Pitts on Church Decline

An editorial by Leonard Pitts suggests that recent declines in religious affiliation among American adults has its root cause in the ugliness that religion has become. This, of course, has been the critique for centuries. Pitts runs through the typical--albeit dated--litany of religious offenders: Faye Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, religiously motivated terrorists, churches that deny access to Democrats and gays, advocates for the 10 Commandments in courthouses, priests guilty of and a church complicit in pedophilia, and religiously motivated councils and organizations pressuring schools. He failed to mention the six televangelists recently under investigation by the Senate Finance Committee for inappropriate use of contributions and the now two-year old scandal involving former National Association of Evangelicals president and mega-church pastor, Ted Haggard. When issuing a wake-up call, its best to be a little more up-to-date.

Pitts is grateful that he knows more about God than what he sees in the well-publicized scandals. Apparantly, he is a rare bird. All of those other people who are leaving the church are just not as enlightened. Unlike Pitts himself, they have been burned by religion but not warmed by God directly.

This is one of those situations where I think a journalist thinks someone else's business is far less complex than his own.

Pitts writes for newspapers. Traditional newspapers are declining at an even faster rate than churches. Are newspapers declining because of incompetent reports and the scandals of fabricated news reports? Is Jack Kelley--the former USA Today reporter and Pulitzer Prize nominated journalist who was discovered to have fabricated news stories--to blame for people's loss of faith in newspapers? Do we blame National Review reporter Thomas Smith? Are the the moral failures of journalist the biggest contributor to the failure of traditional outlets for journalism. OR is it more the result of larger changes in the way information is accessed and processed?

It's easy to blame people we don't like whether they are liberals who have negated the role of civil religion or conservatives who use religion as a blunt object or wackos of whatever abhorrent ideology. In doing so, we fail to ask two of the most important questions imaginable--how am I personally contributing to the problems before us? And what am I going to do to change that? In the end, if we can figure out who's to blame have we succeeded in making real improvement or just shielded ourselves from accusation? Or to put a finer point on it, how will God respond to us if all we do is complain about the people in religious leadership who have let us down? Will God say, "Well done good and faithful servant?" OR will God ask, "Why didn't you do anything to offset their offesnes?"

Let's be clear about something. People are not motivated by religious beliefs to do acts of violence. Acts of violence emerge from our inherent sinfulness. People may use religion to justify their violence but it is not the cause. As for the ministers who have blown it and thus caused the ugliness in religion I say, I think without trying I could name a hundred good, decent, committed, tolerant, well-meaning, balanced ministers who are slogging their way through as best they can. Given time, I think I could find a hundred righteous for every scandal Pitts could name. But despite the overwhelming amount of good to bad, we're all dealing with stuff that's bigger than figuring out who's to blame. All of us are pretty confused about how to move into the future with ministry practices that will relevantly respond to our current setting. I can't speak for all of us but, speaking for myself, the few highly publicized idiots in our business are annoying and ocassionally tragic but largely irrelevant from a larger perspective. Yes, we have to police our own and I think we do as good a job as any industry at confronting serious moral failures. But in terms of the nationwide departure from religious institutions, the impact of scandals that Pitts names are ripples in comparison to the changing cultural tides before us.