Can Christianity Be Saved?: A Comment on a NY Times Editorial & a HuffingtonPost.com Rebuttal

On July 14, Ross Douthat, in a New York Times op-ed piece, asks the question, “Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved?”  Diana Butler Bass, in a rebuttal to Douthat on her HuffingtonPost.com religion blog, argues that the question should be reprased as "Can Christianity Be Saved?", and argues that liberal Christianity be what eventually will save it. While I pretty much agree with Butler Bass' rephrasing of the question, as well as with much of her critique Douthat's argument, I would offer a third possible opinion as to the future of Christianity.

Douthat’s argument follows the popular narrative that liberal churches are shrinking while conservative churches are expanding. The only problem, as Butler Bass points out in her rebuttal, is that this is neither particularly original nor completely true.  His comment may have been true 40 years ago, when the downward trend in religious membership first started, because it hit liberal Christian denominations first.  But it is no longer true today, as the down turn has spread across liberal and conservative denominations alike.

As I covered fairly extensively in my recent book, Paradoxy: Creating Christian Community Beyond Us and Them, popular reporting tends to overlook this fact.  Conservative congregations leaving the Episcopal Church and other liberal denominations to align with like-minded conservative groups get a lot of press.  Yet the substantial reverse flow of liberal-to-moderate refugees back into the Episcopal Church from these departing conservative churches is almost never reported.  True, there are a number of liberal churches that are shrinking, but there are quite a few non-conservative congregations (some that would call themselves liberal, and others, like mine, that reject left/right labels) that are growing significantly.  True, there are a number of conservative churches that are growing, but there are quite a few that are facing declines in membership.  For example, since its ultra-conservative wing gained control of its seminaries and other denominational bodies, the Southern Baptist Convention has been losing members to moderate breakaway groups at a rate more than double that of the Episcopal Church.  And if one factors out confounding practices like re-baptism and including unbaptized births in growth numbers, the downward trend in conservative congregations actually started much earlier than recent SBC reports indicate.

What is at work here is not a conservative versus liberal phenomenon.  Indeed, those very labels are beginning to lose their meaning as more and more people come to understand that the modern conservative and liberal expressions of Christianity are not the polar opposites we thought they were, but merely two different approaches to eliminating doubt from faith and to achieve unity:  conservative Christianity by claiming what is true cannot be doubted and liberal Christianity be claiming what can be doubted may not be true; conservative Christianity by focusing primarily on the truths about Jesus (adherence propositional doctrines) and liberal Christianity by focusing on the truths of Jesus (following Jesus’ ethical teachings). Both of these are “bounded-set” ways of thinking about Christian community; both define Christianity in terms of the boundary conditions between Christians and non-Christians (or between “true” Christians and “heretics”).  One says you are Christian if you believe the right things about Jesus, the other says you are a Christian if you live the way Jesus thought us to live.

But we are now in the midst of a massive paradigm shift in how followers of Christ define Christian Community.  Large numbers of Christ-followers are rejecting bounded-set ways of thinking about Christianity, defining it not in terms of the beliefs and practices that lie at its boundaries, but rather in terms of relationship with the Person who resides at the heart of our faith: our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  If this trend continues, it will be the death of the church as we know it and its rebirth as something both old and new.  Many of us believe that the Christianity that emerges from this turbulent time of transition will be much less institutionally religious than it has almost ever been, and that it will have re-embraced its identity as a Christ following movement that transcends religion.

And that’s a good thing…