The Great Unraveling

My wife loves to knit. I'm bemused as I watch her work. She will knit for hours and then, with a great sigh, unravel a week's worth of knitting. It's hard to watch.

In our story, what is coming undone is the long, cherished tradition of the "Euro-tribal churches" across North America. I use this term with great intention, and I'll take a moment to explain. The churches with which I have worked most closely and the ones with which this book deals most directly are those that trace to the great migrations from the United Kingdom and Europe over the past four to five hundred years, the churches that form the primary Christian groups in the United States and Canada. They created denominations shaped largely by ethnic and religious identities coming out of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century reformations: Lutherans (Germany and Scandinavia), Episcopalians (England), Presbyterians (Scotland), United Church of Canada (Great Britain), Methodists and Baptists (England), Mennonites (the Netherlands and Germany), and so forth.

To a great extent these denominations were formed and expanded in the context of strong national and ethnic identities. For this reason, I characterize them as tribal and use the phrase Euro-tribal churches. It is important to note, but isn't the subject of this book, that these Euro-tribal churches morphed and created a good number of "made in the Americas" denominations, such as Churches of Christ, Pentecostalism, and indigenous spin-offs like National Baptists or the African Methodist Episcopal Church. These are highly nuanced developments, running alongside the Euro-tribal story. Likewise, it is clear that the Roman Catholic Church, in its own migrations to North America, had to redefine itself as one denomination among many others. For multiple reasons — perhaps because its liturgical tradition and hierarchy better transcend national-cultural identities — it has seemed able to weather the unraveling more cohesively than the Protestant denominations.

For the Euro-tribal churches, the story of this unraveling goes back to the middle of the last century. Sociologist Hugh McLeod explains the lead-up to the breakdown this way:

In the 1940s and 1950s it was still possible to think of western Europe and North America as a "Christendom," in the sense that there were close links between religious and secular elites, that most children were socialized into membership in a Christian society, and that the church had a large presence in fields such as education and welfare, and a major influence on law and morality.

The 1940s and 1950s, while influenced by fears of external threats from Communism, were a golden period for these churches. World War II had been won, the Great Depression was over, democracy was prevailing in the midst of a Cold War. The West was ready to celebrate, to leave behind the hardships of the previous half-century. Most Protestant churches flourished in this environment, where it seemed just about everyone and everything was Christian. These churches symbolized the public and social conscience of the age. They were the government, education, economic, and professional leaders of the nation at worship. Young families embraced the new suburbs, churches filled, and denominations experienced their greatest era of new church development.

In this milieu these churches can hardly be blamed for seeing themselves as the center of society and assuming their proclamations and actions would lead to the redemption and betterment of society. They pursued growth with gusto, expanding new church development, filling seminaries, and extending corporate denominational structures offering cradle-to-grave, branded programs that branched across the continent. Donald Luidens paints this picture:

The corporate denomination "metaphor" ... seems to be an apt representation of the organizational formula that saw the establishment and routinization of religious communions throughout the United States. The wide-open "religious marketplace" in the post-World War II era accelerated the development of this corporate model. Like competing businesses occupying a growing market niche, Protestant denominations around the country routinely perfected their production processes and marketing techniques. In these early years the level of competition was minimal and "success" was widespread. However, over time the religious marketplace became a crowded one, competition grew and success became elusive, which accelerated the transformation of the corporate denomination. ...

[R]eflecting the imperialistic optimism of the age, the corporate model ushered in a worldwide vision for Christian ministry (symbolized in the title of the flagship Protestant journal of this era, the Christian Century). ... The corporate model fuelled, and was in turn fuelled by, a Christianity that was outward-looking and expansionist.

Few were aware of, or prepared for, the earthquakes to come. Just as the young church, after Pentecost, focused on reestablishing God's reign within the narrative of Jerusalem and Judaism and could not see the ways the Spirit was about to unravel most of its assumptions, so the denominations failed to see the massive dislocations into which the Spirit would soon deliver them.

The Protestant story couldn't hold the imagination or desires of post-war generations, so the '60s exploded like a socio-cultural-religious Mt. St. Helens. As McLeod observes: "In the religious history of the West these years may come to be seen as marking a rupture as profound as that brought about by the Reformation. ... The 1960s was an international phenomenon."

Throughout North America and Europe, we witnessed the Baby Boom, rising economic possibilities for huge swaths of the public, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the Sexual Revolution, the emergence of the self as the central source of meaning. Along with these came the Human Potential Movement, the Women's Movement, a shrinking world with expanded religious options, the end of National Service in the United Kingdom, the expansion of higher education from elites to the middle classes, the suburbanization of society, and the proliferation of new media.

The changes went on and on, and their impact was massive and unexpected. Like the Babylonian captivity or the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, these events resulted in massive dislocation. The churches were thrown into a world for which they were unprepared. The natural instinct is to fix what is broken and to get back to the stability and predictability they had known. But that world had been torn up.

By the late 1960s numerical growth for the mainline denominations had come to a screeching halt. Despite warnings from...