In a recent issue of The Atlantic (April 2017) Peter Beinart wrote of the new moral challenge on the other side of the culture wars. In Breaking Faith he describes how institutional religion has been slowly but surely losing its foothold in the culture. The fastest growing religious category is "unaffiliated" and those numbers are enormous for rising generations. That, of course, has been the cause of much hand-wringing among church people and speculation about the future. But that is not the direction Beinart takes us.
He is preoccupied with the impact on the culture at large and there is a sizable one. People thought that the exodus from the churches would translate into an easing of conflict between religious people contending about such matters as abortion and same-sex marriage. Indeed, the unaffiliated are decidedly less concerned about such things. It is fair to say that they became increasingly indifferent to those issues. But that is not the only impact.
The same people who were "spiritual but not religious" are not always spiritual. In fact, they are very often unformed in matters of faith, just holding vague ideas about the existence of God or an afterlife. As far as particular understandings of what comprises the good life of faith - its practices, values, ethics, hopes and convictions - they are conspicuously clueless. That is reflected in vast numbers of people who say they are believers but have no substance to that belief. These unchurched became decidedly more intolerant of different ethnicities, immigrants and people different than themselves.
A case in point: During the last election a large group of white voters self-identified as "evangelicals." But the number of unchurched so called evangelicals has tripled since 1990. That title - evangelical - has almost become a philosophical/political moniker. Those same people when asked about religious ideas, Biblical beliefs, or the moral code of Jesus were clearly uninformed. They made decisions based on something else, something other than the core convictions that have guided many Christians for generations.
And that is why so many practicing Christians, church attending Christians, were baffled by the language and ideas expressed in the last election, not only by candidates, but by their constituencies: They were decidedly out of step with anything anyone would have learned in Sunday School or heard from a pulpit in most of the churches in the land. They were detached from a moral compass. Practicing Christians had no explanation for why these unchurched evangelicals would say or do what they did. That is because they were evangelical by name but spiritually unformed.
And there is a rising problem, not just for elections, but for anything in our common life. One of the unexpected consequences of diminishing church attendance isn't just the impact on churches; it is the impact on the larger society.
When a formed moral compass is lost then public discourse becomes crass, purely pragmatic, devoid of principles shaped by truth. When that happens the descent into a Darwinian survival of the strong is well underway. This, I think, represents a crisis for our republic. It is not just that we disagree or have different opinions about any matter of public concern. It is that we do not have communal awareness of the most basic ethical and moral foundations. Let me share an example.
After Senator John Danforth lived through an ethically compromising moment during one of his terms he wrote a book entitled Resurrection. In the book he made confession about what power and politics can lead a person to do, what they led him to do. There is redemption on the other side of our sin, he said, and we should make amends and do it better next time.
Imagine a sitting senator writing such a morally transparent book. But Danforth was and is a man shaped by Christian values and morals. He knew the difference between what was true and false. And it showed.
Where today are the spiritually shaped leaders who live out of such moral conviction? The problem is precisely that scarcity. And unless a moral voice - a larger, not narrowly dogmatic moral voice - enters the public marketplace of ideas that space will become increasingly dangerous and contaminated. This is a time fraught with peril for a number of reasons. One of the main ones, I am convinced, is a public that largely has no refined moral sense. The exodus from the churches does not bode well for turning that around. And the baptismal class of young people I am teaching right now could become a super minority of moral radicals who, if they are courageous enough, lift up their voices to clarify just what it is that we believe and what we do not.
