On March 10, the Christian Science Monitor ran a piece by Michael Spencer (aka Internet Monk) entitled “The coming evangelical collapse: An anti-Christian chapter in Western history is about to begin. But out of the ruins, a new vitality and integrity will rise.” The piece started as a blog, then got picked up by the Monitor, then showed up on Drudge, and then CT online started talking about. This is what happens when a blog goes viral (something that has never happened to my blog). I don’t know anything about Michael Spencer or where he’s coming from with this article, but since it’s made quite a stir, and since I’ve had a few people send me the article already and asked my opinion, I thought I would comment on it.
Here’s the gist of Spencer’s argument:
We are on the verge – within 10 years – of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.
Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants. (Between 25 and 35 percent of Americans today are Evangelicals.) In the “Protestant” 20th century, Evangelicals flourished. But they will soon be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century.
This collapse will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity, seeing it as the opponent of the common good.
Millions of Evangelicals will quit. Thousands of ministries will end. Christian media will be reduced, if not eliminated. Many Christian schools will go into rapid decline. I’m convinced the grace and mission of God will reach to the ends of the earth. But the end of evangelicalism as we know it is close.
Like most predictions, and you’ll have to read the whole article to get all of them, I find Spencer’s to be a mixed bag.
There are some parts of his analysis I agree with: evangelicals are not doing a good job of passing on the faith to the next generation; we are bedeviled by false gospels from the therapeutic and prosperity wheeler-dealers; we have been too invested in causes without being able to articulate the faith; the emerging church will become a small part of progressive mainline protestantism; it could be a very good thing for nominal, marginal believers to stop pretending they are Christian and inflating our numbers.
Then there are the parts of his evaluation that border on truisms, like, if we come under the influence of the Holy Spirit that will be a good thing. Roger that. There are also “predictions” that are already coming true, as in Spencer’s plea for missionaries to come to America from Asia and Africa. And there are places where Spencer hedges his bets: some evangelicals, he says, will create countercultures; some will stay conservative; and some will check out. Well, yes, I imagine all three will happen.
On the whole, I agree with most of his Spencer’s complaints about the evangelical church. But I am not so pessimistic about its future. I doubt seriously that evangelicalism in the future will “look more like the pragmatic, therapeutic, church-growth oriented megachurches that have defined success.” These churches certainly exist in large numbers, but I think they’ve reached their zenith. Pragmatic, therapeutic churches are not the wave of the future. Younger Christians–both on the emergent left and reformed right–think they’re bogus. And while I think lots of people will talk about house churches in America and some will try them, I don’t imagine actual involvement will account for a significant piece of the church pie in this country. I also doubt that “aggressively evangelistic fundamentalist churches will begin to disappear” if for no other reason than that the Lord tends to bless churches that actually do evangelism.
Evangelicalism is not dead. Not by a long shot. It’s curious to me that while secularists have written best-selling books based on their fear of some sort of theocratic evangelical takeover, evangelicals themselves have never cried louder that the sky is falling. I suspect that both of these shrill voices are mistaken.
It’s true that church attendance is down. The percentage of Americans calling themselves Christian is declining. But there are signs of theological renewal in the American church too, a renewed interest in doctrine, God-centered worship, and mercy ministries, especially among the young.
Plus, the numbers are not as bad as we might think. According to the latest statistics from researcher David T. Olson (who admittedly is on the pessimistic side of things), the percentage of Americans in church on any given weekend (and this is half the percentage of those who said they were in church) fell from 20.4% in 1990 to 17.5% in 2005. This is not good. But a closer look at the numbers is revealing. During the same time period the percentage of those attending the establishment Mainline churches fell from 3.9 to 3.0 while those attending a Roman Catholic church declined from 7.2% to 5.3%. But the percentage in evangelical churches was almost identical, going from 9.2% in 1990 to 9.1% in 2005.
Keep in mind these are percentages of the total population. This means the actual number of people attending an evangelical church on any weekend rose by several million over the last decade and a half. Almost all of the net loss in percentage of church attendance came from Catholic and more liberal Protestant churches. For example, in raw numbers, the Mainline churches declined 21% in membership (from 29 million to 22 million) from 1960 to 2000, while at the same time overall church membership in the United States rose by 33%. So the story of declining church attendance percentage is not the story of a new found dissatisfaction with the church at large, as much as it is the continuing story of Catholics and Mainline Protestants losing their young (to evangelical churches or to no church), parents in mainline and Catholic pews not having as many children as evangelicals, and the old (who are found disproportionately among mainline churches) dying off.
All that to say, warnings like Spencer’s can help wake up the pollyannish among us who haven’t noticed that our neighbors don’t all listen to Focus on the Family. But I’d encourage evangelicals (myself included) to find ways to self-criticize that aren’t so quick to rush to the worst doom-and-gloom scenarios. We have a tendency to exaggerate our achievements and our failures. We lionize our past and demonize the future. If evangelical Christianity collapses within 10 years I will be very sad. And very surprised.
And, I guess, then I’ll have to admit that Michael Spencer was right and I was wrong.
