Averting the Crisis

At First Things, Carl R. Trueman writes an interesting, and mostly accurate (in my opinion), article called Is There a Crisis in Conservative Protestantism? There are several things worth a closer look.

First, Trueman makes a distinction between a similar conversation about a crisis in the Roman Catholic Church. He observes that politically conservative Protestants, like their Roman Catholic counterparts, are realising they placed too much faith in the political process — but that the fissiparous nature of Protestantism means an institutional crisis of the kind Douthat describes cannot happen in the same way; from a Roman Catholic perspective Protestantism is itself a permanent crisis.

It is true that we place too much faith in the political process. A huge part of this is because the political process we think we need to participate in - where we think power is to be had - is a process according to the wisdom of the world. As citizens, we have an obligation to participate in our government but what we call the political process is hardly an appropriate participation.

But that isn’t the part of this quote that interests me the most. Trueman "sets aside" the institutional difference between RCs and Conservative Protestantism. He does this in large part because he must. Protestant churches don’t and won’t ever have the same kind of institutional structure and unity as the RC church does, so why go there? But I do think there is a different kind of institutional unity that can be worked toward within the Protestant world. And in that kind unity there may be traction against the crisis he speaks of.

I particularly enjoyed the second part of his analysis, in which he describes an unbearable, kitschy lightness to much that passes for conservative Protestant life and thought — theology that sells as a cheap, rootless imitation; the same brand names producing lightweight books on whatever is the topic of the moment; the same speakers on the same conference rosters, with supercharged staging distracting from insipid content. If we imitate the shallowness of pop culture, he argues, we can expect to replicate its life expectancy. Boy bands come and boy bands go.

This is very much in the same vein as what I have called the "shelf life" of particular manifestations of Christian culture and expression. When we follow the trends we follow them to their same ends. And even in some of our efforts to not follow trends - in our reaction against trends - we are still characterized in terms of the trend and are subject to that trend’s shelf life.

Much of this, we are nearly powerless to do anything about, at least right now in American Protestantism. Culturally, we are institutionally bound to following trends. It is part of our DNA. Like the Geico ads say, it is what we do. Often it seems that true change will only come through a major historic institution-altering crisis. The Church ought to be about creating the future so when something institution-altering happens, or when the shelf life of the trends around us expire, Christ’s Church is there to save. But most of the conservative Protestant church world follows rather than leads.

The last part of his essay includes several comments that I also agree with. But what is notably absent from it hints at what I think is the key to this crisis. Trueman argues that conservative Protestantism lacks a strong tradition of social thought that might help it counter the kitsch, and calls for more of its finest minds to engage the moral issues of the day — not so much to persuade the world as to give clarity of thought to our own people as they go about their daily callings.

Yes, deep thought and clarity is essential. But what about deep practice? What about a church characterized by practical community discipline? If all we do is go to the abstract for solutions we will never succeed. The best we can hope for from an exclusively thought-powered crisis management strategy is that a small segment of the population that has the ability (or quasi-ability) and interest in deep and careful thought might gain a false sense that their island of brains is the true remnant of the church and the rest of us are willful degenerates for not agreeing with their carefully thought out abstractions - which pretty much sounds like a lot of what constitutes the conservative Protestant world already.

The conservative Protestant church needs to develop its community practices. We need to build alternate social institutions through community level disciplines. What does the daily lived-life of the redeemed community look like on the ground? in its neighborhood? Our thinkers ought to spending some of their thought along these lines. This is where we create the future. This is where the crisis is averted, not only for the church, but for the world.