The End of Christianity? On Losing, Dying, and Doing Something Else
The End of Christianity? On Losing, Dying, and Doing Something Else
Should the worst happen, what sort of spirituality will carry Christianity through growing associations with fundamentalism and theocratic ambition?
Is Christianity dying in America?
Maybe. That question is never far from my mind. But there’s another step before death, one which I’ve been thinking about since the 2016 election: what if we lose?
I’m not asking that in the way many did leading up to the 2016 election. The ascendancy of Donald Trump directly coincides with an anxiety among American Evangelical Christians (of which I am one) that they were losing their grip on a culture war they’d been fighting for decades. More than any fear of the church “dying,” it is losing which seems to have shaped the American Christian mindset since I was born.
I grew up in the culture war, was even pretty militant about it. I won’t go into too many details, but let’s say I might have fit in well at the Daily Wire if the early 2010s had treated me differently.
Thankfully, God wrestled with me until I saw my faith’s emphasis on freedom and justice with new eyes. I “deconstructed,” some might say, though my travail doesn’t map onto the “exvangelical” pipeline (and I’ve got feelings about that terminology I’m sure I’ll get into later). I kept my insider’s perspective. I watched peers transpose their religious identities–bombastic but ultimately fragile and uncertain–into thoroughly political ones. For them, the election of Donald Trump and his promise of an “anti-woke” platform was as close to “victory in Jesus” as they’d ever gotten–and I don’t think any of them could really say why.
By the time it all happened, fidelity to Christ had led me in a more ecumenical direction. For my circles, this election was one more victory of imperialism and worldly power over the essentially nonviolent message of the Gospel. Then, as the 2020 election came and went, and January 6th became a new cultural touchstone for the United States, I watched more and more people who claimed the same religious identity as me throw their lot in with a man and a narrative that couldn’t be further from the God I believe in. Being in my faith community felt like returning to my hometown for the first time in 10 years and seeing all the old haunts and landmarks closed, dark, torn down, or replaced. I started to notice the friends I made and the media I followed going out of their way to distinguish “Christians they knew” from an increasingly automatic equation: Christian = Evangelical = White Nationalist.
To those who buy into the total truth of this equation, I beg you to brook a little nuance. Christianity is not, thank God, reducible to the “Christian nation” that has insisted on its own being-so for the last half-century. But in begging for nuance, I also have to admit that this equation is far more true than not true: American Evangelical Christians have insisted that they are the model of Christianity for the entire world, and have worked hard to export their identity across the globe. Conversion has mostly meant religious and political conformity. (There’s a story that lives rent-free in my head about Evangelical missionaries going to the former USSR, unable to get around to the idea that the persevering Orthodox of the regions were, in fact, already Christians.) And the more talk there is of a “dying church,” the more aggressive the colonization becomes. We cannot stand to lose the power and influence we’ve carefully cultivated, and the last ten years have shown the lengths to which we’ll go to secure it.
So when I, as a Christian, look at what’s happening in the world and ask, What if we lose? I mean, what if our worst demons win? What if the assumption that Christians are not-even-crypto fascists takes root, grows, and is affirmed? What if, in the process, my love is doubted and my ideology is put on trial? The reconciling Gospel forgotten under the terrible damage caused by those who tried to force the fearful love of God on the nation? What if my persecution comes at the hands of those same Christians who ascended to power and then pivoted towards an inquisition of all that is “woke”?
To be properly apocalyptic about it, I’m wondering whether Christianity has, in its peculiarly American institution, been consumed by the spirit of “antichrist,” which was always its worst potential. If the Gospel of Jesus will become more and more associated with tyranny and authoritarianism. The theocracy we feared back in 2001 may soon be home-grown in the name of “protecting our Christian nation.” And those of us who believe our God is anti-theocracy will be in the minority, bearing a Gospel of peace but, because it uses the same words as an ideology of violence, unable to preach it openly–at least not in the ways we’re used to.
I believe Christians in the United States are very close to “losing.” Maybe even to “dying,” depending on how deeply the theocratic imagination takes root and comes to power. (And as the ever-on-it
shows: it’s pretty deep already.) There’s a reason why I’m launching these thoughts during the final days of Lent, as the global church is meant to be pondering its finitude, its fallibility, its bondslaveness to death from which our God saves and regenerates us. We live in the not-knowing for a season, suspending “assurance of what we hope for” and “proof of what we cannot see” to live in the tremulous doubt of the first Apostles watching their Lord tried, tortured, and executed as a criminal for upsetting the status quo with proclamations of judgment on the rich and powerful and, perhaps more scandalously, a promise of regeneration and conciliation for all people with each other and with God.In an interview that I cannot locate to save my life but that I’m very sure exists, the late French philosopher Paul Virilio was asked what difference his Catholicism made to his thinking. “To me,” Virilio said, “Catholicism means that, in the end, we lose. We all die. … And then, we do something else.” Even as we sink into the dark places, we always have Easter on the horizon. After death has had its way, we who hope in Christ must–will–do “something else.”
It’s this “something else” that I want to think more about with you all in the pages of this blog. The sense that we cannot move forward without a spiritual renovation that will reorder our priorities and get us to ask different questions. Questions that are no longer about the church’s social relevance or dwindling population and that instead assume and accept thes consequences of our failure. Not our failure to adapt to modernity, but our failure to do the justice tasked to us.
Because we cannot give up our vocation towards peace and justice out of a sense of shame or futility that our institution, our place of belonging, has become an expulsive parody of itself. We can see this disorientation is also an opportunity for reorientation. To cultivate a humility that can sojourn along margins of cultural power and credibility. We may not be used to this; it may feel like a “valley of the shadow of death.” But along the road, we will meet the brothers and sisters long victimized by the Christianity of the rich and powerful. The “end” of Christianity in America may also be the beginning of long-deferred conciliation.
I do not want to be glib when I say a time is coming when Christians in America may have more in common with the oppressed than the oppressor. Lord willing, we will never repeat the depth of violence that would seem to imply. “Persecution” still feels too strong for what I see on the horizon; the hell we feel will still be one of our own making. But Christ harrows all hells, no matter their depth. The spirituality that will sustain us has to start from that faith and go back to it again and again:
“Here, In the utmost loneliness, [the most living love] is preached to the dead… Since this love-death of our Lord, death has taken on a quite different meaning; it can become for us an expression of our purest and most living love, assuming that we take it as a conferred opportunity to give ourselves unreservedly into the hands of God. It is then not merely an atonement for everything that we failed to do, but, beyond that, an earning of grace for others to abandon their egoism and choose love as their innermost disposition.” (Hans Urs von Balthasar, Credo, 54)
I’m grateful to do this work under the banner of unRival Network, a non-profit organization that accompanies peacebuilders to nurture hope, inspire collaboration, and overcome destructive rivalries in a nonviolent struggle for justpeace. It’s a rare privilege, being empowered by my employer to be myself in a forum like this. But the groundwork I’m laying here also represents the overall mission of unRival to expand its community of regular people seeking ever-better ways of being together:
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