The Good Friday (and Easter?) of the American Church

America is "losing its religion." For the first time in modern America's history, only a minority of us belong to a church or synagogue.

This is a trend that's been underway since the turn of the Millenium- and actually, I would argue, long before. Traditional Christian values and ethical beliefs have been held by an ever-shrinking number even of church members for a very long time. I was dealing with it as a parish pastor back in the 'Eighties. And large majorities of the American people- including whole Christian denominations- have completely rejected biblical sexual ethics and convictions regarding the sanctity of human life.

Even denominations that pride themselves on being "pro-life" tolerate and even promote COVID skepticism and the refusal of professing Christians to personally take responsible actions to prevent becoming vectors of the virus, like wearing a mask or practicing social distancing.

 Christians need to give up the corrupting and false sense of themselves as embodying and even dictating cultural norms. We are called to be outsiders, to be marginalized eccentrics. We need to rid ourselves of the insidious drive to "re-Christianize" society through legislation and political power. It has caused the Church to be increasingly mean-spirited, self-righteous, and dishonest. I've been warning for at least the past five years that it was driving people away from the Church and Christ in droves and making Christianity seen more and more by people outside and on the fringes of the Church as a repellant exercise in hypocrisy.

"Christ against culture" thinking runs counter to the historical Lutheran impulse and my own preferences. Still, it's becoming more evident and more apparent to me that we have no choice but to embrace "the Benedict Option." 

We need to embrace political weakness and social marginalization and foster a tightly-knit, well-catechized, closely disciplined and committed community of weirdos that's hard to join and expects its teachings to be embraced and practiced by its members. We need to do what the first Christians did and attract outsiders not so much by evangelism programs as by our evident conviction and personal example.

We are called to make disciples, not members. We need to be willing to shrink if that's what it means to be faithful. We need to stop defining success by numbers. Remember how John 6 ends? "After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. So Jesus said to  the twelve, 'Do you want to go away as well?' Simon Peter answered him, 'Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.'”

The Roman emperor who did the most damage to the Church wasn't Nero or Diocletian. It was Constantine. It's becoming more evident and more apparent that embracing a role as a small, militant, and committed- though politically powerless- group of eccentrics is our only course. And we need to stop being such damned hypocrites. If we're going to treat human life as sacred, we need to be consistent about it, the way the Early Church was. If we're going to preach love, we need to stop being transparently motivated by prejudice and hate. We're going to need more Dietrich Bonhoeffer and less Eric Metaxas, to say nothing of Joel Osteen. 

And we need to ponder Paul's observation that when we are weak, it is then that we are strong. The way things are going, we have no choice but to become a marginalized minority again. 

The question is whether we're going to see God's hand in what's going on and embrace what we're being called to with increasing clarity. The only other choice is to continue to be salt without savor, fit for nothing but to be thrown on the ground and trodden underfoot- and increasingly seen to be such by everyone but ourselves.