A Response to "The Existential Crisis that Isn't."

I want to respond Adam J. Crane's article posted today in the excellent journal The North American Anglican. Crane argues that it is overly alarmist to see the death of the Church in America just as it wrong to say that Christians experience any real kind of persecution in the West. The post is available through this link.. https://northamanglican.com/the-american-churchs-existential-crisis-that-isnt/

"To suggest that the Western Church is persecuted or otherwise under attack dishonors the official and brutal persecutions sustained by the Church throughout history and today in other parts of the world. Externally, the Western Church is not officially persecuted and nearly universally enjoys freedom to worship."

 There are a number things I would take issue with here though I recognise that he is an orthodox Christian, a brother in arms. It is, I believe, a matter of perspective and complexity that makes me question Crane's conclusions. 

Clearly, I could not be a Christian if I did not believe that God's Church will survive the Modern Age, and indeed, all ages. (Matthew 16.18, Revelation 19) This I believe remains the one society guaranteed eternity.  

There will not always be an America. One day McDonald's will sell its last burger.  In the future the much praised British National Health Service (NHS) will say farewell to its last patient. At some point the EU will cease and perhaps something new will take it place. There will come a time when Disneyland will close for good.   

But, the Church will triumph.  

However, this does not mean that particular denominations may survive, or even that whole regions may remain hosts to some kind of church.  God has not guaranteed the Church for America. Christ only said that the Church would remain His Body to the last days on Earth. There is no specifics more than that. 

We should also not discount that orthodox Christianity may be shoved into exile. Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option (2017) invites to consider this as a societal shift away from Christianity which involves a real kick back on Christianity per se. British theologian Patrick Whitworth gave similar conclusions in Prepare for Exile (2008) a decade before.   Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) picked up on this too on his many writings on the demise of Christendom. In  German radio interview in 1969 the then Father Ratzinger predicted a smaller leaner Church in the West.

"From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge — a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so it will lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, it will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, it will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members."

So, I believe a crisis emerging on the church is not without pedigree within theological communities.  Even liberal Christians recognise the end of something when it comes to the Church and society. Some even celebrate it.   

Perhaps the difference between me and Crane is the degree that secularisation damages the Body of Christ in the West? Is it a nasty scratch or a mortal wound?  Speak to some evangelicals and they think "revival" is just around the corner. I've heard that yarn for the past 25 years of ministry. All that is needed is a little bit more marketing and the masses will return. A nip and tuck, eject all that boring ritual stuff, and woosh - the churches will once more be filled. Of course, the progressives think that the change is needed too not in the form of re-marketing or prayer tents but a wholesale butchery of doctrine. Once the Church is rebranded to look like a conference of Extinction Rebellion Guardianistas then the masses will flood in. Yeah right! 

Secondly, persecution of Christians in the West may take a different form than those elsewhere. This is why I put my lot in with Rod Dreher in his latest controversial book Live Not by Lies (2020).  What we have to get our heads around is that there are two potential expressions of emergent totalitarians. There is Nineteen Eighty Four and there is Brave New World.  In modern imagination intellectuals on the Left and Right tend focus on Orwell's grim dystopia.   Dreher argues that Huxley's sugary vision is underexplored and the more likely.  Christians in the West should pay special attention to it and get ready to adapt quickly.

So what does "persecution" in Brave New World version of the future look like? What kind of hardship will a Christian experience in a culture where you can "be" whatever you want to "be", have sex with as many whoevers as you can bear that day, never experience any depression if you swallow your Soma, have almost no responsibility, be totally safe and healthy, and enjoy as many material comforts as you can stomach? What possible trauma could a pious believer know in such a techno-paradise?  Surely this is "easier" than inhabiting Oceania?

The truth is that the serious of faith know the answer to the above.
If we do not what on earth are we doing going to Church anyway?

It's all there in the philosophical and theological dialogue between John Savage and the World Controller Mustapha Mond. Mond is one of the few who have read books of high culture and calculates that there probably is a God. Civilisation, however, has been designed so that God is an irrelevance.

"God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilisation has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness. That's why I have to keep these books locked up in the safe. They're smut. People would be shocked if.." 

So I would say that the difference between persecution in hard and soft totalitarianism is akin to the contrast between physical and mental trauma. In authoritarian states Christians appear to thrive under persecution. The more the Church is pushed down the more it grows. Tertullian's quote rings true, "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church." (Apol L.3) In postmodernity and emerging soft-totalitarianism the trauma manifests itself in a more corporate and psychological manner. The Church as a body loses heart. It is in desolation. Is this not the main theme of TS Eliot's the Wasteland, our foolish sojourn into Nihilism?

    “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
    Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
    You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
    A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
    And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
    And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
    There is shadow under this red rock,
    (Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
    And I will show you something different from either
    Your shadow at morning striding behind you
    Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
    I will show you fear in a handful of dust. ”

My personal experience of speaking to Christians living under authoritarianism is that they truly pity us. They feel there is an urgency to help us more than a requirement to help them. I remember being surprised hearing them say that they would choose being a Christian in their context over ours.  In their view we are more in trouble than they. 

We've been seeing this played out in slow motion for decades. It is not a sledge hammer on the churches but a gentle suffocating pillow, a quiet passing. In some case it is a pillowcase that pastors and congregants happily comply with.  Damian Thompson repeated last year some analysis on this the Spectator. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/holy-smoke-the-strange-death-of-liberal-american-christianity

In Britain we are ahead of the curve in decline and irrelevance.  Church attendance is down to 2%.  Anglican churches at best 1%. I remember seeing graphs like this back in the 1990s. Chilling stuff.

Nothing much has changed, decline is accelerating.

At the current trajectory the Church of England will cease to have any members before the 2040s. Most other mainstream denominations are on the same path. All sorts of church initiatives have been tried for decades but nothing so far has pushed back the tide.  

 Many young people now look at the church in Britain not as an irrelevance but as a toxic brand (the words of Justin Welby) in a not dissimilar way the Huxley's dystopian humans stuck their noses up at belief in the family.  Some of that toxicity is self inflicted but much of it is because the postmodern culture now abhors anything that makes demands or is deemed 'unsafe'.

How can this not be an existential crisis? 

*

I have just re-read today C S Lewis' The Abolition of Man, which is the philosophical underlay for his Sci-Fi series and in particular The Hideous Strength.   It made me think that it compliments BNW well.  It suggests another kind of totalitarianism, a technocracy where the ruling authorities believe they have ultimate power over nature, even the nature of man himself.  This strikes me as somewhere between Huxley and Orwell. In the past year we've seen how easy this has been to install even (and supposedly) temporarily. Such technocracy believes in its charter to make the world risk free can justify the removal of most liberties.