What Will We Do When Christianity Loses Its Respectability?

Tasha and I were in Seattle over the weekend to celebrate the wedding of one of my first “Young Life kids”. He was a junior in high school when we met. And now, after 15 years, he’s “all grown up” and entering into the fore of adult life – a job, a house, a boat, a wife (who incidentally crashed the boat and still managed to garner his lifelong commitment of love). It was a beautiful experience, owing to the Christ-centered focus of the entire wedding, being able to reconnect with dear friends, enjoying the stunning Seattle weather, and (last but not least) the thrill of one drop-top Chevy Camaro.

The Pacific Northwest is often referred to as one of the most unchurched regions of the country and it certainly doesn’t take long for any wide-eyed observer to note the prevailing secular “tone” there. Yet the non-religious drift of American society is certainly not limited to dreary Seattleites and waterlogged Portlanders. Matter of fact, it is America’s Northeast and not the Northwest that dons the particular honor of “most unlikely to attend church.” A Gallup poll shows that while 32% of Washingtonians regularly go to church, only 23% of Vermont natives ever shadow the doorway of a Christian establishment.[1]

As the US experiences the precarious “rise of the nones” (those with no religious affiliation – currently 1 in 5 adults, 1 in 3 under 30), I wonder if this is but a foretaste of the religious estrangement that we’re seeing in places like the UK?  Americans might be aghast when only a quarter of their residents round up the kids and drag them to church on any given Sunday, but Brits might interpret those numbers as some sort of religious revival. In a country where only 6% of the population regularly attends church, American religiosity is more than curious, it is bizarre.

Why?

It is not so odd that so many Americans go to church. What is most peculiar is that so many of these Christian practitioners are not really Christian believers. Whether you’re talking about Catholics, of whom only 60% believe in a personal God at all, or those Christians whose church attendance is less an act of public worship than it is good publicity, it seems that the “respectability” of Christian allegiance is still a pervading force in the United States.

Francis Spufford, acclaimed English author (and practicing Christian) notes:

The idea of people pretending to be regular churchgoers because it will make them look virtuous – or respectable, or serious, or community-minded – is completely bizarre to us. Here in Britain, it is more likely that people would deny they went to church even if they actually did, on the grounds of embarrassment, for embarrassment is one of the most powerfully motivating emotions in British culture.[2]

What was interesting about being at a Christian wedding in Seattle was that nearly every person we talked to had a Young Life story. Virtually every conversation we had with a practicing Christian in the Northwest had some connection to Young Life – they had been to camp at Malibu or Washington Family Ranch, they went through Leadership at UW, they attended Club or Campaigners, etc. Somehow Young Life strengthened their spiritual life in a place where religious belief and practice is marginal at best.

One only wonders how pivotal Young Life’s approach will be – going where they are, earning the right to be heard, proclaiming the central message of the gospel in a winsome and relevant way – as the secular drift of American culture leaks increasingly from the Northeast and Northwest into the rest of the country. I can’t help but think that Young Life’s pioneering spirit is paving the way for the Church as it’s call for the new evangelization is confronted with the widening birth of secularism. It’s a thought that hasn’t escaped the pope himself:

In the Gospel there’s the beautiful passage about the shepherd who realizes that one of his sheep is missing, and he leaves the ninety-nine to go out and find the one. But, brothers and sisters, we have only one. We’re missing ninety-nine![3]

So what will we do when Christian respectability and that old-school sense of church obligation lose their hold in American culture? What will we do when ninety-nine have left the flock? “With our faith we must create a ‘culture of encounter,’” Pope Francis says, “a culture of friendship in which we can speak with those who think differently.”[4] “Instead of being just a church that welcomes and receives by keeping the doors open, let us be a church that finds new roads, that is able to step outside itself and go to those who do not attend Mass, to those who have quit or are indifferent.”[5] It’s working for Young Life in some of the most secularized segments of our country. Maybe, just maybe, it will work for the wider Church and her mission to the world.

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[1] See http://www.gallup.com/poll/125999/mississippians-go-church-most-vermonters-least.aspx

[2] Francis Spufford, Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising, Emotional Sense (NY: HarperCollins, 2013), vii.

[3] See http://ncronline.org/blogs/francis-chronicles/pope-francis-constant-refrain-go-forth-evangelize-help-poor

[4] Pope Francis, vigil of Pentecost 2013.

[5] Antonio Spadaro, S.J., “A Heart Open to God,” America (September 30, 2013).