Playing Catch Up With Unbelievers…

            Or simply playing the wrong game altogether…

There is a growing opinion within some scholarly Christian circles concerning the phenomenon of persons leaving the faith, and I tend to agree with the assessment. Considering the “why” of American Church decline, most sociologically minded, Christian scholars would suggest:

[V]ery few [persons who have abandoned the Christian faith] stopped believing in Christ because of intellectual problems with the Bible or because they were seduced by some other worldview or belief system. Rather, they tend to abandon Christian faith because of the irrelevance, judgmentalism, internal dissension, and lack of compassion they experience within the Christian community. Rather than finding the church to be the community that most deeply encouraged them in their struggles, they lost heart in their discouragement and lost their faith in the process. (Walsh and Keesmaat)*

To expound upon this assessment, I would caution against a misunderstanding. Many agnostic, ignostic, and atheistic thinkers that were once Christian might suggest that “intellectual problems” certainly were great factors in their decision to exit the church community. In fact, they might suggest that it was most certainly the intellectual issues that gave them the courage to step out. There is no question that this is certainly the case. However, the above evaluation concerns the catalyst. The question perhaps is not what was the straw that broke the camel's back, but what initiated and perpetuated the doubt that resulted in an intellectual questioning of the faith. People begin their descent into apostasy not when they begin to evaluate intellectual claims, but when they realize that they see no real power in what their community espouses.

Why would a person that sees real results from the practices of the community wish to doubt? As it is, however, the Christian community’s espoused beliefs do not align with their actions. The question then becomes, “Why would a person that sees no real results from the practices of the community wish to believe?” Now, the apostate might not even readily recall the spark of doubt. Instead, they might speak of the multitude of considerations afterward that led to doubt becoming unbelief. These considerations are more often than not intellectual in nature. While many of these persons would argue that they argue from a more unbiased stance than religious communities, could it be that their search that led them to unbelief, even while being a Christian, albeit a doubting Christian, was marked by confirmation bias. Is it not natural to wish to find an out of a community that inflicts pain and exhibits “irrelevance, judgmentalism, internal dissension and lack of compassion”?

So, the church ends up playing a game we, for the most part, should have avoided playing altogether. Our highest witness is embodiment; however, since we have not done this well, we instead spend an overly exorbitant amount of time in intellectual apologetics with those acquaintances we wish to bring back from unbelief. We are trying to treat a symptom of the real issue, which is distrust in the church. I am a philosopher at heart, and I love apologetics, but we need balance in witness, and we often are fighting the wrong battle.

-TM

*Brian Walsh and Sylvia C. Keesmaat, Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire, (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2004), 130.