A church in tatters
In my review of Rodney Clapp’s new book on neoliberalism a few months back, I write the following:
Clapp sometimes partakes of a certain Hauerwasian grammar, whereby the indicative is used to describe what the church ought to be but is not (yet). Call it the eschatological indicative. Such language can function prophetically, calling the church to enact its baptismal and pentecostal identity, whatever its past or present failings. But it can also mystify the facts on the ground. Those facts are plainly put: The American church is in tatters. Our witness is shredded, our integrity a joke, our children bereft of a heritage and leaving the faith in droves. Reading Clapp’s book, at least until I reached the restraint of the epilogue, I simply did not recognize in his rhetoric the church as it currently exists. The rot, neoliberal and otherwise, runs deep. I want to amen the confidence of Clapp’s homiletic. But mostly I just find myself sighing in lament and anguish.
That passage has stuck with me, partly because it surprised me when I wrote it, partly because it gave words to an unexpressed emotion that, the moment it was on the page, I realized articulated exactly how I had been feeling for some time. The church is in tatters: lament and anguish. That’s it, right there. That’s the alternately benumbed and depressed sensibility I find in myself as I survey the church in America today, a sensibility I detect in many others.
Most folks I know who are in their 30s and 40s and who were raised in the church fall into only a few categories. One is ex-Christian: they’ve left the faith. Another is ex-church: they like Jesus but they don’t do the public-worship-and-assembly thing. A third is deconstructing: they’re currently in the midst of a sincere and long-ranging reconsideration of all they’ve been taught, about God, Scripture, Jesus, religion, ethics, politics, family, what have you. A fourth is imploding: their marriage or job or kids or personal life hit some wall or obstacle and a metaphorical IED blew it all to smithereens, and they’re doing their best to pick up the pieces. The fifth and final group comprises those whose faith as well as church membership are living and active and relatively stable, but who are hanging on by a thread. A single modest financial or family crisis, a lost job or a sick parent, a church scandal or a friend’s move away—a real but not life-altering event—would cut the thread and send them spinning into one of the first four categories.
And that’s about it. If I were to select a single word to unite all of these groups, it would be exhausted. And that exhaustion is ecclesial and spiritual as much as it is economic, professional, political, medical, familial, marital, or social. Even the best and most faithful Christians I know in this demographic are spent, tired, struggling with mental health, terribly lonely. They are, in a word, suffering a kind of sustained desolation while clinging to Christ with all they have—which is not much.
Is it always like this? Has it ever been thus? If I went back and polled our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents at this stage in life, would they report the same? Yes, granted, life happens, and life includes pain and suffering, job loss and cancer, divorce and broken friendships and the rest. Life has always happened. But this feels more specific. It is not as though the church has never been well, in this or that time and this or that place. I know enough of church history to tell you about some of those times and places. Some of them were recent. The church and its members sometimes are brimming with confidence, catechesis, and overall health.
This does not seem to be one of those times, whether one looks at the hard data (the sociological research is rather devastating here) or the anecdata (i.e., one’s neighbors and friends and community). The Lord’s promise to the church is that the gates of hell will not prevail against it. But as I’ve written elsewhere, that promise applies to the church, not to yours or mine, not even to a regional or national collection of believers. The Lord will remain faithful to his people even should it be depleted to a remnant of one. Sometimes, though, it feels like that’s precisely what’s happening in America, a winnowing and whittling down, until there’s none of us left, not even one.
