Table of Contents
FIVE - Lord Have Mercy upon Us
SEVEN - Pleased as Man with Us to Dwell
For Nancy
O Almighty God, who hast built thy Church upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone: Grant us so to be joined together in unity of spirit by their doctrine, that we may be made an holy temple acceptable unto thee; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God for ever and ever.
—The Book of Common Prayer, Collect for the Sunday closest to June 29
Prelude
YOU MIGHT SAY WE HUMANS HARDLY EVER NOTICE PEAKS—financial, political, cultural, physical, and so on—until we find ourselves descending from them: down, down, into strange valleys, step by step, sometimes head over heels. Once, it was bright, blazing noon; suddenly, clouds and darkness gather.
A particularly brilliant example of such a peak is America’s golden summer of 1929, on the eve of the stock market crash—a summer when, as the discerning (if, alas, largely forgotten) novelist John P. Marquand related, “the only clouds on the horizon were the roseate prophecies of an even more roseate future.” Then, like a thunderclap—
We will understand this peak and valley business, if we take the trouble to think about it, as the universal human experience, sometimes stated as, “You win some, you lose some.” One difficulty, for many, lies in watching that experience play itself out in relation to the church of God, whose walls are widely assumed to shelter the eternal, the lasting, and the true—the things of heaven—from ordinary human give-and-take and interference.
Can the church, like any ordinary institution, both soar and fall? We know that it can. We have watched its descents and plunges, its slumbers and snoozes, for as long as there has been a church—something like two thousand years now.
Early in the twenty-first century after Christ, in the United States of America, as in Western Europe, we are watching another of those ecclesiastical plunges: down, down, from confidence, mission, and a gratifying sense of general acceptance, into disorder of the most disheartening sort. Whereas the United States remains, broadly speaking, a religious nation—one of the world’s most religious nations—more and more of the religious decide for themselves what to believe, what store to set by those beliefs, such as they are, and what the terms of human life ought to be. A 2007 survey by the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life, released in 2008, declares that most religiously committed Americans take “a non-dogmatic approach to faith,” persuaded as they are that their own religion isn’t the only way to salvation. A gently pluralistic view of things: calm and democratic, if not precisely, in conventional terms, religious.
On abortion, as surveys have shown for years, a majority of Americans reject, in whole or in part, Christian teachings on the sacred character of an unborn life: in which rejection various Christians, not a few of them ministers, join with gusto. Marriage and marriage relationships, once deemed subject to divine regulation, have fallen under secular domination—so much so that many public officials have undertaken to define marriage in new ways, discovering no reason it should not apply to couples of the same sex. Often, in the century’s first decade, to take in the news was to get the notion that the defining isssue for American Christians was the suitability, or the disgrace, of marriage rights for homosexuals.
The idea that public schools could or should allude to God in describing the work of creation is in many modern eyes scandalous and un-American. For that matter, paganism, heresy, and outright atheism have been winning respectful hearings, not least on bestseller lists. The new century was but a few years old before authors such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens began reaping lucrative rewards on account of excoriating God, declaring him either imaginary or irrelevant. Surely a sign of anxiety, if not of something more serious, concerning our old sacred commitments was the furor several years ago over the novel and movie The Da Vinci Code, a sort of feminist fantasy about a conspiracy to suppress the discovery of—shh!—the “truth” about that celebrity couple, Jesus and Mary Magdalene.
Another reminder of the withdrawing religious tide is the semi-civil war that seems to break out every December. The issue: whether a modern American should bite his tongue before wishing another American a merry Christmas. No one fifty years earlier could possibly have foreseen such an odd and jarring circumstance.
A new vogue commences meanwhile. Christians identified by the media as “progressive” have taken to emphasizing environmental and “justice” issues over moral issues once understood as central to Christian witness: abortion, for instance.
Who is to blame, assuming “blame” is the right word? Various Christians couldn’t be better pleased by what they see as Christianity’s spirit-led growth into new ways of understanding God and His revelation. They might recognize the church’s present journey as a descent from the peak of that ecclesiastical prosperity which marked the 1950s. Just as likely, they would say, fine (if not cool)—high time an old church joined the modern world.
And speaking of “about time,” I need to declare my present purpose, my rationale for tugging at the reader’s sleeve. It is, broadly speaking, to talk about the ravages that modern times have wrought upon Christianity in the United States. More narrowly, it is to speak of how often, how extensively, and with what dismal results, the churches themselves have egged on the ravagers.