Recently, some social scientists studied evangelicalism and came to some interesting conclusions: Its future won’t look particularly Jesusy, at least by current evangelicals’ definitions! Embracing that truth might just stem some of their ongoing decline. But since when did evangelicals excel at embracing the truth?
(From introduction: Jordan “JD” Hall’s lie about a trans lobbyist costs him his church and a huge fine; Hall’s shocking threat against a whistleblower just one month before; Hall’s position in Calvinist hardliner evangelicalism before all that; and David Love tells the same lie and finds out similarly. The case of the stolen prophecies; discussion and review of Jeremiah Johnson’s terribad 2022 prophecies.)
(This post first appeared on Patreon on 9/3/2024. I’m back to audio ‘casts of these posts too, and you can find the recording there!)
Binding the threads of evangelicalism
While I was sick last week, I wrote a short post observing the ongoing fallout of Megan Basham’s book Shepherds for Sale. In her book, Basham tries to make the case that evil liberal kabillionaire Democratic leftists are somehow bribing big-name evangelical leaders to soften their culture-war positions. I find her premise absurd to the point of clownish. If this were actually happening, then it’d be a waste of money. As we’re about to see in a minute, almost no evangelicals actually attend church often enough to make such expenditures worthwhile.
In particular, Basham vilified J.D. Greear, a Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) megapastor and former denominational president. Of course, he wasn’t the only evangelical she accused. Over on Twitter, I ran into another evangelical, Gavin Ortlund, who vagueposted about it. In fact, he was so incredibly vague about it that I didn’t even realize he was referring to Basham at all until someone else pointed it out:
(Notice that Ortlund didn’t say he was doing that. Just that he didn’t want people to assume he wasn’t. That’s not the same thing at all—especially in evangelicalism.)
That loose thread has been on my mind. It was just a little observation when I wrote about it last week, but it quickly blew up into questions of its own: What was all this intra-tribal warfare all about? Why this book now, of all times, when evangelicalism seems poised to shatter into conservative and ultraconservative splinters?
Studying evangelicalism came naturally to Ryan Burge
Ryan Burge has also been on my mind lately. For years, he’s been part of a small and largely-informal research team that studies the decline of Christianity. In general, I like him and appreciate what he brings to the public table. He’s also an evangelical pastor. His church, First Baptist Church in Mount Vernon, Illinois, just closed its doors for good. He’d pastored it for almost 20 years.
I’ve long suspected what he admitted in the closure news:
What I was really trying to do was to convince myself that the rapid decline of my church wasn’t my fault. [. . .]
While my online platform was rising and I was being offered a variety of opportunities to speak and write, things were continuing to decline at my little church. I would come from home from speaking at a conference that had a couple hundred in attendance to preach before a nearly empty sanctuary on Sunday morning.
It was not his fault that his church closed. I don’t think any other pastor could have (or for that matter would have) kept that from happening. I’ve been part of a church that never quite lived, one whose existence not even the internet remembers now. It’s a painful situation for everyone involved—one that evangelicals are ill-equipped to handle due to their prosperity gospel mindset.
The reality of church growth has nothing to do with Jesus or Jesusing
Evangelicals have always assumed that if Jesus likes how a group does church, to use the very Low Christianese, then that church will grow. By now, that is a completely universal belief. Conversely, if Jesus doesn’t like something about the church, then it will shrink and fail. Well, almost always, anyway, as we’ll see in a moment.
Neither is true.
The truth of churches’ growth or closure looks way different: Their precise beliefs about Christianity, their doctrines, their culture-war stances, the Bible translation version they prefer, none of that particularly matters.
What matters far more to the survival of a church is attracting and maintaining a cohesive group culture that features lots of activities that people like doing.
That is why megachurches like the one J.D. Greear pastors will always cannibalize smaller churches. They feature a staggering array of perks and amenities that lure in members from great distances. Once a church congregation drops below a certain number (and this number depends greatly on the church’s exact circumstances), its leaders will find that both retention and recruitment become more and more difficult.
But it wasn’t always like this. Even just decades ago, Christianity wasn’t optional in most American communities. Evangelical leaders had successfully convinced most people that Christian devotions and church membership were essential to democracy itself. Anyone who chose not to perform those devotions and belong to a church risked shunning or worse from their home community.
In such an environment, even small community churches could survive without needing to worry about activities or cohesiveness. Their leaders could flatter themselves into thinking that they survived because Jesus liked how they did church.
As Christianity itself became more and more optional, suddenly real-world group culture and dynamics began to matter enormously. I don’t think most church leaders—particularly in evangelicalism—ever achieved that switch in their own thinking.
This huge sea change has led to an amusing bit of double-think in evangelicalism:
- X Church grows because Jesus has blessed them
- Y Church grows because demons help them, but Jesus doesn’t like them at all
The source of a church’s growth depends entirely on the judging Christian’s assessment of their level of TRUE CHRISTIANITY™. A megachurch’s own members proclaim that their church grows because Jesus likes them, while the beleaguered members of the tiny church a mile away bitterly gripe about megachurch demons poaching their sheep.
The great ‘casual dechurching’ of evangelicalism
Now that Christianity is far more optional for most Americans, people have begun treating church membership like any other club or social activity they might pursue in their shrinking amounts of free time.
I don’t think evangelicals in particular have dealt well with this new normal. Their leaders have insisted for years that church membership is not optional for Christians. Even if a particular Christian has been hurt enormously and consistently by church congregations and leaders, they will still refuse to allow that person to opt out of church membership. However, those leaders are not reckoning with their hosts.
Ryan Burge calls what he sees happening in Christianity a “casual dechurching.” Dechurching is Christianese for leaving church culture behind. And casual dechurching is leaving it behind for what he calls “very boring reasons, very logistical reasons.”
(Sometimes, you’ll hear Christians call people who aren’t involved with churches “unchurched.” Some years back, Lee Strobel wrote a book about “unchurched Harry and Mary.” We even reviewed it some years back. It was a hilarious work of speculative fiction.)
Though big blowout disaffiliations do happen over politics or evangelical bigotry, Burge says, casual reasons dominate his research.
The god of the social and financial gaps
The primary of these casual reasons is simply moving away, Burge has found. Once someone moves away, they increasingly don’t prioritize finding a new church to attend.
Years ago, non-Christian skeptics poked fun at the god of the gaps or God did it. That term means that as we learn more and more about ourselves and our universe, we keep answering questions that Christianity used to answer with “well, Yahweh did it.” As an answer, “Yahweh did it” covers smaller and smaller ground. He creeps into the gaps of our knowledge, and he keeps having to retreat backward into smaller and smaller gaps as our knowledge grows.
The same thing may be true of modern American life. What used to dominate a Christian’s week eventually gets relegated to that person’s spare time. Alas, spare time rarely grows in amounts. It usually shrinks, at least until retirement. There’s always something that feels more important or pressing that needs to get done. Gen Z and Alpha Americans in particular seem to be busier than any previous generation’s young adults ever have been—and way more cash-strapped.
So Christianity becomes like a hobby the Christian used to do a lot, but hasn’t had time for in years—and can’t afford to do anyway. Ryan Burge’s team has found that only about a quarter of Americans who think church attendance is important actually attend with any regularity. Worse, that number appears to be growing slowly over time since 2008.
Pastors will need to significantly retool their vision of doing church to keep their congregation from becoming one of the closure statistics.
Finally, an evangelical says it out loud
On his Substack, Ryan Burge seems surprised to learn that there are people in America who identify as evangelical but don’t perform much, if any, Christian devotions and don’t belong to any churches. He shouldn’t be. The rise of what I call churchless believers has been one of the most potent signs of Christianity’s lost coercive powers. These folks are not non-Christians. Most of them aren’t even completely opposed to joining a church. They just haven’t found any they consider worth joining. So they don’t have much to do with evangelicalism beyond wearing the label.
Perhaps it is this phenomenon that led Burge to write:
[R]eligion doesn’t mean what most people think it means. Increasingly, it’s not some kind of theological ascent where people come to a clear understanding of Jesus, Mohammad, nirvana, etc. [. . .] Instead, I believe that religion has been reduced to little more than a tribal marker, much in the same way that people say they are a fan of the Yankees, or they are Irish, or graduated from Stanford. It’s a way to create an “us vs. them” dynamic.
FINALLY, someone in evangelicalism says it.
I’m not even sure church membership was ever about achieving a “theological ascent.” That might have been its official reason, sure, but there’s no way it could be—not with the sheer catastrophic failure of Christianity to reach that goal. Someone can attend church three times a week for 80 years, pray like a saint, speak in tongues every time, and know the Bible backwards and forwards, and yet still be the most vicious racist anyone ever saw. (And I’ve personally seen that one!)
Whether church membership was ever about achieving theological ascent or not, though, it’s become something else entirely—at least for successful, growing congregations.
Evangelicalism as a social club that doesn’t want to capitalize on its social-club nature
Last year, Burge talked to Church Leaders, an evangelical website aimed at, well, church leaders. In that chat, he describes a strategy he thinks could help evangelical church leaders stop their decline and perhaps even grow again. Check this out and tell me how often you think evangelical pastors would burst into flames just listening to it:
You’ve got to find ways to get Nones on your property in non-confrontational, non-super-evangelical ways…You’ve got to show them that you’re normal people. You’re not weirdos. You’re not trying to make them change their life radically. Today, all you’re trying to do is lift their burdens a little bit and get them through this day in a way that makes sense to them. [. . .]
People need friends, they want social connection. And we cannot discount the fact that, while church is about Jesus and salvation, all those eternal things, it’s also about temporal things like making connections and making friends.
For years now, I’ve maintained that voluntary, optional Christianity operates much like any other social group of that nature. A church will grow if it can offer members these simple things:
- No dealbreakers like unresolved, active, ongoing sex abuse scandals
- Activities people enjoy at price points they feel are fair
Simply put, the monetary and emotional cost of membership plus the opportunity costs involved in NOT doing other things with that time and energy has to make sense.
Making evangelicalism make sense won’t come easy to evangelical pastors, though
Back in 2022, Burge offered an anecdote about how he found a way to give his members a sense of belonging to their community: He started a charity drive to make brown-bag weekend meals for poor public schoolchildren in his church’s community. According to him, his church members made 225 lunches every weekend for children who likely didn’t get much to eat on days when school wasn’t in session. At the time, I suspect his congregation numbered about 15 people.
By then, perhaps it was already too late to affect their church’s fate. But I’ve seen other churches that seem to be managing all right by throwing themselves into community service. I’m just not sure evangelicals could do it, given their cruelty-is-the-point mindset and utter hatred and contempt of the poor. Traditionally, they engage in helping the poor only as a route to coercing them into enduring recruitment attempts—which they call service evangelism.
Even if that hatred and contempt didn’t exist, evangelicals have a much bigger problem.
Evangelicalism is essentially a self-focused, inward-facing worldview
Their entire worldview revolves around themselves. Evangelicalism is solipsistic to an absolutely absurd degree. Their leaders teach them to look out for #1—always, first, and forever. To hell with everyone else—literally, if need be. They’re gonna get theirs.
Don’t let the devil steal your joy, I often heard when I was Pentecostal. That means that no matter what’s going on in the world, no matter what other people might be doing or saying, make sure your safety from Hell remains intact! That is the singular goal of any Hell-believer.
The only way to avoid Hell is to maintain high levels of faith. So just as a church will grow if its beliefs are perfect, maintaining fervent lifelong faith is most possible through accepting and embracing the most perfect beliefs.
Proper beliefs, therefore, matter much more than obeying Jesus’ direct commands to do tons of charity and love their enemies. Evangelicals put orthodoxy way before praxis. For that matter, practice might not even enter into their considerations. Or else it is an afterthought, the expected but hardly mandatory results (or fruit) of proper beliefs.
This intense focus on only embracing the most correct beliefs possible functions as a great substitute for doing all that Jesusy stuff evangelicals don’t want to do. That’s how an 80-year-old Pentecostal grandmother can Jesus hard for her entire life and quote Bible verses to support every single one of her religious beliefs, yet openly use racist slurs, view the poor with extreme suspicion and dislike, and vote for measures that disproportionately hurt all the people she hates.
So I don’t think evangelicals will be able to make the shift to thinking of their groups as purely voluntary and optional. They’ll keep thinking of churches as mandatory, then seethe impotently when reality refuses to cooperate.
NEXT UP: Don’t worry, everybody! Some evangelicals know exactly how to end their religion’s decline. Sort of. We’ll check out their stunning (and largely contradictory) ideas next time. See you soon!
Please support my work!
Thanks for reading, and thanks for being part of our community! Here are some ways you can support my work:
- Patreon, of course, for as little as $2 a month! I now write Patreon posts twice a week. They drop on Tuesday and Friday mornings for patrons, then a few days later on the main site, Roll to Disbelieve.
- Paypal, for direct one-time gifts. To do this, go to paypal.com, then go to the personal tab and say you want to send money, then enter captain_cassidy@yahoo.com (that’s an underscore between the words) as the recipient. It won’t show me your personal information, only whatever email you input.
- My Amazon affiliate link, for folks who shop at Amazon. Just follow the link, then do your shopping as normal within that same browser window. This link adds nothing to your Amazon bill, but it does send me a little commission for whatever you spend there.
- And as always, sharing the links to my work and talking about it!
0 Comments