Lately, however, Douthat has been taking up a topic that he does seem to believe in: the decline of liberal Christianity. He writes about it here and here.
In "Can Liberal Christianity be Saved?" Douthat begins by saying (my emphasis):
In 1998, John Shelby Spong, then the reliably controversial Episcopal bishop of Newark, published a book entitled “Why Christianity Must Change or Die.” Spong was a uniquely radical figure — during his career, he dismissed almost every element of traditional Christian faith as so much superstition — but most recent leaders of the Episcopal Church have shared his premise. Thus their church has spent the last several decades changing and then changing some more, from a sedate pillar of the WASP establishment into one of the most self-consciously progressive Christian bodies in the United States.
As a result, today the Episcopal Church looks roughly how Roman Catholicism would look if Pope Benedict XVI suddenly adopted every reform ever urged on the Vatican by liberal pundits and theologians. It still has priests and bishops, altars and stained-glass windows. But it is flexible to the point of indifference on dogma, friendly to sexual liberation in almost every form, willing to blend Christianity with other faiths, and eager to downplay theology entirely in favor of secular political causes.
Yet instead of attracting a younger, more open-minded demographic with these changes, the Episcopal Church’s dying has proceeded apace. Last week, while the church’s House of Bishops was approving a rite to bless same-sex unions, Episcopalian church attendance figures for 2000-10 circulated in the religion blogosphere. They showed something between a decline and a collapse: In the last decade, average Sunday attendance dropped 23 percent, and not a single Episcopal diocese in the country saw churchgoing increase.
Douthat essentially concludes that liberal denominations are doomed and that only traditional ones have any hope for success. (And his numbers support this to an extent.)
But Douthat is only half-right. While liberal Christianity is in an irreversible decline, so are the conservative versions; they are just a generation or two behind.
And Douthat has it backward that liberal religions have declined because they pandered to their congregations. As he writes, John Shelby Spong didn't change because the laity changed; rather the laity changed because the Episcopal clergy changed. (And they both became more secular as a result.)
For example, I have a friend who is an ordained Episcopal minister. He once said that he and many of his fellow ministers simply lost their faith over time. And while some of them remained in the pulpit, he and others could not. (He is now a Unitarian Universalist.)
So it may not be a case of pandering; it may be an honest evolution.
And the Mainline Protestant churches that Douthat lists as being most in decline (the Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist and Congregationalist) may have just evolved first -- and from the top down.
So even though the more conservative denominations appear to be hanging on for now, their days may be numbered as well. How can the Catholic Church, for example, hope to survive in its present state without ordaining enough young, conservative priests to replace the ones who are retiring? (It can't.) Maybe, instead of evolving like the Mainline Protestant ministers did, the men (and women) who would have joined the Catholic clergy in an earlier age are just taking different paths in life altogether. Maybe they are evolving before they join the clergy. And maybe -- just maybe -- the Catholic laity is evolving too, quietly, before our very eyes and will follow the example of Mainline Protestants in the years to come.
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