Simply Too Late: Duane W.H. Arnold, PhD

SIMPLY TOO LATE

Eight Years Later

Eight years ago, I wrote an essay entitled “Simply Too Late.” I was looking at American Christianity and wondering whether something fundamental had been lost—something that could not be recovered.

Eight years later, I find myself returning to the same question.

The landscape has certainly changed. Not so long ago, 78 percent of American adults identified as Christians. Today the number is approximately 62 percent, while nearly three in ten claim no religious affiliation. The decline may have slowed in recent years, but stabilization should not be confused with recovery. The cultural authority once assumed by American Christianity has largely disappeared.

Eight years ago, I wrote that white evangelicals had compromised their moral authority through their embrace of Donald Trump. Since then, Trump has been defeated, indicted, convicted, nearly assassinated, elected again, and returned to the White House. Through all of it, evangelical support has remained remarkably constant.

The issue, however, is no longer Trump himself, if it ever was. The deeper issue is what Christians have been willing to excuse in exchange for political power.

The Church has always lived in uneasy proximity to Caesar. Constantine understood it. Medieval bishops understood it. Luther and Cranmer understood it. The question has always been how close the altar may be placed to the throne before the distinction between the two disappears.

What troubles me is not whether Christians vote Republican or Democratic. Christians may in good conscience disagree about politics. What troubles me is the willingness to suspend a moral vocabulary once applied to everyone else when that vocabulary becomes politically inconvenient.

Character mattered until it did not. Truth mattered until it did not. Personal morality mattered until it did not.

The young have been watching.

They have also watched our denominations decline. Congregations merge. Seminaries struggle. Dioceses reorganize. Buildings once filled with Sunday schools and choirs are sold or demolished. We speak endlessly about church growth while presiding over institutional contraction.

Perhaps we have failed to ask the obvious question: Why should anyone come?

Church attendance once belonged to the architecture of ordinary American life. That architecture is gone. Someone who walks into a church today, particularly someone under forty, is making a deliberate choice. The Church can no longer depend upon inherited loyalty.

Perhaps that is not entirely bad. Perhaps we are being forced to discover whether we actually believe what we have been saying.

The scandals of clerical abuse have likewise continued to expose the terrible consequences of institutional self-protection. Eight years ago, I asked who among us would casually drop off an eleven-year-old child or grandchild at a parish church for catechism. I wish that question now seemed unfair. It does not.

Yet eight additional years have made me more conscious of something else.

The Church is not simply its institutions. The Church is the Body of Christ. That is either true or it is not.

If it is merely a metaphor, perhaps we should admit defeat, sell the buildings, preserve the best music, put the chalices and vestments in museums, and allow Christianity to take its place among the exhausted institutions of Western civilization.

However, if the Church is actually the Body of Christ, then its failures—terrible as they are—cannot be the final word. That does not excuse them. Quite the opposite. Judgment begins with the household of God precisely because the Church claims to be something more than another human organization.

Eight years ago, I wrote: “I am a Christian. I want to follow Christ. I want to love the Church, but as a friend said, ‘the Church doesn’t love me back.’”

I still understand that sentence. Perhaps I understand it better now.

I have lived long enough within the Church to know its beauty and its cruelty, its holiness and its absurdity, its capacity to sustain life and its capacity to wound it. None of this is new. Peter denied Christ before the Church had even properly begun.

Perhaps the surprise is not that the Church fails. Perhaps the surprise is that, despite everything, Christ continues to meet us there: at the altar, in the Scriptures, in bread and wine, in the Daily Office prayed when no one is listening, in the hospital room, at the graveside, and in the small congregation that continues to gather Sunday after Sunday.

Is it too late for American Christianity to recover the cultural weight it once possessed? Probably. I am increasingly uncertain that we should want it back.

Is it too late to repair all the damage done by clerical abuse, political idolatry, hypocrisy, institutional cowardice, and the substitution of cultural power for the Gospel? Some things cannot be undone. There are people who will never walk into a church again, and Christians should have the humility to admit that sometimes the Church itself gave them good reason to leave.

Yet that is not the same as saying it is too late for the Church.

The Gospel does not promise that our denominations or institutions will survive. Christ did not promise cultural influence, full churches, successful programs, sympathetic governments, or the admiration of society. He gave us a cross, a table, bread and wine, the forgiveness of sins, the communion of saints, and the reconciliation of all things in himself.

Perhaps, then, “Is it too late?” is the wrong question.

Perhaps it is too late to save the Church we remember. Perhaps it is too late to recover privileges we mistook for faithfulness. If so, let them go.

The question that remains is smaller and more demanding: Can we be faithful now?

Can we say our prayers, receive the Sacrament, feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, visit the sick, bury the dead, forgive one another, speak truth, seek justice, and refuse to surrender Christ to the political appetites of either the Right or the Left?

I think we can.

Eight years ago, I ended by saying that I would continue to pray, say the Daily Office, partake of the Sacraments, write, and encourage those whom I could.

I have done so. I expect I will continue.

Eight years ago, that seemed almost like resignation.

Today, it seems rather more like hope.

Duane W.H. Arnold, PhD