Welcome to the summer journey BEYOND Christianity After Religion.
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So, pour yourself some iced tea or lemonade. Let’s revisit the last decade. I can’t promise that this part of the journey will be enjoyable. But, as any hiker knows, sometimes you have to traverse rough territory to get to a better view.
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As we revisit Christianity After Religion, I want to underscore this short section on pages 28-29. People often mix up “revivals” and “awakenings.” That confusion was almost always one of the first questions I had to address in many events. Holding this definition in mind is the key to understanding the entire book. The quote is from the late William McLoughlin, a historian who taught for many years at Brown University:
“Revivals are essentially rituals of personal religious renewal that are often emotional and always involve a conversion of some sort. Revivals may stand on their own . . . or they may be the subset of an awakening.
An awakening is a much larger event. Awakenings are movements of cultural revitalization that ‘eventuate in basic restructurings of our institutions and redefinitions of our social goals . . . Revivals and awakenings occur in all cultures. They are essentially folk movements, the means by which a people or a nation reshapes its identity, transforms its patterns of thought and action, and sustains a healthy relationship with environmental and social change.’
Awakenings begin when old systems break down, in ‘periods of cultural distortion and grave personal stress, when we lose faith in the legitimacy of our norms, the viability of our institutions, and the authority of our leaders in church and state.’”
— Christianity After Religion
Revivals are personal and, perhaps, congregational. But awakenings are communal, culture-wide convulsions. Revivals may change individuals or grow particular churches. Awakenings transform the patterns and practices of an entire society. Revivals usually support existing institutions. Awakenings typically involve the end of dominance of some institutions and open the way for new ones to emerge.
In Christianity After Religion, I argued that we are in the midst of an awakening, not a revival.
Looking back over the first section of the book, I want to underscore three points: 1) the “crisis of legitimacy,” 2) the decline of Christianity, and 3) revisiting “spiritual” and “religious.” In each case, I note “how my mind has changed” about the topic.
There are a lot of numbers in Part 1. Occasionally, people are turned off or frightened by numbers and trends. Surveys and statistics aren’t destiny. Instead, they are like snapshots in time — and they tell stories if one learns how to listen to them. When I presented Christianity After Religion at events, I initially didn’t realize that numbers scared some of my readers — and more than a few people were angry at me for sharing these statistics or denied the viability of the research. I’ve never been quite sure why. I don’t think of numbers or surveys as perfect instruments. They are one kind of data to enable us to see our world more clearly, especially during times of stress and social division.
In addition to the numbers, the first section introduces a pattern of awakening with five movements that (might) lead to cultural transformation.
Today’s post is long. Make yourself comfortable and read on.
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THE CRISIS OF LEGITIMACY
How My Mind Has Changed:
It was — and is — much worse than we knew
When explaining the “crisis of legitimacy,” I pointed to the “horrible decade” of 2000-2010 and how disorienting recent events were to both religion and politics. Looking at these particular episodes are key to understanding the framework of awakening — and, I hope, foster an honest wrestling with a history we’ve lived through and that has changed us.
If I were writing now, I’d extend that section — “Two Horrible Decades.” Here are a few historical events in the decade that followed the horrible decade, all with continuing consequences in our lives:
2011: Occupy Wall Street
Although the Occupy movement, a left-wing populist protest, was relatively short in duration (two months), it brought the issues of economic inequality, the failures of neo-liberalism, and the power of corporate capitalism to the fore. Its slogan “We Are the 99%” continues to resonate — as the global billionaire class is wealthier than ever and their political goals have (in many cases) reshaped or overtaken most of western democracy. We may not all be camping in tents protesting, but almost all middle-class people across the western world are now aware of how tenuous economic prosperity is, the impact of corporate capitalism on major challenges like climate change, and how uncertain our children’s financial futures are. Occupy wasn’t horrible. The issues it pointed to were — and still are.
2012: Trayvon Martin Shooting
2012: Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting
On February 26, the unarmed 17 year old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by George Zimmermann, who later claimed self-defense and was acquitted by a Florida jury. The case was the most covered media story of the year (eclipsing even the presidential election) and led to the Black Lives Matter movement, especially when Martin’s death was followed by the killings of (among others) Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner. For many white Americans, Trayvon Martin’s death revealed that racism wasn’t “over” (as many had thought with the election of President Obama) and prompted a new awareness of and activism around racial injustice.
On December 14, a heavily armed man walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT and massacred 26 people, including 20 young children. Although there had been school shootings before in the United States, this one was so brutal and the victims so young that the nation was shocked. Politicians tried to pass new gun control measures afterward, but were defeated by powerful gun lobbies. In the decade since, the number of mass shootings has risen from 272 episodes in 2014 to a high of 690 in 2021, falling slightly to 646 in 2022 and, sadly, 346 as of July 4 in 2023. Some of those shootings have become bywords of American violence: Mother Emanuel Church, Pulse Nightclub, El Paso Walmart, Majorie Stoneman Douglas High School, Ulvade Robb Elementary, Navy Yard in Washington, DC, the Las Vegas music festival. Americans have lost confidence in our own safety.
2015: Canadian Indian Residential Schools Report
In 2008, the Canadian government began an investigation into the impact of century-long practice of Indian residential schools — mostly administered by the Catholic Church — on indigenous children. The report issued in 2015 concluded that the system had amounted to cultural genocide and initiated a process for reconciliation between Canadians and First Nations peoples. The report has had a profound impact on Canadian identity, history, and politics — and has opened questions about colonization, native cultures, religion, and violence in other western nations. It was a big deal — and too many Americans don’t know about it.
2016: Brexit/Election of 2016, Clinton v. Trump
One day, historians will write entire books on 2016 in Anglo-American politics. I was in England shortly before the Brexit vote and vividly recall thinking how similar the political environment felt vis-a-vis the early months of the American election — especially regarding anger toward immigrants and a general sense of populist fury against, well, everything. When Brexit passed in the UK, I wondered if it was a signal that Trump might win here. We’ll talk a lot more about 2016 in two weeks when we discuss backlash. All I’ll say now is that 2016 is so painful still to me personally that I can barely write this paragraph. I don’t think I’m the only person in either the UK or the USA to feel this way.
2017: Protests
January 21, 2017, was the largest single protest in modern American history — the Women’s March — when at least 500,000 people (mostly women) descended upon Washington, D.C. protesting the election of Donald Trump. The D.C. march was the largest, but approximately 5 million women joined in cities and towns across the United States, meaning that 1.5% of the nation’s total population protested in the nation’s streets that day. There were 650 marches in other countries as well. The day — and anger over Trump’s election — would prove a catalyst to new political involvement and a potent social force, especially for the #MeToo movement that emerged in October 2017. (MeToo was a smaller movement around sexual abuse launched in 2006, but it exploded in 2017 when the New York Times and the New Yorker published stories about sexual abuse in Hollywood.) Women’s increased political power has been twinned with an increase in strictures against women’s freedom and a revival of “trad” wives and cultures of female submission.
On August 11 and 12, a very different protest erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia. The “Unite the Right” rally gathered white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and Christian nationalists from around the nation as they attempted to block the city of Charlottesville from removing a statue of Robert E. Lee. Their torchlight procession and the riot on the following day created headlines about “alt-right,” fascist, and authoritarian movements — something most Americans had previously ignored. That Trump refused to condemn these groups shocked the political class in Washington and many moderate Americans who had previously considered themselves Republicans. In nearly every way, Charlottesville remade both the Trump presidency and the GOP.
2020: Global Pandemic
Then came the Coronavirus pandemic that disrupted everything and heightened some of the worst trends of the decade. Very few people alive had ever experienced anything like it — and it is, of course, still going on.
UPSHOT: When I was writing Christianity After Religion in 2010 and 2011, I didn’t think things could get worse. They got worse. Much worse. And many more people are questioning the legitimacy of every institution across the western world.
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THE DECLINE OF CHRISTIANITY
How My Mind Has Changed:
It happened faster than predicted
When I wrote the book, I was mostly working with statistics from 2009. One decade later, in 2019, Pew Research released this chart tracking the decline of Christianity over ten years:
That chart, and this one from Public Religion Research on “Generational Religious Identity” from 2022, show the same trend of a drop in Americans who identify as Christians and an increase of the religiously unaffiliated.
Pretty much all the data we have now tells the same story: Fewer Americans claim to be Christians and the number of religiously unaffiliated people continues to grow. (Also, people are not “coming back to church” when they marry and have children. Please throw every expectation from earlier generations in the history waste bin. That’s all gone for good.) Religion is still important and Christianity still influential. But these trends are straining major religious institutions and causing political turmoil about the role of faith in the public square.
There are a lot of bad books covering these developments. For two of the more thought-provoking analyses of these trends, I recommend Robert P. Jones’ The End of White Christian America (2017) and David Hollinger’s Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular (2022). If you like Christianity After Religion, you’ll like both.
UPSHOT: Even among those of us who knew these statistics a decade ago, few imagined the emerging size and scope of religious disaffiliation and its social impact, including the anger directed against evangelical Christianity and the movement to “deconstruct” faith.
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SPIRITUAL AND RELIGIOUS
How My Mind Has Changed:
It hasn’t, mostly
The 2009 responses to the question “Are you spiritual or religious?” on page 92 are remarkably like those below in this Pew survey from 2017. Pew had different percentages for 2012 than the Princeton Survey I’d quoted from 2009, but the numbers wind up in a surprisingly similar place:
The energy is still in the “and,” with those who somehow are seeking to combine or renew their faith traditions with a sense of the spiritual — connecting more deeply with God, one another, creation, and their communities.
One thing that I didn’t anticipate, however, was that the “religious but not spiritual” percentage would hold up quite as much as it has. In an increasingly secularizing culture, that moniker sometimes masks a reactionary movement — especially among some young adults — toward “trad” faith, rejecting contemporary theology and biblical criticism, and finding security in dogmatism and hyper-orthodoxy. The “religious but not spiritual” for a time clustered around online communities referred to as “weird Christians,” a tag that seems less in use than just three years ago.
UPSHOT: Spirituality is still a strong longing in a less religiously concerned culture. “Spirituality,” however, means different things to different people and is a contested term. For some, spirituality points in an open and inclusive direction; for others, it means returning to a kind of neo-medieval romanticism. When someone says they are “spiritual and religious” or “spiritual but not religious,” it is worth exploring what they mean by it!
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IN CONCLUSION
The widespread crisis of legitimacy has deepened and stretched over two entire generations. People who were in college at the turn of the millennium are now in their forties. Children have been born and grown to adulthood in these tumultuous two decades and know no other world. In terms of religion, it has caused every single American religious tradition - liberal or conservative, mainline or evangelical, ancient or modern, sacramental or contemporary - into some sort of defensive posture, worried about membership, budgets, buildings, and the future. No denomination has escaped this and none has dealt with it well. Every plan that I know of to fix, save, restructure, or otherwise rescue particular denominations has failed.
In the broader culture, the crisis of legitimacy has resulted in constant anxiety, politics based in fear, distrust of experts and the media, and division. It isn’t just Donald Trump. These forces were in place before he came on the political scene. He figured out how to leverage them to the advantage of certain groups and people, thus exacerbating the crisis of legitimacy even further.
In short, you aren’t imagining it. All this has really happened. And it has been painful and earth-shaking and bewildering. There is a hint of good news in it all, however. You are not alone.
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QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
Which events of the last twenty years have made the strongest impact on your life? Which ones changed the way you understood the world? Altered your sense of faith or political involvement? How have these historical events changed your mind?
How has the growth of the “nones” effected you, your family or church community? Do you feel angry about these statistics? Understand them? Has your spirituality or theology changed in relation to the decline of Christianity?
What do you think of these David Korten questions on pages 94-95: “By what name will our children and our children’s children call our time? Will they speak in anger and frustration of the time of the Great Unraveling? . . .Or will they look back in joyful celebration on the noble time of the Great Turning, when their forbears turned crisis into opportunity...and brought forth a new era of human possibility?”
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FRIDAY ZOOM Q&A: July 7 at 4PM Eastern/1PM Pacific. Come ready with questions and comments. There will be no guests. Just us. If you can’t attend in real time, I’ll send out a recording within a few hours so you can watch it.
➡️ Friends in Europe, Africa, Australia/NZ, and Asia: Send in questions to the.cottage.email@gmail.com. I’ll try to include them in the conversation.
Check your email for the ZOOM link on July 7 around noon eastern.
As a 75 year old retired pastor, my “awakening “ began with National Guard troops gunning down college students protesting Vietnam. For me, It has never stopped since that day. We have lost touch with the source of our being and our unity with one another and our world. We list the deaths of so many young black men at the hands of police, the emergence of the LGBTQ rights movement, Trump election, the Supreme Court rulings, but we cannot overlook the nightly litany of horror caused by our fascination with our guns and our 2nd amendment rights. I pray we WILL be awakened to a new reality...a new. Life Together ( a hint of Bonhoeffer here?]
I’m late to this thread, but I’ve experienced many events that have revealed systemic instability. 2016. Trumps effect on the Supreme Court. But I also have a question, maybe too broad for this particular discussion...what about Climate Change? And all the extreme weather events that have happened in recent years. I know it might be seen as more “nature” than “culture” but Climate Change definitely signals that the world is changing, and will continue to change, rapidly. It seems like an awakening of some sort might be necessary in the face if it. It’s huge.