October 25, 2024

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)

*****

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.

October 20, 2024

What if everything--God and world, matter and spirit, you and me--is one harmonious whole?

The Hindu theologian Ramanuja describes vertical nondualism.

Let us hypothesize that reality is nondual--organic, harmonious, and intrinsically related--such that everything within it is distinguishable but inseparable. Now, we can distinguish between two types of nondualism, the vertical and horizontal. Vertical nondualism refers to the inseparability, interpenetration, and shared energy of God, humankind, and the universe. Horizontal nondualism refers to the inseparability, interpenetration, and shared energy between all aspects of creation, including persons.

To articulate vertical nondualism, we will turn to the Hindu theologian Ramanuja, the most prominent writer within Visistadvaita Vedanta, or the teaching of qualified nondualism. This tradition interprets advaita as both one and two, hence makes room for the inherent relatedness between God, humankind, and the universe that we are advocating. Ramanuja argues that everything in the universe, moving and unmoving, feeling and unfeeling, conscious and unconscious, is an expression of God and therefore just as real as God. Ramanuja writes: “This world . . . consisting of spiritual and physical entities, has the supreme spirit [God] as the ground of its origination, maintenance, destruction, and of the liberation of the individual from transmigratory existence.” In Ramanuja’s interpretation, the difference that distinguishes two things is real, a name and form granted them by their benevolent Sustainer, Vishnu, who also grants them their fundamental unity with, in, and through himself. Both human souls and the physical universe are modes of God, who emanates, sustains, and incorporates real distinctions into the divine. Hence, everything is both one and two, distinguishable yet inseparable.

Because this God pervades all human souls and all material objects, we can experience the sacred anywhere—in heaven, in ourselves, in others, and in matter. Anyone having any one of these religious experiences is experiencing an aspect of God. If the experiencer thinks exclusively, then they may believe that their experience is the only legitimate experience. But, if one divine ontology (or metaphysic) can accommodate the varieties of religious experience, as does Ramanuja’s, then such exclusivism is unnecessary. Our religious experience can be plural, making for a richer life.

Moreover, Ramanuja’s personalist panentheism, in which God is a full-fledged person, better serves Christian faith than impersonalist Platonic idealism, which has been the intellectual source of Christian panentheism for centuries.

The Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna describes horizontal nondualism.

Ramanuja’s nondual vision is primarily vertical: he explains how God emanates individual human souls and the material world of time and change, even while God remains an embodied person in heaven. However, he does not develop horizontal interrelatedness. While he advocates the dependence of souls and matter on God, he does not posit any interdependence between persons or material objects themselves. Another Indian thinker, the Mahayana Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, insists on the absolute interdependence of all this-worldly beings on one another— while denying the existence of any sustaining God. His doctrine is that of sunyata (shoon-YAH-tah): literally “emptiness.” But this is not a generalized emptiness: he insists that all existents (things) are empty of svabhava (swuh-BHUH-vuh)—“own being,” unchanging essence, inherent existence, intrinsic nature, or independent reality. Instead, everything derives its existence from everything else, even as it grants existence to everything else, in one pulsing flow of infinite relatedness.

As mentioned above, sunyata translates literally as “emptiness.” Even in the modern Indian language of Hindi, sunya (SHOON-yah) can be translated as “zero,” “empty,” “nothing,” or “nothingness.” Due to this literal meaning, many opponents of Nagarjuna have interpreted sunyata as voidness and accused him of nihilism. Nihilism is belief in nothingness. These philosophers argue that, if everything depends on its relations for existence, then nothing can exist, because things must exist before they come into relationship. This argument belies our tendency to believe in separate things, each of which possesses its proper substance, unchanging essence, or enduring nature.

This misinterpretation is sometimes encouraged when teachers of sunyata critique our attachment to things. If we consider a “thing” to be an abiding object with stable qualities that will grant us permanent satisfaction, then there is no “thing.” But to assert that there is “no thing” and that there is “nothing” makes a fine distinction that careless readers may overlook, leading once again to the accusation of nihilism. When Buddhists assert that there is “no thing,” they are asserting that everything flows into everything else, not that there is “nothing” at all.

Properly interpreted, sunyata does not assert the nonexistence of objects; it asserts the interdependence of objects. Things exist contingently, based on their manifold relations, and any object’s self-expression will change based on its context, which means the object will change based on its context.

Everything is interdependent. Nothing is independent.

Consider an electron. We could argue that it has an unchanging essence since, as an elementary particle, an electron is absolutely simple. It is not composed of any other particles, unlike protons and neutrons, which are both made of three quarks, according to quantum theorists. So, it doesn’t depend on those other parts for its existence. All electrons share the same negative charge, the same mass, an up or down spin, etc. And, as an elementary particle, electrons last a very, very long time—perhaps 6.6 × 10²⁸ years, according to the most recent experiments.
If electrons are perfectly simple, behaviorally identical, and vastly enduring, then don’t they refute our assertion of universal interdependence? Don’t they have independent being? Even though we may know all the properties of an electron, we cannot describe the behavior of any particular electron without knowing its context. If I ask you to imagine an electron and tell me what it is doing right now, you must imagine it in a situation. You know that, in general, it has a negative charge, but you cannot know if it is currently being attracted to a proton or repulsed by another electron. You know that, in general, it is immensely stable, but this particular electron may have just been birthed by a muon or may be on the verge of annihilation by a positron or may be about to fall into a neutron star, where it and a proton will be smashed together to create a neutron. You don’t know if it is bound up in an atom or free, you don’t know its energy level, you don’t know its spin, etc.

In other words, even though all electrons share the same properties, you cannot know much about any particular electron until you thoroughly know its context. We learn the electron’s general properties, and we think we know the thing-in-itself. But there is no thing-in-itself. There is only the thing-in-relation.

To be open to life, we must love time.

Since sunyata refers to the infinite relatedness of things, to translate it literally as “emptiness” is misleading. The terms empty and emptiness have negative connotations in English: “I feel so empty” is not a celebratory comment. Since Nagarjuna argues for the perfect activity and receptivity permeating the cosmos, a more accurate translation would be openness. By design, entities within the universe are wholly responsive to one another.

For humans, who are blessed with the freedom to interpret the universe as we wish, this openness can be forgotten, ignored, or denied, but only at great expense. Those who close themselves off will feel less. Those who open themselves up will feel more.

With regard to persons, Nagarjuna rejects the existence of any unchanging, eternal, isolated self. Everyone is empty of self-existence. Again, Nagarjuna is not asserting that each person is a nothingness. He is neither an eternalist who asserts the existence of an unchanging soul, nor a nihilist who denies the existence of any self. Instead, he asserts the existence of a dynamic, impermanent, thoroughly related “self.” In other words, he does not assert that the self does not exist so much as he asserts that all selves exist, together. We are not one self but many selves, as one—one web, one nexus, one interconnected, interrelated, pulsing becoming. Everyone is entirely permeated, causally and qualitatively, by everyone else. And this absolute relatedness is realized through impermanence. Profound interdependence occurs through time and is dependent on time.

To the human being accustomed to craving permanence, the concept of emptiness will initially present as a threat, but it is actually an opportunity. Our related self is as expansive as the universe. For the person who has realized emptiness, reality is characterized by unceasing novelty. We do not fear the end of happiness, because we have always known that any period of happiness will end. We do not become undone by tribulation, because we know that tribulation will pass. Thus, the person who has realized emptiness can be buoyant, even through the vicissitudes of life, because that person recognizes the impermanence of all vicissitudes.

Impermanence, our unceasing passage through time, does not cause human suffering. Our craving for permanence in the midst of impermanence causes our suffering. The solution to suffering, then, is to stop craving permanence. The solution to suffering is to love time.

Indra’s Net illustrates the promise of openness.

The Buddhist tradition provides a powerful illustration of the dynamic reciprocity that we have been discussing, commonly referred to as “Indra’s Net.” To please the god Indra, his courtly artist resolved to create a work of stunning beauty. To do so, the artist spun a net throughout all universes, reaching forever in every direction. At every link in the net, he hung a sparkling jewel. Each jewel catches the light of every other jewel and reflects it, thereby containing within itself the sprawling splendor of the entire cosmos. At the same time, the light of each jewel is caught in all others, so that it is also active within them. Any one jewel contains the universe, and is expressed throughout the universe, in one glittering cascade of light.

In the vision of Indra’s net, we are the universe, and the universe is us. Spiritual wealth lies beyond the bounds of any narrow ego. Instead, the infinity and exteriority of reality invite the self beyond the self into the whole. Abundance surges as the outer becomes the inner, until there is no outer and inner, only an open expanse of shared energy. How much we contain, how big we are, is determined by how open we are to the universe. If absolutely open, then we can contain the whole universe. If absolutely closed, then we contain naught but our empty self. In the Buddhist view, we are as full as we are empty, and we are as empty as we are full. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 19-23)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Burton, David. “Is Madhyamaka Buddhism really the middle way? Emptiness and the problem of nihilism.” Contemporary Buddhism 2, no. 2 (2001). 177–190. DOI: 10.1080/14639940108573749.

Cook, Francis H. Hua-Yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra. Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 1977.

King, Richard. "Early Yogacara and Its Relationship with the Madhyamaka School." Philosophy East and West 44, no. 4 (1994) 659–83. DOI: 10.2307/1399757.

McCagney, Nancy. Nagarjuna and the Philosophy of Openness. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997.

Nishida, Kitaro. Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview. Translated by David A. Dilworth. Hawai’i: University of Hawai’i Press, 1993.

Ramanuja. Vedarthasamgraha. Translated by S.S. Raghavachar. Madras: Vedanta, 1956.

Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna's Middle Way. Translated by Mark Siderits and Shoryu Katsura. San Francisco: Wisdom, 2013.

October 16, 2024

What if reality is fundamentally united, and we just can't see it?

Unity-in-Difference: The Case for Pluralistic Nondualism

As we have noted in a previous blog, “nondual” is the English translation of the Sanskrit terms advaita or advaya, which literally mean “not-two.” Some schools of Hinduism interpret “not-two” to mean “only one.” They then propound monism, the belief that everything is just one thing, a pure unity, such that all differentiation is illusion. For example, the Ashtavakra Gita states, “I am always one / without two.” The poem also declares:

Two from one!
This is the root of suffering.
Only perceive
That I am one without two,
Pure awareness, pure joy,
And all the world is false.
There is no other remedy! …

The world with all its wonders
Is nothing.
When you know this,
Desire melts away.
For you are awareness itself.
When you know in your heart
That there is nothing,
You are still.

The Ashtavakra Gita is a monistic text that rejects belief in a personal God. Monism teaches that everything is really one thing. In this case, the Ashtavakra Gita teaches that all reality is Brahman: pure being, pure bliss, and pure consciousness. Only Brahman is real; everything else is illusion. The poem grants everyday life a certain provisional reality, like that of a dream. But in the end, salvation is the recognition of one’s own identity with Brahman.

“Identity” is more than “unity.” If only Brahman exists, then your self is false, and the universe in which you live is an illusion. If Brahman is everything, then in truth, you are identical with Brahman; you are Brahman.

But nondualism, as we are interpreting it, is not monism; it is harmonious pluralism. In our view, nondualism means indivisibly united yet internally distinguished. Pluralistic nondualism discerns the unity in difference that underlies all things. For this-worldly examples, we may think of the light and heat of a fire, which are distinguishable but inseparable, both one and two. Physicists may think of space and time, which they call space-time. Psychologists may think of memory, intelligence, emotions, and will, those various aspects that constitute one mind.

Pluralistic nondualism is not atomism or separatism.

Pluralistic nondualism charges the cosmos with dynamic reciprocity, such that we can never determine where one thing stops and another starts. All transitions are gradual, as the river flows into the sea, the grassland transitions into the forest, or the plains meet the hills. The universe is one expansive continuum, without demarcation. And if reality is a continuum without demarcation, if all boundaries are arbitrary and artificial, then difference does not oppose, and difference certainly doesn’t annihilate. Instead, difference generates energy. For fullness of life, safety needs danger, warmth needs cold, day needs night, and light needs darkness.

We call the far shore of a river the “opposite bank,” but it opposes nothing. Instead, it cooperates with the near shore to grant the river its being and direction. We call the front and back of a coin “opposite sides,” but which could exist without the other? If we take away the front, the back ceases to be, and vice versa. They do not oppose; they co-originate. So thorough is this universal interdependence that, as Barbara Holmes observes, “The light . . . pierces but does not castigate the darkness.”

Nondualism is not a perennial philosophy.

Some scholars of religion believe that all religions are fundamentally the same. In their view, differences between religions are accidents of history, geography, and culture, while similarities result from their shared sacred source. So, we should put away our differences and instead act together on our shared values, to make the world a better place. These scholars frequently gather quotes from the mystical traditions of various religions, and these quotes do share a certain resonance. Since the scholars find these quotes in different times and places, they deem their collective teaching to be the “perennial philosophy,” the recurring, universal truth. And for these scholars, the perennial philosophy is the eternal heart of all religion.

There are several problems with this belief. Religions tend to be vast, long lasting, and literate. They produce vast amounts of writing, which makes it easy to find similar quotes in different traditions. By way of analogy, we can find similar rocks in each of the seven continents, even though the continents themselves are quite different geologically. Moreover, the endeavor of the perennial philosophers is basically evaluative: “If we take the world’s enduring religions at their best, we discover the distilled wisdom of the human race,” argues Huston Smith. Perennialists go to each religion, find that part within the religion that is most attractive to them, lift it out of context, and declare it to be the core truth. But this process simply reveals their own religious preference, to which they ascribe transcendent authority. Anyone could do this in the way that pleases them most. The perennial philosophers tend to be mystics, but legalists could just as easily select legalistic passages from multiple traditions and declare legalism the perennial philosophy. Or, more dangerously, militants could select militant passages from different religions and declare militancy to be the perennial philosophy. The choice is that of the selector.

Even worse, from our perspective, the perennial philosophy erases difference. If all religions are basically the same, then differences in thought, feeling, and practice are irrelevant. Pluralistic nondualism, by contrast, finds wealth in difference. Their ritual practice (that of other religions), and the transformation that it offers, stimulates our ritual practice to reform. Their ethics give us a unique perspective and new insight into our own. Their thought worlds and lifeways open new perspectives onto our own. If all religions were the same, then no religion could challenge another. Religions frequently advocate transformation, and the engines of transformation are difference, disagreement, and debate. Sameness is impotent.

Pluralistic nondualism offers hope.

We live in an age of metaphysical divorce, an age in which corrupt worldviews and philosophies fracture that which is naturally united. Nondualism asserts that all reality is inherently related. Nothing is separable from anything else, and no one is separable from anyone else. Thus, nondualism offers intellectual resistance to the false divisions that cause our suffering, implicitly condemning sexism, racism, classism, nationalism, co-religionism, neoliberalism, and every other divisive worldview. Many movements assert our fundamental relatedness and countless groups are working to make the world a better place. Humanists work to improve the human condition, because they believe that humans are inseparable from one another. Ecologists work to protect nature because they believe that we are part of it. Religious leaders help people recognize their embeddedness in the sacred. All assert connectedness: humanists call it humanism, naturalists call it ecologism, religious leaders call it God. Nondualism, as an umbrella concept, can help unite these different groups to act together for a better world. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance, pages 15–19)

*****

For further reading:

Byrom, Thomas. The Heart of Awareness: A Translation of the Ashtavakra Gita. Boston: Shambhala, 1990.

Clooney, Francis Xavier. Seeing Through Texts: Doing Theology Among the Śrīvaiṣṇavas of South India. New York: State University of New York Press, 1996.

Habito, Ruben L. F. Living Zen, Loving God. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1995.

Holmes, Barbara. Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004.

Huxley, Aldous. The Perennial Philosophy. New York: Harper and Row, 1944.

Smith, Huston. Bill Moyers: The Wisdom of Faith with Huston Smith (WNET: 1996).

October 8, 2024

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.