The Pew Study and Designer Religion

The recent Pew Forum study titled, "U.S. Religious Landscape Survey" has received a surprising amount of attention not only among religious types, but even in the dinosaur media that normally ignores such things. The major 'finding' of the study that's gotten the most attention is the increasing fickleness of the American public regarding their religious affiliation. A high percentage of Americans have adopted a different religious affiliation (including religious disaffiliation and just 'unaffiliated') from the affiliation of their youth. The implication is that denominational loyalty is in decline, and that designer and consumeristic religion is on the rise. Such findings are not exactly surprising. What is surprising is that they are not exactly accurate.

Designer Religion does not explain the plight of the mainline denominations, and it doesn't offer a way out of their predicament simply by 'rethinking what it means to be the church'. Mainline Christianity is already a designer religion, and has been during its four decade decline. If Americans were only interested in designer religion in some amorphous sense, the mainline would be doing just fine, because that's what it offers people. Evangelicalism is also a designer religion. Yet, they're doing much better.

The bottom line is that the church, liberal and conservative, emphasizes certain things to the demotion of other things. Idols exist in both camps. The church is not very out of touch at all with the individualism of the country. Like individuals, churches are picking and choosing what to teach, how to teach it, and how to live it. The worst thing church leaders can conclude from the Pew Study is that they need resemble the culture more than they already do, and that that would magically solve the church's identity crisis. A 'new way of being the church' that merely accelerates its appeasement to cultural designerism is exactly the wrong thing to do. It will result not only in more and more Americans becoming 'unaffiliated', but the church itself will become unaffiliated too, no matter what brand name is on the church bulletin. It's a formula for getting lost and confused, and offering nothing to the world that it's not already intimately familiar with, even though it wishes it wasn't. There's nothing 'new' about this approach; there's nothing about it that's innovative or forward-looking. It's nothing more than trying to repair the same roof on the same house.

My take on the Pew Study is very different. I think it's likely that the rise of 'unaffiliated' Americans is the result of people not wanting to be locked into a brand name (a particular religious affiliation) that more and more people equate with a truncated spirituality (ie: a designer spirituality). Conventional wisdom is that religious 'consumers' want designer spirituality, but established religious denominations aren't giving it to them, and that this is why denominations are in trouble. This isn't entirely false, but it's not really accurate either. An increasing number of evangelicals and mainliners alike want their spirituality expanded beyond the picking and choosing approach of the church. It's well documented that more and more evangelicals are looking for biblically faithful approaches to poverty, climate change, and global justice. Yes, this is designer religion, but it's a much broader form of it. Likewise, a number of liberal religious folks I know talk about how they want the mainline to move beyond its scripted talking points and mushy theology to embrace something more concrete and more broad.

The problem with institutional religion is that it's not appreciating the desires of many people for a broader and more comprehensive vision of spirituality and religion that touches all aspects of life. There is no religious affiliation that is currently known for offering such a thing. Presbyterians are known as closed off intellectuals who have sacrificed childlike faith on the altar of worldly sophistication and respectability. Evangelicals are knowns as gay haters. The mainline is known for its fights and in believing that not being too sure of anything is a virtue. Is it any wonder why more and more people would rather be 'unaffiliated'? The church will begin broadly succeeding again not when it goes farther down the road of embracing unaffiliated designer religion, but when it does the opposite and presents a robust faith that is comprehensive and all encompassing. This is truly the 'new way of being the church'. But it requires a robust Jesus, a robust theology, a robust commitment to prayer, a robust view of Kingdom, a robust doctrine of Scripture, a robust attitude of godly engagement with the world, and a robust belief in the Rock of our salvation that grounds everything else. This is the kind of 'generous orthodoxy' that will make people proud to be affiliated again, not McLaren's version that simply wants to inconsistently join the culture's spiritual agnosticism and treat it as a badge of honor.