Newspapers, Church Culture and Bad Breath

(I want to give due acknowledgement for this post to ideas I read on Brant Hansen's blog Letters From Kamp Krusty, particularly his post FAQ #24: Shouldn't We Just Stay Where We Are, and Work for Change, Rather than Abandoning the Church? These ideas mirrored ideas that had also occurred to me, but it was nice to see confirmation by Brant and those who commented on his post.)

Let me tell you the story of a ficticious acquaintance of mine, named Fred, who found himself involved in an interesting and rather awkward social situation a while back. Fred was hired as a high school music teacher and band coach. At the school which hired him, music and band had traditionally been the most popular classes, with many more kids wanting to sign up than there were spaces available. But when Fred began teaching, he noticed a curious change.

During the first few weeks of his first teaching term, a number of students dropped out of his classes. Others begged to be let in, yet upon meeting Fred, they quickly changed their minds. The band began to shrink alarmingly, as a number of of trombone players and drummers dropped out. Even the flugelhorn player quit. Fortunately for the school, Fred had been hired at the start of the winter term, so the band's participation in the football season wasn't immediately threatened. Fred also noticed that as he made his rounds on campus, both students and teachers tended to avoid him and to keep their interactions with him as brief as possible.

Now Fred had minored in psychology while in college, so he began to formulate various theories about what was happening at his high school. He thought at first that he was experiencing a simple “generation gap” in which teens felt that they couldn't relate to adults like him. But as he watched students talking with other teachers he was forced to abandon this hypothesis. Then he began to think that maybe there had been a secret shift in Myers-Briggs personality types among both students and faculty – that maybe society as a whole had become decidedly more introverted. Yet as he saw students clowning around during lunch, he had to abandon that hypothesis also. Lastly, he theorized that the rise of “social electronics” such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, texting and i-Pods had conditioned students and faculty to interact with each other virtually, and that they were uncomfortable with face-to-face interactions with their fellow flesh-and-blood humans.

But one day the town dentist showed up at school to give his daughter a ride home. The daughter was a tuba player in Fred's band class. As the dentist talked with Fred, he suddenly blurted, “Man, your breath stinks! I can tell just by looking at your teeth that dental hygiene isn't one of your priorities. Your teeth look like they haven't been brushed in six months!”

Now Fred doesn't really exist (at least as far as I know), yet his rationalizations and his social blind spot are typical of some large-scale American social institutions that are now failing. Over time, these institutions have adopted a view that they are indispensable to American life, and they can't believe that they are now declining. One of the evidences of their disbelief is the invention of imaginative theories to explain or rationalize that decline.

Take newspapers for instance. Many articles have been written recently about the death of newspaper journalism in America. Those articles I have read have blamed such factors as rising American illiteracy; the increasing prominence of electronic journalism such as radio, TV and Internet news; and the rise of social media such as blogs, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and podcasts. (See http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/31/080331fa_fact_alterman for instance.) Many pundits who focus on the impact of social media also talk of the changing tastes and culture of young adults. Of course, all these articles have been written by newspapers or other mainstream media outlets. The main point of all these articles can be summarized as saying that the newspaper as an American institution is dying due to large-scale societal and technological shifts that are beyond the control of newspapers.

Yet newspapers (and by extension, mainstream media in general) are neglecting the real possibility that their breath stinks. Let me tell you why I don't regularly buy newspapers. It's because most American papers are now owned by a handful of extremely rich corporations, whose aim is to present a view of the world most conducive to maximizing profits. The fact that this view of the world frequently doesn't match reality doesn't seem to bother them too much. One example is the coverage of the protests at the G20 conference in London earlier this year. Fox News, CNN, USA Today and others uniformly portrayed the protesters as a handful of crazed anarchists and the London police as virtuous professionals who were simply doing their jobs. Yet it took citizen journalists broadcasting video on YouTube to show the reality – that the London police were guilty of savage brutality and provocation. Another example is the recent violent clashes in Peru between indigenous peoples and the Peruvian military and international oil companies who had been granted permission by the Peruvian government to go into indigenously inhabited areas to drill for oil. The indigenous people were rightly upset that their homelands were about to be ruined for the sake of oil company profits. I'll bet that this story wasn't widely published on page 1 of most major papers.

Why should I therefore pay money to someone to lie to me? Why should I spend my money to be dumbed down? When a major event like a hurricane impacts the U.S., why should I rely on American media, who shy away from a rigorous presentation of the strategic impacts of such an event, and who focus instead on “human interest” stories? (An example: instead of saying, “The hurricane is a Category 3 storm with a diameter of XX miles, and will impact the following industries in these regions, etc.” we get something like this: “We're here at the Last Chance Catfish Bar and Grill with Bo and his two dogs, Cletus and Fred. Bo, you fixin' to ride out this storm?”)

This blindness and stinkiness also applies to the present state of American evangelicalism. But here it's a bit harder to get at the truth of what's going on. We do know that there has been an explosion of interest in “church growth” since Rick Warren's Purpose-Driven books and seminars were introduced. There are also examples of impressively-sized megachurches throughout America, as well as anecdotal accounts of increased church attendance during our present economic crisis. Yet there is also evidence of a decline in church membership overall, as well as a decline in evangelical influence within the broader American public.

For instance, a 2007 Church Solutions Magazine article stated that the number of “unchurched” Americans had risen to nearly 100 million. (Source: http://www.churchsolutionsmag.com/hotnews/74h293758.html) This article cited a study performed by the Barna Group, which also found that of that 100 million unchurched, ten million were born-again Christians. An October 2008 article in the Oregonian described the fall in church revenues due to the economic crisis. (See http://nacba.net/Article/Churches_money.htm). And a recent USA Today article stated that megachurch growth is now stalling. (Imagine that!) (Source: http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2008-09-08-megachurches-numbers_N.htm. See also Megachurch - The Megachurch Future.pdf as well as this from the Suburban Christian blog: Suburbia and the rise and fall of megachurches.) One megachurch pastor cited in these studies mentioned a “back door problem”: “We have over 500 people joining our church every month, but just as many are leaving each month. Our back door is as big as our front door!”

There are various theories floated by pastors, church-growth “consultants” and other members of the evangelical intelligentsia in order to explain these phenomena. The theories sound very similar to those cited to explain the death of newspapers: changing demographics, the rise of social media, changes in culture, and so on. There are also some added, highly creative explanations, such as the rise in a “post-modern” mindset. Some evangelical thinkers have even come up with their own term for this, shortening “post-modern” to “po-mo.” There are also those who talk of how we're in the midst of some new spiritual movement that will result in the appearance of an “emergent” church. Others talk of how we're failing to “meaningfully engage the culture.” But these theorists conveniently ignore the specific ways that modern American evangelicalism is turning people off.

Consider megachurches again. According to a study performed by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, megachurches collect healthy revenues, yet half of their income goes to staff salaries and benefits. (Source: http://hirr.hartsem.edu/megachurch/megastoday2008_summaryreport.html). Modern evangelicalism has bred a veritable mob of pastors who want to have their own megachurch. Church growth movements such as the Purpose-Driven movement have formulated a body of techniques designed to make church attenders into unquestioning supporters of their pastors and of their pastors' desires to build religious empires, as I documented on my blog TH in SoC under the post, The Warrens of the Purpose-Driven. I have recently been reading Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford, and in reading his description of how white-collar organizations try to program their employees into organizational drones, I couldn't help but think of the Purpose-Driven movement.

Consider also how the issue of abusive churches has been raised over the last two decades through such excellent books as Churches that Abuse and The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse, as well as by means of many websites. Yet in reading of the shenanigans practiced by some large evangelical churches, it seems to me that their pastors have read all the material they could find on abusive churches, then tried hard to perfect the abusive techniques they read about. (In much the same way, I think that Western growth capitalists and Chinese authoritarians are doing their best to steal tips and techniques of control from each other – but that's another subject, for another blog.)

Consider how American evangelicalism and its support structures have become simply a machine for collecting money and political power from a certain sector of the population. Consider how many Americans are turned off by a politicized Christianity that supports consumerism, empires and wars of conquest with talk of “God and country,” yet neglects the charity commanded by the New Testament.

I'd like to suggest that Americans are rejecting the institutional evangelical church because the institutional church has become an exploitative place. They are searching for alternatives to the institutional church, yet institutional church leaders are still bent on building large empires for themselves. In a Barna group study on alternatives to conventional church experience, the church explorations of average Americans were discussed, as well as the reactions of mainstream pastors. Significantly, while two out of three pastors agreed that “house churches are legitimate Christian churches,” less than half of these said that they would ever recommend a house church to anyone. Resistance to house churches was highest among pastors who earned more than $75,000 a year. (I wonder why...) (Source: http://www.barna.org/barna-update/article/19-organic-church/47-americans-embrace-various-alternatives-to-a-conventional-church-experience-as-being-fully-biblical)

The American evangelical church needs to repent. Pastors in particular need to repent. If this means getting counseling for egotism, greed and sociopathic tendencies, or even resigning the pastorate, so be it. I have no intention of becoming part of someone's religious empire. Been there, done that. I didn't go to church today (although I would really have liked to). It's not because of some mysterious, inexplicable spiritual/socioeconomic shift in American society. But pastors, it's because man, your breath stinks! You need to brush your teeth!