The proportion of Americans who consider themselves members of a church, synagogue or mosque has dropped below 50 percent, according to a poll from Gallup released Monday. It is the first time that has happened since Gallup first asked the question in 1937, when church membership was 73 percent. (The Washington Post, March 29, 2021)
This news is not big news. Church attendance has been declining for decades. Who cares and why? Aside from sponsored charities, churches are making little contribution to the national weal. Most are uninspiring or irrelevant; others, especially evangelical churches with substantial membership, contribute more than a fair share to dissension and division, to bigotry and abuse, and to the general dissipation of norms of social decency and personal respect. Love your enemy—huh? who said so?
Yesterday, during the mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., vexed David Lawrence, publisher-columnist of U.S. New & World Report, because, so Lawrence opined, King did not know that his place was in the pulpit, not on the pavement. King was not alone in his social activism; of white clergy, rabbis in disproportionate numbers, some leading Protestant ministers, and a few Catholic priests were also active for civil rights. As notable as any was Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Jr., who led the Freedom Rides for Voting Rights in the South.
Today, almost all clergy notable for their views on social matters are from evangelical denominations. Their message is not a moral plea for societal reform—at his best, Billy Graham was ambiguous about desegregation and opposed to King’s efforts—but a garble of Biblical snippets or interpretations almost invariably at odds with the meaning of the text—at its worst, Joel Osteen’s “prosperity gospel” claims that Jesus wants us rich—or, from a national perspective, political trivia about matters of gender orientation, sexual mores, or procreative choices. To me, these preoccupations bespeak dirty minds.
The younger generations—I speak broadly, of course; most alt-right misfits are under 40—want or at least accept more in the way of diversity and equality. The reason is not hard to seek. The end of legal segregation and the fact of some integration has meant that many people, more urban than rural, have grown up in close(r) association with people different from themselves. They are classmates, teammates, co-workers, friends, and lovers. They may have some lingering taint of culturally present bigotries, but they talk as if they are trying to banish them from their lives. When they seek guidance in dealing with moral issues like honesty, empathy, respect for others, etc., they rarely look to churches, synagogues, or mosques which do not preach or apply such messages to daily life. Rev. William Barber is a notable exception. Except for him, when was the last time a prominent man or woman of the cloth was seen leading a movement by organizing efforts at social reform? So the younger generations have left or continue to leave once-respected institutions in search of something to address their needs.
Obviously, churches are not doing so or, in some cases, doing so for shabby reasons. As the “rabbi” to my ex-step daughter, an Episcopal priest, I hope for revivals of the Episcopal and Lutheran churches. I find the efforts of the National Cathedral, the closest thing which we have to a national church, deserving. The Presbyterian and Methodist churches still have their work cut out for them in their struggle against racism. Baptist and Catholic churches—well, let me move on. Even so, the language of faith, grace, redemption, and divine love which fills most sermons offers comfort to some, but it is not the language of action, urges no action, not even self-scrutiny or self-criticism, and, to the modern mind, conveys little meaning and inspires very little. Anyone aware of the harmful, hateful words and deeds of, say, Christian anti-abortionists, Christian anti-immigrants, or White Christian nationalists knows the signs of the anti-Christ.
One note in line with my previous blogs on matters of religion. From my Jewish perspective, a defect of Christianity is its lack of a defined code of conduct. The Nicene and Apostles Creeds speak of Jesus’s miraculous birth and his miserable death, with no word about his teachings, mainly moral. This gap reflects Paul’s antinomian rejection of the Jewish Law. Paul’s love is no instruction, guide, or even a restraint. So Christianity has filled its moral void with locally acceptable cultural, political, and religious customs, norms, and practices. Today, direction for the many nominally Christian is increasingly political dogmas, culture-wars issues, and alt-right cult causes—not sources of humane, never mind presumably Christian, values, principles, and practices.
Of many who have abandoned religion—I exclude DIY religions—and affiliated with the political extremes, moral atrophy is their distinguishing feature. The farther one moves to the left, the closer one gets to the right, and vice versa. Ardent Progressives are little different from ardent Trump supporters; both demand party loyalty, ideological or doctrinal purity, denigrate or attack opponents, deny or avoid facts not conforming to beliefs, and refuse discussion or debate. Locally, Progressives have failed or refused to face the dodges, deceits, and derelictions of a Progressive-dominated City Council in matters of police reform. They are wrong to think that causes are adequate substitutes for conscience and character. Truth, honesty, and the courage of righteous convictions are everywhere in short supply. I have seen Diogenes with his lantern walking the streets of Las Cruces.
So, in the absence of or silence from worthy moral leadership addressing these issues in churches, synagogues, and mosques, I fear a moral anarchy enabled by mendacious or anodyne media pundits and morally confused or politically opportunistic leaders in business, education, law, religion, and government. I fear that individualism—“do your thing,” not do the right thing—has corrupted the social ethic, frayed the social fabric, and debilitated the communal impulses of civil society. These deficiencies, which religious commitments worthy of the name can help remedy, are undermining American democracy. Americans who do not come to think of themselves as a people, as in “We the People,” can expect to become first a mob, then an autocracy, in an apartheid America.
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