The Dying Church

the gospel according to Howard Beale

A few times a week, I’ll run across somebody who says the Church in America is in serious trouble, and getting worse. Normally, I won’t engage them because no matter how eloquently I state my case, they won’t care to see it.

There are two theories about why the church is in danger. One is that the world is impossibly sinful, and it’s getting worse, and if this continues, the church is done for. I believe the world is impossibly sinful, but I believe it has always been so. What I call sin and what the dying church people call sin usually aren’t the same things, but I haven’t noticed a marked increase in either.

The other theory is that the Church has become infected with people who don’t follow the true teachings of Jesus Christ. I agree with that, too. So did Martin Luther many years before any of us were born. I heard that quite a lot when the Methodist Church was breaking into pieces. I never understood how disaffiliating from each other would stem this perceived declivity in the church.

It’s true that church attendance is way down. Attendance at the movies, baseball games, concerts, and plays is also way down. Last year, something like twenty percent of all concert ticket sales worldwide were for Taylor Swift Eras Tour Concerts. You might not be going to concerts, but your daughters are. Football ticket sales are slightly up, and ticket sales for Women’s Professional Basketball are way, way up, but I don’t know how long that trend can last.

A wise man, a fictional newscaster named Howard Beale, once said: “We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is: ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.” The actor who delivered this monologue died before he could accept the Oscar he won for it.

Things are bad—worse than bad—and we’re hiding in our homes. More than anything, that is what causes church attendance to drop. I fall victim to it, too. When the sun gets oppressive in the summer, I like to watch my church on TV rather than putting on a tie and going out in the world. The world almost always disappoints, and it’s so cozy in my living room.

I went to a high school that many people thought was impossibly liberal because we refused to segregate. I used to try to find more polite ways to say that, but I’m old and I’m tired of semantic games. Our twenty-five-year-old football coach stood down the entire Mississippi Private School Association because he refused to play segregated schools. Sometimes, the bravest person in the room is a redhead.

They called us liberal, but we wore uniforms and had mandatory chapel twice a month. We also had communion in the school gym, even if it meant we had to use hamburger buns as the body of Christ because somebody forgot to buy regular bread. I very rarely ever spent an entire day at school without seeing somebody wearing a clerical collar, even if he was wearing a John Prine or a Grateful Dead t-shirt under it.

The guy who led me down a path where I became a Republican for a little over twenty years was the headmaster at that impossibly liberal school. I didn’t care for him, and he didn’t care for me, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t teach me, and even though we didn’t agree more than we did, he did make me see some things about the government that I couldn’t disagree with.

A church without (or with less) political power probably seems like it’s in danger and dying. I don’t think that means we’re headed in the wrong direction, though. They put a crown of thorns on the head of Jesus because they said he was King of the Jews. They killed him nailed to an olive tree, a fate reserved for criminals and slaves. Jesus didn’t worry about the church having political power or declining attendance at temple. He knew something we didn’t, something we’ve since forgotten.

Howard Beale said you had to get mad as hell and say, “I’m not gonna take this anymore!” Then he said we didn’t have to do that anymore because Ned Beaty convinced him capitalism was more important.

If the people convinced that the church was dying would listen to me, I’d tell them that the church will very likely outlast us, although we might not recognize what it becomes. If you’re really worried about it, try going out in the world more often. Begging people to leave you alone in your living room isn’t the way.