The End of Church

[regnaD kciN]

8. I'm not sure about your equivalence...

...of "the churches who are part of the right wing" who "made politics the mainstay of the church" and "the church in general."

Lots of people here love to rail against the "religious right," for obvious reasons. But, in fact, such churches have only been a minority of American Christianity at any time in the history of the country, including the past thirty or so years when they were getting most of the media coverage and being basically co-opted as right-wing Republicanism at prayer.

It looks like you and your family had bad experiences with politically-conservative churches or denominations, so I can understand your reactions. But there are lots of us in progressive or moderate denominations who have not shared your experience, and we're dealing with the same issues about "the end of church." This is what Diana Butler Bass (and others, such as Phyllis Tickle and Brian McLaren) has spoken to, and I don't want to say much more about her conclusions until I've had a chance to read her book.

In another thread here, a poster provides a long, well-reasoned argument about the decline in religion being due to churches concentrating so much on the "other-worldly" (i.e. "saving souls&quot that they have neglected the Kingdom of God on earth. There may well be a great deal of truth in what the poster says. But I think it's more a failure to make the connection between the two: the Kingdom* of God as it exists among us, and the Kingdom of God still in the future (note: although you'd have a hard time telling it from most "conventional wisdom," even among American Christians, Christianity is not and never has been about some sort of blissful disembodied existence "in heaven&quot , and the notion that these two aspects of the Kingdom are vitally entwined with each other -- God is not just transcendent or imminent, but both and, similarly, one cannot just "dream of heaven" while ignoring the here-and-now, or work to build the present while banishing the eternal.


*Let me point out from the outset my own dissatisfaction with this term, which, to modern ears, can't help but conjure up visions of medieval absolutist monarchs -- and exclusively-male ones at that -- but it's what was used by early Christians, for whom, as one Biblical scholar put it, saying "God is King" implicitly adds "...and Caesar isn't." One book I read recently offered some more-fitting metaphors, but I don't remember which one it was right now, and really am not inclined, at 3:20 A.M., to go searching for it right now.