Preface
A Brief Apology for a Long Book
Gentle Reader,
Maybe I should apologize for such a big, fat book. I confess I began it intending a kind of “user’s manual,” and such books get hefty. But heft was required, it seemed, because the last half-century has seen nearly all of American Christianity’s many denominations steadily shrinking. Maybe, I thought (as a mid-life convert to the Jesus movement), since fewer of us were getting the basics, a clear, comprehensive, up-to-date refresher might help. I believed this complex, beautiful faith, soon to mark its 2,000th year since Jesus of Nazareth’s crucifixion around AD 33, simply needed to be explained better and put in context.
Although I’m no pastor or divinity school professor, I’m an experienced author and college instructor, not to mention a committed Christian and student of Christian history and theology, so I figured I could do that. I’d aim it at others like me—curious, educated non-professionals who felt a spiritual pull, a sense of hope, and a longing to find deeper meaning.
But times have changed. The deeper I dug, the more I began to realize that the problem wasn’t that Americans needed a refresher, but rather that they often didn’t much like the way that Christianity was being practiced, and found its teachings increasingly irrelevant. They were deliberately turning away. What was needed was an apology.
Now, since I’m not the Pope, or a megachurch televangelist flying around in a private jet, or a spiritual guru offering shortcuts to enlightenment, I’m not really in the position of having much to apologize for, at least where the faith is concerned. But it saddens me that this ancient, wise, and powerfully moving tradition has become something to feel apologetic about. The showy, aggressive Christianity so visible these days isn’t what I practice, nor does it truly represent the joy, wonder, and hope at the heart of the world’s largest religion.
And, in fact, the faith does have a long “apologetic” tradition. By apology, though, that doesn’t mean an expression of regret. Instead it refers to a type of book written over the centuries in a genre traditionally known as an apologia, which has nothing to do with saying you’re sorry. An apologia is an argument, like one that a lawyer makes to justify and support an idea in court. In the 1940s and 1950s, the English scholar and novelist C.S. Lewis wrote several classic apologiae, such as his perpetual bestseller, Mere Christianity. Lewis wasn’t a pastor or accredited theologian either, but his writings reached a wide audience and made the case for a modern Christian faith. Yet many of those arguments aren’t resonating much with people these days. Times have changed. So my idea for this book soon changed too. It became an apologia intended for people of a new century.
American Christianity’s public face in recent years has too often been pretty scary—one of right-wing politics, moral hypocrisy, anti-scientific resentment, and anti-intellectualism. “Us versus them” often appears to be its calling card rather than the radically hopeful, inclusive, and compassionate message Jesus preached. At many evangelical churches, gatherings have sometimes looked and sounded more like political rallies than worship. Simply put, increasingly Americans have been coming to see Christianity as a problem, not a solution.
The relevance question is harder. One woman I know often tells me that she fears her grandchildren won’t have the chance to learn about the faith until they’re grown; for their parents, who live a comfortable life, church just doesn’t seem meaningful anymore.
So is it realistic to hope that Christians will see a return to days when nearly all middle-class American families belonged to churches because . . . well . . . because that was what everybody else did? Probably not. Those days are gone, no matter how many “Make America Great Again” hats politicians sell. If we’re to rediscover Christianity in our century, it won't be because that’s what is expected or demanded, but because it’s what people feel they need.
That’s why this book became instead one person’s exploration of what Christianity could be for Americans, one that indeed imagines what it might be for a new millennium. As a Christian, the process of writing it became as much about reorienting myself as it was offering a guide to others. But that task required exploring five big, complicated and interrelated questions. So, alas, this book remains fairly hefty.
The questions are:
What about Christianity trips people up these days?
How can Christians respond by reimagining the faith’s traditions in ways that 21st-century people will find compelling?
Since much of Christian tradition relates to the Bible, how might we read that book in a more informed and relevant way?
Because different denominations still approach the Bible and tradition differently, how might someone searching for a forward-looking faith find the right approach today?
Finally, once the other questions have been addressed, how might the answers affect the aims of Christianity for Americans in the years to come? In other words, what should we do?
Very quickly, then, here’s my “30,000-ft. overview” of where this path has led—my broad conclusions about the problems that the book identifies, and some solutions it proposes. Reading this up front might help you decide if you want to walk with me through the many pages that follow:
Problems—Christian faith in America too often still employs models that our century has mostly moved beyond. In an increasingly postmodern era, it still takes a modern attitude. By that I mean its attitude remains essentially binary: true versus false, right versus wrong, mind versus body, and even divine versus human. (It wasn’t always so: Jesus, whom faith tells us is both divine and human, offers us a different, non-binary way of understanding things.) American Christianity also typically remains too transactional—teaching people, “If you do or pray X, God will respond with Y,” and focusing on piety as a means of personal salvation. It’s also hierarchical, following traditions of top-down preaching and teaching rather than Jesus’s bottom-up message of service. Finally, American Christianity too often envisions itself as a divinely sanctioned institution, a chosen family, or a “shining city on a hill,” asking members to join an exclusive “us” rather than participate in a larger community in which everyone is “us.”
Solutions—I will suggest in this book that for significant numbers of Americans of our century to reengage with Christianity’s beauty and deep wisdom, it must offer them ways of approaching scripture and tradition more creatively and imaginatively, connecting to our own and our culture’s lived experience, facing today and looking beyond it toward tomorrow. Some binaries remain, but need to be updated or transformed: focusing on finding holiness instead of performing piety, offering service rather than seeking personal salvation, building from love-centered ethics rather than judging from a moralizing high ground, and seeking spiritual connections rather than “selling” faith to others. To some extent, we also need to find new ways to talk about faith. Old terms like “spirit” and “salvation” no longer have the juice they once did. So what new ones might take their place? Lastly, as you’ll see, one cause for alarm among American Christians over the past half-century has been the rapid decline in the percentage of their fellow citizens who consider themselves part of the faith. So I’ll just say it: The hardest part of this book for dedicated Christians to accept might be reckoning with the idea that maybe the faith isn’t for everybody.
Traditionally the faith has pursued universal expansion, like its historical rival, Islam, seeking to spread around the world and to convert others to its truth. (It remains the world’s largest religion, and continues to grow in non-Western regions, such as Africa.) Jesus’s “great commission” to preach the good news has usually been interpreted as one that seeks to reach out and bring everyone into the fold.
Yet the percentage of Americans who identify as Christian has fallen from around 90 percent in 1972 to around 65 percent in 2022, with projections that Christians will soon cease being a majority among Americans. My own journey to rediscover the faith suggests to me that maybe in our century it needs to reconsider its evangelistic tradition, at least in this country. A one-size-fits-all Jesus has traditionally meant either/or thinking—“you’re saved or you’re not.” But in an increasingly interconnected, multicultural, multiracial America, proselytizing a single universal faith for all may not be realistic.
I’d also argue that such thinking isn’t true to what Jesus actually preached. He told his followers, “I am the way.” But only later was that teaching interpreted to mean that Christianity, as an institution and a set of doctrinal beliefs, was the way. Are the two actually the same?
Consider this too: Is Christianity healthier if more people go to church because they feel pressured to, because they just want to fit into the culture, and maybe because they’re frightened into conformity by threat of force or fear of damnation? Or is it better if a smaller but more honestly spiritual number of people join because they find that faith adds depth to an often two-dimensional existence in our century’s materialistic society? Wouldn’t that smaller, more authentic movement prove more attractive in the long run?
I’m not sure. That might also be an either/or question. Yet the second version of Christianity certainly seems more likely to intrigue hopeful doubters and non-Christians who feel a spiritual pull. In either case, I’m convinced that we make the best case for our faith simply by being authentic, and by walking the walk more than we talk the talk.
So, I’m sorry I can’t offer the step-by-step manual here that I set out to write. Instead, I invite you to join me on a meandering journey through those five big questions to discover how we might address them and move forward. Perhaps it will stimulate your own ideas and engagement—which is exactly what’s needed.
Faithfully yours,
Robert Alden Rubin
Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina
[Draft, November 2022]