Christianity must become progressive, or else it might die.

[The Great Open Dance]

Love is the only sure ground for human flourishing

Love is the ground, meaning, and destiny of the cosmos. We need love to flourish, and we will find flourishing only in love. Too often, other forces tempt us into their servitude, always at the cost of our own suffering. Greed prefers money to love, ambition prefers power to love, fear prefers hatred to love, expediency prefers violence to love. And so we find ourselves in a hellscape of our own making, wondering how personal advantage degenerated into collective agony. Then, seeing the cynicism at work in society, we accept its practicality and prioritize personal advantage again, investing ourselves in brokenness.

The world need not be this way. Love is compatible with our highest ideals, such as well-being, excellence, courage, and peace. It is the only reliable ground for human well-being, both individual and collective. Yet the sheer momentum of history discourages us from trusting love’s promise. Despondent about our condition, we subject the future to the past.

Historically, one institution charged with resisting despair, sustaining hope, and propagating love has been the Christian church. Its record is spotty, as it has promoted both peace and war, love and hate, generosity and greed. The church can do better, and must do better, if it is to survive. Today, the church’s future is in doubt as millions of disenchanted members vote with their feet. A slew of recent studies has attempted to understand why both church attendance and religious affiliation are declining. To alarmists, this decline corresponds to the overall collapse of civilization, which (so they worry) is falling into ever deepening degeneracy. But to others, this decline simply reveals an increasing honesty about the complexity and variety of our religious lives. In this more optimistic view, people can at last speak openly about religion, including their lack thereof, without fear of condemnation.

Historians suggest that concerns about church decline are exaggerated, produced by a fanciful interpretation of the past in which everyone belonged to a church that they attended every Sunday in a weekly gathering of clean, well-dressed, happy nuclear families. In fact, this past has never existed, not once over the two-thousand-year history of Christianity. These historians report that church leaders have always worried about church decline, church membership has always fluctuated wildly, and attendance has always been spotty. Today is no different.

A powerless church can finally serve a powerless savior.

To some advocates of faith, this decline in church attendance and religious affiliation is a healthy development, even for the church. When a culture compels belief, even nonbelievers must pretend to believe. During the Cold War, believers in the Soviet Union had to pretend to be atheists, and atheists in America had to pretend to be believers. Such compelled duplicity helps no one; as anyone living under tyranny can tell you, rewards for belief and punishment for disbelief produce only inauthenticity. Even today, many people claim faith solely for the social capital that a religious identity provides. If perfectly good atheists can’t win elections because atheism is considered suspect, then politically ambitious atheists will just pretend to be Christians. But coerced conformity and artificial identity show no faith; Jesus needs committed disciples, not political opportunists.

Hopefully, after this period of church decline, what Christianity loses in power it may gain in credibility. Self-centeredly, faith leaders often blame the decline in attendance and affiliation on the people. More frequently, the leaders themselves are to blame. In the past, people may have stayed home in protest of corruption, or in resistance to state authority, or due to their own unconventional ideas about God. Today, sociologists identify different reasons for avoiding organized religion. Most of their studies focus on young people, who often reject Christian teachings as insufficiently loving and open. Their responses to surveys suggest that the faith’s failure to attract or retain them is largely theological, and they won’t change their minds until Christian theology changes its focus.

The young people are right.

Christianity shouldn’t change its theology to attract young people; Christianity should change its theology because the young people are right. They are arguing that Christianity fails to express the love of Christ, and they have very specific complaints. For example, traditional teachings about other religions often offend contemporary minds. Our world is multireligious, so most people have friends from different religions. On the whole, these friends are kind, reasonable people. This warm interpersonal experience doesn’t jibe with doctrines asserting that other religions are false and their practitioners condemned. If forced to choose between an exclusive faith and a kind friend, most people will choose their kind friends, which they should. Rightfully, they want to be members of a beloved community, not insiders at an exclusive club.

The new generations’ preference for inclusion also extends to the LGBTQ+ community. One of the main reasons young adults reject religious affiliation today is negative teachings about sexual and gender minorities. Many preachers assert that being LGBTQ+ is “unnatural,” or “contrary to the will of God,” or “sinful.” But to young adults, LGBTQ+ identity is an expression of authenticity; neither they nor their friends must closet their true selves any longer, a development for which all are thankful. A religion that would force LGBTQ+ persons back into the closet, back into a lie, must be resisted.

Regarding gender, most Christians, both young and old, are tired of church-sanctioned sexism. Although 79 percent of Americans support the ordination of women to leadership positions, most denominations ordain only men. The traditionalism and irrationalism that rejects women’s ordination often extends into Christianity’s relationship to science. We now live in an age that recognizes science as a powerful tool for understanding the universe, yet some denominations reject the most basic insights of science, usually due to a literal interpretation of the Bible. The evidence for evolution, to which almost all high school students are exposed, is overwhelming. Still, fundamentalist churches insist on reading Genesis like a science and history textbook, thereby creating an artificial conflict with science. This insistence drives out even those who were raised in faith, 23 percent of whom have “been turned off by the creation-versus-evolution debate.”

Tragically, although most young adults would like to nurture their souls in community, many are leaving faith because they find it narrow minded and parochial. They can access all kinds of religious ideas on the internet and want to process those ideas with others, but their faith leaders pretend these spiritual options do not exist. Blessed with a spirit of openness, this globalized generation wants to learn how to navigate the world, not fear the world. Churches that acknowledge only one perspective, and try to impose that perspective, render a disservice that eventually produces resentment. Over a third of people who have left the church lament that they could not “ask my most pressing life questions” there.

Change toward God is good.

Why are Christian denominations so slow to change? Perhaps because, as a third of young adults complain, “Christians are too confident they know all the answers.” Increasingly, people want church to be a safe place for spiritual conversation, not imposed dogma, and they want faith to be a sanctuary, not a fortress. They want to dwell in the presence of God, and feel that presence everywhere, not just with their own people in their own church.

This change is good, because it reveals an increasing celebration of the entirety of creation that God sustains, including other nations, other cultures, and other religions. Faith is beginning to celebrate reality itself as sanctuary, rather than walling off a small area within, declaring it pure, and warning that everything outside is depraved. As Christians change, Christian theology must change, replacing defensive theology with sanctuary theology. This sanctuary theology will provide a thought world within which the human spirit can flourish, where it feels free to explore, confident of love and acceptance, in a God centered community. Such faith will not be a mere quiet place of repose for the individual; its warmth will radiate outward, to all. In so doing, it will at last implement the prophet Isaiah’s counsel, offered 2500 years ago: “Enlarge the site of your tent, and let the curtains of your habitations be stretched out; do not hold back; lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes” (Isa 54:2 NRSV).

What follows is my attempt to provide one such sanctuary theology. My hope is that it will help readers flourish in life, both as individuals and in community, in the presence of God. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 1-5)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Barna Group, “Six Reasons Young Christians Leave Church,” September 27, 2011. barna.com/research/six-reasons-young-christians-leave-church. Accessed September 23, 2022.

Barna Group, “What Americans Think About Women in Power,” May 8, 2017. barna.com/research/americans-think-women-power/. Accessed September 20, 2022.

Kinnaman, David and Aly Hawkins. You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church . . . and Rethinking Faith. Michigan: Baker Publishing Group, 2011.

Public Religion Research Institute. “Religion and Congregations in a Time of Social and Political Upheaval.” Washington: PRRI, 2022. https://www.prri.org/research/religion-and-congregations-in-a-time-of-social-and-political-upheaval/. Accessed September 18, 2023.

[atreides1]

1. Well in my opinion

It's been dead for at least the last two centuries.

[The Great Open Dance]

6. Yet

It's bastardized form remains politically influential, tragically.

[WilliamLouis]

2. If Christianity doesn't become progressive

Die, then rise again like Jesus?

[The Great Open Dance]

4. Perhaps

but hopefully, in a more agapic form, at last.

[Tweedy]

3. The Gospels are quite progressive

The Good News is not at all the cruelty espoused by the Trump aligned Christian nationalists.

Christianity is progressive right now. Love thy neighbor as thyself is about as progressive as it gets.

It is the whites sepulchers who are devoted to a religion of Mr. Trump with cruelty and malice aforethought for all. Don’t forget these folks also want you to believe Jesus, the man who gave everything away, wants you to buy them a Gulfstream. That is something for certain; nevertheless, it has zero to do with any teaching of Jesus.

[The Great Open Dance]

5. Apostasy

is rampant among many who call themselves Christian. The Gospels make that clear, by anticipation.

[Tweedy]

15. I don't think many of Mr. Trump's "pastors" believe in anything

Remember when the right claimed “relativity” would lead to a nihilism where no-one behaved decently because the fear of God would be gone?

I certainly do. It used to give me the serious creeps to hear, but not for the reasons the moralizers were trying to evoke. It made me wonder what horrible things they wished to do that didn’t happen because they feared God.

Most of us don’t hurt each other because we really dislike pain, enduring it, inflicting it, even watching it. Neither God, nor the fear of him have much to do with this deep apathy to pain most of us have.

It feels like the nihilists won on the right side of America’s political aisle. In the meantime the rest of us, who do not wish to hurt random strangers much less our loved ones, did not even notice the fight the right wing decent types were losing.

[marble falls]

7. It is. It really explains a lot to me when these alegedly evangelicals discriminate and use the old testiment ...

... to justify their hate.

[Major Nikon]

14. Not zero

Jesus accepted money to the point of needing a treasurer. So it wasn't as if he was saying hocus pocus and the capital needed to run his ministry magically appeared. The concept of tithing was central to being a Jew during the time of Jesus and there's no doubt the bible points out Jesus was a proponent of the practice which certainly would have been self serving.

The central theme of the bible is that the church is the conduit by which the church tax/donations flow. Everyone involved is skimming off the top, including Jesus.

[Tweedy]

16. What treasurer? This is news to me.

I am not familiar with that apostle.

The temples in those times were banks basically. Jesus’ great sin against the Roman hierarchy was throwing the moneylenders out of the Temple.

Did you know Christians fought and killed each other in the way back about whether Jesus needed to defecate? They also fought about whether he owned anything. A lot of hokus pokus bogus to kill one’s neighbor in my humble opinion.

[Major Nikon]

17. Judas was Jesus' treasurer

The point being Jesus wasn't running his ministry for free. Just like any other organized religion, the funds come from the people they have convinced they speak for whatever made up entity they are promoting. The difference between Jesus and Kenneth Copeland is the latter is working on a much larger scale and audience spread out over a much larger geographical area. I suppose it could be argued Copeland needs a Gulfstream in the same way Jesus needed a donkey.

[Tweedy]

18. I missed that description of Judas

Kenneth Copeland never changed water into wine.

If the miracles are too much, Kenneth Copeland never stood in the way of angry people with stones anticipating stoning an allegedly adulterous woman to death. He certainly never stopped the stoning of anyone anywhere.

We can debate whether Jesus owned a donkey, I suppose. Perhaps he rescued a donkey from a certain death in the desert. I have no idea.

[Major Nikon]

19. Copeland claims all sorts of miracles

He’s a faith healer who claims to cure COVID and whatever else ails you through his power. You may think this is nonsense, and you’d be correct, but the same is true for any miracles attributed to Jesus.

[Tweedy]

20. Kenneth Copeland's followers died of covid in record numbers

That said, faith, even faith in a grifter, can be healing. Is that a miracle? I suppose it is lovely for the person healed. What does it matter to them from whence their healing came?

As for Jesus’ miracles, many people take strength from their recounting. That strength, too, is real. I was not there. I cannot be a fact witness. The gospels themselves have been rewritten more times than anybody likely knows and I don’t read Aramaic, either.

There is much more happening in our synapses (perhaps electrons singing at a spooky distance 😉?) than your dry reading of life would allow.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagmomantis

I saw one of these this week. No doubt, it exists because of evolutionary moments of which I remain unaware. That dry book feeling (and I love reading just about any old thing) does not explain how seeing what I thought was a stick move made me feel.

The wonder of this world is absolutely real, absolutely spectacular and absolutely healing even if each and every second of it can be explained in infinite detail. In fact, even the explanations are often extraordinary.

Have a wonderful Sunday with many perfectly explainable miracles within reach

[Major Nikon]

21. All of the synoptic gospels were written anonymously and not by those they are attributed

Regarding fiction, certainly strength people find from all sorts of fictional writings. The difference with the bible is people at least claim to draw strength from the bible on the belief that what is clearly a work of fiction is not. Compare that with something like Santa Claus which people understand is childish nonsense, but still derive value in the subterfuge.

It kinda does matter where someone's healing comes from. Snake oil salesman are routinely shut down by the FDA for trying to make money off the ignorant. Fake doctors are jailed for quackery. Yet somehow if someone does these things under the veil of religion, they get a free pass from the legal system, but that doesn't mean they should be free from others calling bullshit because someone claims it did them some good.

[Tweedy]

22. I agree frauds should be prosecuted

I don’t agree that religion is per se fraud. Some of it is. How can we police that? Basic common law fraud works excellently there.

Too bad our so-called originalist Justices have proclaimed we have no common law fraud even though every one of our framers would be shocked by the proclamation.

[Major Nikon]

23. How we police that is pretty easy, at least in theory

You just need to have the mindset of rejecting so-called “truths” which are based on fantasy and mythology rather than evidence. The reason why religion is so inherently corruptible is because people can use it to tell you what is true without one shred of evidence and no arbiter one can appeal to for contradiction.

In practice when you have people who are conditioned from birth to reject critical thinking, this becomes nearly impossible making these people highly susceptible to corrupting influence.

[Tweedy]

24. Truth is told with story

You can call that fantasy or mythology if you want. Nonetheless, nearly every thought we have is based on a story. Even Pythagoras has his story.

Let us make the story of our century a truly magnificent one, in part by electing Kamala Harris our next president.

[gay texan]

8. Wont shed a tear if it goes away n/t

[eppur_se_muova]

9. The best approach is to devote effort towards both. nt

[anciano]

10. Another excellent post....

First of all, a belated welcome to DU, it's great to have you here.
IMO, church attendance and religious affiliation are declining due to the increased awareness that the whole idea of religion is incompatible with observable science based reality.
I personally embrace the concept of universal oneness with Nature as the only rational and reasonable "spiritual" explanation, since most humans seem to have an innate need to believe in something.
And in regards to the Christian faith, the inconsistencies and absurdities in its sacred text also have to be a contributing factor.
I share the following quotations not in a mean spirited manner, but only for objective consideration in regards to the overall theme of the OP ...
"You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones who need help?" Mark Twain
"It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible." Eric Hoffer
✌️

[The Great Open Dance]

12. Thank you

for your amiable disagreement. Of course, taking the Bible literally is catastrophic--the fundies actually believe that Balaam's ass talked!

I read the Bible, like Jesus, for agape, the unconditional, universal love of God, which is to be known, practiced, and felt as deeply as possible. If it's not agapic, it's not true.

That being said, I respect your pantheism. I too find God in nature, I just find God elsewhere as well . . .

Best wishes,

Jon Paul

[mike_c]

11. good riddance

Kick it to the curb and wash it into the sewers of history.

[Major Nikon]

13. Corruptibility isn't a bug of organized religion, it's a feature

The idea that organized religion can somehow be reformed into what it pretends to be is a fool's errand. It will always pretend to be a force for good while actually doing what it was always designed to do, which is to control the masses for those who will use it for maliciousness. We would have always been better off without it and we will always be better off without it.

[hurl]

25. I doubt either will happen to a significant degree

Change toward God is good.

I don't see how change toward something for which we have so little evidence is remotely good. It seems to me like the exact opposite... Heck, we can't agree on who or what 'God' is, much less what it wants, so how could change toward that be anything other than a path toward chaos?

Change toward observable reality would be far superior, IMO.

Faith is beginning to celebrate reality itself as sanctuary, rather than walling off a small area within, declaring it pure, and warning that everything outside is depraved.

Where? I haven't seen any examples of this, but I could have missed them. I see faith as almost by definition believing in something despite reality, not because of it. If there were actual evidence in reality, faith would be superfluous and unnecessary. Faith looks in practice to be actively hostile toward reality and a blatant an attempt to displace it.

And I say all this as a person who grew up in an environment of sincere faith, who understands its powerful grip from very personal and direct experience.

[Ilikepurple]

26. I don't hold out much hope.

Historically, I believe a very small percentage of Christian institutions have been progressive. Organized religion tends to be a power grab or it couldn’t spread so rapidly. There are, of course, progressive leaders, representing the world’s religions, but they generally don’t hold much power.

[Submariner]

27. Christianity used terrorism and

terroristic threats of burning in the flames of hell for eternity to force me to believe in some god named Jesus. It was a hideous time.

The nuns spent years teaching me about all these imaginary sky people, and as it turned out, none of it was real.