What Baptist leaders have known for years is finally public: The Southern Baptist Convention is a denomination in decline. Half of the SBC's 43,000 churches will have shut their doors by 2030 if current trends continue.
And unless God provides a miracle, the trends will continue. The denomination's growth rate has been declining since the 1950s. The conservative/fundamentalist takeover 30 years ago was supposed to turn the trend around; it didn't make a bit of difference.
Leaders said it did. Reporters and politicians believed it did. But the numbers kept going down until, finally, they have become obvious to everyone.
Evangelical faith has been dropping since 1900, when 42 percent of the U.S. claimed that distinction. Every year, Religious Right evangelicals, such as those who lead the Southern Baptists, are a smaller proportion of the country. Every year, their core values are violated more flagrantly by the media, scientific discovery and mainstream behavior. Every election, politicians promise to serve them and then don't because evangelicals lack the power to make them.
What all this means is that we were duped.
All the hype proclaiming an evangelical resurgence was merely that - hype, a furious shout from a faith losing its grip, manipulation by a relatively small group of dedicated, focused, political power-seekers.
The long decline of Southern Baptist faith is critical to the entire evangelical movement because the Southern Baptist Convention, which claims 16 million members, is the biggest evangelical denomination in the country, almost six times as large as the next biggest predominately white evangelical denomination.
The second-largest evangelical group, the National Association of Evangelicals, has claimed 30 million members. Their churches actually have 7.6 million, tops. Most of those are having the same problems the Baptists are having.
As the true picture of evangelicals' problems has developed, panicked leaders are splitting into camps. Some say that the church is lax, soft, sold out. That what's needed is an even bigger dose of the medicine that the SBC fundamentalist takeover delivered. More authority, more strict interpretations of the Bible, more sermons about sin and suffering and sacrifice, more rigor about who is and who isn't getting to go to heaven.
Others say the problem is image. Evangelicals have been seen as mean-spirited and narrow. Caring about the environment and giving more attention to the poor and needy will turn it around. Get out of politics, they say. Play down abortion and gay rights. That will fix the problem.
But these responses won't halt the increasing irrelevance of evangelical faith to the great majority of the U.S. population. Here are just three of the many reasons.
One is Alcoholics Anonymous and all its 12-step offspring - the creation of two Christian men who wanted to help alcoholics. They modeled AA on the teachings of Jesus and the ideas of philosopher William James. Instead of asking alcoholics to be saved, they asked them to call on a god of their own understanding.
They eschewed guilt and any talk of sinfulness. Repentance was directed at specific people who had been harmed. There was no doctrine, no institution, no demand for monetary support.
Tens of millions of addicts and other troubled people learned that they didn't have to read the Bible, attend church or follow a preacher's rules to engage a divine power that could heal them.
Such open-ended faith had never been experienced before. And so the role of the church as interpreter of God's truth and the Bible as its sole repository lost power with millions.
The second attack came within the church as American evangelicals themselves became less willing to proclaim that they are the only ones saved. That idea had seemed reasonable when people lived in fairly homogeneous groups. Since few people had much to do with foreigners - except in times of war, when they were trying to kill them, or from behind a tourist's camera, when they were making souvenirs of them - "our way is the only way" seemed reasonable.
But international travel, business and communication have changed that. So have huge waves of immigration. Now "the other" is likely to be your son-in-law or grandchild.
The idea that only one little part of one kind of religion has the only way to God has begun to seem more and more unlikely, rude, un-Christian, even. And evangelicals, who don't like being boorish any more than anyone else, have become less and less willing to relegate their neighbors to hell.
So we have a completely formless god of great power and instant accessibility romping around, rescuing millions whom everyone else had given up on. Then we have more Christians getting squeamish about proclaiming hegemony over heaven.
And along comes The Pill. Nothing in history has changed human relations as much as that little white pill.
The curse God laid on Eve wasn't quite so ironclad anymore. Skip forward a few decades, and couples started delaying marriage until their late 20s, 30s or even 40s. But that pill meant there was less pressure to abstain from sex until the wedding.
So hardly anyone did. Evangelical leaders resolutely hewed to the abstinence standard at least formally, resulting in little more than extra hypocrisy.
That didn't matter much. Hypocrisy has always flourished, and it hasn't killed the church yet. But evangelicals' failure to grapple with change meant the church was no help in a world where people were expected to sleep together long before marriage and desperately sought guidance about when and with whom.
Evangelical leaders defend their stance by claiming that God doesn't change and that neither does sin. But sin does change. Slavery wasn't sin once. Now it is. Taking a wife and a concubine wasn't sin once. Now it is.
And God - or our understanding of what God is, which is all we actually have - changes, too. Human understandings are remolded so that faith can remain vital and effective during new times.
Whether evangelical intransigence is pleasing to God isn't anything that humans can ever be absolutely sure of. If it is pleasing to him, God may send a great revival that will sweep the country and restore them to their place of predominance.
Such revivals have happened before. They could happen again.
But I've named only three of the ways that evangelical faith has come to seem less useful, necessary and vital to those who might benefit from its teachings. Evangelical faith is failing in so many other ways that a growing number of Christians believe a New Reformation is needed.
If they are correct, the Southern Baptist Convention is unlikely to lead that reformation. Let's hope it is at least around to participate.
Christine Wicker is the author of "The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church." Her e-mail address is christine@christinewicker.com and her web address is www.christinewicker.com
There is no difference between christian extremists and islamic extremists except for the symbols.
Both want to create a tyrannical governmnet which punishes the supporters of Freedom.
Christian extremists don't support the Constitution or American Freedom because it doesn't tell them to in the bible.
Danny S - RLRA
Real Live Recovered Alcoholic
Read your Gospels. You will see a Christ who served among the poor and abandoned masses. You'll also see a Christ who had infinite patience for everyone except the religious leadership.
A church that wants to succeed needs to call its members to serve God by serving others and to accept the outstretched hand of God to establish a personal one on one relationship. The church is NOT the gateway to God. It is the local support group for those who want to reach out to God and serve him.
I'm all for critiquing the SBC and pointing out the powerful men who have gained wealth and power through exploitation of religion. But as someone who lived through the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC (I listened to Dan Quayle speak at the '92 SBC convention), I think a relevant question is what has happened to the exiles. (Really, what clued me in is that I really liked "Murphy Brown" and didn't see what the big deal was.)
There are many, many people who have forsaken that kind of Christianity for other types that are more forgiving, more concerned with social justice, more like the Christ of the Gospels. There are traditional versions of this (I'm more familiar with the historical Baptist movement that advocated and advocates for the separation of church and state -- see the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty -- http://www.bjconline.org/ and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Also, there is a movement called Emerging Christianity -- which has grown up from post-evangelical and mainline traditions. Emerging Christianity isn't the megachurch or McChurch, but is more like a church that embraces post-modernity.
I'm looking forward to reading Wicker's book, but I'm desperately hoping for some nuance about a faith -- that despite all its flaws -- continues to challenge and fascinate and sustain me.
Only half? The more fundamentalist sects need to go the way of the Passenger Pigeon.
Why? I was cheering with every paragraph until we got to that bit.
The less religion, the better. And no religion would be the best. Just imagine.
For me the Evangelists represent a return to the condemnation and judgment and absolutism of the Old Testament and Talmudic law then the message of mercy, humility and forgiveness Jesus brought us..
A really great article let's hope more people choose to read and take solace in what Jesus taught, than these zealots and heretics of the Evangelist movement or the slippage we see in regard to some issues and threats the Roman Catholic hierarchy has resorted to of late as well..
That, to me, is very very bad news
It's what the Muslims use to whip up their followers into a feeding frenzy, and we are starting to see some of the same effects here.
Another issue, which I expect you discuss in the book, is the rampant anti-intellectualism of evangelicalism. I attended the largest evangelical seminary - Fuller. It is the only one that actually encouraged consideration of alternative viewpoints - rather than the swallow it whole approach of most.
I believe the anti-intellectual view is necessary to sustain the fundamentalist agenda. Thinking minds can't accept a young earth creation. A thinking mind needs to open up to alternative ways of explaining our relationship with God. That does not require one to deny Christianity - it does require openness to the idea that many of the concepts that fundies hold so dear may be representations of reality that were necessary for humans a millenia ago, but confuse and misdirect the human mind of today.