Trending From Church, Which I'm Doing Too

The sanctuary of Brooklyn Baptist Church, which used to be
Golgotha Finnish Congregational Church
(which I attended as an infant - my first church)
in Brooklyn's Sunset Park neighborhood. 
The remaining Finns sold their building to the Baptists,
a multi-cultural evangelical congregation,
in the late 1980s.

______________________

For it is not an enemy who taunts me—
 then I could bear it;
it is not an adversary who deals insolently with me—
 then I could hide from him.
But it is you, a man, my equal,
 my companion, my familiar friend.
We used to take sweet counsel together;
 within God's house we walked in the throng.
- Psalm 55:12-14 ESV

Christianity continues to dominate American culture.  Yet religious practices here, such as church attendance, are in decline.

Some researchers misread data gleaned from church attendance statistics and inaccurately state that America is becoming less "Christian".  What's really happening, however, probably points to more of an honest admission by Americans regarding the priority they place on acting out their faith.

Yes, many Americans no longer attend church.  And technically, I'm one of them.  I watch the video feed from "my" church online, but frankly, I admit I have no desire to return to in-person worship.  And it's not because of Covid, or doctrinal issues, or how hard it is to find a parking space on Sunday mornings in the hipster Dallas neighborhood where "my" church is located.  

Mom and I both had stopped attending in-person church before the pandemic ever hit.  Her reason is mostly her age, and her increasingly limited mobility.  My reason is completely different, but I wonder how common a reason it may be.

More and more Americans appear to be comfortable in not just dropping church attendance, but being unaffiliated with church, period.  By now, that trend should surprise nobody, since it's been going on for decades.  People have stopped going to church for all sorts of reasons, and it doesn't look like many of us plan on returning anytime soon.

Nevertheless, look around you:  Here we are, the Monday before Christmas, and how many homes in your neighborhood boast Christmas decorations?  You likely know the folks on your block who attend church regularly, and those who don't.  And I'll guess that the folks who never attend church have the same amount of decorations as those who do.

So while church attendance has been the big data point researchers have been watching, does it really point to any significant decline in levels of America's cultural Christianity?  That's always been a fairly shallow concept anyway, right?  How theologically-sound have been the measures of how "Christian" America was, and is?  

Every Advent season, for example, some folks complain over the evolution of "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas", but in reality, that change indicates more of an inclusion of other celebrations instead of an outright refutation of Christianity.  Plurality of faiths among a society like America's, with our strong immigration ethos, should not be conflated with people from Christianity's legacy losing interest in observing it within pews.

(Sidebar #1:  Pews, of course, are those long wood benches with built-in backs that "church growth movement" experts pilloried during American Christianity's seeker-sensitive movement, one of the tricks churches began using to try and fill sanctuaries - excuse me, "worship centers" - when America's church attendance decline became noticeable, back in the 1990s.)

(Sidebar #2:  And IF there are fewer and fewer "Christians" honestly celebrating Christmas, why do the remaining Christians blame society at large?  Most American Christians are dyed-in-the-wool capitalists, and capitalism is all about bottom-line marketing to the consumer.  So why bemoan the folks who are trying to appeal to the broadest constituency with their inclusivity of all December/January religious holidays?  As long as Christians aren't penalized for their "Christmas" sentimentality (Christmas is not a Biblical holy day anyway, you know), what's the harm?  Christians who fear the fact that fewer and fewer Americans actually observe a religious Christmas should pray about how they can minister better to their lost neighbors, instead of grumbling about terminology that only reflects society.)

Having fewer and fewer folks in those pews likely isn't a bad thing anyway, because it means that people who only marginally voiced allegiance to Christianity simply have decided to stop their pretenses.  Not that everybody remaining in America's churches are "saved" - I believe that, unfortunately, there are folks who attend church still as a pretense for a faith that they want to exercise on their own terms.  

For example, the idolatrous rise of Christian nationalism has taken over much of the religious right, meaning that allegiance to Christ may be falling to allegiance to Americanism.  

Depending on how one defines a "Christian nation", dropping church attendance still doesn't necessarily mean that Christianity itself is experiencing a "mass exodus", as one Roman Catholic demographer cleverly put it.

I was raised in the evangelical church.  I can trace my life by the Christian churches I've attended:

1. Golgotha Finnish Congregational Church; Brooklyn, NY
2. Maple Flats Baptist Chapel; Cleveland, NY
3. Kenwood Heights Alliance Church; Oneida, NY
4. Rome Alliance Church; Rome, NY
5. Arlington Alliance Church; Arlington, TX
6. East Park Church of the Nazarene; Arlington, TX
7. Pantego Bible Church; Arlington, TX
8. First Evangelical Free Church; Brooklyn, NY
9. Calvary Baptist Church; New York, NY (the only church I've ever joined)
10. Arlington Presbyterian Church; Arlington, TX
11. Park Cities Presbyterian Church; Dallas, TX  (my longest affiliation; over 20 years)

I've written articles for Crosswalk.com, a prominent evangelical website.  I served as a leader in the singles ministry at New York City's venerable Calvary Baptist, which was, overall, my best church experience.  For about three years, I worked in the financial office at Pantego Bible Church, a sizable non-denominational fellowship now located in Fort Worth, Texas.  For over a decade, I sang in the chancel choir at Dallas' wealthy Park Cities Presbyterian.  

Most of my Facebook friends have been acquired over the years through my various church affiliations.  My parents met as counselors at an evangelical Christian youth camp near Cape Cod, and my mother graduated from an evangelical college.  My brother and sister-in-law met while students at Moody Bible Institute, an evangelical college in Chicago.  So I'm definitely a product of America's Christian church culture.

Yet even I have lost my enthusiasm for the American church.  Yes, I still watch Sunday services online, but mostly I do that for my mother, who is a luddite and needs me to get the connection on my laptop computer for her.  I have personally become disillusioned with the way American evangelicals "do" church, and have both moved myself out of their circles, and have been forgotten by them.

I may have a few church-going acquaintances who actively shun me, but mostly, there's simply no more room in American evangelicalism for people like me.  I don't fit the mold they've created for what the typical evangelical church congregant should look like.  

Right off the top, I'm not married, I don't have kids, and I'm not currently employed.  Singles have never had an easy task navigating the cliques of conventional church, and the longer we stay single, the harder it becomes to assimilate.  Being divorced is marginally OK, especially if you still have kids at home, but being never-married means something is deeply flawed in you.  Unless you're making a ton of money from a great job, and can tell others your career simply comes first.  Which, um, I can't!

I live in my aging mother's aging house and help care for her.  Some folks peg me as a "mamma's boy".  If my life was a sitcom, I'd be the butt of the jokes.

To make matters worse, I am not a Christian nationalist, I have never voted for Donald Trump (or Hillary or Joe, for that matter), and while I believe it's a sin, I don't believe abortion is the greatest one.  I am not an anti-vaxxer, and I've had all my Covid shots.  I remain a registered Republican, but I don't vote a straight Republican ticket.  My faith is supposed to be in God, not politics or governments or laws.

Even worse than all that, however, is my battle with chronic clinical depression, which many Christians mock as a fake illness, a sin, and an excuse for laziness and immaturity.

I managed to sustain considerable friendliness with many folks at the churches I've attended, but as my life has continued to wear me down emotionally, I've discovered that those friendships only went as far as what other people could understand about me.  After that, I suspect my problems were simply too confusing and demanded too much time and attention - time and attention they could more easily spend on people more like themselves.  

Some would accuse me of whining and complaining now, but hey - I'm not complaining as much as I'm parsing out reality.  Modern life is complex and extremely time-consuming.  Schedules fill up fast.  In such a world, streamlining one's friendships to obtain maximum benefit from them makes sense.  And I understand that.  I can't say I'd handle the trappings - and traps - of modern success any better than anybody I've known.

In retrospect, I also realize I could have worked harder myself at making those friendships last.  I know I'm not outgoing or charismatic.  But that means my relationships were not organic enough to develop into friendships on their own, right?  Just going to the same doctrinally-sound church while professing hope in the same Biblical Savior proved woefully insufficient as a baseline for sustainable fellowship.

It's been a sad realization for me.

Maybe there's a country-club mentality among modern American Christianity, and maybe that's what's turning off many folks.  Us versus them.  In versus out.  And as American churchgoers increasingly embrace political dogma alongside their churchy preferences, the freedom many conservative religious people feel to wrap the Cross of Christ with the American flag gives them an unBiblical purpose.  And what is that purpose, but to market themselves as our country's patriotic remnant.  It's the new church schtick, since the specter of eternal damnation doesn't seem to hold as much resonance anymore.  Market your church as a defender of traditional family values, keep trying to legislate morality, and draw your battle lines around the vices in our society you can most easily define.

Maybe church has become a matter of defining what separates us.  Whereas Christianity can point to a history of welcoming the disenfranchised - at least, in Christ's day - today, it's mostly about how well a person can assimilate into a moralistic group, and how much sin they can avoid while still having their share of fun.  Anything that challenges their expectations and preferences provides sufficient justification for excommunication, or at least social distancing.

(Sidebar #3:  Churchgoing conservatives hate social distancing when they perceive liberals are forcing it.  But churchgoers have been doing it for years.)

So yes, while I'm not particularly threatened with data analyses that paint dire futures for Christianity in America, I personally can vouch for the data showing church attendance in decline.  Some churches do continue to grow, but I suspect such outliers generally reflect church-hopping - some call it "church-shopping" - as socio-religious butterflies flit from one congregation to another, like there are big revolving doors within any given city's church culture.  Some people who still want the churchy vibe strive to find the best fit for how they intend to live their lives (but not necessarily how Christ has taught us to live them).  Meanwhile, if somebody with as rigorous a churchy background as mine can become so disillusioned with the American church, imagine how easily other folks - with an even more ambivalent view of church attendance - can find it daunting and discouraging.

As for me, the basics haven't changed:  I still believe in God, and I believe in Jesus Christ, His holy Son, Who was born of humble birth to provide salvation for all of us humans who believe that He is the only Way to Heaven.  I still believe in the holy "catholic" (small "C", meaning "universal) church, and the communion of saints, as the ancient Apostles' Creed reads.  I even believe that believers should not "forsake the assembling of ourselves together", as Hebrews 10:25 reads.  

However, are people like me who no longer attend church the only ones who have fallen out of such idealistic descriptions of Christian fellowship?  What about the people who remain in their country-club-type churches, in their cliques; never bothering to consider if how they're exercising their churchy paradigm is corrupting the communion of saints by... forsaking assembling with marginalized saints?

"Oh, those marginalized people can attend church with us, but they will need to rise up to our pseudo-religious standards.  We shouldn't have to work harder to include them, or figure out why they're not as fun to be around."

(Sidebar #4:  If just about everybody in a congregation feels that way, it's kinda like the Kitty Genovese tragedy in 1960s New York City, when a woman screamed for help during an attack in the middle of the night.  Basically, although they heard her screams in their upscale Queens neighborhood, her neighbors figured "somebody else" would come to her aid - which meant that in reality, nobody did, and her corpse was found later).

Some folks find basic Biblical faith to be extremely exclusionary.  Which, theologically, it is.  And for those people who simply find the Gospel itself offensive, their abandonment of the church is sad, but not surprising.  Meanwhile, haven't many churches today made a different form of exclusiveness so popular amongst themselves?  

Some sins are more acceptable than others (gluttony, vanity, coarse joking, and increasingly, alcohol abuse are the wink-wink "bad habits" that can actually win a churchgoer more acceptance).  Popularity continues to define church pecking orders.  Wealth is an obvious way of doing that, but pick a metric - any metric - within society at large, and you'll find it mimicked either brazenly or discretely in church.  We are to love our neighbors as a way of demonstrating our love for God.  Churchgoers who prefer mixing in their religiosity and their lifestyles, unfortunately, are simply demonstrating their love only for neighbors who are like themselves.

And despite everything I've just written, I get that.  I really do.  As social creatures, all of us tend to do that in most aspects of life.  It's a comfort factor, and a safety factor.  Unfortunately, doing the same thing in church, like folks do in country clubs, is part of the dumbing-down of church and theology that's been going on for generations now (and not to bash only conservative churches, but liberal ones have been doing it all along, too).

And - shucks - not finding comfort and safety in church myself, it helps explain why I have no desire to return.  Extrapolate that across our country, and the trend explains itself.

Maybe at one time, there was something special and unique about going to church and being "in fellowship" with other people who claimed to believe in Jesus Christ.  When I attended Calvary Baptist, on busy 57th Street in Midtown Manhattan, we had homeless people attending, along with at least one matronly lady who I'd see arrive in a silver, chauffeur-driven limousine.  Plus cultures, skin colors, and ethnicities from literally around the world.  

Calvary's diversity was stunning.  There were Sundays where I'd stand on the main floor of its packed sanctuary (literally every Sunday, ushers would be cajoling seated parishioners into making extra room in their already-full pews), surrounded by this panoply of contrasts, all singing the same hymns, and tears would well in my eyes; I'd be overcome realizing how it represented a sample of what Heaven will be like.

Today, however, church no longer seems special.  And that's not God's fault, it's ours.

_____

Monday, February 6, 2023

By the way, some readers who are familiar with Park Cities Presbyterian and its congregation - one of the world's wealthiest - might casually deduce that my detachment from it stems from personal bitterness at being so economically poor relative to its congregants' affluence.  In response to such a presumption, I would first say that I never participated in Park Cities Prez because I was pretentious enough to figure I could fit in with their target audience.  I schlepped over there (a 40-minute drive in the best of times) because their corporate worship services were in the classical, traditional style, which I believe best reflect God's glory and holiness (and hey - those church growth experts say preference is the top reason to pick a church, right?).  

Second, I'm actually grateful to God for the time I got to spend at Park Cities Prez.  I learned a lot about money, wealth, and the people who have it.  For example, I learned not to begrudge people their wealth; not just because being jealous is wrong, but money really does add heavy complexity to one's life.  I also saw that money truly is relative, and God has given His church (the "holy catholic church" :-) plenty of it to do His work.  The thing is, in areas where we see funds lacking, it could mean we aren't spending His money properly.  

But enough about money, and Park Cities.  My conclusions about the church in general stem not just from my experiences in Dallas, but from the ways and things I've seen professing evangelicals from across the church spectrum do, be, and embrace.

I also have found it curious that since posting this essay in December, the only feedback I've heard (except from one long-time friend at Park Cities) has been from other folks who are disaffected from church.  I don't know how to explain that, but it seems to prove my point that churchgoers today are more comfortable without folks like me.  If I could be proven wrong, I'd gladly admit it!