Novelist Alphonse Karr’s old lament that “the more things change, the more they stay the same” has stood the test of time for a reason. It carries a truth about the human condition that resonates in the new age of artificial intelligence, just as it did thousands of years before Mr. Karr committed it to paper.
Human nature, the way we tick, is what makes us and breaks us and confuses us. The obvious has a habit of being the hardest thing to see, while common sense is often the missing component in many events.
What brings this to mind is a series of conversations I’ve had recently with disparate groups of folks — not about how they came to Christian faith, but how they lost their faith, or at least how they rejected what little they knew of the faith in the first place.
The Smoldering Wicks
There is, of course, an overarching social dynamic at work in the Western world — more specifically, the US — that makes the faith less attractive to begin with. The modern universal church has collapsed from within because it has wandered away from the core premise of its existence in the first place. In contemporary language, as a whole, the modern church hasn’t “read the room” well. It has been too faddish or too stodgy, depending on the cultural demands of the day, when following the culture has never been a mission of the church.
And in the post-World War II world, the rise of the statist dynamic, globalization of commerce, and the attending radical political imperative to dismantle freedoms that sat at the core of Western civilization — most importantly the freedom of faith, family, and culture — have left the church staggering.
However, on the individual level, what I hear over and over is that a budding or baby faith developed in school or a church was extinguished early on by careless, “meatless” theology, hard and demanding hearts, or social pressures that disengaged serious discussion of what the Gospel of Jesus Christ is, and isn’t, in the first place.
And, of course, a young person thrown into the mind-grinder of a typical college today not only has their capacity for critical thinking homogenized, but has faith demoted or destroyed as anti-intellectual, anti-science, and anti-modernity, where in reality the Christian faith has been the fountainhead of all of those.
Religion as a Weapon
I first ran into this phenomenon of rejecting what little a person knows about God in my own family. I came to faith in midlife after being raised in a nonreligious home. My late mother was an Australian who grew up in an Anglican boarding school in Sydney and rarely saw her parents.
What she did see was a hard and loveless religious institution where punishment included days locked in a dark closet, or other harsh physical punishment.
The wall that she erected against personal faith was high and wide. She wasn’t “anti-God” as much as she was determined not to relinquish her independence of action and thought once she was free of the religious leaders.
A friend from childhood who became a successful attorney was from a church-going family, and he told me not long ago that he and his family became involved in a church — but after his children left home, they left the church, too. Now he doubts that they’ll even look for a new church. They saw that the lives of the pastors and many in the congregation didn’t square up. They were more interested in socializing and business than in God. Now doubt has put out the embers of their tattered faith.
Another friend recently confided that she’d left the “faith” as a youth after hearing a pastor belittle and bully members. She’d challenged the behavior, only to become a new target of it. The lesson poisoned her budding faith, and she’s never recovered, nor returned.
Exterminating Faith
I’ve talked to many others who, as youths, questioned the Bible or their existing faith, only to find that the very people who should have helped them instead told them they simply had to believe more or try harder. In essence, the church itself snatched their young faith, and they have never returned.
Anecdotes are just that, but the pattern is so strong in my experience that I wonder if the greatest driver of church decline is the church itself. When it doesn’t make the ministry of Christ its ministry, then it’s just the rules of man. It becomes a hard, legalistic, and loveless place.
None of this is surprising. Jesus spent a lot of time criticizing the “scribes and Pharisees” of His day. He reserved His hardest and most pointed words for the religious and institutional elites who tried to mousetrap Him and His disciples into heretical or inflammatory language that could be used to destroy the ministry.
In Mark 7, the Pharisees and teachers asked Jesus why His disciples ate grain without washing their hands. Jesus’s words were brutally honest. “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites. ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.’”
Bluntness Personified
The pattern of the Lord’s truth-telling and calling out the religious authorities works its way through the gospels, most dramatically in Matthew 23, with the six woes He announces against them.
He explains that the teachers of the Law and Pharisees “shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces.” Sounds like what I often hear.
Later, He was confronted in the Temple Courts by the “chief priests and Pharisees” and later by the “Sadducees.” He accused the former of hypocrisy, “Why are you trying to trap me?” and the latter of not even understanding the Scriptures they themselves taught.
He would call the ruling elite “whitewashed tombs,” beautiful on the outside in their fine garb, but on the inside full of “dead men’s bones.” He wasn’t done. “On the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.”
But it shouldn’t be so with the modern church. There is only room for His story now. The story of Christ is the story of the great love of the Father. And that same love is what calls us, and it is how we know love – and His truth. Everything we need to learn or teach is in that story. The Lord said in John 18:20, “I have spoken openly to the world.” And later in 18:37 “…for this I have come into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”
I often wonder if we believe what He said, or if we really listen for His voice in the noisy world. Or if perhaps our evangelism is too focused on countering the cultural viewpoints of our day, or “what Christ can do for us,” or defending concepts that need no defense while following a program, and not enough on becoming part of the vine of His Love and redemption.
I keep thinking that what we do know is all we need to know.
Michael Giere writes award-winning commentary and essays on the intersection of politics, culture and faith. He is a critically acclaimed novelist (The White River Series) and short-story writer. A former candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Texas, he was a senior executive in both the Reagan and the Bush (41) administrations, and in 2016 served on the Trump Transition Team.
