How Did We Arrive Here? A Philosophical and Historical Journey Toward Dechurching

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Jim Davis
Well welcome to as in Heaven season three. My name is Jim Davis. I am your host and pastor of Orlando Grace Church and I am joined by my co host and friend Michael Aitchison, who serves as the lead pastor and planter of Christ United Fellowship Church here in Orlando. And I’m happy to be joined today by another friend Colin Hanson, who joined us back in season two a return guest. Colin serves as the vice president for content and editor in chief of the gospel coalition, where he also serves as the executive director of the Keller Center for Cultural apologetics. He hosts the gospel bound podcast on the TGC network of podcasts. And he has written numerous books most recently, and probably very well known by this point, Tim Keller his spiritual and intellectual formation, which is a fantastic book that I’ve read. And if you want to hear more about it, go over to his past podcast gospel bound, and you can hear me interview Colin on his podcast about his book, Colin is one of the most thoughtful and definitely productive people that I know most people might not realize that he is actually the one who coined the phrase young, restless and reformed back in around 2006. He has always been a student of culture in the church. And I can’t think of anyone better to talk to today about the historical and ideological underpinnings of this deep searching movement. We’re following the season than him. So man, thank you for joining us again.

Collin Hansen
Oh, thank you, Jim. I’m excited to be here.

Jim Davis
Well, now, before we jump in, we also want to recognize that D churching, has been a reality since the time of the early church, we see John, in his early epistles wrestling with those who have left the church course during the early days of persecution, we see Christians in their writings wrestling with how to think about those who are no longer counted among them. So D churching, has always been a reality and we have to acknowledge will always be one. However, the data that as we’ve been talking about, we talked about a lot in episode one last episode with Dr. Ryan Berger, it suggests that the manifestation of de churching we’re seeing in the United States is in fact unique in some ways, and is driven by historical factors that we can account for and analyze. As we said, currently, there are between 30 million and 50 million people living in the United States who used to regularly attend church, but no longer do such a large shift raises a lot of questions, many of which we hope to explore over the course of the season. But one of the one of the ones that looms, the largest is simply how in the world did we get here? So to start, Colin, where do you see some of the ideological or philosophical seeds that begin to set the stage for this movement?

Collin Hansen
I’m glad, Jim, that you alluded earlier to the fact that this is something that the Bible had seen, because we can jump forward as well and see that this was also something that happened in the early church. largely what we associate that with is persecution, we think of the martyrs we think of the heroes we think of Perpetua and Felicity, who were honored so often by Agustin and others in the Roman Empire period. And we think about their heroic stand for for truth. But there were many people and Augustine himself addressed that problem. What do you do with people who recanted their faith and then they want to come back to the church, those who had left and then wanted to come back. This was a, you know, a pervasive or common at least phenomenon through those persecution centuries in the in the early church, but I think most commonly, Jim, what people are thinking of with de churching is more of a byproduct of the Enlightenment and that challenge from within Western Christendom, to that dominance of the church. Enlightenment is such a broad and expansive concept, we could have entire podcast seasons, just discussing that and whether or not it was a real thing. No at all. But the basic premise is, is fairly clear, the Enlightenment emerges out of and related to a lot of the fracturing of the Western Church. And in part the, the criticism toward the Roman Catholic elite leadership, and the entire church, especially by Protestants. So one of the one of the arguments that’s been advanced by the scholar Alec Ryrie, in his book unbelievers is that a lot of what we associate with the churching and people, you know, leaving the church, critiquing the church is where a lot of those original criticisms of the excesses or the abuses of the church get turned against the church itself again, As the Trinity itself against God Himself and what you what you see very clearly from there is that a lot of other movements like deism Unitarianism objections to Orthodox Christianity emerge out of that same intellectual milieu. And that’s commonly what we then have seen as that kind of broad de churching, especially in terms of its philosophical and, and theological development.

Mike Aitcheson
Colin, that was a lot that was rich, can you help us understand? How did those Enlightenment ideas work their way into the DNA of the United States? Take us down history lane.

Collin Hansen
Yeah. Love doing that, as you guys know, and as we’ve enjoyed doing in previous podcasts as well, I think one of the most helpful things for people to know today about D churching, is that we don’t have a clear declension narrative in American history. I think many people imagine and this comes from the right and the left the de churched, as well as those who continue to believe they have this notion that people in the past were, I don’t know, sometimes I think that we just imagined they were stupid, that we are just so much smarter than they were. And so now because of quote unquote, science, we don’t believe that stuff anymore. And we forget, wait a minute, people back then did not assume that people rise from the dead or that the Holy Spirit conceives by a virgin that people did not assume those sorts of things. And so one thing that really helps people to know is that there was a particular time early in American history, where church affiliation was perhaps at its very lowest. And there’s some irony here, because of the way Christians sometimes talk about the American founding, because that low ebb of Christianity was around the American Revolution. Now, if you think about it, it actually makes quite a bit of sense, is because the the American Revolution brought this emerging United States into close relationship with France. But as we know, after the American Revolution, France went through a tremendous amount of turmoil. And the same royal regime that is supported the American Revolution gets overturned by this French Revolution, which is very much influenced by a number of Enlightenment ideas. And so you can see this through some secular thinkers, who were very prominent, I mean, at the center of the American Revolution, such as Thomas Paine, very outspoken critic of religion, which are fairly uncommon for the time, then you can see that also through far more complicated figures, such as Thomas Jefferson, who was widely known for his pro French views. And, and so what you see with them is this introduction of a lot of ideas coming out of the European enlightenment, and to the point where Timothy Dwight, early 19th century, he’s the president of Yale, Yale College, which was originally Puritan and, and founded as a more conservative counterpart, the Unitarian Harvard. But by the time Timothy Dwight, Jonathan Edwards, grandson, the famous revivalist. By the time he was president, he says, essentially, there’s no belief at Yale, everybody’s talking about adopting a different identity as a French philosopher, an atheist and skeptic of religion. But you also have another dynamic, that’s what’s happening intellectually in that sort of academic hub of the early United States, the early American republic. But you also have another dynamic at play, which is that after the American Revolution, through the Louisiana Purchase, again, through through Jefferson, you see a dramatic movement of Americans to settle the West. On the east, you have a lot of these established communities, whether it’s up in the north, you have more of a Congregationalists from their Puritan forebears and the South Mid Atlantic, you have more Presbyterian or Anglican Episcopal, there’s a lot of leadership where the church is the hub of the community. By the time you move out West, that’s not the case. And so areas that we think of today is largely the Midwest or the Deep South, were just absolutely wild west places at the time, and until, you know, the what eventually, which we can talk about as well, eventually, the Second Great Awakening would come, these were considered to be very godless places and where de churching was just assumed to be the norm. So I just find Mike, that it’s so helpful to go back and to understand that there’s not this everybody used to be religious now they’re not. But really history is more like a bunch of ups and downs is a very litigated phenomenon throughout American history.

Jim Davis
Well, just to underscore what you’re saying many people made this point, this is not original domain. In fact, I can remember it’s been a couple years ago, David French was on your podcast, making the same case that, you know, we think about the founding of our country, and you’re talking about that being one of the lowest periods of religious adherence in the country, the Constitution, and I feel like I’ve got to caveat this, there’s much I’m thankful for for the United States. I’m not anti American. But but the Constitution is the watershed document into secularization in the West. I don’t think among historians that’s significantly debated. I mean, you compare it to the constitutions of like the colonies that are talking about Jesus and the Holy Bible, and and converting the Indians and all that that’s absent from our constitution. So there was it wasn’t just the low adherence, but there was a concerted effort to move away from this Christian founding is that would you say that that’s a correct statement?

Collin Hansen
Yeah. And of course, there was a lot of disagreement among the founders themselves when it came to this approach. But the Constitution, as you point out from David, French, and others, is a shockingly secular document for the era, shockingly secular. Now, like I said, you had very different visions, Jefferson, and Madison would have had one perspective, John Adams would have had another, his relation, of course, Samuel Adams would have had another Patrick Henry, many different approaches. And I would say that, where they tended to agree, and this is part of why things are so different for us today, and why they’re why they’re so dramatically different is that even those who would have been Unitarian or deist, they still would have had an understanding that basic aspects of morality that Americans understood, particularly white Americans would have understood for that time period, was simply taken for granted. So they really could not conceive a world I mean, Jefferson believed that there would be a time in the near future where belief in the Trinity would simply evaporate. But I don’t think he could have foreseen the way that would be detached from certain moral assumptions. And from community norms, those were taken for granted. So we have to both simultaneously uphold that many aspects of Christian morality, were upheld, of course, most famously rejected were Christian views on biblical views on race and, and prejudice and, and all those sorts of things. But otherwise, and in many ways, those were still upheld, even by people who were thoroughly secular, and even anti Christian in their orientation.

Mike Aitcheson
So So Colin, just move the ball down the field even further, you sort of alluded to this in your previous answer, you made a reference to the Second Great Awakening. So here we are in the United States is being established as being founded and it’s continuing to move westward, you have the first Great Awakening, which is from around 1730 to 1777. And then you have the Second Great Awakening, which is basically 1790 to 1830. How do these awakenings impact American religion? And then help us parse out the differences between the two and why that’s important?

Collin Hansen
That’s great question and Mike. And I’m going to make things a little bit more complicated than most people typically expect when it comes to this. And this is what I was I’m trying to do going back to ALEC Ryrie argument that we talked about earlier, that it’s one thing to be able to criticize a corrupt church. But then it’s a short step to criticizing the concept of the church itself or of God. Here’s what happened in the first Great Awakening. first Great Awakening was a an increasing awareness of the importance of immediate conversion and of heart religion. We take this for granted today because we’re evangelicalism. This is what it means to be an Evan Jellicle. That emphasis on immediate conversion on heart religion. It’s pretty different in some ways, from what you saw in the early church, in some ways, in terms of long seasons of preparation, same thing with the Puritans when it came to conversion. So the American Revolution kind of the, the, you know, the first Great Awakening is simultaneously this massive upsurge is huge growth and expansion of religiosity. But it also poses a major challenge to community coherence and to religious establishment authority. One of the most insightful books out of the University of Richmond scholar Douglas Winiarski. It’s called darkness falls on the land of light. And so you can see that evangelicalism is this revolutionary phenomenon, that like I said, both spreads, you know, tremendous religiosity and upsurge of church affiliation, but also skepticism toward church leaders. Just imagine many of the figures that we associate most prominently with the emergence of evangelicalism such as Gilbert and and William Tennent to the Mid Atlantic and Atlantic Presbyterians, their one of their primary messages was how, if the pastors don’t support us and your pastors are not Christians, so a lot of skepticism toward religious figures, they’re the Second Great Awakening comes through. And it’s a similar phenomenon in this regard. It is simultaneously this huge, huge dramatic expansion unlike anything we’ve seen before in all of American history before in sense of almost universal adoption of evangelicalism by the by the time of the Civil War, America is an almost thoroughly Evan Jellicle nation. That doesn’t mean every single person was a Christian. But this is the rise of and he still had some skeptics, for sure. It’s also the era of New England Transcendentalism and, and things like that, but But you see this, I mean, it is it is a huge awakening. And and it goes all the way from the frontier. We mentioned earlier that that frontier was, was heavily de churched, especially compared to New England, or the, or Georgia or the Mid Atlantic states like Virginia. But the Second Great Awakening changes that dynamic entirely revolutionizes that. And this is where we get the rise of the Methodists and the Baptists, they went from being these small, relatively marginal groups around the American founding, to being nearly dominant, ever since. The Methodists have a kind of historic boast of, of having a presence in every county in all of the United States. And of course, we know that the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest denomination in the country. And we also see the influence as well of the American Baptist Convention among the African American among African American churches. And so all of that happens through the Second Great Awakening. And so, so you see this simultaneous huge upsurge of religiosity. But there’s also an undercurrent of anti establishment attitude, and even Methodism, and bap and Baptist theology lends itself a little bit to some of that criticism because of its origin in the, in the revivals, at least in their American expressions, compared to some other places. But yeah, so it’s kind of a mixed bag of huge religiosity. But you can already see that there are certain other challenges that are baked in.

Mike Aitcheson
Right, right. So okay, what impact does the Civil War and the abolition of slavery have on the, you know, these American religious trends?

Collin Hansen
Well, I mean, untold changes there, but we began to see the changes by the 1840s. And that’s because to the 1840s, and 1850s, the three major denominations, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist, all divided between North and South, and not exclusively over the issue of slavery. But that was certainly a major factor in there. All sorts of other theological issues got tied up in that, just as we’ve seen in our own day, and just loose on the Civil Rights period, is a pretty common common challenge there. But of course, we see a couple of different things happen in the aftermath of the Civil War. First of all, you see throughout the south, the sharp separation between white and black churches, it’s very confusing, but many people don’t realize that, that slaves and their masters were often members of the same churches, especially in the Baptist tradition. Now, they would have been segregated, they would have been treated very differently, but they were typically members in the same church. Well, that splits, they split off and they kind of they go on different trajectories, ever since that’s one of the biggest changes that happens there. But I don’t know how you guys and I, everybody knows from listening to this podcast, I love history so much I find so much understanding in it. But one of the things I learned in seminary was that when you’re looking through church history, you want to map it out, where you see where things overlap in terms of dates. So you can see, oh, this was happening, but also this was happening, but also this was happening all at the same time, people were experiencing them at the same time. So the Civil War, and the argument over slavery is happening at the same time as a another massive global event in terms of d churching. And in American religion, that is Charles Darwin in his publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, as happening at the same time, and so as we’ve talked about previously, Do you have this phenomenon where Darwin’s work begins to spread across, especially the north, which is the intellectual hub of the country still, and especially in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. So that begins to spread throughout, especially the North. At the same time that the theory that the historian Mark Noll observes that the debate about slavery significantly weakened some people’s trust in Scripture, as the ultimate arbiter of American society and of the good life. And so you, you begin to have some of this skepticism that comes into the church, especially related to evolution. At the same time, when abolitionism and the post, the post war reality begins to, to open people up toward more generic interpretations of Scripture, as opposed to a fidelity to some of the specifics, in part because they’ve seen how pro slavery advocates have abused the Bible to make their case. So you’ve combined those two things together. And even though there’s a massive amount of religiosity and church, institutional support and power in the United States, north and south at the dawn of the Civil War, and throughout it, you can begin to see fairly quickly that the situation in the North is going to dramatically change. And the North is going to go on a very different trajectory with religion, and with church and with the churching compared to the south.

Jim Davis
That’s really helpful. There’s like three different things you said that I want to drill down on, but we’re staying at a higher a higher altitude here, we’re going to move forward in history. As we move in this timeline toward the 20th century, at the end of the 19th century, there seems to be a big dip. And you’re alluding to this in church attendance, especially in North influenced by biblical criticism coming over from Germany, can you flesh that out a bit and what impact this has moving again, past the Civil War as it takes hold even more deeply, and how Christianity is received generally in the culture,

Collin Hansen
another major revival begins to take place across the United States, but also the world at the end, really, at the beginning of the of the 20th century. So kind of in response to what you see in there with the 19th. There’s this big, big response. And you see it globally. You see it in Korea, you see it in India, you see it, most famously probably in Wales, but you also saw it across the United States. And so there’s a lot of conversation about religious revival around that period. However, one of the things that you notice, especially in the American context, is that you see a different dynamic playing out one that’s akin to what we’ve discussed already before, it is that our Christianity is understood primarily in terms of its morals, and its social implications, which remember, those were a big factor in the dynamics of the Civil War, opposing slavery. But now you begin to see the rise of something called the social gospel. The social gospel then corresponds with these trends, of biblical higher criticism, of really getting into the text of Scripture and undermining its development, to show that it’s supposed lack of coherence, and how it was an edited cobbled together document that’s not intended to be authoritative. That is a huge phenomenon, especially in the north. But to tie this back down to what I said about what I was alluding to about the South earlier, the South is on a different trajectory. It’s not that nobody knows about biblical criticism. It is that because of the criticism of the north, towards southern views of slavery, and because of the abject poverty experienced across the South as a result of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, and combined with an ongoing sense, through reconstruction of, of democratic dominance, can reassertion of white supremacy through Jim Crow, the South develops a very solid cultural mentality that resists any incursions academically or politically or otherwise from elsewhere, especially out of the country, but also from the north and south, the southern church, even though they are engaging in some of these some of these new trends, economic trends, not nearly at the same level as the North. So what you see happened throughout the northern churches into the 20th century is the fundamentalist modernist controversy, where the miracles of Christianity are challenged as being, you know, incapable of being integrated with with with human rationality, but at the same And the morals are upheld. And so in my writing on Tim Keller, I observed that and learn from others that even at the beginning of the 20th century, about 25%, of people living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan were still churchgoing, evangelicalism. And you have this, this emerging belief of the cosmopolitan angelical, the one who still believes in doing the right things and family and faith, but they don’t really care anymore about the specifics. Well, you, we can probably jump ahead to see what’s going to happen. But on the other side of the fundamentalist, modernist controversy, you begin again through the 20s and 30s, to see a collapse of church attendance and affiliation, especially in the north, that coincides with denomination splitting over these theological differences. And so but it’s important to note, the north and south are on relatively different trajectories during this process.

Jim Davis
That’s helpful. I want to I want to keep our walk through the 20th century, we’re now solidly in the 20th century, but the most important factors that remake the face of the United States after this are, of course, the two World Wars and how society rebuilds itself following them. There’s economic prosperity like the world has never seen before. There’s the baby boom, the Cold War drives patriotic sentiments, you’ve got Billy Graham filling stadiums, a church it’s in source. It’s also around this time in this Cold War era that In God We Trust appears on our money and under God appears in our pledge for the first time, which is not I find generally known that that’s it popped up I think, in the 50s. If I’m if I’m correct,

Collin Hansen
as an allusion back to Lincoln, right, I keep going, yeah.

Jim Davis
What No. And then at the end of the toward the end of the century, of course, there’s the collapse of the Soviet Union. So How significant are these factors? And how does this groundswell potentially end up leading to the wave of de churching? In the generations that follow that?

Collin Hansen
Yeah, so I think in the reason this conversation is so fraught, is because especially for white Americans, the 1950s are seen as the parodic Matic period. It is either the period of time that we are always trying to recapture patriotism, faith, family, prosperity, community, church, all these things working together. Of course, again, the story is quite different for African Americans. But what Americans is probably

Jim Davis
isn’t allowed to ask me my cages, and I would that was about to say, my gauges, and how would you like to go back to the 1950s it’s

Collin Hansen
very, very different. But it looms large, in the it looms large in the psyche of, of white Americans especially, but then so to the 1960s, because the 1960s are the paradigmatic rebellion from the conformity of the 1950s. And so I’ve seen others like Yuval Levin, point out that our politics are perpetually stuck in a basic nostalgic, neverending argument about the 1950s and the 1960s. What I’m trying to establish in this interview, is that that period of time in the 1950s was not the norm in American history. When you go and you look around at so many different churches affiliated with with largely white denominations, especially across the American South, you will see entire new church buildings, Sunday School wings after Sunday School wings that are as big as churches are the biggest like schools that we would see today, public schools that we’d see built today. And they almost all date from that period from the 1950s. And especially then the 1960s. And one thing that’s unique is that you can look at it back as kind of like a high watermark for white evangelicals. You mentioned a Billy Graham, we can add there, you know, the whole new Neo Evan Jellicle movement led by people like Carl Henry, Harold, John Aachen, gay, that emerges from that period of time as well. But it is also that it is the height of civil religion in American history. It’s the era of Dwight Eisenhower, who was not considered some sort of particular Evan Jellicle. And Harry Truman before him who, who so disliked Billy Graham, that he told him to never come back to the White House, again, was not necessarily just an Evan Jellicle time it was also the high watermark for the Roman Catholic Church in United States and the Protestant mainline so all these different expressions were were prospering at the same time because like what you said, Jim, because of the the baby boom and family structures have have always been a very close, close. Come companion to religiosity, but also because that essentially what it meant to be an American at the time, was synonymous with being a Christian, or at least a religious believer in general, because the primary enemy of the United States would have been a communist. And we have to understand what it would have been like to be in America in that time, where you have this constant threat of nuclear war, from this atheistic regime, which is bent on world domination. And we will often remember kind of the role that the Soviet Union played, but especially for evangelicalism and their history, we can’t forget the role that China played in that, because so many people had connections to Christians, they’re missionaries there. Of course, Billy Graham’s own wife, Ruth had spent time there. Her father was a missionary in China. So there’s always this thread of atheistic communism looming. And what you mentioned, Jim, the and God We Trust are under God. And the pledge, is a way of asserting that As Americans, we are religious believers, because we’re not communists. Now, I’ve seen many people make this observation, I think I probably learned it first from Tim Keller. But that lasts until the end of the Cold War to a certain level. And I don’t think, Jim, that it’s a coincidence, that around that period of time, we begin to see religiosity and church affiliation, in particular begin to decline precipitously, we see a big decline around 1992 to 1994. And then another decline, significant decline that we’ve been in, we’ve been in ever since around the year 2000. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that around that time, the primary enemy of the United States switched, no longer Was it an atheist who, by contrast, you’re supposed to be a religious believer. But now it’s the kind of religious believer who takes his or her faith so seriously, so horribly, seriously, that they would actually fly a plane in the World Trade Center to kill all kinds of innocent people in the name of their God. And so that becomes a paradigm shift for Americans to begin to think of anybody who takes their religious affiliation too seriously, is a threat to the social order. That’s a very significant change, and one that I think we continue to live right in the middle of today.

Jim Davis
Now, I think that’s an excellent summary. And I know people like Ryan Birge have have said, I mean, just highlighting what you’re talking about in the 90s, you could be an American, and not a Christian, for the first time, you know, letting go of your Christianity didn’t mean you’re also letting go of your Americanism. So that everything you’re saying corresponds with that, that data.

Mike Aitcheson
So So Colin, going going back to this the focusing on the Soviet Union in a couple decades preceding its collapse, there’s another another political movement happening, right? It’s the rise of the Religious Right. And essentially, the flipping of the geographical basis of the political parties. Where does this factor in? And what are some of the issues and politics that shake up church attendance.

Collin Hansen
So you’ve got two different factors here, and it feels like we’re, we’re kind of stuck in a perpetual chicken in the egg phenomenon, where the religious right is either this new overt politicization of religion, or it is simply the natural response of Christians, to dramatic changes in views towards sexuality in American culture, that are precipitated predominantly by the invention and the adoption of the birth control pill by Planned Parenthood in the 1960s. Which, without that plausibility without that change, and we wouldn’t be able to see hardly any of those subsequent changes. So you’ve got the rise of, of the sexual revolution. And we know what that means in terms of marriage, significantly declining marriage rates, we know what that means in terms of, of births out of wedlock, huge jump through the 1990s of bursts outside of marriage. Father’s being absent in in the home. Of course, that’s across the across ethnicities, first predominantly the African American community, but by the 1990s and 2000s. It’s significantly the case across especially lower educated white communities. So you just that that is a huge challenge for the church. One that again, we’re still in the middle of today. A one of the responses to that is the rise of the religious right. Now, here’s one thing that’s that’s pretty significant. Billy Graham was by far the most well, I mean, he’s most, he was commonly known as the most popular American. So you have this huge this American Evangelical, this evangelists. He’s the most popular person, this most admired and trusted person in the country during this period of time. And yet, he, through his experience, especially with Lyndon Johnson, as president in the Vietnam War, and then also with Richard Nixon, comes to see that his fusing of American civil religion and politics, that he was a huge champion of in the 40s. And the 50s. And the 60s in the 70s, is bankrupt by the 1980s. That opens up a huge door for other people to enter in and say, No, we don’t need less of that. Keep in mind, Billy Graham, is an advocate for nuclear treaties and even Disarmament in the 1980s. Imagine how unpopular that was for him. So you have that in his place, even though he remains a very popular figure, the rise of this new religious right, then you have abortion politics kicking in not only from 1973, but especially the 1980s under Reagan, and then into the 1990s. You have then this is hugely important decision, the early 1990s, Planned Parenthood versus Casey, we’re now living in the aftermath of the dobs decision that overturned roe. Almost everyone thought for sure that Planned Parenthood versus ks V. Casey that was going to overturn Roe v. Wade, in part related to that, and responding to that you see a pretty significant upturn in protest, and also a violence by people who claim to be Christians, a lot of the protests are from Evan Jellicle Christians, then media attention of these protests was enormously negative, I cannot emphasize enough how incredibly negative it was. I mean, it just it is it is it is unreal. And at that point, we start to see a major shift. And people declining to affiliate with any church in particular, because it’s seen as being part of this contentious culture war. And then you see another thing happening, you see the beginnings of this in the 1990s. And it takes all the way until the 2000s 2003 is the critical year here, where the Episcopal Church allows the ordination of a gay Bishop, that then unleashes a whole series of church splits, divisions that again, we are literally still living with now 20 years later, that has weakened church affiliation, and basically has helped to cement in people’s mind that church is associated, especially among whites. Now, there’s different trends with African Americans that are overlapping in some ways. But essentially two things are happening that to be religious is to be one, a member of the Republican Party. And number two, is to really be a certain kind of Evan Jellicle. Christian. So it becomes this kind of all or nothing phenomenon. And for those people who are either not Republicans, or they’re of a different type of, of religion, especially of different denomination, especially Catholic or mainline, they begin to simply disaffiliate altogether, and their denominations have are splitting over this. And on top of that, their denominations have taken a huge turn, in many ways toward the left, theologically, going back decades, and are actually still quite heavily political in their leadership, but just on the left wing, all of that just wreaks havoc. I haven’t even mentioned here yet, the church abuse scandal, we can have a whole conversation about that as well. But you can just see the level of tumult that we’ve experienced between the sexual revolution. In fact, let me just give you this this quick illustration, the Gospel coalition’s first meeting was in 2005. At that meeting, Don Carson said, the issue of homosexuality would be the equivalent in the 21st century to what the issue of indulgences was in the 16th century, which led to that division in the western church that we know of as the Reformation. He was saying that the 21st century would see another split in the church on that level, not because of homosexuality, but simply that is the kind of introduction or the presenting issue to a bigger transformation. And again, because we’re talking here about D churching. You can see that over that time period, as you guys are covering in this podcast, you have seen 10s of mill Millions of Americans leave the church altogether during that time period.

Mike Aitcheson
And with all of this, we just about reached today, or at least we reached the 21st century. And with the 21st century, we get big tech, we get economic crisis, social media, increased social mobility, and more. This is the period each of us have been adults through and experience life. And and our loved ones and our neighbors, both positively and negatively. How have the last 20 years, put us where we are today?

Collin Hansen
I’m really going to have to exercise some restraint on this one, Mike. This is and maybe, maybe let me take it this direction. In my work at the Keller Center for Cultural apologetics, this is an exercise that I like to undergo with my students when I’m teaching them with our fellows at the center. Because it’s very illuminating, because it helps us to develop as a church. What should our response be? Let me let me just walk you through that. Because I think I think it’ll be it’ll be very helpful, essentially, for even through everything that I’m telling you here, for 50 years before 2000, about 70% of Americans said that they affiliated with the church, it went up and it went down, they might switch traditions, they might leave one they might go to another but generally it’s fairly stable. In a when you’re looking at it big picture. But something Mike begins to change in the year 2000. And from the year 2000. On it is it is declining to the point where a couple years ago it reached 47%. From 70. For 50 years, it’s at 70. Now it’s at 47 and still declining less than half are affiliated with any religious institution in America. How does that happen? I think for every region, every different tradition, perhaps even different ethnicity, certainly different countries or regions around the world. You can look inductively at your situation and be able to map this out. Now to get to the answer to your question. Let’s try to draw together a few of the different things that we’ve been talking about in here. Let’s let’s kind of throw on a mental whiteboard, the different options that we could talk about of why this has happened, especially since 2000. We could say 911. Remember what we talked about there with 911. We could look at politics, the role between President George W. Bush, the religious right gay marriage, and the rise of the new atheist movement, all the way then until Donald Trump in 2016. And polarization there especially on the right, and the role, the religious right, we could look at that, we could look at the Catholic abuse scandals. First time that hit significantly in the in the public consciousness was 2002, with the spotlight report out of the Boston Globe. But I think we might lean in a little bit of a different direction. And that’s because the year 2000 is also the year when 50% of Americans now have the internet in their homes. Now, there are any number of things that we could talk about related to this. But simply let me say this, the internet is a notoriously moving target. But it’s safe for us to assume that this digital revolution is in the earliest stages still. And when we think about artificial intelligence, in particular, we have no idea where this is going to go. But we live currently in the age of the algorithm. What does the algorithm do? The algorithm is sort of like repeating back to us the darkest corners of our psyche, that for the sake of community, and for solidarity and for sociability, we’ve tried to suppress, but the algorithm just brings that out from the dark corners and puts it front and center and makes it our sole identity. So what does that do? It means that everybody is incentivized to rush toward the corners of anger. And there are no institutions in the middle that are that can hold it together because they get attacked by the algorithms on both sides that that draw out the worst aspects of people in their fear and their loathing of others. So it’s not just that since 2000, we’ve seen a decline of the church. We have seen an unprecedented unprecedented decline of trust in every different kind of institution in our society, perhaps with the slight effects adaption of some aspects of the military, we are seeing a collapse of institutions. And the church is one of those institutions that used to play a role, even going back to the 1950s of being this, this, this place of social solidarity of, of institutional of community trust. But you know, Mike, we could be having this conversation about newspapers as well. And you could say, oh, the kind of newspapers is a simple political is a simple economic phenomenon. Well, sure, it is. But it’s also an expression of community solidarity, of institutional trust, of trying to draw people together with one another, to work together toward a common goal, all of which the algorithm not only destroys by, by catering to our worst impulses toward one another, but also creates a precedence of the digital over the physical. And the church, as we know, as Christians is a is an inherently and unnecessarily physical thing. It’s one of the reasons why I wrote my book, rediscover the church, Rediscover church where the body of Christ is essential, which, which came out a couple years ago,

Jim Davis
which we quote, in our book for what it’s worth,

Collin Hansen
there you go, thank you very much. So I just think, to wrap it up here, because I’m not going to get a chance to be able to talk about anything positive here. I just want to commend that exercise. Because once you’re able to identify the prime aspects behind the churching, you can develop through that method, a theological vision, for what aspects of the church and the gospel, we need to prioritize, we need to lean into we need to embrace we need to emphasize today, if we’re going to hope to arrest some of these trends of the churching.

Jim Davis
Well, I can’t imagine covering more in 45 or 50 minutes and doing it well enough that the pacing, I’m just really thankful for your knowledge, but also your you just have a gift of awareness of the audience and pacing. And I just I just really appreciate your time here. And one of my takeaways from like, just that last little bit, is that it feels like churches that are that are truly valuing the gospel, and all that that is with it are going to be better equipped to walk through the season of turmoil than those who are experiencing more. And I’m not trying to be overly negative, but more man centered kinds of sermons. And so I appreciate that. And I hear you it’s not all doom and gloom. History is what history is. We are where we are. But we believe that there is great hope in the Gospel. And obviously, we know how the story ends. And I know you know that and so just thank you so much for walking through that with us for you talked about your students. Thank you for making all of us students here today, man. So thank you and keep up your good work at Sanford at the gospel Coalition and the Keller Center. Thanks. Thanks, Jim. Thanks, Mike. All right. Well, we talked in episode one about we referenced there’s two kinds generally speaking of D churching. Casually, casually, D Church and the D church casualties. We’re going to be diving into those. Please join us next week as Patrick Miller joins us and we begin to talk in earnest about casually de churching blessings