Um, I think you've forgotten a little detail...

... commonly referred to as "The Catholic Church":

It is easy to see why most people are contemptuous of this amalgam of credulity, sentimentality and narcissism, which in its evangelical Christian form is tied up with myths about the age of the earth and origin of species, sexual taboos and a conservative political agenda. With this as the public face of religion it's not surprising that in the US, as in Europe, Christianity is collapsing.

That is a shame because if it collapses everything essential to it and worthwhile, which is now merely obscure, will become inaccessible. Christian theology, metaphysical doctrines about the existence and nature of God that I believe to be true, will become curiosities, like the teachings of second-string neo-Platonists. Service books will languish in archives, for study by antiquarians. The better churches will be preserved as museums; mediocre ones will be gutted and refurbished as restaurants, condos and office space.

In Europe religious belief is already anomalous: San Vitale is a museum. In the US, Christianity has been absorbed into a syncretic mishmash of self-help programmes and therapies, new age products and scraps of eastern religions. There are cults for every taste and circumstance. Maybe some coherent religious system will surface in the way that Christianity emerged from the soup of cults and mystery religions in the Hellenistic world. Maybe Christianity will re-emerge. Maybe.

That from the conclusion to a short but rather heavy-handed, wild-eyed piece, "Christianity in the US is Collapsing", in today's edition of The Guardian. It sounds far more like a bitter wish than a thoughtful analysis of what and what might be.

Granted, there's no doubt that cases can be made for the poor health of Christian faith in the U.S., but, then, cases require facts, arguments, historical context, and so forth. Not weird and more-than-dubious statements such as this about the relationship between ancient Christianity and the Middle Ages: "Exuberance and wonder gave way to a crabbed obsession with sin and Christians turned inward to fret about the health of their souls." Right. Because, after all, when you read—to pick just one well-known example—Augustine's Confessions, you find nothing at all about sin and salvation and the state of one's soul. (Granted, I've only read the book four times, but I'm fairly certain Augustine mentioned sin and salvation in there somewhere.) Never mind that some guy named Paul of Tarsus, writing a wee bit earlier than Augustine, exhorted the Christians in Philippi to "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" (Phil. 2:12), and that another man, Simon Peter, known to have lived and travelled with Jesus Christ for a few years, told his readers, "As the outcome of your faith you obtain the salvation of your souls" (1 Pet. 1:9). And so forth.

But Bible verses aren't really the issue here so much as the author's obvious contempt for evangelical Christianity; after all, she indicates no interest at all in Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy (nor can I see any such interest in her other columns). Even though Catholics are minorities among Christians in the U.S., they have a bit more history behind them in the larger, global picture; put another way, the Catholic Church has been declared down and out, dead in the water, and ten feet under many times throughout the past two thousand years (as Chesterton wrote about so well in The Everlasting Man). And while things are hardly perfect in the Catholic Church in the U.S. (and no serious Catholic thinks any such nonsense), they are, I think, notably better than in 1975 or 1989 or even 2003. And, to take it a step further and with an obvious nod to Louis Bouyer, Evangelicalism moves in one of two possible directions: toward the Catholic Church, or away from her. Evangelical groups that move away, especially by ditching essential Christian doctrines and beliefs about morality, surely do collapse and begin to die. Thus, forms of Protestantism in the U.S. that move further away from Catholicism will indeed keep collapsing. Mark Brumley, in writing about Bouyer's book, The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism, summed it up this way:

As we have seen, Bouyer argues for the Reformation’s "positive principles" and against its "negative principles." But how did what was right from one point of view in the Reformation go so wrong from another point of view? Bouyer argues that the under the influence of decadent scholasticism, mainly Nominalism, the Reformers unnecessarily inserted the negative elements into their ideas along with the positive principles. "Brought up on these lines of thought, identified with them so closely they could not see beyond them," he writes, "the Reformers could only systematize their very valuable insights in a vitiated framework."

The irony is profound. The Reformation sought to recover "genuine Christianity" by hacking through what it regarded as the vast overgrowth of medieval theology. Yet to do so, the Reformers wielded swords forged in the fires of the worst of medieval theology–the decadent scholasticism of Nominalism.

The negative principles of the Reformation necessarily led the Catholic Church to reject the movement–though not, in fact, its fundamental positive principles, which were essentially Catholic. Eventually, argues Bouyer, through a complex historical process, these negative elements ate away at the positive principles as well. The result was liberal Protestantism, which wound up affirming the very things Protestantism set out to deny (man’s ability to save himself) and denying things Protestantism began by affirming (sola gratia).

Bouyer contends that the only way to safeguard the positive principles of the Reformation is through the Catholic Church. For only in the Catholic Church are the positive principles the Reformation affirmed found without the negative elements the Reformers mistakenly affixed to them. But how to bring this about?

Bouyer says that both Protestants and Catholics have responsibilities here. Protestants must investigate their roots and consider whether the negative elements of the Reformation, such as extrinsic justification and the rejection of a definitive Church teaching authority and Tradition, are necessary to uphold the positive principles of sola gratia and the supremacy of Scripture. If not, then how is continued separation from the Catholic Church justified? Furthermore, if, as Bouyer contends, the negative elements of the Reformation were drawn from a decadent theology and philosophy of the Middle Ages and not Christian antiquity, then it is the Catholic Church that has upheld the true faith and has maintained a balance regarding the positive principles of the Reformation that Protestantism lacks. In this way, the Catholic Church is needed for Protestantism to live up to its own positive principles.

Read his entire essay, "Why Catholicism Makes Protestantism Tick". The sad irony, when one pulls back a bit and looks at the larger picture, is that the author of the Guardian column claims to be writing the obituary of one form of Protestantism while she herself is sitting among the tombstones of liberal Protestantism (specifically, the one marked "Episcopalian").

Comments

[Joe]

Everywhere I look I see evangelical churches with full parking lots. Meanwhile, magazines like TIME and Newsweek that laugh at evangelicalism are going out of business. There is strong enough evangelical presence in mainline denominations to cause denominations like the ECUSA to implode when they go to liberal, strong enough evangelical and Mormon presence, along with Catholic, to halt Prop whatever it was in Cali, and some Brit chic things Christian faith is dying? What continent is she living on, anyway... Oh, wait, it's Europe. 'Nuff said.

[Carl E. Olson]

Brit chic

I'm not sure if Harriet Baber is from England, but she lives and teaches in California: "Harriet Baber is a philosophy professor at the University of San Diego. She is the author of The Multicultural Mystique: The Liberal Case Against Diversity. Married, with three children, a dog and cat, she lives in Chula Vista, California, seven miles north of Tijuana."

[Joe]

My sloppy assumption since it was The Guardian. I guess she sees The Crystal Cathedral. I see evangelicalism as in chaos but hardly dying...

[Harriet Baber]

Actually, I'm from New Jersey, thought my husband is British. And I do have a great deal of interest in Catholicism and Orthodoxy. One of my problems with Evangelicalism is that bad money drives out good. Since Evangelicalism has now become the public face of religion in the US people don't see these other, more desirable religious alternatives.

Thanks for picking up my piece!