Diana Butler Bass and Rachel Held Evans get it right … Ross Douthat, not so much
A few months back, I read Ross Douthat’s recent book (Bad Religion) and hoped someone would write a response to it. Then I read his NYT piece Sunday, and felt the same.
Diana Butler Bass wrote an excellent response here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diana-butler-bass/can-christianity-be-saved_1_b_1674807.html
Quotable:
…[in 2012], liberal churches are not the only ones declining. It is true that progressive religious bodies started to decline in the 1960s. However, conservative denominations are now experiencing the same. For example, the Southern Baptist Convention, one of America’s most conservative churches, has for a dozen years struggled with membership loss and overall erosion in programming, staffing, and budgets. Many smaller conservative denominations, such as the Missouri Synod Lutherans, are under pressure by loss. The Roman Catholic Church, a body that has moved in markedly conservative directions and of which Mr. Douthat is a member, is straining as members leave in droves. By 2008, one in ten Americans considered him- or herself a former Roman Catholic. On the surface, Catholic membership numbers seem steady. But this is a function of Catholic immigration from Latin America. If one factors out immigrants, American Catholicism matches the membership decline of any liberal Protestant denomination. Decline is not exclusive to the Episcopal Church, nor to liberal denominations–it is a reality facing the whole of American Christianity.
Douthat points out that the Episcopal Church has declined 23% in the last decade, identifying the loss as a sign of its theological infidelity. In the last decade, however, as conservative denominations lost members, their leaders have not equated the loss with unfaithfulness. Instead, they refer to declines as demographic “blips,” waning evangelism, or the impact of secular culture. Membership decline has no inherent theological meaning for either liberals or conservatives. Decline only means, as Gallup pointed out in a just-released survey, that Americans have lost confidence in all forms of institutional religion.
The real question is not “Can liberal Christianity be saved?” The real question is: Can Christianity be saved?
And Rachel Held Evans also hits the nail on the head, here:
http://rachelheldevans.com/liberal-conservative-christianity
