I caught this little local news snippet yesterday and thought it was interesting–both for what it says, and what it doesn’t say. It’s about a Creationist coming to a local church in that area to give a lecture about his branch of fundagelical pseudoscience. What this church doesn’t realize is that their guest speaker is part of the reason for their religion’s dwindling numbers, relevance, and credibility.
Last time, I showed you that a person can have love, or they can have culture wars–but they can’t have both. Unfortunately, a huge number of Christians want both. Such people truly believe that they can totally be loving while they try to rip other folks’ lives apart, rob them of their rights, and discriminate against them–as long as they do it all with a big ole Jesus smile on their faces! But something is changing in the world of religion, and we saw evidence of that coming change this very month. It has to do with Christians’ tendency toward criticism avoidance.
Sometimes it’s downright painful to see a Christian skate right up to the edge of understanding and then skitter and windmill away from it again. Richard Krejcir has managed that stunt in a post he wrote for an evangelical church leadership site, reminding me yet again that culture-war-loving Christians really don’t have a good solution for their current membership crisis.
Do more of that, and harder. It’s a mantra by now. It hasn’t actually worked yet, but it’s literally all the religion’s leaders have in their toolbox for coping with a crisis that nobody–most especially themselves–ever saw coming.
One of the most fascinating bits of fallout from the ongoing secularization of America is that we’re starting to ask some questions now that would have been completely unthinkable 20 or 25 years ago. One of the most provocative of those questions centers on whether or not we should start taxing churches and making them responsible for all of their own activities and upkeep. What would have been shocking and quickly rejected out of hand is now getting some serious attention from all kinds of places!
The biggest Protestant denomination in the United States continues to suffer serious churn in its membership, and those of us who are rooting for its failure won’t be disappointed to hear how they’re dealing with it. I recently discovered a quiet little update to one of their most surprising task force meetings.
Kim Burrell is a gospel singer and minister who wants us all to know that she thinks gay people are ickie. But in displaying her homophobia, she’s accidentally illustrated something about where her religion is going, and why.
We’ve been talking about the various ways that Christianity has used coercion to convert and retain members through the centuries. Its legal clout has faded and its political power has waned, its credibility as a world faith is faltering more quickly than anybody could have guessed, its members leave by the thousands per day, and churches close by the hundreds per year. Its leaders and adherents alike know that clearly, something must be done! But when there is nothing in their toolbox but coercion, then that is the tool they shall use–even when coercion only hastens their end.
We’ve been talking lately about the various ways that Christianity rose to power as the dominant Western religion in the 2nd to 5th centuries. But the fun couldn’t last, and now that power is declining sharply with every passing year. As Christians began losing the power to force people to comply with their demands, they also became increasingly desperate to regain that power.
We’ve been talking lately about the various ways that Christianity rose to power as the dominant Western religion in the 2nd to 5th centuries. But the fun couldn’t last, and now that power is declining sharply with every passing year. As Christians began losing the power to force people to comply with their demands, they also became increasingly desperate to regain that power.