How can evolutionary theology help us to understand the decline of the church in the West?
All Christian churches in Australia and across the Western world are now aging and in numerical decline, including Pentecostalism which had previously been thriving. How can we view this decline in the light of Evolutionary Theology? When populations enter decline, it may be the precursor to either evolutionary change or extinction. For years, many of us have been hoping for the former but fearing the latter.
To understand why the church in the West is apparently on a path towards extinction we have to understand the nature of religion itself. Religion’s primary role is to provide people with an experience of the sacred – a sense of the numinous – and to offer human hope in the midst of the difficulty of life. It does this, first and foremost by providing a world view which populates the cosmos with sacred beings, meaning and purpose. By naming and describing God and other spiritual entities and situating our lives in relationship to these holy beings, religions offer a spiritual narrative for our lives, an identity and a community. They then provide rituals, spiritual quests and prayerful disciplines which enable us to interact with this spiritual world. But all these benefits hinge upon our adoption of the proffered world view, if we do not believe, we cannot receive! This is why we usually refer to a religion as a “faith”; it requires acceptance and trust on the behalf of the “believer”. In order to achieve this a religion has to do two things: it has to roughly fit the facts of the world as the follower experiences it and also offer a vision of the cosmos as the believer would wish it to be. This is especially true in an environment of contested religious ideas. A religion that offers a world view that better fits and explains the universe, offers more hope and an increased capacity to achieve God’s intervention, will win out.
This was the reason for Christianity’s success in the ancient world. With its ordered creation story, perfect, transcendent image of a loving God, its hopeful offer of answered prayers in this life and salvation and eternal peace in the next, it won out against a more chaotic Greco-Roman religion. As Christianity spread, this view of the cosmos the hearts and minds of most communities who had once followed primal religions. It did not grow in India or the Islamic world as they already had a well-developed world view.
Having won in the Western World, Christianity dominated for centuries. For all its faults, it provided the dominant, largely unchallenged world view. That is, until the Enlightenment when all that changed; the West produced another child that vied for attention. In this enlightenment world view, rationality reigned over dogma, individual rights over the collective power of the church and the collegial discipline of science over the individual experience of spirituality. When Darwin offered this burgeoning ideology a new evolutionary account of the creation of life, Christianity found its dominant cultural role on shaky ground. This was weakened further in the twentieth century as the principles of evolution were extended to the creation of the universe itself. Here was an alternative belief system which appeared to have much better explanatory power than the traditional Christian one. While it did not offer as much hope in terms of personal prayer and a future in heaven, it certainly offered an easier life here on earth for its followers. The benefits flowed from this scientific world view in the form of health care and a longer life span as well as all the material benefits of an industrialized society.
In evolutionary theory, extinction often occurs when a population fails to adapt to a changing environment. This change may stem from shifts in habitat, increased competition, or the emergence of new predators. Furthermore, as a population shrinks, it experiences a “bottleneck,” reducing diversity and resources, which further undermines its ability to survive. This is exactly why the church is struggling with the possibility of extinction. As our understanding of the nature of the cosmos changed, Christianity lost its currency to fit the facts about the world as people understood and experienced them. The survival of the fittest won out.
However, the new Western Enlightenment worldview did not have it all its own way. It could not provide a powerful sense of the sacred as Christianity did. In fact, it acted as a desacralizing force. This presented modern humanity with a dilemma. How were we to hold onto the explanatory power of the new world view while maintaining some sense of the sacred? This tension has shaped the spiritual and religious landscape of the modern era. There are three different responses to this shift that are worth examining in detail; they are:
The liberal-progressive church tried to go with the times and accept this new world view to varying degrees. However. it soon found exactly what was mentioned above – that the collective and individual experience of the sacred was tied to the world view and struggled to survive when sacred stories were demythologized and turned into metaphors. You really did have to believe to receive! Unfortunately, the all-important creation narrative was deconstructed rather than replaced by a more vital story and the theological house of cards was on shaky grounds. Even if this did work for one generation it proved almost impossible to pass on to the next.
Religious conservatism.
The religious conservatives basically resisted and fought this shift in world view. They were joined each generation by converts and young escapees from liberalism, fleeing the looming demise of the church. However, this spiritual bargain – we will retain a pre-modernist world view in order to maintain our sense of the sacred and the divine benefits that flowed from it – proved fragile. Reality, social change and an aging and declining community proved as hard to resist as the incoming tide. Renewal movements which emphasized and offered new access to the sacred if only people would affirm that old time religion came and went without deeply affecting the church’s march to extinction.
Evolutionary Theology. Represents a dramatic different path. It is not just liberalism in a new dress. By actually adopting evolution as a new creation story it is offering a way for us to reconstruct rather than deconstruct our faith and open up new paths to the experience of the sacred.
Evolutionary Spirituality 