Decline and its possibilities

Is society in decline? Is our culture getting worse? Is the West less Christian by comparison to the past? And are these things a cause for lament?

Your answers to these questions do a lot of work in locating you in debates among Christians about the state of things today. I’m thinking in particular of anti-declinists, who resist and reject declension narratives as hysterical, overwrought, incomplete, or even unchristian. It occurred to me recently that anti-declinists confuse a number of concepts—which is not their fault, since their opponents often confuse them as well—that are distinct from one another.

First is decline. In what sense decline? In what area(s) of life? Religious in particular? Social, moral, aesthetic, political, economic? Or is the question a matter of net gain/loss? Claims about net loss are always going to be inordinately subjective. Countering a sense of loss in, say, church attendance with an equivalent gain in household wealth is a textbook instance of changing the subject. To be frank, Christians concerned about whether people have left church for good don’t care about the economy. It’s apples and oranges.

The second issue is blame. It’s often assumed that, if things have in some sense gotten worse (over the years, decades, or centuries), then those responsible are them, out there, the Bad Guys. But this doesn’t follow. It may well be the case that things have gotten worse because of us. The culprit, in other words, is Christians. Christians are on the hook for the things they bemoan. The church is culpable for social, moral, or religious decline. The proper response to recognition of genuine decline, then, is not pointing fingers at the world but donning sackcloth and ashes; fasting and prayer; contrition and repentance. (Next is figuring out a faithful path forward, but doing so is still an in-house affair.)

The third issue is judgment. Christians believe that God is Judge. And within history, God’s mysterious providence does not withhold all consequences of the actions of individuals, communities, and nations until the End, but enacts them, in part, in time, as anticipations of the Final Judgment. Our chickens do not always come home to roost. But sometimes they do. And when they do, it is the work of God. In the realm of social or cultural decline, then, Christians are inclined to see the hand of God. And often as not, it is against the church that his hand works. Judgment begins at the house of God. Nor is divine judgment a sneaky way of outsourcing blame back onto the culture. Well, this is God’s work—guess y’all will acknowledge him now! On the contrary, sometimes divine judgment works for the world to the detriment of God’s people. Assyria wins and Israel loses; Babylon wins and Judah loses. Not ultimately, but for quite a while. The gates of hell shall not prevail against the church. But Caesar made thousands of martyrs for a full three centuries before the bloodletting stopped.

The fourth issue is suffering. Not all suffering on the part of Christians is God’s judgment on our sins. But all of it is an opportunity to imitate Christ. That is, to unite out sufferings to his in patient endurance as a witness to the power of his resurrection. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Let us say, even, that the sweat of the saints—the smallest of pains in the mundane challenges of daily discipleship—is likewise the seed of God’s word scattered on the soil of our culture. It is God who gives the increase. All we can do is witness. We are not to seek after suffering. But when it comes, as it always will, in whatever form, our calling is to persevere. Not to whine. Not to complain. Not to eschew martyrdom for a martyr complex. Not, certainly, to feign bemusement at this strange disruption of how things should be, namely, life running smoothly. Life running smoothly is a blessed temporary relief from the ordinary run of things in a fallen world. So even and especially when society is in process of some kind of decline, even and especially if it is religious in nature, the task of the church is the same: faithful witness in suffering.

The fifth issue is hope. To spy decline is not to deny grounds for hope. Hope is in God alone. His promise is sure: the gates of hell will not prevail against the people whose God is the Lord. Nevertheless they will claim victories along the way: provisional victories, but victories all the same. Christian hope lies neither in the absence of decline nor in renewal following decline but in the ultimate victory of Christ above and beyond the waxing and waning of human civilizations. Behold, the nations are as a drop in a bucket. For the Lord, that is, and therefore for the church. A whole political theology is contained in that single verse. The peoples are like grass, which wither under the Lord’s breath; he makes nations rise and fall, but his word stands forever. Decline is both real and inevitable. It is also subordinate to the mission and worship of the church.

If I’ve been training my sights on the errors of the declinists, a few implications follow for anti-declinists as well.

First, decline is possible. To read some anti-declinists, you’d imagine they’ve sincerely bought into the myth of progress. They’re like film critics who tell you, every year, that the movies have never been better. Novels and music and all the other arts, too. Did I mention epic poetry and its public performance and memorization by children? Nothing ever changes, except when it does, and it’s for the better. That’s a mighty dollop of silliness no serious person should countenance. But it’s ruled out a priori for Christians. So for any Christian writer or thinker not driven by pessimism about our age, he or she must at least admit the possibility that decline may happen and perhaps even is happening.

Second, Christian decline is possible. Some anti-declinists read as though, even if a civilization might get worse, the state of the church within that civilization can never get worse. But we’ve already seen that this, also, is a red herring. I often think, in this respect, of Alan Jacobs’ marvelous review of Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option, which opens with a description of the extraordinary Christian culture of fifth-century Cappadocia created and fostered by saints like Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus. Yet no such culture exists there today. Here’s Alan:

If the complete destruction of a powerful and beautiful Christian culture could happen in Cappadocia, it can happen anywhere, and to acknowledge that possibility is mere realism, not a refusal of Christian hope. One refuses Christian hope by denying that Jesus Christ will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, not by saying that Christianity can disappear from a particular place at a particular time.

Christianity can disappear from a particular place at a particular time. When I read non-declinists, I wish they would begin every paragraph with an affirmation of this possibility. Because most of the time, it sounds as though they do not believe it is possible. Yet we know it is possible, because it has happened time and again throughout history. Which means that people worried about it happening here are not fantasists; they are not hysterical just because they worry about it. Their worry may take the form of hysteria. They may be foolish in their response or ungodly in their lament or wicked in their prescriptions, not to mention their treatment of others. But the worry is valid in principle. The only question, ever, is whether it is a plausible worry given our time and place, and thence whether it is likely. It becomes a cultural question, a hermeneutical question, even in a sense an empirical question. That’s the arena for debate. Not its sheer possibility.

Third, non-declinists have to distinguish not just the mode of pessimism from its judgments but also the judgments from their implications. Bemoaning some particular religious or social loss is not ipso facto an endorsement of everything in the past (whether that past be the 1980s or ’50s or ’20s or 1770s or 1530s or 1250s or whenever the ostensible golden age is said to have occurred). Nor is it a denial that anything has improved. Declinists are on the hook for their rhetoric, which should be nuanced and accurate rather than generic and overblown. But anti-declinists are on the hook, too. They often write like to give an inch is to lose a mile. Any decline means total decline. Perhaps also despair. None of which follows.

The Christian theology of providence is an extraordinary analytical tool. It allows the soberest of diagnoses and the most confident of hopes. It’s always a delicate balancing act. Any Christian who writes about the state of society is going to fail in some way. But we can fail a little less, it seems to me, not least by being mindful of the distinctions I’ve elaborated above.