Yesterday evening I was able to truck along through more of The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? The book is eminently accessible, chiefly because they don’t just ladle out platefuls of horrifically depressing statistics, they develop sketches of each of the kinds of people who are leaving, according to the demographic categories they’re profiling. The exvangelical sketch, for example, is named Tammy (not a real person) whose husband lost his job and became abusive. Along the way, she discovered her child was molested at a church camp. She, they explain over and over, “is done.” She will never be going back to an evangelical church, though it’s possible some other kind of religious experience might tempt her.
The dechurched mainstream evangelical is named Hannah and is an overwhelmed mother who would certainly go back if someone invited her. She means to, she just never gets around to it. The authors wish aloud that her friend, Amanda, would think of calling her and hope that by reading this book, you will be one such friend. The cultural Christian, Tom, isn’t even a Christian, but he did like going to church a long time ago. He not only needs to be invited to church but, they say, he needs a whole community of people to come around him because even if he did go to church, he wouldn’t know why he was there. There’s a Catholic dechurched profile and a bipoc one. In each case, the person they sketch reflects the data they observed about politics, religious feeling, level of trust in other societal institutions, and broader family relationships. They include a sort of shibboleth about Jan 6 and Christian nationalism in each set of data.
I’m now in the second half, where they’re advising congregations about what they can do, and if they have any hope, or if they should just give up and die. This section starts with a heartwarming anecdote about Dunkirk, which you can take for what you will. I assume they mean that it looks like we’re all done here, but that at the eleventh hour, the few remaining church-goers in America will fly out of their foyers and wrest passersby off the pavement to come back in and begin to tithe once more. They quote Winston Churchill’s rallying cry, “We will fight them on the beaches, etc.” They also use the Belong Believe Behave trope to shape their practical advice. In the section “Belief, Belogning, and Behavior Are Connected,” they reiterate how important it is to go to church:
If we claim to believe and behave but do not belong, we become a lone ranger Christian. While we have a category for shut-ins and other challenging circumstances, the Bible seems fairly clear that we are a people who gather together physically. Our lack of belonging is in itself a behavioral issue. The author of Hebrews tells us not to neglect meeting together. In every city where the gospel is preached in Acts, the new believers were connected to a local church. We are given dozens of “one anothers” in Scripture that can only be carried out as we belong to a local church. When we neglect the Bible’s exhortations to belong, we can become stagnant and dull in our faith.
This seems to me a dancing around the issue still. As I said yesterday, it didn’t occur to the writers of the New Testament that you might “become a Christian” and then continue to watch the live stream in perpetuity, especially by a conscious choice. We might add to the number of people who shared this belief every single Church Father many of whom pondered the troubling typology of the Ark, likening it to the church. If you’re not in the ark, in other words, you’re going to perish in the deluge. The church is the ark. If you want to survive, that is to be saved, you had to believe and behave and belong at all cost. This shaped, if you are a student of the medieval period please correct me, many fascinating historical moments, like that time when Ambrose wouldn’t let Theodosius take communion on account of how he slaughtered all those people. Clearly, Theodosius was lacking some key elements of the “belief” part, but the incident elucidates how everyone before 21st century Americans thought about the Sunday morning worship time. While Theodosius desperately wanted back into the ark and was willing to debase himself to do it, most of us today would recoil from such a proposition, and instead would go buy another quick pdf Bible Study download to ease the pain.
Evangelicals like to say the ark is Jesus—you have to be saved by him by faith alone—which seems like a tidy way around the church. But it unhappily doesn’t get you out of the difficulty because Jesus calls the church both his own Body and his Bride. It would be nicer and less difficult if the Body of Christ could just be the invisible collection of people who believe through time and space, but it isn’t just that. It is also the visible embodied church that individual people join themselves to by going every Sunday for the service and then, I would plead, even with tears in my eyes, staying for coffee hour and getting to know another person.
So far, for the authors, the burden of getting the dechurched back to church rests pretty squarely on the shoulders of those who are still going. (I’m not done yet, so I think they will have lots more recommendations.) By and large, I agree with them. People who are still going are the only ones who are going to care enough to keep trying to get the people who’ve left to come back.
It’s just that the whole framing of the problem seems to me to perpetuate the very problem we are this moment discussing. In all the “What will it take to bring them back” sections, they are still working through demographic issues, and trying to get at the particular goods that people feel they require in order to make the long journey through the front door and into a pew, or more likely a cushioned stand-alone chair. It seems like it’s still about sending out mailers and hosting giveaways and sharpening up social media platforms.
Whereas, I think a lot of people—millions in fact—have left for two simple reasons. The first is that there is no “there” there. On the one hand, mainline churches kept their liturgical form and lost all their belief. On the other, lower more evangelical churches jettisoned the form, hung onto the belief for a while, and then gave up and put in a basketball court. Why go when the light show isn’t even that great? Why go to have your self-esteem boosted? You can get that better on TikTok.
The only reason to go to church, as far as I can see it, is to commune with Jesus in the special way that he promises when you gather with other believers. You can pray alone over your coffee all day long, but if you never go to communion, and never submit yourself to the preaching of the word rightly divided—both of which are sacramental in nature—you not only will become stagnant and dull, at some point you won’t even be a Christian anymore.
Which brings me to the second reason millions of people have left. It is embarrassing to be a true Christian. Setting aside racism, misogyny, Jan 6, and church abuse—which I can do because even though they do exist they are all culturally acceptable ways to hate the church—people who believe and behave and, the real kicker, belong put a lie to the various false gospels of this age. There are so many of them and they are all Christian adjacent, but they also serve as moral excuses for doing what you already wanted to do anyway. I guess that is going to be another post because Matt says we have to run away to our walk.
Have a nice day! And, for the love of all goodness, go to church. It will probably feel like it will kill you, but it won’t. Not if you find a good one, which do still exist, though they’re harder to find…sorry! As I said, have a nice day.
That's the kicker, isn't it? We don't want to be "that sort" of Christian (or even to be thought of as such, even if we really are). We are actually ashamed of the gospel.
In the latest First Things, there is a good book review of Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America. The reviews puts a common cause politely:
"A common theme is that one's sexual proclivities - or those of a close family member - are often the fundamental cause of a breach with one's faith community."
The review (and the book) notes that other excuses might be made after the fact, but that the refusal to submit to traditional sexual morality is often the real reason for departure.
Less nicely, I've oft heard from ministers of different churchmanships that when someone suddenly expresses a problem with the Faith, the ministers ask (or are tempted to ask), "Who have you been sleeping with?"