Transubstantiate

Both traditions are losing out to the unaffiliated.

If there’s one overarching conclusion that comes from studying survey data of American religion over the last several decades, it is that fewer people identify with an established religious tradition every year. The ranks of religiously unaffiliated, also called the nones, have grown from just about 5 percent in the early 1970s to at least 30 percent in 2020.

Religious demography is a zero-sum game. If one group grows larger that means that other groups must be shrinking in size. So that rise in the nones is bad news for churches, pretty much across traditions. When you sort Christians by denomination, mainline Protestants are continuing to show significant decline.

By their own membership tallies, mainline denominations are showing drops of 15 percent, 25 percent, and even 40 percent over the span of the last decade. There is little room for triumph on the evangelical side; their numbers are slipping too.

Examining these two traditions, though, shows us two different stories about how their churches are losing members and could offer a trajectory for what the American religious landscape will look like in the future.

First, it’s important to point out that mainline Protestants—the grouping scholars use for denominations like the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the Presbyterian Church (USA)—used to outnumber evangelicals by a significant margin in the 1970s. In 1975, just over 30 percent of Americans were mainline, while about 21 percent were evangelicals. However, those lines began to converge quickly, and by 1983 there were more evangelicals in the United States than mainliners.

This rapid shift in American religion was driven primarily …

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UPDATE: Mark Dever’s church has its legal fees covered in the latest legal victory among congregations who sued over worship service limits during lockdown.

Capitol Hill Baptist Church has settled a lawsuit with the District of Columbia over claims that its coronavirus restrictions violated the First Amendment by barring outdoor worship but permitting other outdoor activities.

According to The Washington Post, DC agreed last week to pay $220,000 to Capitol Hill Baptist to cover its legal fees and stated that officials “will not enforce any current or future covid-19 restrictions to prohibit CHBC from gathering as one congregation.” The settlement said it was not an admission of wrongdoing by the city.

Capitol Hill Baptist, led by 9Marks founder Mark Dever, was the first to sue over the District’s restrictions, following multiple attempts to secure a waiver from citywide restrictions, which didn’t permit church services of over 100 people, even if outside, masked, and socially distanced.

Dever’s church based its request on its belief that the Bible calls churches to gather as one assembly—not in multiple services, multiple sites, or online. During the restrictions, it crossed state lines to gather outdoors in Virginia.

“Ultimately, the church is not something we want to be in as a building,” said Dever in a clip from spring 2020. “It’s a people we want to be with. That’s why we Christians always gather, so that we can be with the people of God and do the things that Jesus has called us to do.”

The church’s legal case initially resulted an injunction allowing congregants to return to worship in October 2020, months before all capacity limits were lifted in DC in spring 2021.

Churches in other states have also won settlements over similar First Amendment claims. California will pay $2 million to cover legal …

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Faith and Liberty Discovery Center traces Scripture’s presence at America’s founding and reminds visitors that “faith guides liberty toward justice.”

America’s “most historic square mile” got a new resident on the Fourth of July weekend. Joining the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the American Bible Society has opened a $60 million museum to highlight the role of Scripture in the founding of the United States.

“We are leveraging history to advocate for the Bible,” said Alan Crippen, chief of exhibits at the Faith and Liberty Discovery Center (FLDC). “The American story of liberty is unintelligible without knowledge of the Bible, and how it impacted our leaders.”

The new museum gives special space to William Penn and his “holy experiment” of Pennsylvania.

Alongside his Bible, the museum displays an original copy of Penn’s 1683 pamphlet, The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience Once More Briefly Debated and Defended. Informing Penn’s vision for governance, the charter of Pennsylvania guaranteed religious freedom and sought peace with the local Lenni-Lenape Native American tribe.

The FLDC’s six exhibits are more than a storehouse of artifacts, though. Interactive exhibits present six foundational American values: faith, liberty, justice, hope, unity, and love. An electronic “lamp” allows visitors to activate additional material, and store memories for retrieval at home.

The exhibits pose additional questions for contemplation or group discussion. The First Amendment section prompts: Do you agree that a just society requires freedom of religion and dissent? Another follows George Whitfield and asks: Do you agree that people can have a direct and personal relationship with God?

“Exhibits are meant to be immersive, but not to proselytize,” said Crippen. “This question …

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After recognizing that sin and evil aren’t outside threats, families are doing more to promote abuse awareness.

Josh Duggar was slated to stand trial this month on charges of downloading and possessing material that depicted the sexual abuse of minors. Instead, his court date has been delayed until the fall. His family’s series Counting On has been cancelled by TLC.

In the months to come, Duggar’s case will be covered as the saga of a former reality TV star, making headlines in celebrity magazines as did every courtship, wedding, pregnancy, and birth announcement from the famously fruitful Duggar brood.

But for some who come from Christian circles like the Duggars’—conservative Christian churches, tight-knit homeschool networks, big-family “quiverfull” movements—this case isn’t just about Josh Duggar. It represents a larger concern over how their communities teach about sexual abuse and, sadly, have missed opportunities to respond to it.

“Josh Duggar is in the position he is in because he was enabled and protected from consequences at every step by his revolting parents and their patriarchal, dehumanizing theology,” said Jacob Denhollander in a series of tweets posted after Duggar’s arrest in April of this year. Denhollander advocates for victims along with his wife, Rachael, herself an abuse survivor. But he also grew up one of 13 siblings in “the same homeschooled circles as the Duggars.”

Duggar has confessed and apologized for sex offenses he committed as a teen back in 2002–2003, and for infidelity in his marriage. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges that in 2019 he downloaded material depicting the sexual abuse of children.

His pattern of sexual abuse and misconduct has been reported on for years, but the recent case comes at a time of more attention …

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How the son of a Hindu priest gradually made his peace with the “unfairness” of the Cross.

Even at the distance of over 40 years, I still remember having my fingerprints documented for my criminal record. It was the first time in my life I had felt ashamed about anything.

The young police constable was pleasant enough as he gently guided me through the process of fingers, thumbs, and ink pads. He was sensitive to the sense of grief originating from a single sound in the room: the uncontrollable weeping of my distraught mother sitting a few feet away, as my father tried quietly calming her.

As recent immigrants to the UK from India, they were confused and shocked. They had wrenched themselves from established lives as schoolteachers. They had traveled to England by sea, working in a shoe factory and selling bus tickets so that my brother and I could go to school. For families immigrating from the Indian subcontinent, providing an education for their children was (and still is) the driving priority. So when my parents discovered that their teenage son had spent years secretly engaging in arson and shoplifting just “for fun,” they could barely comprehend it.

Sometimes it takes the tears of a loved one to stop us in our tracks and focus our minds on where we’ve gone wrong. But what exactly was I ashamed of? My mother’s grief had brought sudden clarity about the damage I had caused to my family—shameful, lasting damage. It dawned on me that there really is a moral law in the universe, and I had overstepped it. Actions had consequences, just as my family had taught me. The Hindu idea of karma, I had learned, is that you get what you deserve. Here was karma, spectacularly demonstrated.

Debating Christianity

I am the son of a Hindu priest who was himself the son of a Hindu priest. In the working-class …

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Interceding in community is vital to the Christian life.

A young Chinese woman with a rare chronic disease spent most of her days in darkness in the early 20th century. As Christiana Tsai lay in her dark bedroom, month after month, then year after year, she learned to pray. The story of her prayer journey, Queen of the Dark Chamber, profoundly shaped my faith as a young adult. From Christiana I learned about perseverance and passion in prayer. I learned that prayer shows love and support for people when we cannot be with them. I saw prayer as a high and joyful calling.

Christiana Tsai inspired me deeply, but her model was limited to only one setting for prayer—in isolation, away from life’s distractions and responsibilities. Ben Patterson describes the emphasis we often place on this kind of prayer: “I was raised in a tradition that believed the man alone on his knees in the closet is the pinnacle of great prayer—one person one-on-one with the Almighty.”

A closet sounds like a strange place to pray unless one is familiar with Matthew 6:6. Jesus instructs his disciples to go to an inner room—literally a storage closet—shut the door, and “pray to your Father in private” (NLT).

Prayer alone is certainly one model of prayer in the Bible, but if we read the Bible only through the lens of praying in a closet, we miss much of the rich diversity possible in prayer.

Jesus’ words on prayer in Matthew 6, part of the Sermon on the Mount, are preceded by teaching about giving money and followed by instructions about fasting. For all three of these topics, Jesus mentions doing them “in secret” or “in private.” In our teaching and preaching about prayer, we have often elevated praying in secret above all other forms …

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As new tensions divide the country, the men’s movement leaders wonders what they could have done differently.

R

andy Phillips didn’t want to watch the video of a Black man being killed by police, but his son asked if he had.

“No,” Phillips said, “but I’ve read a bunch of articles.”

He knew the details—both of this specific deadly encounter between Derek Chauvin and George Floyd and the larger context of racial division in America. He knew too the history of Christian efforts to combat racism and bring about reconciliation. He had, in fact, been president of Promise Keepers 25 years before, when the leadership decided that racial reconciliation would be its No. 1 priority and then the men’s ministry almost immediately started to flounder.

“Honestly, son, I’m not going to watch it,” he said. “It’s just too painful.”

“Dad,” said Tim Phillips. “You need to feel it.”

When Phillips watched the video, he was overwhelmed by the pain of Floyd’s slow death. He felt the Holy Spirit show him a tornado over Chauvin’s head, as if the police officer were the pinpoint of the destructive, swirling evil as it touched down. And he wondered: If he had let God change him 25 or 26 years ago, and let God shift Promise Keepers the way it was supposed to shift, maybe none of this would have happened.

America could have been different. God could have used Promise Keepers to reconcile Floyd and Chauvin and help Chauvin see Floyd how God saw him—as someone so deeply and impossibly loved that God would send his only Son to die just for him.

Promise Keepers was, after all, the largest movement in modern America pushing white people to reckon with racism and the most significant since the civil rights marches resulted in legislation, assassination, …

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As we gather again, congregants bring the weight of trauma and tensions built up over more than a year spent apart.

Back in March, Iowa pastor Andrew Schmidt could tell from the energy in the sanctuary that it would be Celebrate Church’s most-attended weekend since the pandemic began.

Schmidt welcomed new members, baptized babies, and teared up as he extended his arms to pray blessings over the congregation from the stage. Even with the church split between mask-required and mask-optional services, he said seeing 390 people in the building felt “almost normal.”

It was exciting—and a wake-up call.

“Wait a minute, we didn’t want to just go back to the same things,” he later told fellow leaders at Celebrate, the biggest church in the 7,000-person city of Knoxville. “What is different for us, opportunity-wise?”

With COVID-19 vaccines making way for looser recommendations around distancing and masking, many congregations in the US have been able to get back to normal operations again. But some are not rushing to return to how things were, opting instead to rethink how and why they gather.

Across the country, pastors like Schmidt have ushered weary congregants through virtual worship setups, lonely hospital stays, funerals, job losses, intense political tensions, and relentless debates over pandemic precautions. Churchgoers making their way back through the sanctuary doors in 2021 will carry the weight of trauma and divides built up over more than a year spent apart—if they decide to return to the building at all.

During the first months of the year, fewer than half of regular churchgoers in the US made it to an in-person service, according to the Pew Research Center, though more than three-quarters said their churches had reopened.

Attendance has continued to rise, but some who once filled …

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Let’s talk about the issue tearing the American church and country apart.

Christians should be afraid of critical race theory. That’s the message that a number of conservative Christian leaders have shared in recent months. Last fall, the presidents of the five Southern Baptist seminaries issued a statement saying that “affirmation of Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality and any version of Critical Theory” is incompatible with the Baptist Faith and Message, the denomination’s core beliefs. This anxiety made CRT a main focus at the denomination’s recent gathering.

In recent years, some evangelicals have identified critical race theory as an ascendent ideology in the church that is fundamentally at odds with Christian faith. This anxiety has been mirrored by many conservatives at large and the debate over this ideology has moved from the previous president’s public disgust of the ideology to state legislature measures that would ban it in schools. All of this comes months after the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor have once again spurred both conversations about how the church ought to respond to racial injustice but also how the church should discuss this reality. One recurring concern for some Christians: that their fellow believers have adopted the worldview and talking points of critical race theory and Marxism.

Over time, these charges have been lobbed by Christians at Christians, the latter of whom often feel like this language mischaracterizes the movement, miscasts their efforts, or unfairly shuts down conversations without a hard look at the issues actually at stake.

D.A. Horton directs the intercultural studies program at Cal Baptist and serves as associate teaching pastor at The Grove Community Church in Riverside, California. His 2019 book, …

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This Fourth of July, worship leaders work to focus devotion “In Christ Alone.”

Around star-spangled holidays like Memorial Day and Independence Day, churches have often faced pressure to feature a patriotic song or two in their worship service lineups. But this year, many worship leaders are thinking more carefully about those expectations and how they can recognize a national holiday while preserving God’s place as the sole focus of our devotion.

Cole Willig, worship leader at The Crossing in Milton, Delaware, anticipates some criticism over the absence of patriotic content in this year’s Fourth of July service.

“I’m not going to gear [the service] toward a man-made nation,” Willig said. “My job is to provide a space for people to worship, but then also to teach what worship is.”

For the Christian, faith and patriotism are not simply two dimensions of identity; worship music and patriotic music are not simply two “genres” of music. The worship of God through song is a distinct spiritual act of love and obedience. The singing of patriotic music is a voluntary act expressing varying degrees of allegiance and support for one’s country.

But throughout US history, we’ve seen generalized Christian faith and patriotism go side by side, as two complementary facets of American civic religion and identity.

During the final years of World War II, the US military found itself responsible for the internment of over 375,000 German prisoners of war. Those in charge of overseeing the massive internment project were interested in more than just containment—they realized that they had the opportunity to “reeducate” the enemy through carefully curated propaganda.

Music was part of this propaganda effort. A radio broadcast called “Cavalcade …

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