Disgusted Young People: How Martin Luther King Predicted the Decline of the Mainline Church
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- Derek Penwell Author; Editor; Speaker; Activist
So often the contemporary
church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an
archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the
church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the
church’s silent--and often even vocal--sanction of things as they are.
But the judgment of God is
upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the
sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit
the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no
meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose
disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.
~Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter
from a Birmingham Jail
I remember listening to a series
on NPR one time about young adults leaving their religion behind. The
thrust of the weeklong series centered on the increasing number among the
emerging generations who no longer claim any religious affiliation.
Some gave traumatic grief as a
reason for giving up, and others named a ponderous ecclesiastical hierarchy
they no longer found useful, while still others struggled with what felt like
the silliness of trying to find consolation in mythology. I got the impression
from listening to them that they’ve thought more about religion than many of
the people I know who’ve remained in the church. They’ve carved
their disbelief out of the cold existential marble of a future scape devoid of
religious infrastructure.
Interestingly, though, some of what
I heard sounded like wistfulness, a desire somehow to have the “something” they
felt like religion offers. “Not consolation, necessarily” they say. “Not so
much forgiveness,” they’re quick to add. For some it sounded like a desire for
community. For another I heard it as a longing for the kind of
taken-for-grantedness associated with a meaningful afterlife, which some
religion offers.
“Do you still pray?” the
interviewer wanted to know.
Haltingly, “Yes … well, sort of.
I’m not sure you could call it prayer.”
Another, “I try to feel gratitude,
which seems to me like prayer.”
Young man: “I’m embarrassed to
admit it, because it makes me sound like a hypocrite after all the things I’ve
said this week, but yes, when things get really bad, I still do.”
Many of them were quick to point
out that they weren’t looking to get back into religion, but there seemed to be
something …
I think the church ought to pay
attention--not so we can figure out a way to give them what they want in the
hopes that all these “nones” will want what we’ve got and come back to teach
the 2nd grade Sunday School class. I think the church ought to pay attention
because, whether they can articulate it with precision or not, much of what the
nones are saying is that the kind of stuff often peddled in the name
of religion just isn’t interesting enough to hold anybody’s
attention--let alone young people who have precious little extra time and a
mountain of student loan debt with which to be preoccupied.
The other thing I’ve heard the nones
saying is that evidence of Jesus and his commitment to a new world is often
difficult to find in the lives of the people who appear to claim his blessings
with the most enthusiasm.
In other words, what nones
tend to see when they see the church has less to do with the humble path of
faithful service in the pursuit of justice, than with what appears to be the
venal and self-aggrandizing building of personal kingdoms by those certain that
the Jesus of the Gospels must not have meant what he said “literally.”
I mean, come on. Have you read the
Gospels? I am not even lying.
·
Surely, Jesus was just doing a little fancy rhetorical
two-stepping when he uttered the first words of his public ministry in Luke:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good
news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and
recovery of sight to the blind” (Lk. 4:18-19).
·
It’s not like Jesus literally meant
that we shouldn’t oppose people who think differently from us about God, not
like Jesus was actually saying that “whoever is not against us
is for us” (Mk. 9:40).
·
He couldn’t really mean it when he
said, “Do not resist the evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right
cheek, turn the other also” (Mt. 5:39).
·
Jesus didn’t intend it literally (and
especially not corporately … about congregations) when he said that “those who
want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my
sake, and for the sake of the gospel will save it” (Mk. 8:35).
·
Yeah, that whole thing about “tax collectors and
prostitutes going into the kingdom of God ahead of you [religious folks]” was
just a figure of speech (Mt. 21:31).
·
Seriously, he was just trying to make a point when he
proclaimed: “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.
Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are
laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when all speak well of
you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets” (Lk. 6:24-26).
·
Jesus was just being, you know, metaphorical when he
set down the sweeping breadth of his vision of the saving love he was about to
unleash through his death: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will
draw all people to myself” (Jn. 12:32).
Irony: I--and
progressives who view the Bible not as the blueprint of a castle meant to house
a few select people but as a series of sketches meant, when taken together, to
set down a comprehensive vision of an entirely new world in which everybody’s
welcome--am regularly accused of not taking the Bible seriously, of picking an
choosing only the parts I like, of failing to read the “literal sense” of
Scripture.
Unfortunately,
Christianity--because of so many botched attempts at fitting in, at being
relevant, at making sure society doesn’t think us metaphysical rubes and
hayseeds--has domesticated the faith to such an extent that disbelief takes
little effort. We have fostered a situation in which it is appallingly easy, as
Terry Eagleton says, to reject faith “on the cheap.” Faith, in the hands of too
many of Jesus’ loudest and most unremittingly convinced fans, cannot but feel
like the spiritual equivalent of polyester underpants--unflattering,
out-of-date, and scratchy in the tenderest places.1
Here’s the thing: If the nones
find disbelief preferable (and Lord knows there are plenty of really good
reasons to do so) why not try to give them something interesting in which to
disbelieve? My fear is that at the heart of much disbelief sits a reality that
I, as a Christian, don’t have any stake in believing in either.
If the “nones” are leaving the
church (and again, anyone with a little sense and some walking around change
admits that there exist arguably compelling grounds for doing so) why not give
them a true picture of what is they’re leaving? My fear is that
they’re leaving because they’ve gotten a taste of a Christianity that many of
us have no desire to defend.
If the “nones” ever should venture into a church looking for
Jesus, they’re probably first going to have to witness him in the lives of his
followers outside the church … years, miles before they ever
get through the front door. My big fear is that what they’ll witness isn’t
Jesus, but instead someone parading around wearing a symbol of the capital
punishment that killed him, winking and talking knowingly about “those” people,
and how this once proud Christian nation is going to hell because of ________
(fill in the blank: the humanists, the gays, the illegals, #BlackLivesMatter, the
moochers who carry iPhones but who want us to pay for their healthcare, the gun
control sissies, or the liberal socialists and their “class warfare”).2
Fifty years ago this April, Martin
Luther King, Jr. sat in a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama and wrote a letter
to moderate clergymen in white mainline churches. In it he expressed his
disappointment in the church’s inability to be a people formed more by a vision
of Jesus than by fear of cultural rejection. Those “men of God” asked him to
lighten up on the integration demands, to let time make the changes for which
they were too afraid to stand. But in the process they forfeited something
crucial--the ability to speak with integrity on behalf of Jesus, the one who
gave his life as the ultimate embrace of the abandoned and the voiceless. It’s
possible, I’ve heard it said somewhere, to lose your life by the very process
employed to try to save it.
And do you want to know, at least
in part, what losing your life while trying to save it might look like?
According to Martin Luther King, it looks like a stampede of disgusted young
people falling all over themselves trying to get to the back door.
They came. They saw. They got the
hell out of Dodge.
The God who gave enough of a crap
about this dirt mound to call it “good,” and then show up to rent a shabby one
bedroom apartment in the very throbbing heart of it must find little utility in
the overly sentimentalized and acculturated versions of piety that have come to
be associated with popular Christianity. People are dying all over the world
(many of them in our name) and we find time to fume over the fact that a baker
has to make a cake for people whom she doesn’t approve of.
Poor folks in our own neighborhoods
are hungry, cold, and sick, people of color are dying at the hands of the
"justice" system, refugees in need are being refused hospitality
because we can’t figure out a way to act like Jesus and build
really cool bombs at the same time. So we spend our hours figuring out all the
conspiratorial ways of rhetorically framing government bureaucrats as rapacious
tyrants ready to relieve us of our money and our constitutional rights, instead
of demanding that they help form an equitable society.
In 2015 the
wealthiest 1% in the world owned 50% of the wealth, while those with a net worth
less than $10,000 a year comprised 71% of the world’s population, but a
vast swath of Christianity is much more concerned that folks with the same
sexual equipment can now get a marriage license down at the courthouse in a
handful of states.
Fifty years out, Martin Luther King
called it. He said that “the judgment of God is on the church as never before.
If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early
church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed
as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.”
And guess what happened. Over the
next fifty years, we
have seen those millions cast whatever loyalty to the church aside. Looking
like a social club apparently just won’t get it done.
If the church ever figures to
reclaim the respect of the “nones,” let alone their loyalty, it had better take
a hard look--not just at itself, but at Jesus. Because to the extent that
they’re looking at all, they’re looking for Jesus.
Why not try something new? We’ve
done “disappointment” and “disgust” to death.
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