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Jonathan Storment

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Leaving Church: Before You Go…

Leaving Church: Before You Go…

Last updated on: April 25, 2017 at 9:21 am by Jonathan Storment

Leaving Church: Before You Go… 2017-04-25T09:21:28-05:00 Jonathan Storment

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

leavingchurch-cover So last week I started a short series responding to a great article in the Atlantic called “America’s Empty Church Problem”

I loved this article, because it’s written to and by people who have previously assumed that America’s Empty Churches weren’t a problem, they were the solution!

I’ve grown up hearing religious leaders like me lament that people are leaving church, we’re losing our youth etc. And I’ve read lots of books on how to get them back or keep them from leaving.

But for all our toil and strategy, people are still leaving church.

But now, after a couple of decades of decline in church attendance in America (primarily among white people), we’re starting to get some hard data to help us explain just what happens to people when they do.

And maybe the hardest of data is the rise of Donald Trump.

Voting With Your Feet Leads Eventually to Actually Voting

Every year, the week before Easter in Abilene, our church hosts luncheons with four other churches in town and we swap pulpits each day. And every year, there’s always some good natured ribbing among the pastors.

Last year, Cliff Stewart was preaching at Highland (the church I serve). Cliff’s a good friend, and a Presbyterian pastor, and I jokingly said “I’ve made Bro. Cliff promise to be on his best behavior today. Or I’ve threatened to mention that Donald Trump is a Presbyterian.”

This was back in April of last year, back when the idea of Trump becoming President still seemed far-fetched. And right after I made that joke, someone yelled out in the luncheon “He’s unchurched!”

Maybe this anecdote doesn’t carry the weight on a blog that it did for me in real life. One because this is not a group of people who are prone to yell out during anything. And two because that person was exactly right.

Donald Trump is like the growing majority of American’s. Sure, we may be Christian in name, and for now, even somewhat in practice, but we don’t make time for a regular church community.

And like I said last week, I understand why, being connected to a church is hard work relationally, emotionally, and spiritually. Sometimes it feels like churches ask too much and give too little. Sometimes churches abuse their authority, make poor decisions and hurt people.

And sometimes we hide behind those excuses to avoid being connected to a local community of anything.

There’s a saying in church leadership I’ve heard a thousand times. Whenever we’re discussing making changes that might be controversial someone will inevitably say “People might not say anything against this decision but they will vote with their feet.”

Which just means that they won’t complain, they’ll just leave church without making a fuss.

Except, it turns out, they eventually do.

Christians at the Polls

Since Donald Trump won the Presidency it has been touted over and over again that 81% of white evangelicals voted for him. I’ve had several incredibly awkward conversations with people outside of Christianity about this.

How do you explain that so many people voted for a man who appears to be antithetical to all they supposedly value?

Without getting into a larger argument about the nature of the last election and the forced choice some felt between Trump and Clinton, I do think there are some broader observations that The Atlantic made that can help us understand not just why so many voted for Trump in the end, but how he won primary after primary and rose to power in the first place.

The majority of the people that voted and identified as white evangelical…didn’t actually go to church.

This was one of the most surprising things in the Atlantic article. And something that I think is an important point for us to grasp. The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency doesn’t show the strength of Christianity, it’s an example of it weakening.

Here’s how the Atlantic put it:

When pundits describe the Americans who sleep in on Sundays, they often conjure left-leaning hipsters. But religious attendance is down among Republicans, too. According to data assembled for me by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), the percentage of white Republicans with no religious affiliation has nearly tripled since 1990. This shift helped Trump win the GOP nomination. During the campaign, commentators had a hard time reconciling Trump’s apparent ignorance of Christianity and his history of pro-choice and pro-gay-rights statements with his support from evangelicals. But as Notre Dame’s Geoffrey Layman noted, “Trump does best among evangelicals with one key trait: They don’t really go to church.” A Pew Research Center poll last March found that Trump trailed Ted Cruz by 15 points among Republicans who attended religious services every week. But he led Cruz by a whopping 27 points among those who did not.

Why did these religiously unaffiliated Republicans embrace Trump’s bleak view of America more readily than their churchgoing peers? Has the absence of church made their lives worse? Or are people with troubled lives more likely to stop attending services in the first place? Establishing causation is difficult, but we know that culturally conservative white Americans who are disengaged from church experience less economic success and more family breakdown than those who remain connected, and they grow more pessimistic and resentful…

Now I know that there were also plenty of people who go to church who voted for Trump. In the church I serve in West Texas we’ve got a healthy mix of both Democrats and Republicans, and I knew lots of people (who are good and decent) were backing him from the beginning. But for the most part, that wasn’t the case. In fact, most of the preachers and pastors I know were, like me, surprised and not a small bit disturbed by his seemingly mysterious rise.

The Irony of Leaving

That’s what made this Atlantic article so helpful for me. I get it. People leave church (and almost every other kind of social organization) these days because it’s hard to live in community. In a world of personalized screens and hyper-individualism living in community is very counter cultural!

But then we become resentful because the actual benefits of church begin to go missing from our lives. And Trump, the article says, was both the beneficiary and the driver of those exact resentments.

So no matter where you fall politically, don’t underestimate the trajectory that we are on as our social structures and institutions weaken one choice at a time. And you don’t just have to take The Atlantic’s word for it.

For those on the more conservative end of the spectrum, maybe you’ve read the Conservative Christian Rod Dreher’s book The Benedict Option, where Dreher (himself a cautious Trump supporter) reflects back his own shock at the evangelical support for Trump:

The idea that someone as robustly vulgar, fiercely combative, and morally compromised as Trump will be an avatar for the restoration of Christian morality and social unity is beyond delusional. He is not a solution to the problem of America’s cultural decline, but a symptom of it

In a tragic irony, an article I read last week said that 14% of Christians in America left their church right after Trump was elected.

Some of those left because they didn’t feel like their clergy supported him. But most of them left because they couldn’t believe that their fellow Christians had help to elect him.

And if that’s where you are than I get it. But before you go….consider this.

The great irony is that wherever those Christians spend their Sunday mornings now, whether it’s Starbucks or a late breakfast out, there’s now a much better chance they run into the very people they left church to avoid.

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