God in America: An Update

The Secular Sabbath movement. What church dropouts think about God. Evangelical saint Elizabeth Elliot. Saint (Mother) Teresa on joy.

Photo by Karl Fredrickson on Unsplash

Can You Find God in a Bikini? In a city where religion is dead, the young search for a higher power—in a sauna with Diplo. Olivia Reingold, Free Press.

This is about a small but telling movement called Secular Sabbath, started by Genevieve Medow-Jenkins. On the plus side:

The purpose of her Secular Sabbath sessions is to connect her “couple hundred” members to a higher power, at a time when attendance at religious services across the country is dwindling. 

“I hope that they connect with a sense of purpose, through God or something greater than just themselves in this world,” she told me.

In other words, even though Americans are increasingly giving up on church, they’re still looking for God—even in a sauna with [DJ and songwriter] Diplo. Medow-Jenkins, who was raised Jewish, says she rarely goes to temple now, but still finds God all around her. 

“The other day, I was upset about something. And in that moment, I asked God for help,” she says. “In moments of vulnerability, it always does in some way come back to God.” 

Doesn’t sound “secular” to me, but it’s definitely anti-church and anti-rules. After an encounter with Orthodox Jewish relatives, she says,

“It was so negative for me because it was so rule-bound,” she says. “And I knew when I created Secular Sabbath, I didn’t want it to have many rules. I wanted it to feel like you could be any version of something and still be included.”

Juliana King, a blonde 37-year-old acupuncturist, says there was a time when the word God made her bristle. “Because God felt like this man in the sky that tells you how to be, and so I was uncomfortable with the word for a long time.”

She used to attend a Presbyterian church but now says she is a “cafeteria spiritualist” who picks and chooses which practices work for her. “I want to find God and know God in my own way,” she says. “I don’t want anyone to tell me the quality of God or how to worship or anything, I want all that to be my own experience.”

Diplo is enthusiastic about this movement, and he says he looks to Jesus Christ as an inspiration. Though it’s unclear where he finds this Jesus, it’s certainly not in the Gospels: “He was a perfect person. He was kind.  His ambition was to be the best person you could be.”

It’s a window into the confused spirituality of our times, but also a reminder that “secular” will never win the day.  Paganism, perhaps, but secular, no.

Dechurched America: 40 million worshippers no longer attend: A record number of US citizens now go less than once per year. By Peter Franklin, UnHerd.

A deeper dive into an ongoing trend:

The US is unusually religious by Western standards, but that is changing fast. To understand what’s really going on — and what it might mean for the country’s politics — we need to look under the hood of America’s apparent secularisation.

The key fact which is ignored is that there are millions of Americans who used to be regular churchgoers, but who have now stopped. In a new book, The Great Dechurching, Jim Davis and Michael Graham put the number at 40 million. This is, they write, “the largest and fastest religious shift in US history.”

It’s easy to craft a liberal narrative here: under the growing influence of university education, younger, smarter Americans are turning their backs on the Right-wing evangelicalism of earlier decades and embracing secular modernity instead….

Their key findings, based on 7,000 interviews, confound the conventional wisdom…. Loss of faith is by no means the only reason why people stop going to church. Davis and Graham point out that among people quitting evangelical churches, levels of conservative religious belief remain high….

“Dechurching” is a complex phenomenon, which has more to do with shifts in everyday lifestyle than the fallout from the culture war…. As Davis and Graham observe of America’s absent evangelicals, “more than half […] are willing to come back right now.” They just need better churches.

Ah yes, we just need better churches. But of course; we’ve always needed better churches—even in the packed churches of the 1950s. Churches have always been full of selfish, prideful people, and their attempts at teaching and living out the gospel have always fallen short. 

Besides the perennially tarnished people and programs, I think there is one more reason people don’t like to go to church, especially a church that takes its mission seriously. They don’t like all those “rules” laid down by Jesus who, yes, makes us feel so uncomfortable at times.

Now for a couple of the church’s best.  

First, an evangelical saint….

Elisabeth Elliot and the Mystery of Divine Providence: Bestselling author Ellen Vaughn (The Jesus Revolution) has just brought out the second volume of an authorized biography of Elisabeth Elliot, who was, and remains, an inspiration to evangelical Christians around the world. John W. Kennedy. Acton Institute.

Well, I think Elisabeth spoke to an earlier time. I think it’s relevant today—when I think about Millennials or Gen Zs or people like myself, Boomers—especially volume 2. I wrote that with a sense of here’s someone who was really looking at what is the difference between just religion—or Christianity with sort of pat answers, platitudes, never-doubts, (and) that kind of religiosity—and a real authentic faith in Christ. I think that’s the journey that we can all relate to regardless of our age or life experiences because, if our faith is real, in fractured times like these we need to have a sense of what is Christianity the way Jesus founded it and what is just cultural overlay. Elisabeth was an early explorer of that question.

Now a Catholic saint…

Many Children Are Not All Right. What Are We Going to Do? Mother Teresa challenges all, Republicans and Democrats alike. Kathryn Jean Lopez. National Review.

Among the many wonderful Teresa quotes in this piece, my often grim-faced self needed to hear this:

We must be able to radiate the joy of Christ, express it in our actions. If our actions are just useful actions that give no joy to people, our poor people would never be able to rise up to the call which we want them to hear, that call to come closer to God. We want to make them feel that they are loved. If we went to them with a sad face, we would only make them more depressed.

Grace and peace,

Mark Galli

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