Christianity must become progressive, or else it might die.

Love is the only sure ground for human flourishing

Love is the ground, meaning, and destiny of the cosmos. We need love to flourish, and we will find flourishing only in love. Too often, other forces tempt us into their servitude, always at the cost of our own suffering. Greed prefers money to love, ambition prefers power to love, fear prefers hatred to love, expediency prefers violence to love. And so we find ourselves in a hellscape of our own making, wondering how personal advantage degenerated into collective agony. Then, seeing the cynicism at work in society, we accept its practicality and prioritize personal advantage again, investing ourselves in brokenness.

The world need not be this way. Love is compatible with our highest ideals, such as well-being, excellence, courage, and peace. It is the only reliable ground for human well-being, both individual and collective. Yet the sheer momentum of history discourages us from trusting love’s promise. Despondent about our condition, we subject the future to the past.

Historically, one institution charged with resisting despair, sustaining hope, and propagating love has been the Christian church. Its record is spotty, as it has promoted both peace and war, love and hate, generosity and greed. The church can do better, and must do better, if it is to survive. Today, the church’s future is in doubt as millions of disenchanted members vote with their feet. A slew of recent studies has attempted to understand why both church attendance and religious affiliation are declining. To alarmists, this decline corresponds to the overall collapse of civilization, which (so they worry) is falling into ever deepening degeneracy. But to others, this decline simply reveals an increasing honesty about the complexity and variety of our religious lives. In this more optimistic view, people can at last speak openly about religion, including their lack thereof, without fear of condemnation.

Historians suggest that concerns about church decline are exaggerated, produced by a fanciful interpretation of the past in which everyone belonged to a church that they attended every Sunday in a weekly gathering of clean, well-dressed, happy nuclear families. In fact, this past has never existed, not once over the two-thousand-year history of Christianity. These historians report that church leaders have always worried about church decline, church membership has always fluctuated wildly, and attendance has always been spotty. Today is no different.

A powerless church can finally serve a powerless savior.

To some advocates of faith, this decline in church attendance and religious affiliation is a healthy development, even for the church. When a culture compels belief, even nonbelievers must pretend to believe. During the Cold War, believers in the Soviet Union had to pretend to be atheists, and atheists in America had to pretend to be believers. Such compelled duplicity helps no one; as anyone living under tyranny can tell you, rewards for belief and punishment for disbelief produce only inauthenticity. Even today, many people claim faith solely for the social capital that a religious identity provides. If perfectly good atheists can’t win elections because atheism is considered suspect, then politically ambitious atheists will just pretend to be Christians. But coerced conformity and artificial identity show no faith; Jesus needs committed disciples, not political opportunists.

Hopefully, after this period of church decline, what Christianity loses in power it may gain in credibility. Self-centeredly, faith leaders often blame the decline in attendance and affiliation on the people. More frequently, the leaders themselves are to blame. In the past, people may have stayed home in protest of corruption, or in resistance to state authority, or due to their own unconventional ideas about God. Today, sociologists identify different reasons for avoiding organized religion. Most of their studies focus on young people, who often reject Christian teachings as insufficiently loving and open. Their responses to surveys suggest that the faith’s failure to attract or retain them is largely theological, and they won’t change their minds until Christian theology changes its focus.

The young people are right.

Christianity shouldn’t change its theology to attract young people; Christianity should change its theology because the young people are right. They are arguing that Christianity fails to express the love of Christ, and they have very specific complaints. For example, traditional teachings about other religions often offend contemporary minds. Our world is multireligious, so most people have friends from different religions. On the whole, these friends are kind, reasonable people. This warm interpersonal experience doesn’t jibe with doctrines asserting that other religions are false and their practitioners condemned. If forced to choose between an exclusive faith and a kind friend, most people will choose their kind friends, which they should. Rightfully, they want to be members of a beloved community, not insiders at an exclusive club.

The new generations’ preference for inclusion also extends to the LGBTQ+ community. One of the main reasons young adults reject religious affiliation today is negative teachings about sexual and gender minorities. Many preachers assert that being LGBTQ+ is “unnatural,” or “contrary to the will of God,” or “sinful.” But to young adults, LGBTQ+ identity is an expression of authenticity; neither they nor their friends must closet their true selves any longer, a development for which all are thankful. A religion that would force LGBTQ+ persons back into the closet, back into a lie, must be resisted.

Regarding gender, most Christians, both young and old, are tired of church-sanctioned sexism. Although 79 percent of Americans support the ordination of women to leadership positions, most denominations ordain only men. The traditionalism and irrationalism that rejects women’s ordination often extends into Christianity’s relationship to science. We now live in an age that recognizes science as a powerful tool for understanding the universe, yet some denominations reject the most basic insights of science, usually due to a literal interpretation of the Bible. The evidence for evolution, to which almost all high school students are exposed, is overwhelming. Still, fundamentalist churches insist on reading Genesis like a science and history textbook, thereby creating an artificial conflict with science. This insistence drives out even those who were raised in faith, 23 percent of whom have “been turned off by the creation-versus-evolution debate.”

Tragically, although most young adults would like to nurture their souls in community, many are leaving faith because they find it narrow minded and parochial. They can access all kinds of religious ideas on the internet and want to process those ideas with others, but their faith leaders pretend these spiritual options do not exist. Blessed with a spirit of openness, this globalized generation wants to learn how to navigate the world, not fear the world. Churches that acknowledge only one perspective, and try to impose that perspective, render a disservice that eventually produces resentment. Over a third of people who have left the church lament that they could not “ask my most pressing life questions” there.

Change toward God is good.

Why are Christian denominations so slow to change? Perhaps because, as a third of young adults complain, “Christians are too confident they know all the answers.” Increasingly, people want church to be a safe place for spiritual conversation, not imposed dogma, and they want faith to be a sanctuary, not a fortress. They want to dwell in the presence of God, and feel that presence everywhere, not just with their own people in their own church.

This change is good, because it reveals an increasing celebration of the entirety of creation that God sustains, including other nations, other cultures, and other religions. Faith is beginning to celebrate reality itself as sanctuary, rather than walling off a small area within, declaring it pure, and warning that everything outside is depraved. As Christians change, Christian theology must change, replacing defensive theology with sanctuary theology. This sanctuary theology will provide a thought world within which the human spirit can flourish, where it feels free to explore, confident of love and acceptance, in a God centered community. Such faith will not be a mere quiet place of repose for the individual; its warmth will radiate outward, to all. In so doing, it will at last implement the prophet Isaiah’s counsel, offered 2500 years ago: “Enlarge the site of your tent, and let the curtains of your habitations be stretched out; do not hold back; lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes” (Isa 54:2 NRSV).

What follows is my attempt to provide one such sanctuary theology. My hope is that it will help readers flourish in life, both as individuals and in community, in the presence of God. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 1-5)

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For further reading, please see:

Barna Group, “Six Reasons Young Christians Leave Church,” September 27, 2011. barna.com/research/six-reasons-young-christians-leave-church. Accessed September 23, 2022.

Barna Group, “What Americans Think About Women in Power,” May 8, 2017. barna.com/research/americans-think-women-power/. Accessed September 20, 2022.

Kinnaman, David and Aly Hawkins. You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church . . . and Rethinking Faith. Michigan: Baker Publishing Group, 2011.

Public Religion Research Institute. “Religion and Congregations in a Time of Social and Political Upheaval.” Washington: PRRI, 2022. https://www.prri.org/research/religion-and-congregations-in-a-time-of-social-and-political-upheaval/. Accessed September 18, 2023.