Calling It Part 1

Christmas, 2024. After a long year.  After long years. 

For my entire life, I've been a member of the Presbyterian church. For those who don't pay attention to these things, it is one of what they call the mainline Protestant denominations, along with the Methodists, Congregationalist, Lutherans, probably the Episcopalians. It's the kind of denomination with big churches on the main streets of most downtowns and large buildings all through your town and suburbs.  When I was a kid, everyone who wasn't Catholic or Jewish was in one of these churches.  They were the establishment. 

We were members of this denomination because my grandfather, a German kid from Nebraska farm country married a young Anglo/Scots-Irish lady from a small town. They were both dedicated to building successful lives in the city (Lincoln) and Presbyterianism was often the top of the socio-economic food chain in a place like Lincoln. Being an active member of this church was part of being a leader in the community. 

I grew up with all this. I took comfort in our somewhat anodyne rituals, found plenty of substance to explore (especially when a minister in my teenage years introduced me to Niebuhr and Tillich), and in general wanted to stay connected--to people in my family, to part of a past. 

We were always vaguely aware there was a different sort of Christianity. More conservative, Biblical literalism, speaking in tongues, televangelists, revivals, all of that.  Various kinds of Baptists and Pentecostals.  Mostly it was associated with places not like where I grew up, in a big city suburb--it was part of rural, southern places.  In high school there was one guy who was "born again"--known as John the Jesus Freak in our halls.  

This changed pretty fast with conservative swings of the Reagan era and the rise of the Moral Majority. Born Again was everywhere, and I got familiar with the names and institutions. 

Lines began to form.  Those other groups told churches like mine we weren't real Christians. Because of the way we talked about Jesus and the content of worship, but also for political reasons.  Our stance on abortion or gay rights and gender, and the rights of groups oppressed by local and global power. And on political party.  Churches like mine saw themselves as holding onto something like the true (in our eyes) spirit of Protestant Christianity, which had an embedded if not always expressed throughline of justice, mercy and peace.  But we also became more progressive, most obviously in gay rights and women's voices, but also in opening our hermeneutics ever wider. 

And we shrank.  Congregations got smaller.  Our denominations had fewer members. Peeople and congregations left for places where they could hold out against the changes our denomination might embrace. Our denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA) has gone from over 3M members in 1983 to just over 1M in 2023.  In the last 15 years or so, the local office here in Nashville (called a presbytery) has gone from having several people on staff and its own leased office space to smaller space, then renting space in one of the big churches and now I think they are completely virtual.  One of the old seminaries in the denomination, McCormick in Chicago (check out the name--McCormick, as in Cyrus the 19th century inventor of the mechanical reaper, and a benefactor of the seminary when the denomination represented the social order to people like him) has shrunk campuses a couple of times and now works from 5th floor office space in someone else's building. 

The other sort of church--we'll call them evangelical for purposes of labeling here, recognizing all names are contested--grew, but also increasingly became attached to the Republican Party and to political power, emerging today in this form that can only be described as Christian Nationalist (or Christianist).  They are married to Trump, Musk and anyone like that who represents an authoritarian order.  Let's support guns, regressive taxation.  Treat refugees with hostility, promote policies that make people more precarious. Celebrate greed.  Combat cooperation and mercy. 

To me part of being Presbyterian increasingly became about trying to build the conditions for a resurgence of Christianity, to reclaim or preserve a claim to what it means, to see our denominations return to health, to continue the line of dialogue with thinkers who led to this moment, to continue to bring the Bible into constructive relationship with movement towards a better life for people and better stewardship of creation.  To preserve a Christianity that responds to the fact of God's existence by cultivating mercy, grace, nurture, and care. This effort faced the growing resistance of those who would convert Christianity into a cult to support national, authoritarian power and make of the churches institutions dedicated to extending punishment and pain.  

After decades at this, I'm ready to call it.  We lost.  Christianity is whatever the nationalist preachers and charlatan politicians say it is.  What we do at my church is an increasingly isolated, private thing. There will always be people who hold on to bits of old practices of devotion and philosophy, and we can keep doing that.  We can keep reading Mary Daly, Gustavo Gutierrez or Walter Brueggemann.  As best we can, worship together.  If we can keep the big old buildings open, fine, but they are kind of ridiculous. There are so few of us.  We don't need that kind of space.  

It's hard in good faith now to ask people of good faith, people who want a more humane order, to come and call themselves Christians. The name and forms of gathering imply an alliance with nationalist forces who thirst for dominance. Subscribing to this name and identity implies a thirst for punishment, a lust to define enemies. In this environment, we have to assume these old churches will continue to shrink. I did some financial modeling for my church recently, and one of the things we have to consider is that the slide might not be reversed, we might not return to where we were.  In lots of phenomena, continued movement along an established trajectory is a common outcome. Many of my scenarios for the congregation show continued, slow decline in participation.  

In this time, where we can say the question of what it means to be a Christian has been answered, put us in a familiar place. Religion, including but not limited to Christianity, in most eras has served as a national cult upholding some dominant political power. Christianity might have experimented with an alternative purpose for maybe a couple hundred years and even then sporadically.  Now we revert to may be religion's natural state.    

This space, where I can assume irrelevance, is in its way liberating.  For one thing, it opens up doctrinal space. For me, it makes sense that in addition to holding and continuing in dialogue with the ideas and practices of the past centuries of Christians, we also reach further back to the older, Earth-based practices that seem to be what held sway for those of us with roots in Europe before the priests showed up at our villages and towns and got us on board with the new religion, the religion of the rulers and lords. Those practices, of marking the seasonal cycle, giving weight to the other living things in our environment, and honoring the landscape itself, have real benefit to to us and our neighbors.  I'm happy hybridizing.  With the denomination withering , it serves as less of home, and we no longer need to defend it doctrinal boundaries.  

We don't really have a label any more. A name has some power (though actually fleeting) to fix the qualities of a thing or a category.  Without a name, the thing floats.  It can configure and reconfigure, it can, like experience, change shape constantly.