The Caboose at the End of the Cultural Train?

My father used to love reading the newspaper. Every day, in fact, he’d read all three New York dailies, cover-to-cover.

He especially got a kick out of the letters-to-the-editor. He’d chuckle at all the hysterical, over-the-top outrage frequently fomented in its pages. So I’m not sure what he’d think about my own letter-to-the-editor a few weeks ago in the Cape Cod Chronicle.

In it, I commented on the fact that the week before the paper had published a detailed map showing the exact path of the tornado that first touched down in Harwich Center. Since I’d worked there for over a decade, I was curious.

Naturally enough, to orient myself, I looked for the First Congregational Church, only to discover it wasn’t there. The high school was identified, as was Brooks Park. Yet the church, arguably the most recognizable and historic landmark in town, had effectively been scrubbed out of existence.  

This is consistent with what I’ve seen in recent years – that houses of worship are simply left off maps. A friend emailed me to say that on Google Maps, for instance, at the 500-foot scale, all sorts of community places are identified including libraries, schools, police, cultural centers, even funeral homes and cemeteries. But not churches.

“At the 200-foot level,” he conceded, “they do include churches.” I guess we can all be grateful for that.

This struck me as a perfect example of how, in contemporary America, public opinion has shifted with respect to religion. It’s as if, as I said in my letter, the First Amendment has been altered to read “freedom from religion” as opposed to its actual wording, “freedom of religion.”

Within this paradigm shift, we’re still permitted to worship as we choose, albeit privately, while participation in the public square is confined largely to the secular point of view. Over the years this sensibility has been codified by the law and the courts. As a result, the church has been publicly sidelined, if not silenced altogether.

As we know, this wasn’t always the case. In my lifetime alone I’ve witnessed the overturning of centuries of social precedent. In just 50- or 60-years America’s foundational civic ordering has been radically altered.

Yet, I fear, being plucked unceremoniously from our long-established seat at the cultural table just may not be the worst of it. For while modernity does seem increasingly embarrassed by us, we almost act as if they have a point.

Which is to say, we’ve accepted the role secular society has assigned to us. We’ve become the poor stepsister, victims of a perverse form of the Stockholm syndrome. Our self-esteem is at an all-time low.

So how did we get here?

About a year ago, while doing a google search, I found a keynote address delivered in Philadelphia in 1913 by my grandfather, Dr. Paul Leinbach, at the golden jubilee of the Reformed Church in the United States’ Board of Home Missions (its 50^th anniversary).

Having just assumed the position of pastor at one of New York’s collegiate churches (in Harlem to be exact), he describes the immense social problems and daunting economic challenges facing a city teeming with newly arrived immigrants from all over the world, many poor and dispossessed.

The overcrowding, inadequate housing, and inhumane working conditions, to name but a few of the problems, occupy his thoughts. He goes on to question those unconcerned with their plight, those who fail to see what Jesus would see, our common humanity.

He then offers a prescription for addressing these maladies. The church henceforth must work together with government and business leaders. It must embrace the newest insights from the world of science and, indeed, the newly emerging social sciences. The church should align itself with the best and the brightest, with the “experts,” wherever they may be found, whether inside the church or out.

He gently critiques the older version of Christianity with its narrow emphasis on regeneration and doctrine. A brave and intrepid church must not cower in the face of new discoveries and new insights, he assures. It must welcome change if it is to tackle the world’s great problems.

His address is an example of a then-emerging shift within mainline Protestantism, a movement that came to be known as the Social Gospel. For the most part, the Social Gospel assumed the church’s foundational beliefs and intrinsic values would proceed unabated. The gospel would continue to be known and lived.

What would be new would be the intentioned effort to Christianize all institutions and instrumentalities of society, including government, education, and business. If civic leaders could be engaged effectively in the work of the gospel, society would improve along the lines implicitly advanced by Jesus.  

Now, I don’t know about you, but this all sounds pretty-darned good. A no-brainer, in fact. Who opposes helping the less fortunate? Besides, isn’t that what our Christian faith demands?

Yet what my grandfather and many church leaders of his generation may not have foreseen was that over time the church’s focus on politics and social policy would crowd out the foundational teachings of the gospel.

When Dietrich Bonhoeffer arrived at New York’s Union Theological Seminary in the late 30s, among the premier mainline seminaries of the day, he was amazed at how little the students and faculty seemed interested in theology. Their focus was more on political and social policy, i.e. the Social Gospel. They were in a hurry to change the world; less so on transmitting and defending the faith.

Much the same situation exists today.

In a guest column roughly five years ago in the Cape Cod Times, a retired Episcopal priest took up the timely question: “Why Aren’t They Coming?”

After citing statistics cataloguing the precipitous drop in church attendance over the last few decades, he listed various attempts churches have made to turn things around – new music, different preaching styles, a more informal approach to liturgy, and revamped efforts at community outreach.

While applauding some of these efforts, he returns to the fact that none of these things has changed the overall dynamic – church attendance and involvement in general continues to drop.

Maybe, he suggests, perhaps a bit scandalously, it has something to do with the instructions people are not receiving at church.” Now them’s fighin’ words!

He points out that people today are inundated with alternate messages from the media, academia, Hollywood, the internet, and various other secularizing influences. Combined, these “generate a constant avalanche of ideas, authoritative studies, scripture interpretations and a variety of theologies that challenge some of our most basic beliefs and values.”

And yet, he contends, many churches “ignore the doubts and confusion people have as a result of this…bombardment, leaving young and old to wonder if there are any rebuttals they can believe in.”

“Those who are struggling with faith issues today,” he concludes, “expect the clergy, armed with their theological education and training, to provide answers to hard questions…[In] avoiding such questions from the pulpit, clergy give the impression there are no answers.”

Of course, the pastoral shift in focus away from theology was far less a problem in the 50s and early 60s when the culture still largely adhered to traditional Protestant teachings. Even if pastors were more interested in social or political matters, the culture still retained much of its foundational Christian beliefs.

In the mid-60s that all started to change. Disillusioned with the establishment, of which the church was a part, my generation summarily rejected its more traditional values and norms in favor of a new and largely secular approach.

This, as we know, has only accelerated over time. Today we live in a society where multiple generations have had absolutely no contact with Christianity or the church. And that’s a sea-change.

Meanwhile, as if in a time warp, the clergy continue to focus on political and social policy. Whenever I go to the U.C.C.’s website, for example, virtually all I find are political statements and social polemics. Almost entirely.

(By the way, one of the reasons Linda and I initially were attracted to Pastor Sue’s ministry here was her focus on the things of the gospel.)

Meanwhile, our increasingly frayed and distracted society wallows in spiritual limbo. Those hungering for spiritual food are not looking for a lecture on politics or social policy. They can get that anywhere. What they’re looking for is religion.

As membership and money steadily declines, an air of desperation seems to hang over our churches. We think if we become politically or socially enlightened enough, “relevant” enough, if we take our cues from the leading cultural elites and tailor the gospel to fit dominant secular aims, American culture will accept us again. Like us again. Respect us again. Curiously, they don’t, and on all counts.

Dr. Samuel Johnson once said of George Lyttelton, “Politics did not…so much engage him as…withhold his thoughts from things of more importance.”

Politics is ephemeral. It’s based on the narrow immediacy and limited vision of the present tense, of the “now.” Besides, as T.S. Eliot noted in his landmark book from the late 30s, Christianity and Culture, politics is downstream from culture.

Politicians may be self-serving, vainglorious, greedy, or corrupt, he said, but if the culture demands certain behaviors, politicians will have no choice but to tailor their words and actions to accord with the people’s wishes, even if they themselves have little use for them.

So while we may bemoan the current political scene in America, it nonetheless accurately reflects the health, or lack thereof, of contemporary American culture. With God effectively expunged from public life (as well as from maps), is it any wonder we see so much dysfunction in society and politics?

Let me be clear. It’s not that political or social issues are unimportant. It’s that they’re too important to be left to political or social theory, much less politicians and social theorists.

In 1 Peter, we are told that the church, you and I, are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people,” summoned to “proclaim the mighty acts of him who called [us] out of darkness into his marvelous light.”

Implicit in this statement is the fact that human beings need God. The culture, in other words, needs us, even as it steadfastly denies us. It is thus not we who should conform to the ways of the world, but the world to the ways of God. And how is this to be achieved? Through the timeless, faithful witness of the church of Jesus Christ, i.e. you and me.

Peter Berger, the noted sociologist, once asked, “Why is it that the church is always the caboose at the end of the cultural train?” Why, indeed.

For even when the church finds itself in disfavor, or perhaps especially when it finds itself in disfavor, its importance only increases; it does not recede.

Therefore, we ought not lose heart, or lose nerve, for the work of the church today is as essential and as timely as it’s ever been. Amen.