by Duncan Park

In spite of loud protestations to the contrary, I maintain that it’s actually all over for ‘The Faith’ as we know it. Forget the evangelical razzamatazz, the fundamentalist bluster, and the catholic arrogance. The situation for faith is so desperate I believe a “state of emergency” should be declared in the Church.

Anyone who thinks “The Faith” is doing just fine, thank you very much, has been living on Mars or in Alabama. Here on earth things don’t look so good.

A total paradigm shift has taken place in the global culture that will have dire consequences for religious faith and practice.

…

This, of course, is the culmination of a whole series of crises that have battered the “Religious Planet” like a hail of comets since the Enlightenment – in philosophy, natural science, politics, psychology, historical criticism, biblical criticism, with the Darwinian comet coming dangerously close to throwing it completely off its axis. This relentless onslaught has finally reached catastrophic proportions in a head-on collision with the postmodern world.

…

The only areas in the Western world where Christianity hangs on by more than its fingertips are where it has created religious theme parks isolated from the culture. Here supernaturalists and traditionalists huddle together like doomed dinosaurs trying to catch the last rays of a retreating sun. This is a sad place of desperate measures.

…

All Church establishments in the West are, of course, in an acute state of denial. The ecclesiastical machinery clanks away from the Vatican in Rome to the Bible-Belt in the United States, churning out its business-as-usual message to a dwindling constituency.

What is its business nowadays? The Western Church is now largely part of the entertainment or heritage industry with residual, mainly administrative, care-taking roles in education, health and social services. One by one its powers have been stripped by the State and it is left with decaying shrines and a collection of culturally disembodied rituals. In the popular mind it has been largely reduced to a Gothic prop for Hollywood’s latest supernatural fantasy.

Even in non-Gothic Western countries like Australia, the majority see the Church as a place for rather sad people who don’t get out much. More ominously for Western Christendom, as the entire cosmology of Christianity disintegrates before our eyes, the post-modern paradigm shift seems to be establishing itself as the global post-religious culture.

I’m not saying this is bad news for the planet, just that it is the end of the road for traditional Christianity.

The old-time religion has become unbelievable. Not just “out there” in the big bad world – where “Church” stands for bum-numbing boredom and brain-dumbing twaddle – but also on its home turf. Even in once priest-ridden Ireland the seminaries are all but empty. And it is not just the more sinister bum-numbing that has emptied Mass of the vast majority of its youth, but the collapse of credulity in an educated and prosperous population.

And it is not only in the traditionally angst-ridden, hybrid Anglican-Quaker-Unitarian-liberal tribes that I encounter spiritual trauma and an anxiety of faith, but also in my own full-blooded evangelical tribe.

For many, evangelical culture has replaced evangelical experience. Testimony is thin and unconvincing. Spontaneous prayer is often forced and clichéd. Sermons are often homilies on feel-good spirituality – sermonettes for Christianettes. The “I was far in sin” songs no longer reflect the experience of the largely middle-class singers who are now only “honorary sinners”. Salvation fatigue is setting in. If even here, in the heartland of Western Protestant Evangelical Christianity, the old spells are no longer working, surely the end is nigh after all?

….

However, others still think that a visible, yet radically reformed Christianity is possible. It will require subversive loyal disobedience on the part of those who value the Christian tradition if a radical Church is to have a place in the new order. The irony is that although the traditional Church wants radicals like a hole in the head, they are precisely what it needs if it is to survive.

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But, and it’s a big but, the Church must also allow the radical alternative. It must also let its children grow up. It must let the healed leave the casualty ward. It must let the actors exit stage left. It must not withhold permission. It is on this point that a new radical faith must be uncompromising.

This is where radicals must get political, because the religious establishment will not gracefully give permission. Religious dependency is big business. The princes of the church, the evangelical fat cats, the fundamentalist Mafia, will need to be faced in battle. In this war, the Pope has many more divisions than the radicals, so those who want to liberate people from the tyranny of inferior knowledge and emotional bondage will necessarily have to employ guerilla tactics.

…

No, the new Reformation will be fought at street level, as Jesus fought his reformation and radicals must fight theirs.

I believe the Church can re-mythologise. I think the global culture will eventually force it out of the nineteenth, fifteenth and maybe even the first centuries.

It might come kicking and screaming, but I think those who love it can persuade it, especially those who are already on the far side of belief.

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This is an edited version of an address given at a Sea of Faith conference in Australia in 2000

from http://homepages.which.net/~radical.faith/misc/park.htm

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