Why religion went obsolete - Part 6
This will be my final post reflecting on Christian Smith’s book Why Religion Went Obsolete. If this is a topic that interests you, I would highly recommend you pick up a copy.
Smith’s explanation for why traditional religion has been in steady decline in America for decades is that it slipped into a state of unplanned obsolescence. People who once found it relevant or helpful no longer do and therefore younger generations are unlikely to even consider it an option.
Traditional religion has been replaced.
By what?
By whatever “works.”
We saw in my last post that people today tend to think of themselves as entirely self-contained, what Carl Trueman calls a “psychological self.” People approach life like it is a customizable self-actualization project. We are who we decide we are. We can be whatever we choose to be. In a reality like that, if people happen to come across traditional religion and it helps them achieve whatever subjective version of self they’ve chosen, great. But not only is it increasingly less likely for younger generations to encounter traditional religion, even if they did, many of the uncritically accepted “contours” of what Smith calls the “millennial zeitgeist” are simply incompatible with it.
In other words, even if someone were to try traditional religion, he would most likely conclude it will not “work” for him.
So, what is traditional religion to do?
I have a couple of thoughts here. There is overlap between the subjective quest for self-actualization and traditional Christian theology. Christian orthodoxy affirms that life is a journey. If the average person senses or feels like he’s moving toward some kind of actualized end, that’s because he is.
But where Christian orthodoxy challenges this aspect of the millennial zeitgeist is to say that the destination is not self-chosen or self-constructed. For Christians, we are created in the image of God and what the world calls actualization we call salvation, which is nothing less than participation in the life of God.
And if we’re correct, if what people operating under the millennial zeitgeist are truly after is “participating in the divine nature,” to borrow a phrase from the Apostle Peter—or as Saint Augustine famously said, “we are restless until our hearts find rest in thee (God)”—they aren’t going to arrive at that destination by pursuing cultural alternatives to traditional religion. They can participate in a self-constructed deity or spirituality, but that is not the same as participating in the inner life of God; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
And it will never quite satisfy.
People are still interested in issues of “ultimate concern.”[1] We all feel the ache of longing for transcendence. As long as that is true, traditional religion will have its place. The church simply needs to remain alive and vibrant so that it can be here for people when, like the bleeding woman who turned to Jesus after spending all she had trying to get better elsewhere, they realize all the roads they’ve traveled in search of actualization have led to dead ends and traditional religion is the only path left not taken.
So, as it relates to the world, the church will have to do more honoring of people’s lived experiences. Not that preaching at the world has ever done any good, but it will be even less effective influencing the millennial zeitgeist. Instead, the church needs to meet people where they are, affirm their felt need to self-actualize, but offer in its shared life a more compelling and satisfying alternative.
Which brings me to the second focus for the church. While we need to meet people outside the church where they are, honoring their experience, we also need to carefully and thoughtfully challenge the millennial zeitgeist inside the church. If anything will draw people into traditional religion it is the people who currently occupy the pews. Our lives have to be good news.
But to the degree we are controlled by the same zeitgeist, we have nothing to offer the world it doesn’t already have. The church has to become a place that produces the kinds of people other people look at and think, “that’s the kind of life I want.” If the church were a business, you don’t grow it by hiding a bad product under good advertising. You grow it by having a great product. If the product is good, people will find it.
And the product in many churches is not good. I recently watched a documentary on Netflix called “The Twister.” It’s all about the E5 tornado that destroyed Joplin, MO in 2011. One of the interviewees in the documentary is a man named Cecil. He was a junior in high school in 2011. A major part of his story was growing up in a church in Joplin where he says his greatest fear was being left behind following the rapture.[2]
So shaped was he by teachings related to the rapture that he admits during the tornado he was concerned the rapture had come and that he would be left behind. I understand people wanting to speculate about end times and what it will be like when Christ returns, but to teach dogmatically about something no one understands or can perfectly anticipate, to the point where young people growing up in your spiritual care are fearful for their well-being, is ministry malpractice, and as long as this is the garbage that people are being taught in churches, traditional religion has no hope.
People will always hunger for God but they will be left with no choice but to try and find God outside the church.
Churches need to make first things first. We have to focus on what it looks like to be disciples of Jesus in our culture. We have to help people engage practices that form their characters in love. We have to teach them how to have the “mind of Christ” so they can more thoughtfully engage the world and their own experiences. So long as the church is adopting the millennial zeitgeist and pumping out people who look and act nothing like Jesus, there is no reason we should expect people to join us and we should probably hope they don’t.
That fewer and fewer are suggests we should spend less time trying to “reach” culture and more time getting our house in order.
[1] A phrase used by psychologist James Fowler to name the focus of religion.
[2] The rapture is a doctrine based on a collection of NT passages. The prevailing assumption is that when Christ returns he will gather to himself those who are saved (presumably being caught up with him in the air) and those who are not saved will be “left behind” to suffer upon the earth.
Smith’s explanation for why traditional religion has been in steady decline in America for decades is that it slipped into a state of unplanned obsolescence. People who once found it relevant or helpful no longer do and therefore younger generations are unlikely to even consider it an option.
Traditional religion has been replaced.
By what?
By whatever “works.”
We saw in my last post that people today tend to think of themselves as entirely self-contained, what Carl Trueman calls a “psychological self.” People approach life like it is a customizable self-actualization project. We are who we decide we are. We can be whatever we choose to be. In a reality like that, if people happen to come across traditional religion and it helps them achieve whatever subjective version of self they’ve chosen, great. But not only is it increasingly less likely for younger generations to encounter traditional religion, even if they did, many of the uncritically accepted “contours” of what Smith calls the “millennial zeitgeist” are simply incompatible with it.
In other words, even if someone were to try traditional religion, he would most likely conclude it will not “work” for him.
So, what is traditional religion to do?
I have a couple of thoughts here. There is overlap between the subjective quest for self-actualization and traditional Christian theology. Christian orthodoxy affirms that life is a journey. If the average person senses or feels like he’s moving toward some kind of actualized end, that’s because he is.
But where Christian orthodoxy challenges this aspect of the millennial zeitgeist is to say that the destination is not self-chosen or self-constructed. For Christians, we are created in the image of God and what the world calls actualization we call salvation, which is nothing less than participation in the life of God.
And if we’re correct, if what people operating under the millennial zeitgeist are truly after is “participating in the divine nature,” to borrow a phrase from the Apostle Peter—or as Saint Augustine famously said, “we are restless until our hearts find rest in thee (God)”—they aren’t going to arrive at that destination by pursuing cultural alternatives to traditional religion. They can participate in a self-constructed deity or spirituality, but that is not the same as participating in the inner life of God; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
And it will never quite satisfy.
People are still interested in issues of “ultimate concern.”[1] We all feel the ache of longing for transcendence. As long as that is true, traditional religion will have its place. The church simply needs to remain alive and vibrant so that it can be here for people when, like the bleeding woman who turned to Jesus after spending all she had trying to get better elsewhere, they realize all the roads they’ve traveled in search of actualization have led to dead ends and traditional religion is the only path left not taken.
So, as it relates to the world, the church will have to do more honoring of people’s lived experiences. Not that preaching at the world has ever done any good, but it will be even less effective influencing the millennial zeitgeist. Instead, the church needs to meet people where they are, affirm their felt need to self-actualize, but offer in its shared life a more compelling and satisfying alternative.
Which brings me to the second focus for the church. While we need to meet people outside the church where they are, honoring their experience, we also need to carefully and thoughtfully challenge the millennial zeitgeist inside the church. If anything will draw people into traditional religion it is the people who currently occupy the pews. Our lives have to be good news.
But to the degree we are controlled by the same zeitgeist, we have nothing to offer the world it doesn’t already have. The church has to become a place that produces the kinds of people other people look at and think, “that’s the kind of life I want.” If the church were a business, you don’t grow it by hiding a bad product under good advertising. You grow it by having a great product. If the product is good, people will find it.
And the product in many churches is not good. I recently watched a documentary on Netflix called “The Twister.” It’s all about the E5 tornado that destroyed Joplin, MO in 2011. One of the interviewees in the documentary is a man named Cecil. He was a junior in high school in 2011. A major part of his story was growing up in a church in Joplin where he says his greatest fear was being left behind following the rapture.[2]
So shaped was he by teachings related to the rapture that he admits during the tornado he was concerned the rapture had come and that he would be left behind. I understand people wanting to speculate about end times and what it will be like when Christ returns, but to teach dogmatically about something no one understands or can perfectly anticipate, to the point where young people growing up in your spiritual care are fearful for their well-being, is ministry malpractice, and as long as this is the garbage that people are being taught in churches, traditional religion has no hope.
People will always hunger for God but they will be left with no choice but to try and find God outside the church.
Churches need to make first things first. We have to focus on what it looks like to be disciples of Jesus in our culture. We have to help people engage practices that form their characters in love. We have to teach them how to have the “mind of Christ” so they can more thoughtfully engage the world and their own experiences. So long as the church is adopting the millennial zeitgeist and pumping out people who look and act nothing like Jesus, there is no reason we should expect people to join us and we should probably hope they don’t.
That fewer and fewer are suggests we should spend less time trying to “reach” culture and more time getting our house in order.
[1] A phrase used by psychologist James Fowler to name the focus of religion.
[2] The rapture is a doctrine based on a collection of NT passages. The prevailing assumption is that when Christ returns he will gather to himself those who are saved (presumably being caught up with him in the air) and those who are not saved will be “left behind” to suffer upon the earth.
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