The Liberal Church: Anything Goes But Nobody Shows?

A few years ago, one of my children, new to the Toronto area, was looking for a church. He visited a lot of United and Unitarian congregations along the way. What he found, for the most part, were small struggling churches where most of the membership was female and older than 65. His comment to me was, “Anything goes, nobody shows.”

Really? Is that the best that can be said of the liberal church? Perhaps. Over the past month the press has been full of similar negative assessments of the liberal Church. This recent spate of articles began with Ross Douthat, a Catholic, writing in the New York Times, on July 15. In an article entitled, “Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved,” Douthat accounts for the steady erosion of liberal church membership by arguing that liberal churches, “often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism.” Then on July 28, Margaret Wente, writing in Toronto’s The Globe and Mail, argued that the liberal church’s move to a “more open, more inclusive, more egalitarian and more progressive” faith has been a colossal failure, in part because the United Church now offers, “intellect, rationality and understanding” instead of spirituality and social activism instead of the gospel.

And then, of course, there is the irascible Tom Harpur, who contributed his nationally syndicated column to the Northumberland Times on July 30. Entitled, “Tsunami Due for Religion as We Know It,” Harpur argues that, “the ‘half-gods’ of the old religion are in the process of being taken apart.” The half-gods Harpur refers to are a witch’s brew of the worst of Christianity: unbelievable doctrines, literalistic understanding of ancient texts, and disgraced priests and evangelists. Interestingly, Harpur doesn’t just go after the liberal churches, but all churches. Before the end of his article, however, Harpur also offers a note of hope for those of us who want the best for the future of faith. He writes that, “the end of religion as we have known it is the beginning of something much greater,” that is, “the evolution of the highest spiritual attributes of human kind.” Unfortunately, he is very vague about what these attributes look like, or how we might achieve them.

The most interesting of the recent commentaries on religion comes from Diana Butler Bass, author of the acclaimed Christianity After Religion: The End of the Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening. Writing in the Huffington Post on July 15, (“Can Christianity Be Saved? A Response to Ross Douthat,”) Butler Bass makes the point that it isn’t just the mainline churches that are declining—all churches are, including Evangelical churches. So, for example, the denomination I left this year has been losing members for years, and is a shadow of what it was twenty years ago. Recent commentators have pointed out that one in ten Americans considers himself or herself a former Catholic. Were it not for immigration the Catholic church would be a shell of what it is now. The most conservative large American evangelical church, the Southern Baptists, have also been declining for at least ten years, having lost, by some estimates, nearly 20% of their membership.

Like Harpur, Butler Bass is nevertheless hopeful, though she’s also more specific. She argues that that the future of Christianity is with churches where “a form of faith that cares for one's neighbor, the common good, and fosters equality, but is, at the same time, a transformative personal faith that is warm, experiential, generous, and thoughtful. This new expression of Christianity maintains the historic liberal passion for serving others but embraces Jesus' injunction that a vibrant love for God is the basis for a meaningful life.”

I like the direction Butler Bass is suggesting. In her book she argues that whatever is happening in our institutional churches, and no matter how suspicious people are of those institutions, it is clear that the public at large is still deeply interested in, and engaged in, spiritual pursuits.

But to get to young adults like my son, our churches have to be more than places where anything goes. They also have to be places where he can find warmth, community, friendship, purpose, and a humble longing and awe for God.

And come to think of it, that’s what I’m looking for too.

The Idiot Box

My wife and I do not own a television. We never had. Judging by the reviews of this year’s TV season, so far, we’re not missing much.

However, our refusal not to purchase a television isn’t really related to our dislike for what’s on television. My pet reason for not having a television is that many scholars suspect that watching even a small amount of television detracts from the ability to read well. Repeated exposure to TV develops the synapses and neural pathways in the brain that decode television; but this brain development seems strongly correlated to lack of development in the reading center of the brain. For Christians, who are people of the Word—undermining the ability to read well and deeply is a spiritual issue.

Even Camille Paglia, a famous culture critic best known for celebrating television’s role in the “repaganization of Western Culture,” understands how television is dangerous in this respect. She writes that in the second command God forbade the use of all images in heaven above and earth below because God understood that such images create a powerful, spiritual urge to ignore words. So Paglia calls for “the enlightened repression of our children,” by which she means rigorous word-centered education to the exclusion of TV, if we want our kids to become all they can be. Commenting on this insight, Neil Postman said, “With the Second Commandment, Moses was the first person who ever said, more or less, “Don’t watch TV; go do your homework.”

So what about your TV watching habits? I have a few suggestions. First, inform yourself about the State of the discussion when it comes to the benefits and risks of TV viewing, especially for children. I’d recommend Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, and Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. In my book, Not Sure, you can find a long bibliography on the relation of television to reading on page 42.

Second. Make reading together a family-time priority until well after the kids are reading on their own, a lot, with pleasure. As an added benefit, you’ll double and triple your cuddle time. My wife and I took turns reading to our children for an hour a day until the oldest was well into high school. That daily hour is easily one of our kids’ best memories of growing up.

Third. Don’t ever allow the television to play when a parent isn’t watching along. Children of all ages need instruction and wisdom about what they see on television because television mostly portrays a fanciful world without God where greed, envy, and several more of the deadly sins carry the day. That’s a very jaundiced view of how things really are; kids need another perspective to interpret TV for them.

Finally, if you don’t have time or energy for the above—and I take it that includes a lot of this blog's  readers—I have one final suggestion. It cuts through all the difficulties that go with having a television. Get rid of it.

Our family fell into life without a television when I was in seminary and couldn’t afford cable, much less the television itself. Somehow that circumstance has become a blessing that continues to give and give. Over the years we’ve avoided countless hours of uncommunicative stupefaction and had discussions, reading, and lots of other fun activities instead.

The bottom line here is that all the time and energy it takes to watch television responsibly may simply be out of reach for most of us. On the other hand, all those extra hours without a television could provide a rich, rich resource for raising kids in the way they should go. All for the price of a trip to the trash can.