I am more concerned about the spiritual health of the Church than the religious landscape of the country.

From self-congratulatory evangelicals triumphantly wagging their fingers at mainliners to panic stricken fear mongers bemoaning the collapse of the country, the Pew Research Center survey of the U.S. Religious Landscape has evoked quite a range of responses. I have also heard and read some insightful analysis of the nuanced details of this report. Anyone who has been paying attention for the last 50 years is not surprised.

Though I can’t imagine that my perspective is unique or significant in the maelstrom of words this has provoked, I believe attempting to articulate it helps me clarify my thinking with the hope it might do that for someone else too.

I do not think the future of the United States depends on the size of religious institutions. Nor do I think that the rise and fall of religious institutions indicate the spiritual health of the Church in the United States. I want to see my country as a role model for justice and peace for all people in which the rule of law protects the weak and restrains the powerful. I want to see the Church as a mosaic of communities of Jesus disciples living out faith and love among and between themselves and reaching out into the communities and world around them.

I believe the Church is strongest when it is dependent on the power of God and does not lean on the broken crutch of pseudo Christian civil religion. From that standpoint the decline in Christianity in the United States is the loss of a generic Christian social consensus, I expect it will strengthen the Church. When self-identifying as a Christian means more than a bland religious overlay on respectable citizenship, it has a much better chance of pointing toward authentic discipleship. Such discipleship is not whimpering defensiveness nor bombastic certitude. It not only welcomes honest questioning but encourages it. It thrives on dialog in which people who are seeking to live out their faith in Jesus seek to learn from each other rather than to convince or condemn each other.

For its first three centuries the Church was formed, took root and grew in the context of the Roman Empire that was at best indifferent and often hostile. Within a generation of becoming the official religion of the empire, the spiritual decline was precipitous. Renewal movements from the Dessert Fathers and Mothers, to Benedict, to Francis, to Ignatius and his Protestant counterparts, have always had to set themselves apart from the mainstream of cultural religion. Is it possible that the decline of cultural Christianity in the United States opens the way to genuine spiritual renewal that transcends the tribal boundaries of Catholic-Protestant, Evangelical-Mainline?

The United States (and any other remnants of Christendom) are manifestly temporary. They will pass from the human scene either by the flow of history or eschatological intervention. They are not manifestations of the Kingdom or Reign of God or Christ. The Church, however, is something of advance colonies of that Realm in which Christ is sovereign. Though its fortunes may wax and wane and its forms and practices change, I am convinced it will persist until the parousia.