Seminary CM10: The Rise of the Nones

This is the tenth post on the Contexts of Ministry in my Seminary in a Nutshell series. See the bottom for the previous posts in this unit, "The Person and Contexts of a Minister." I have completed one other unit in this series, The Pastor as Leader.
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In this stretch of the Contexts of Ministry series, we are exploring the historical and cultural context of American Christianity. Today we are looking at the state of the American church in relation to the rising demographic of the "nones," those in America with no religious affiliation.

1. From 1990 to 2014, the number of individuals who do not identify with any religion whatsoever has almost tripled in America. In 1990 the number was 8.1%. In 2014 the number was 22.8%. Here is the Pew Research Data from 2014.

Here is a paragraph from the study: "The drop in the Christian share of the population has been driven mainly by declines among mainline Protestants and Catholics. Each of those large religious traditions has shrunk by approximately three percentage points since 2007. The evangelical Protestant share of the U.S. population also has dipped, but at a slower rate, falling by about one percentage point since 2007."

The drop is strongest among Millennials. "Fully 36% of young Millennials (those between the ages of 18 and 24) are religiously unaffiliated, as are 34% of older Millennials (ages 25-33). And fewer than six-in-ten Millennials identify with any branch of Christianity, compared with seven-in-ten or more among older generations, including Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers. Just 16% of Millennials are Catholic, and only 11% identify with mainline Protestantism. Roughly one-in-five are evangelical Protestants."

Unlike earlier generations, these young people are not re-entering the church after sowing their wild oats in college.

2. Ed Stetzer has offered an interesting evaluation of this phenomenon. He points out that the percentage of people attending church has remained pretty steady over the last 70 years. Indeed, the percentage of the American population that self-identified as evangelical had grown to 35% in 2014.

His conclusion was thus that the rise of the "nones" (no religious affiliation) was coming from nominal Christians. "Convictional Christianity" was going strong. "The nominals are becoming the nones and the convictional are remaining committed," Stetzer wrote.

There is perhaps a theological perspective to take here as well. Jesus said, "Small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it" (7:14). We can wonder whether the number of "true believers" is ever really much more than 30%. Are the hoards of Americans who go to church true followers of Jesus Christ? It seems doubtful.

Hebrews 11:13-16 suggests that, in this current age, Christians are always strangers and exiles on the earth. Even when Christianity is culturally dominant, real Christians probably will only make up a minority. Indeed, the situation is perhaps most dangerous and deceptive when Christians think they are in the majority. When the institutions of society are "Christian," they probably aren't.

3. What are some of the cultural dynamics that may keep many Millennials from the church?

The "civil religion" tendencies of American Christians are probably a major factor in the decline of Christianity among Millennials. Civil religion is the inability for a person to tell the difference between God and country. Patriotism and political party tribalism mix imperceptibly with one's religion. Flag goes on pulpit. "Only Republicans can be Christians." No doubt when we have the next set of data we will find that the recent election has caused an even more significant drop in Christianity among Millennials.

Four out of five self-identified evangelicals apparently voted for Donald Trump to be president. It seems clear that Millennials consider him morally reprehensible. Despite a tape that came out with him boasting of his ability to grope women, despite hateful comments he made during the campaign toward countless types of individuals, despite video clips that seem to show a tendency not just to lie about big things but to lie about almost anything, still evangelicals overwhelmingly voted for him. To Millennials, greed and narcissism seem to be the only fixed points in his decision making process, with everything else free to change according to what he thinks is most advantageous to him at the moment.

An event this past week is only likely to increase this perception. Neo-Nazis, KKK, and white nationalists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia a week ago Saturday, and they were met by large numbers of anti-protesters, including an anti-fascist group called Antifa. One of the white nationalists plowed his car into a group of peaceful individuals, killing a young 22 year old woman. The President was not only slow to condemn the neo-Nazis, but appeared to view both sides as morally equivalent. While numerous individuals withdrew from Trump advisory boards, leading to their disbandment, his evangelical advisory board largely remained intact.

Fighting abortion, which we will see in a later post was the issue in the 1980s that corraled evangelicals more than anything else into the Republican corner, is not the central moral issue for Millennials. How you treat people who are not like you is the central concern. Millennials are also concerned for the planet and climate change in a way that is incomprehensible to many older evangelicals. Given this mix of values, American evangelicalism seems morally reprehensible to many of them.

This is an important point. It is not that they are uninterested in God or morality. It is that they actually consider evangelicals to be morally reprehensible in numerous respects. Christianity in this form seems immoral, even evil to them.

4. Issues of race and gender thus feature large in the Millennial moral perspective. White evangelicals--and the evangelical demographic is overwhelmingly white--tend to be blind to issues of color. Because they do not face the same history and biases, they often do not see the struggles of people of color. Indeed, when the cork of these pressures pops off, all they see is the disruptive result, not the structures that caused them. What they see is that such individuals are sometimes hired and they are not. This inability to see one's own advantages as a white person is called "white privilege."

To most Millennials, gay individuals are real people, their friends, their family. To much of white evangelicalism, gay individuals are somewhere else. They are an idea, a stereotype, a theological discussion. Millennials largely do not see the distinction between "loving the sinner, hating the sin." Many of us try to make careful distinctions between homosexual acts and the person doing them, but this distinction seems largely rejected by Millennials.

Accordingly, it is not surprising that even this past week, several Christian groups were labeled as hate groups, primarily for their lobby against gay marriage.

This cultural dynamic puts churches in a difficult place, and there will be many Millennials who will reject the church for this reason. Even more, churches may face significant difficulties from the state going forward because of our stances on these issues. After the reactionary blip of Trump is gone, these forces will likely rush forward on the church with a vengeance.

5. A recent book wrestling with Christianity and evolution has suggested that conflicts between science and faith are the number one reason young people leave the faith. Whether we like it or not, Millennials tend to see evangelicals as forces of ignorance in American culture. The technological revolution and the seemingly never ending stream of scientific improvements even in their lifetime have led them to believe that scientists are smart and genuinely in pursuit of truth.

So when scientists say, "Climate change is real and very dangerous" or "Evolution is beyond reasonable doubt," they tend to believe them. When the Bible is offered as a counter-argument, they ask "which Bible" or "whose interpretation of the Bible"? They have not grown up in isolation from other churches and religions. The internet has made it all available to them.

We will have to see fully what the dynamics of the generation after the Millennials will be. Having been raised in the shadow of 9-11, it is possible that "Gen Z" will be more traditionally conservative in its values. The question is whether it will equate those values with Christianity. Conservatism without Christ is truly scary indeed. Ask the Germans.

6. What are we to do? We must be true to Christ. The way we share the good news may change. It always has. Perhaps we should not try to take over the world so much and let God deal with the world (1 Cor. 5:12-13). The Millennial concern for others is Christian to the core. Maybe if we focused on being "for" others and less "against" things, our witness might begin to heal.

Of course we also have to be true to what we believe Christ requires of us. We should be aware, however, that there is likely to be not a little American culture in what we think is the core. Dialog with Christians who are full of faith but not like us is the surest way to see where we have let cultural traditions creep into our kingdom core.

A large part of evangelicalism for the last hundred years has been characterized by protectionism against forces of the modern world that we did not know how to handle. There are Christians who have faith and yet have not abandoned dialog with science and scholarship. Twenty years ago Mark Noll wrote of the "scandal of the evangelical mind." He meant the tendency of many evangelicals to oppose education and hard hitting scholarly thinking.

Many of us are ready to go. The evangelical movement as we have known it may die. But the true church will go on. Revival will come. But we may not like it or recognize it. Indeed, many will no doubt think it is of the Devil.

Next Sunday: Culture 11: Webber and the "Younger Evangelicals"

The Calling of a Minister

• The Domains of Ministry
• The Calling of a Minister
• Ministerial Calling in Scripture
• Ministerial Calling in History
• God can call anyone he wants into ministry.
• A Theology of Calling

The Person of a Pastor

• Intro to the Pastor as Person
• Personal Strengths and Weaknesses
• Sacred Pathways
• Individual Spiritual Disciplines
• Corporate Spiritual Disciplines
• Some Formational Reading

Contexts of Ministry

• Kinds of Context
• The Making of Meaning
• How Culture Works
• The Cultures of the Bible
• The Kingdom Core
• The Church and Culture
• A Culture Map

American Church History Context

• Global Christianity
• My American Church Context

Seminary CM9: My American Church Context

This is the ninth post on the Contexts of Ministry in my Seminary in a Nutshell series. See the bottom for the previous posts in this unit, "The Person and Contexts of a Minister." I have completed one other unit in this series,The Pastor as Leader.
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1. There were a number of creative features to the initial design of the Cultural Contexts of Ministry class when Wesley Seminary was founded at Indiana Wesleyan University. One of them was to cover American history in the contexts of ministry course. In the design of the curriculum, Norm Wilson was concerned that the Global Christian History course not assume a North American focus, as if white American Christianity was the culmination or center point of Christianity.

Out of this discussion came the idea of covering American Church History in the Cultural Contexts of Ministry class. American church history would then be seen, as it should be, as one of the contexts of American ministers in the US, but not necessarily that of ministers in other parts of the world. The idea was that, when the curriculum left North America, this component would switch out the American piece for the local and regional church history of the cohort elsewhere.

So it is not a little unusual to cover American church history in a cultural contexts class. Another unique feature, the brain child of Keith Drury, was to cover this context in reverse and selectively, depending on who was in the class. So each student in the class would start with whatever church they were currently a part of and work backward. The end result was often a board that looked like an upside down tree, with each student starting as a branch at the bottom and working back up to the trunk of earlier Catholicism.

2. So for me, The Wesleyan Church came from the merger of two smaller denominations, The Pilgrim Holiness Church and (1922) the Wesleyan Methodist Church (1843). The PHC often looks back to an event in 1895 and my grandparents' branch went back to 1882, but it was largely a collection of little groups in the Midwest that came out of revivals in the late 1880s/early 1900s. These individuals were Methodists, Quakers, and so forth. The Wesleyan Methodist Church was started by a group of abolitionists who were unhappy with the way the Methodist Episcopal Church was not taking a stand against slavery.

So my parent denominations roughly come out of the Methodist Episcopal Church, which was founded in 1784 by John Wesley after the American Revolutionary War. Because of the separation between the Church of England and America, it seemed necessary to ordain ministers who were part of his Methodist movement, which grew out of the Anglican Church or the Church of England.

At this point, the church ancestry leaves the US and goes back to England. The Anglican Church came out of Roman Catholicism in 1534 during the Protestant Reformation. The Roman Catholic Church came out of the split between East and West in 1054. Before that you had common Catholic Christianity.

Part of the goal of this exercise was to help students see where they came from theologically. A non-denominational church might say, "We just follow the Bible," but of course they're wrong. All it takes is a few questions to figure out where your ideas and traditions really came from. You may be a mixture of traditions, but unless you grew up reading the Bible in a bomb shelter, there is little doubt but that much of what you think the Bible says is teaching you heard from someone else in a particular Christian tradition.

3. So most American Christians will have a strong Baptistic element to their sense of the Bible. The Baptist tradition has had the strongest influence on American Christianity of any tradition. The Baptistic influence 1) clearly emphasizes believer's baptism by immersion, soon after "conversion," 2) tends to be local church centric rather than a larger hierarchical structure, 3) tends toward the fundamentalist side, reacting against the forces of modernism and thus with a tinge of anti-intellectualism and anti-education/anti-science, 4) has a strong sense of eternal security and the inevitability of sin.

These forces are strong on a wide-variety of denominations, including my own, which supposedly comes out of the Methodist tradition. Your typical independent or non-denominational church is probably Baptistic in orientation. Although no doubt claiming to get its beliefs from the Bible alone, these American churches will strangely look a lot like the previous paragraph. Perhaps only 25.3% of Americans (in 2007) are officially Baptist, but the influence on evangelicalism (25.4% in 2014) is much more pervasive.

In the South they say there are no Lutherans, Methodists, or Presbyterians. There are only Lutheran Baptists, Methodist Baptists, and Presbyterian Baptists.

Often coupled with Baptistic elements is the Pentecostal tradition (8.9% in 2007). So you take a Baptist church and add an openness to speaking in tongues, and you have an Assemblies of God church. These groups are often put into the category of evangelicalism, which is a largely white American tradition (black churches usually do not self-identify as evangelicals, 6.5% in 2014).

Evangelicalism, following the myth of simply being Bible-believing, is often typified as being 1) Scripture-centered, 2) conversion-centered, 3) cross-centered, and 4) socially active. [1] But what this really means is 1) tending toward the fundamentalist in reaction to forces that emerged in the late 1800s/early 1900s, 2) in the train of the revivals in England and the US in the 1700s, 3) strongly influenced by John Calvin, and 4) willing to fight against modernism.

In other words, what we believe as Christians is usually connected to the Bible but extremely filtered through the history of our American context. A lack of awareness of these forces is a fundamental blindspot of the American church. It is also why there are over 30,000 American denominations. Most of them are convinced they are just reading the Bible and doing what it says... and that so many other groups are wrong.

4. So if you wanted to start a denomination, what are the ingredients? What are my choices from which to choose?

a. Church Structure: First, only a Protestant would want to start a new denomination. We protesters originated in the late Middle Ages over abuses in the Roman Catholic Church. Most of the early split-offs (Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, Methodist) retained some of the episcopal structure of the RCC. So this is one of your choices. Do I want a more episcopal structure with bishops and a hierarchy (doubtful, if you're starting a new denomination)? Or do I want to go Baptistic (more likely, especially if I live in a democratic society) and let the local congregation pick their pastor? Well, at least after my prophetic rule is over.

Think you're getting back to the Bible by doing away with hierarchy? Maybe you're part of the house church movement. Nah, you're just riding the waves of American culture without knowing it. In America, I get to decide stuff, and we're currently in a "state's rights" phase of our country's history, an example of Baptistic influence affecting our politics. "Push the rule down locally."

b. Fundamentalist or ?: If you are trying to start a new denomination, there's a good chance you have been influenced by the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early 1900s. This means you are very sensitive to scholarship on the Bible, on modern science, and probably have your reservations about education in general. These things were not always the case.

In the early 1800s, American Christians would not have seen a conflict between science and religion. And it was Christianity more than anything else that was behind the rise of American colleges and universities. The turning point was with the rise of German biblical scholarship in the late 1800s and the rise of evolution in science in the late 1800s/early 1900s. That is, the rise of modernism.

American Christianity has never quite been able to recover. Instead, a certain understanding of the Bible became a matter of war. No discussion is allowed on these matters. Rather they must simply be believed and all reason marshaled to support the "right" position only. The rise of the nones may in part be the result. Certainly a lot of people have lost their faith in the meantime, being told that it was either the fundamentalist dogma or leave. The strong support of Trump by evangelicals is a manifestation of this American dynamic.

I wonder if there will be an unexpected revival among the nones in the decade to come, with an unexpected new wave. If so, much of the American church would consider it perverse because it would not conform to fundamentalist expectations (cf. the emergent church). Perhaps not. Right now there is a re-surge of fundamentalism. But I wonder.

c. Conversion vs Sacrament: The revivals of Wesley's England and then across America were a natural result of the rise of individualism and democracy. In a world where the individual decides and votes, it becomes essential for the individual to choose Christ. It is no longer a decision that was decided for you by your group. You must make it your own. "God has no grandchildren, only children."

Thus we see a shift from infant baptism to believer's baptism, one of the choices you will want to make a decision on as your start your new church. But if you are starting a new church, I feel quite convinced you will go with believer's baptism.

Others seem enamored right now with sacraments. But they tend to move in the Episcopal direction, with some then making the jump to Catholicism or the Orthodox tradition. They rarely start churches. :-)

d. Experiential Orientation: So how are you going to treat spiritual gifts, especially tongues? Are you going to allow emotional expression in worship? How demonstrative will your services be? What will the worship style be? Hymns? A worship band? No instruments? Does the Spirit still give people spiritual gifts? What does it mean to receive the Holy Spirit?

e. Theological Gap-Filler: So what are the main options with regard to theological ideas? Again, I'm assuming you're Protestant in some flavor if you are starting your own denomination.

Here are some options:

• God: Are you going to focus more on God's nature as love or as just? Are you going to see him determining everything or giving extensive freedom to his creation? Does he know everything or does his knowledge unfold with our choices?
• Christ and salvation: In what way does Jesus reconcile us to God (assuming you believe he did)? How does the cross and atonement work? How is someone saved (assuming we need to be saved in some way)? Or is Christ more a model to follow? Do you have to know him in your head to be saved or is it about knowing him in your heart? Once you are "saved" are you always saved or can you lose this state? 
• Spirit and the Church: See some of the options above.
• Eschatology: Can things get better? Can the church have an impact on the world? Or are things inevitably going to decline until Christ returns? Is Christ returning? Do we die and go directly to heaven/hell or is there going to be a resurrection to a new earth? Is there going to be a Tribulation with an Antichrist? Is everyone going to be saved? Are most going to hell? Or does God just annihilate those who aren't "saved"? 
• Ethics: How does God expect us to live in this world? Can we defeat temptation and sin? How free are we? Is the Christian life primarily about following rules or is it more about being in relationship with God? Is your emphasis more law-focused or grace-focused? Should we force the society we are in to have our Christian ethic? Or are we in exile in a world without God?
• Creation: In our times Christians often take a position on the creation. Is it something we need to steward and protect as God's representatives on earth or is it largely something we need not worry about?

5. The main take-away is that no one reading this post is a Christian in a vacuum. Your Christian identity has inevitably been shaped by your historical and theological context. In other words, it has been shaped by culture every bit as much as by ideas. If we do not know these influences on us, we do not know ourselves and we are slaves to the whims of history.

Next Sunday: Culture 10: The Growth of the Nones

[1] David Bebbington, The Dominance of Evangelicalism

The Calling of a Minister

• The Domains of Ministry
• The Calling of a Minister
• Ministerial Calling in Scripture
• Ministerial Calling in History
• God can call anyone he wants into ministry.
• A Theology of Calling

The Person of a Pastor

• Intro to the Pastor as Person
• Personal Strengths and Weaknesses
• Sacred Pathways
• Individual Spiritual Disciplines
• Corporate Spiritual Disciplines
• Some Formational Reading

Contexts of Ministry

• Kinds of Context
• The Making of Meaning
• How Culture Works
• The Cultures of the Bible
• The Kingdom Core
• The Church and Culture
• A Culture Map
• Global Christianity