The End of Christianity in the West? (Part II)

By Dr. Riley Case

A recent study by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement reports that Christianity is dying and is headed for extinction in nine western countries.  Christianity is in trouble in other western countries not mentioned in the nine.  Of those countries identified with Western civilization only in the United States—to the chagrin of progressive analysts—does Christianity seem to be alive and  (relatively speaking) well.

What is different about the United States?  One explanation refers to “exceptionalism,” the view that America holds a special place in God’s plan.  Ever since the days when the Puritans spoke of America as a “city set on a hill,” or when Francis Asbury cried out: “America, America, God will surely make it the glory of the world for religion,” there has been the sense that America in some way fits into God’s greater purposes.

However, there need to be some disclaimers.  People who speak of exceptionalism often refer to democracy, freedom, wealth, influence, and power as special blessings bestowed by God upon America.  This is unfortunate.  A calling from God, whether to an individual, a family, a church, or a nation, always relates to servanthood.  If there is blessing it is only so that the blessings can be used to bless others.

For fifteen hundred years God used the European nations (and North America) for the good of the entire world.  In the process there developed a civilization connected with Christianity.  We enjoy the fruits of that civilization.  But there were some down sides.  Christianity became too closely connected with the civilization.  The “white man’s burden” was understood to mean that the world would be Christianized, or at least made a better place, if all nations accepted Western civilization.  Civilization was associated with enlightenment and progress and science.  For liberal Protestants this progress became related to the Kingdom of God.  The scary by-products of this thinking would lead to eugenics, racism, Indian schools, colonialism, and imperialism.

This form of American “exceptionalism” can be rejected.  It implied a superior race, a superior culture, and superior ways of doing things.  This link between Christianity and Western culture is now being discredited, helped along by world wars largely fought between supposedly Christianized and civilized nations.  The reaction to this “Christian” civilization is leading to multi-culturalism, growing cynicism, and the disintegration of the church in European nations.

But another understanding of Christianity was at work, particularly in America, and Methodism was a part of this.  Methodist revivalism believed its purpose was not to perpetuate European traditions (including Wesley’s Anglicanism) but to save souls.  The early Methodists, converted and Spirit-filled, railed against the worldliness of the culture around them.  They scorned ruffles and dances and “aristocratic” and gave no deference to established authorities.  They felt no need, at least at first, to establish colleges and seminaries.  It was a bottom-up religion instead of a top-down religion.

Early camp meetings serve as an example.  Camp meetings initiated the altar call, and thus shifted the center of religion from the altar where Christ is sacrificed weekly in the sacrament, to an altar where individuals offered themselves as a living sacrifice.  This new understanding of altar shifted the center of faith away from sacramentalism, creedalism, and rationalism (including education) to a new form of experiential Christianity.  Common people had a direct relationship with God.  There was bestowed on them an authority through the Spirit quite apart from human mediating authorities.  Rich or poor, black or white, educated or not educated, male or female—there were no distinctions at the altar.  The camp meeting was one of the first settings where blacks and whites gathered together more or less as equals.  In 1776 the number of black Americans who were church members was less than 1%; by 1810 it was 11%.  Methodists recorded that 20% of its membership was black by 1820, even after the major A.M.E. split.

Converts could be saved and sanctified and called to preach all in one meeting at the camp meeting.  Women, if not allowed to preach, were allowed to exhort, and this would eventually lead to preaching.  The non-ordained could work the altar service as well as the ordained.  New forms of music emerged, the spiritual and the gospel song.  Lack of proscribed restraints led to uninhibited worship.

Several weeks ago, in the midst of preparing a presentation for the Indiana United Methodist Historical Society on Methodist revivalism, camp meetings and the holiness movement, I had occasion to attend a Pentecostal church.  It occurred to me during the service (the service was three hours and 25 minutes long so I had some time to reflect) that a great deal of the Christian world on that Sunday was worshipping in a style not unlike what I was experiencing in that Pentecostal church.  It also occurred to me that  almost everything that was taking place in that service (with the exception of speaking in tongues, and the keyboard backup) was taking place in Methodist camp meetings 200 years before: being slain in the Spirit, dancing, shouting, call and response, praise music, anointing, healing, exhorting, and an extended altar service.

In their original form camp meetings had a relatively short life in the United States.  But the kind of religion growing out of camp meetings, basically what is today known as evangelicalism, persisted.  Not all Methodists supported this kind of evangelicalism.  For Methodists becoming respectable and educated and refined (characteristics associated with civilization), Methodist revivalism was a chapter in church history associated with superstition and lack of refinement and best relegated to the past.  Respectable Methodism was buying into the civilizing as Christianizing understanding of spreading the Kingdom.  America’s first authentically Methodist president, William McKinley, told a group of Methodist leaders in 1899 that he decided that the United States should take imperial control of the Philippines in order to, among other things, “educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christian them.”

But there was always a part of Methodism (as in the holiness movement) that believed that however commendable western civilization might be, the direct knowledge of a living God through Jesus Christ, was more important and that experience of Christ could be adapted to any culture.  This is the point E. Stanley Jones was making in his 1920s classic, Christ of the Indian Road.  According to Jones, the Bible message is not Christianity, or education, or churchianity, or western civilization, but Jesus, a Jesus who can be seen in a turban who walks the paths of the Indian villages.

Global Christianity did not grow much during the 19^th century when it was linked with Western civilization.  What American “exceptionalism” offered was a way and an approach to faith that allowed the gospel to take the new forms of the cultures and systems in the places where it was being proclaimed.  Pentecostalism, a step-child of the Methodist holiness movement, is a good example.

A number of people today are taking a fresh look at the relationship between the American experience and global Christianity.  Lamin Sanneh, originally from Gambia, has several books including Whose Religion is Christianity?’The Gospel Beyond the West. Mark A. Noll’s book, The New Shape of World Christianity (Intervarsity Press, 2009), also explores the topic.

What does this have to do with United Methodism today?  The United Methodist Church in America, along with other mainline denominations, at least in its institutional form, has much more in common with dying European Christianity than with the growth and vitality of the church in Africa, South America, and parts of Asia.  It proscribes and taxes and is in many ways culture bound (to the progressive, academic, and political culture of the day).  Its colleges have abandoned any meaningful witness to the Christian faith, and for sure are not committed to the church’s purpose of “making disciples.”  It seems quite perplexed on how to relate to its non-European overseas constituency.

Will these problems be recognized at the upcoming General Conference?  We’ll see.