This week’s Sunday Times contained an interesting article by Andrew Sullivan on the shifting religious scene in America, including the rise of atheism. It concludes that:
American Christianity, despite so many resources, has ignored its intellectual responsibility. And atheists, if this continues much longer, will continue to pick up that slack.
However, while this diagnosis seems to me to be sadly correct (and true of Christianity in the UK as well), I find the solutions it proposes to be unconvincing:
Religion must absorb and explain the new facts of modernity: the deepening of the Darwinian consensus in the sciences, the irrefutable scriptural scholarship that makes biblical literalism intellectually contemptible, the shifting shape of family life, the new reality of openly gay people, the fact of gender equality in the secular world.
Oh yeah? Assimilating to modern values hasn’t exactly done the church much good so far. While not all of so-called “the new facts of modernity” that Sullivan mentions are necessarily antithetical to historic, orthodox Christianity, the rush to adapt Christianity to contemporary thinking seems to me to be part of the problem.
Of course, reactionary rejections of modernity have distorted the Church just as badly, but in different ways. The Church must neither uncritically accept nor uncritically reject modernity and postmodernity, but be clear and confident in the Gospel and so able to engage with contemporary life constructively, accepting the good and rejecting the bad.