For more than a decade I hosted a nationally syndicated talk show. I read five newspapers a day, 30 journals a month and a few books a week. All of that helped me learn to spot certain trends, and all of them, I think, contribute to our nation's current crisis.
I’ll mention just three.
Dick Staub
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• The rise of unbelief. The number of people who say they have no religious affiliation has doubled in the past 20 years.
• The decline of Christianity. The percentage of American Christians has shrunk from 86 percent to 76 percent since 1990, according to a new survey, and the decline is not entirely undeserved.
• Widespread dehumanization. In what management guru Charles Handy calls “The Age of the Hungry Soul,” there are signs of widespread spiritual, creative, intellectual, relational and moral impoverishment.
Like all ideologies, unbelief has consequences, but our current crises cannot be laid at the feet of unbelievers. Instead, I lay it at the feet at the faux Christianity that dominates American religious life.
Catholic, mainline, evangelical, Pentecostal, fundamentalist and other churches share the blame, as each has failed in its own way to represent Jesus to the world.
Look at the list of obvious failures:
• The hypocrisy of sex scandals including Catholic priests, televangelists and faith leaders, including the former president of the National Association of Evangelicals.
• The spread of greed, consumerism and “affluenza” instead of caring for the poor as Jesus commanded.
• Instead of practicing the Augustinian rule of “In essentials unity; in non-essentials liberty; in all things charity,” we’ve offered
the spectacle of more than 38,000 Christian denominations.
• Instead of loving “outsiders,” many Christians declared war on them, seeking political power over spiritual power and personal renewal.
• In a culture characterized by diversion, mindlessness, celebrity and propped up by technology and clever marketing strategies, churches have become consumer-driven entertainment centers or faddish demographically shaped special interest groups divided by age, ethnicity, education, income or worship style.
Sadly, in an age of spiritual hunger most of American Christianity offers an unbearable lightness. Coming at all this from a Christian tradition, I'd like to suggest a few elements in the road to recovery.
First, we must restore God to the central place in our lives and churches. This is not a new problem. In the first century, the Apostle John told the church at Ephesus that it was time to return to its first love. The lukewarm church at Laodicea, meanwhile, was chastised as “wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked, so be earnest and repent.” We’d do well to listen up.
Second, we need to rediscover a holistic gospel that is boiled down to its essentials. We must be reminded of the good news that all humans are created in God’s image with extraordinary spiritual, intellectual, creative, relational and moral capacity. Jesus didn’t come to make us Christians, but to make us fully human by restoring all that unraveled in our rebellion against God.
Third, we need to rediscover a sense of authentic community that fosters unity in diversity. The church of my youth required proper belief and behavior as preconditions for belonging. It is obvious that Jesus’ disciples misbehaved and possessed inadequate or incorrect beliefs, but Jesus stayed with them. He was more interested in the direction of their lives than the immediate perfection of their lives.
Finally, we must serve our local community like Jesus served his, in both word and deed. Last year, a young woman in our community named Darlene Pohl died suddenly and her boss spoke at her memorial service. Here’s what he said:
“Darlene loved her God, her faith, and her church. We didn’t talk about it a lot, but it was clear she had an extraordinarily deep faith. A confident faith. This was clear in her lack of a need to talk about it. Perhaps from her faith came a remarkable moral compass. Her ethics were sharp and accurate and fair. This you would see everyday in how he talked to the kids. How she dealt with the kids when they made mistakes. Her instincts were always on target, and I learned a lot from her.”
A moral compass.
Sharp ethics.
Faith lived out instead of talked about.
Sure sounds like a way out of the storm to me.
Dick Staub is the author of The Culturally Savvy Christian and the host of The Kindlings Muse (www. thekindlings.com). His blog can be read at www.dickstaub.com. This column is distributed by Religion News Service.