they once enjoyed. And still they must budget to the $5, or else go into (more) consumer debt that will never get fully paid off.

In particular, Americans have had to seriously prioritize our expenditures. We no longer have wiggle room. There’s no longer any money or time to burn. If something isn’t essential to our lives, then we can’t waste time or money on it anymore.

And Jake Meador does sorta understand this. In sneering at “workism,” he declares that under this ickie worldly paradigm, church involvement “is a math problem that doesn’t add up.” His OP actually suggests that church flocks can Jesus their way right out of “workism” —and into such a grand and meaningful community that its sheer helpfulness and supportiveness draws back those who’ve left over the years.

I, in turn, gently suggest that there’s absolutely no way for church communities to do that—even if they wanted to do it, which evangelicals have repeatedly and constantly demonstrated they do not.

Why the Bruderhof ideal doesn’t work in evangelicalism as a whole, much less Christianity as a whole

A long time ago, I ran across a missionary’s excellent essay about “Rice Christians,” a common concept in missionary circles. “Rice Christians” are people who join Christianity just to get material benefits from their recruiters. They’re only there for the “rice” the missionaries give out to converts. Once the “rice” stops flowing, they leave.

So missionaries have to be careful about promising real help to their converts. If they promise too much help, then people will convert just to get it. But if they don’t help converts at all, then they will win far fewer converts.

This phenomenon happens across Christianity as a whole, too. Plenty of people join particular churches for perks they think they can gain from membership. These perks can range from money to making new friends to rubbing shoulders with famous or powerful members.

And they can go far past a particular church community, too. Several times, I heard a rumor while living in Idaho that it was advantageous to doodle a little beehive next to one’s signature on all paperwork done in that state. This beehive, indicating affiliation with Mormonism, was supposed to tip the scales in the doodler’s favor regarding employment, financial aid, legal disputes, disability requests, and much more.

The Rice Christian fly in Christianity’s Vaseline

However, the only real-world aid that Meador describes in the OP is distinctly temporary in nature, and very situational:

A healthy church can be a safety net in the harsh American economy by offering its members material assistance in times of need: meals after a baby is born, money for rent after a layoff.

“The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church,” The Atlantic, July 29, 2023 (archive)

He offers no service-related help, for that matter. Everything he describes is entirely inadequate to the needs that many Americans have, and entirely too short-term a solution. He thinks this limited, short-term aid will be vastly outweighed by warm fuzzies the members of his idealized community will feel:

Perhaps more important, it [this limited, short-term aid] reminds people that their identity is not in their job or how much money they make; they are children of God, loved and protected and infinitely valuable.

“The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church,” The Atlantic, July 29, 2023 (archive)

Sure. And if that were true, churches would not be in decline, because they tell people that all the time as it is. All Meador allows to be added is a small amount of short-term aid to go along with those warm fuzzies.

Strict transactional rules might not feel very Jesusy, but they’re necessary in mutual-aid societies…

How long do you suppose a church like the one Meador and Dechurched idealize will last before desperate people discover it? Not long, I wouldn’t reckon. How long will that community be happy to subsidize a middle-class family whose financial security has been wiped out? Not long either, I’d guess. It’ll take more than a single rent payment to make many Americans solvent after someone loses their job, and more than a few meals dropped off at a home whose family faces a new mouth to feed in order for it to achieve financial equilibrium again.

Any mutual-aid group needs to put very strict rules in place to ensure members’ own financial security. Otherwise, with one-bedroom apartments running over $1,000 a month in some big cities, those churches will be sucked clean in very short order.

That’s one reason that communes work, to the extent that they do. They control their own land and usually provide jobs within their own community. That way, the group’s leaders can track their members’ contributions to the community—so members’ requests don’t ever outweigh their overall contributions. Modern parents’ babysitting circles work much the same way. So does social capital, on a more informal and personal scale.

I’m simply not sure churches are set up to handle that kind of accounting. I’ve sure never heard of one that did it. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, of course. I’ve just never heard of any churches doing it.

… and evangelicals won’t like being on the receiving end of it anyway

Normally, when right-wing Christians in particular dabble in this kind of accounting, it’s punitive.

For instance, Crisis Pregnancy Centers use religious busy-work, like this example from one location’s volunteer manual, to award piddling bits of help to their desperate female victims. As well, all too many religious charities force aid requesters to sit through sermons in order to earn a single meal or a place to sleep that night, like this example from a Christian forum. Note, please, that not one commenter there objects to this situation at all or insists that the homeless be fed first, then listen to the sermon only if they wish. They know better!

If someone tried to do that with evangelicals, I think we’d hear about the results on the evening news that night. They’d know exactly what it means and why it’s happening. As with abortion, the only moral request for help is their request for help. Most of them joined in the first place to get stuff from others (even if some of that stuff is intangible: safety from Hell, attention, conferred power, ready-made friendships), not to give their own stuff away to others.

Otherwise, when Christian church communities reject requests for help, it inevitably results in very sore feelings, as one Catholic discovered. Rejection is beyond inevitable; there’s just so much more help needed than any Christian communities can possibly fulfill. There’s a reason why our government doesn’t allow Christians to handle the social safety net, and it isn’t just that they always end up wielding it like a bludgeon.

If Christianity’s leaders begin asking even more of church congregations, the results are sure to be funny

Jake Meador thinks, as do his pals at TGC and other hardline Calvinist groups, that The Big Problem Here is church leaders asking too little of their congregations. Asking them to be more supportive toward each other—through increased donations of time and resources—will, these evangelicals are sure, bring churches closer to their idealized vision of a united, loving, mutually-supportive community.

Meador can cloak this truth in as many Jesusy descriptions of such churches containing people secure in their identity as “children of God, loved and protected and infinitely valuable.” The real story here lurks within the tangible time-and-resource-based support he wants churches to offer.

However, I don’t think many church leaders will make the grand mistake of taking that advice. I strongly suspect that most sincere evangelical pastors go through a phase of thinking like that. So they will already understand what the results will be as needy or attention-seeking new recruits join their congregations looking to reap communal benefits.

But giving this kind of advice is a win/win for its creators. If nobody listens, they can grouse about being ignored prophets. If someone listens and the situation turns out poorly, they can accuse that hapless sucker for inaccurately enacting the advice, or maybe blame demons for attacking them. And the advice itself sounds so incredibly Jesusy that lots of Christians will assume it simply must succeed, even if they can’t find any churches that actually do it.

As for church leaders themselves, they already know the dire truth facing their religion:

If they don’t have a way to force people to join up and stick around, it increasingly won’t happen.