Is American Christianity dead?
Or is it just that the smug secularism of both the religious right and religious left has brought us to the brink of an abyss?
I’m going to pose a question that absolutely no one in the churches, academia, or the media has perhaps even dared to contemplate these days.
Is American Christianity dead?
Note that I’m not at all asking the infamous question, which Time magazine in citing the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche served up on its cover in April 1966 and triggered endless and virulent debate (which continues to this day) – “is God dead?”
Nor am I querying in regard to the death of Christianity itself, which has been around for two millennia and is not just very much alive, but burgeoning in popularity throughout much of the former colonial world now known as the Global South.
I humbly ask if American Christianity has, figuratively speaking, kicked the bucket.
Now, of course, like Nietzsche himself who made the declaration that “God is dead” through the mouth of a madman in 1882, we’re not talking about “death” in a literal sense (Nietzsche, by the way, was crafting a punning rhyme that is only intelligible in German and not in English (“God is dead” = Gott ist tot).
Nietzsche’s adage has been routinely misinterpreted for decades to suggest that God no longer exists, if he ever did. But what Nietzsche really implied was that the word “God” had become a vacuous and meaningless trope because of its constant misuse as well as overuse, and that serious and sincere faith had been replaced by what today we might term the “weaponization” of religious language for ulterior ends.
That’s more or less what has happened to American Christianity, according to University of Oklahoma sociologist Samuel Perry.
Perry writes that the much-touted decline in Christian belief and church-going over the past decade cannot be attributed simply to the overdetermined and slippery notion that America is “secularizing” (we’ve been doing that, according to the academic literature, for several centuries or more).
No, says Perry, the blame falls squarely on the almost complete absorption of religion by politics. He observes – amusingly:
American Christians who are concerned about the future of their faith should take warning. Planting your beloved faith in the welcoming soil of partisan politics is like burying your loved one in Stephen King’s Pet Cemetery. What returns is neither living, nor dead, but something else entirely. Potentially the stuff of horror movies.
And we are not even near the conclusion of the dramatic and “horrific” climax of the one we are currently watching.
In his essay Perry focuses almost exclusively on right-wing politics, but the fault lies as much with the left as with the right.
The kind of cartoonish reduction of Christianity to polemical left-wing politics that one finds with such notorious X-influencers as the so-called New Evangelicals and prominent ex-evangelical trolls like Mason Menennga illustrate the former case.
America’s hyperpolarized Presidential politics with its Hobson’s choice between Biden and Trump who remain little more than sloppy metaphors for each party’s apoplectic and abiding hatred of each other is what without doubt has brought us to this grim and fateful pass.
The deeper question no one seems to want to bring up is how we got there in the first place.
We can start with a review of some not so recent, but also not that remote, history to garner a certain critical perspective.
The year 1966 when the aforementioned Time cover hypothesizing God’s demise first appeared serves as a distant mirror to the present one.
The slogan “God is dead”, as deployed in both the academic and journalistic rhetoric of that day, had less to do with Nietzsche’s specific concerns as it did with the process of “secularization”, which then as now seemed to be both omnipresent and irreversible.
But in the next few years there would be a sea change in both popular and professional attitudes, and the reason was a single “black swan” event that changed the trajectory of history in powerful and lasting way.
It was President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to escalate our involvement in the Vietnam War, which eventually killed just under 60,000 Americans, seven times the number that died in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
The violence and intractability of the Vietnam conflict, which lasted more than a decade, put the collective psychological kibosh on the (then) youthful Baby Boomers’ breezy optimism.
Just like many current GenZers, who have been nurtured all along in a social justice-irradiated growhouse of daydreams about solving the world’s problems that can be dispatched as easily, innocently. and elegantly as the slogan “yelp if you need help” in PAW patrol, the much maligned boomers were under virtually the same spell when they rose up and devoutly marched off in the early Sixties in response to John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech exhorting them to “pay any price” and “bear any burden”.
But a wave of assassinations of iconic political leaders from the Kennedy brothers to Martin Luther King Jr., the rising smoke of urban riots proliferating throughout the last part of the decade, and of course the mayhem in Southeast Asia that went on and on with “no light at the end of the tunnel”, as the cliché of the era expressed it, altered the social mood drastically among America’s youth almost overnight.
The cognitive dissonance young people experienced from these historic traumas led to a radical rethink about what at the time was considered the “inevitable” secularization of religious belief and practice to the point of oblivion.
The sudden change can be glimpsed through the writings of one of the most popular Christian authors of the age – Harvard theologian Harvey Cox.
Cox became an instant celebrity in 1966, same year as the special Time issue, when he published the widely celebrated best-seller The Secular City.
The tenor of what Cox wrote can be summed up in the opening paragraph of his work:
The rise of secular civilization and the collapse of traditional religion are closely related movements…Secularization, an equally epochal movement, constitutes a massive change in the way men grasp and understand their life together, and it occurred only when the cosmopolitan confrontations of city exposed the relativity of the myths and traditions men once thought were unquestionable.
The ”death of God”, Cox implied, really means that the human race (in reality he meant the Western, educated elites) no longer needs to feel dependent on any transcendental order. Secularization, he wrote a few pages later, “has relativized religious world views and thus rendered them innocuous.”
But within just a year or so Vietnam and its affiliated domestic catastrophes made this statement seem both naïve and outdated. Harvard psychology professor turned countercultural guru Timothy Leary came out with another runaway best-seller entitled Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out in which he boldly declared the tide was running in precisely the opposite direction from where Cox had said it was.
Leary is most famous for having promoted with silver tongue the fad of psychedelics and by extension the recreational use of mind-altering drugs, which prior to the late 1960s were eschewed by the overwhelming majority of the American middle class.
But he was also a strong and effective advocate for the proposition, bruited in the first chapter of his book, that “the purpose of life is religious discovery”.
It’s not at all the case any longer, Leary wrote, that God is dead. “Remember: you are God” he gushed.
And millions of young Americans took him not only seriously, but literally.
A few years after that we had the beginnings of the “Jesus Revolution,” as for the most part accurately depicted in the recent movie by the same name.
In its wake also came the great evangelical revival of the 1970s that brought us everything from megachurches to new and hip forms of Pentecostalism to the beginnings of the “culture wars” and a decided politically conservative turn among the Boomer generation.
The “secular city” suddenly became little more than an academic knockoff of Disney’s Fantasyland.
Cox, as a result, ended up eating a large amount of crow. In the mid-1970s he spent extensive time at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado – American headquarters for Vajrayana (i.e., Tibetan) Buddhism – and published Turning East, in which he essentially endorsed Leary’s take on things.
In 1995 during the age of Bill Clinton he went so far as to throw in his lot with the aftereffects of the Jesus revolution in his book Fire from Heaven and lionize Pentecostalism as the new world-transforming force of religion for the twenty-first century.
It should be noted ironically that, as I wrote a week ago, Pentecostalism seems at this present moment to be the much-preferred whipping boy for the kinds of anti-Christian hypersecularistm redux from the mid-Sixties that Perry among others sees as the latest “inexorable” trend.
In 2013 at the high water mark of the administration of President Barack Obama, just when the urban revival was at its peak and a new militant “secularism” was on the runway and poised to take off, Cox republished The Secular City with a new introduction and some new and not-so-subtle cautions about overplaying the “Christianity sucks” paradigm that seems so attractive nowadays to those with severe historical memory loss.
Secularization is a regional, not a universal, pathway for the different peoples of the world, Cox opined. There is no emergent “secular city” in the planetary – or “cosmopolitan” – sense, and in fact many throughout the Global South reject secular values, attitudes, and ideas as recrudescent strains of cognitive colonialism.
Cox, who came across in 2013 as somewhat chastened, asked, “can the proponents of the secular understand themselves as only one among many worldviews?”
A comedown from The Secular City and a warning to those who are addicted to the overpoliticized types of religion that is driving American Christianity from one of the political spectrum to the other to the brink of the abyss!
But, returning to our initial question about whether American Christianity is dead, we need to keep in mind that while history rhymes, it never actually repeats itself.
The metamorphosis of much of American Christianity into the crudest sorts of hyperpartisan politics, which has no analogue from the 1960s, is an entirely novel development.
And the naked and crass idolatry it inspires, let alone the potential for cataclysmic social upheaval and internecine violence, does make the situation far more ominous and disturbing than it was a half century ago.
At the same time, I would still go along with the main critique of secularism that it is not the future, either immediately or in the long run.
As Cox points out in rehashing a robust variety of eminent scholars in the late modern period, the notion of the “secular” is joined at the hip with “Christianity”.
In fact, one could go out on a limb and argue that “secularism”, like Unitarianism or Congregationalism, is just another instance of Christian denominationalism that flourishes for a season, only to wither and go dormant until historical circumstances are favorable to its revival.
This time around, I predict, the implosion of secularism following historical shock treatment will not lead necessarily to any sort of cozy and consoling revival of familiar forms of Christianity, as happened in the aftermath of the Vietnam debacle.
Like the first decades of Christianity, contemporaneous with the Roman destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem that changed Judaism irrevocably, the imminent “apocalypse” of our day will bring about something that our toxically polarized political hacks on the Christian right and left with their feeble minds and spiritual dehydration are incapable of imagining.
However, God certainly can, and that is why need to be on the lookout for false prophets.