How Modern Churches Deconvert People*

The best place to be trained to be an unbeliever, wholly impervious to the life altering reality of the gospel, is in the modern church; more specifically, the modern American mega-church and the modern liberal churches (like the United Methodists, Evangelical Lutherans, PCUSA, and the like). No one attending these churches thinks of himself or herself as an unbeliever. And that is exactly why they are perfected unbelievers, just as the pharisees of old, except without the theological understanding.

Here is how these churches do it:

1. Offer cheap grace

Any truly effective evil leverages good for its own purposes. The bizarre truth is that the gospel is almost weekly preached, at least in some germ form, in these deconversion factories, but it is something like an inoculation. It is just enough exposure to a thing to make one impervious to its effects.

The "Christian" dedicated to a couple hours each month of "the gospel" hears only this: God loves you exactly as you are. He acknowledges and indeed accepts you in all your idiosyncrasies where others have not. He joins you, blesses you, adores you, and dies to show you how marvelous you are! All you need to do is acknowledge some theoretical "sinfulness," and he will love you and infuse you with grace to reach your highest potential. No demands. No changes needed, except the ones you need to become your best self. His death on the cross was a demonstration of his love (see Abelard). I've said a lot more on this lack of any real understanding of the gospel in my "Reformation" series. See here.

2. Constant moralism

Many of these churches know that the gospel is just not enough to give the Christian some sense of identity in the world (it only takes a single twenty minute sermon to make it clear), so they default to social action, and the constant goading of Christian moralism. The deep repentant life change that is supposedly the great mark of an encounter with Jesus is presented as a social justice agenda. Theology is too complicated and requires too much from the "faithful," who have no patience for it. But everyone can relate to action, to building a well in an African village. Wealthy parishoners within these churches tend to use all of their intellectual resources extracting capital from their fellow man, albeit via the free exchange of capitalism, and thus have little time or interest in thinking through what it means to live a full orbed Christian life. But guilt compels them to do some good with all their money, and so this is the perfect scenario for cultivating the Christian activist who also doesn't in the remotest sense know the distinctives of the Christian faith. Christians are people motivated by the free gift of salvation and by Jesus' example to do good for our fellow man. Is it really any more complicated than that? How many know their doctrine and do nothing, right? One end of the pole is justified by showing how many are on the other end.

3. Zero Theological training

Theology is only for a few Christians who have the intellectual bandwidth for it. The faithful need things to be simplified for them. Christianity 101 and Christian moralism are enough for them. After all, how well have you practiced the little bit of the Christian faith that you currently know? You really don't need to know more. You need to be more faithful to the true and simple moral principles that Jesus teaches. You don't need to understand about total depravity or substitutionary atonement. You need to get busy.

The interesting thing is that the human mind abhors a vacuum. Into the void left by churches these people stuff all the training that the world can offer. They learn well how to parrot the philosophical and moral and truth claims of the postmodern American culture. They are thoroughly attentive to the voices of their true teachers via social media and Hollywood. They study these things for hours each week and then give passing attention to the thinnest possible forms of Christian teaching for 1 out of 168 hours each week at best.

4. Experiencial worship

Worship becomes an "encounter," an "experience." God is no cold idea adopted by the mind. This is not about "religion," but "relationship." He is a living presence felt in corporate worship, with the help of worship bands and soaring chords and gripping video montages and witty stories. The gospel in these churches is a matter of subjective life-change and not a fact crashing down into history, behind which is a new reality; a reality that is antithetical to anything else in the world. Sin is not that bad and therefore grace is not that good. The Church is not a place to "renew the mind" by the full preaching of the gospel, which everything in our own beings and everything in our culture opposes, but a kind of "spiritual" pick-me-up. Christianity--that great force that has rolled on through history conquering the western world--now is no bigger than the shining auditorium for an hour each Sunday, replete with talented singers and mood lighting and bad architecture laid out in such a way as to enshrine human performance. It is a cheap imitation of our fallen culture complete with crosses. What it most assuredly is not is a new culture brought to life by a new truth.

Modern worship that locates God on the campus of some mega-church is like the ancient pagan oracles, where people came to the gods when they needed something, performed some mantras that manipulated blessing or counsel to pour forth, after which they receded back to the world of their own creation, and the process continued so long as there was a belief that the oracle enriched one's life or gave one some control.

5. Experiencial apologetics

Why believe the Bible is true? How are we to interpret the Bible? Why affirm that there even is a God? How do we make sense of evil or the Trinity or the apparent difficulties of modern science and the claims of Scripture? What about all the bizarre things in the Old Testament?

The answer to these and many other reasonable questions is this: "No one can argue with your experience." Of course it never occurs to us that if this is our answer, then we have nothing really to say to the man whose experience in Islam, or in Scientology, gives them precisely the "life change" and "salvation" and "joy" that we claim our experience is giving us. Any claims to the "truth" of experience would be mutually self-cancelling. Ah, but these are big words that no one needs to think about. No one is trying to win an argument when it comes to personal relationships with Jesus.

6. Singular evangelical focus

We are not here to go through a kind of organic cultural and personal and total transformation, but to bring people to church in order to make them like us. We want masses of people folded into temporally isolated and community-less church attendance. That is what it means to do evangelism. That is why it is so hard for the pastor who promotes this kind of church experience to recognize that becoming a doctor or lawyer or politician or businessman is meaningful, outside of the money that can be passed to the church to build churches and continue to bring people in. He curiously believes that the whole purpose of life is to "bring them to Christ," which to him means bringing them to church to hear the thin gospel, but then they go on to experience church life exactly as it is enunciated here, which of course in the end only perfects their worldly banquet by supplementing it with Sunday fair.

The Lion that the churches can be in these places is tamed and caged and pared of its claws and fangs, lest it break forth to do some wild and unpredictable thing, like leave the building to do battle with the world. Or, the way Lewis put it: "They castrate, and bid he geldings be fruitful."

How bizarre that the Church used to think of itself as a called out community (ecclesia), utterly foreign to the world; a place where one was unmeritoriously brought in by the grace of Christ in order to be broken down and recreated, to become part of a new salt and light culture. It was a place where we boasted of Christ's work for us, in us, all around us, and then brought that influence into direct conflict with the world.

7. Church is adjusted to make unbelievers comfortable, and that is exactly what it does

The goal is to bring unbelievers in. It never occurs to us that the unbelievers begin to call themselves believers and remain comfortable in their unbelief, because that was the whole purpose of the church in the first place. If you want to test this at your church, just ask them what justification means? Ask them what they were saved from? If they say, "from my sins," in a Sunday schoolish response, then ask the simple follow up question, "What is the big deal with that?"

Think of a place that does all I've suggested. It tells you that you are okay the way you are, even if you have experienced some faint cognitive dissonance. It tells you that the great gift of Jesus' death and resurrection entails helping you know your own hidden worth and helping you unlock your latent goodness. It tells you that you don't need to think in a new way. It tells you that you should give some money and do some good things. It gives you a warm and inclusive experience each of the twelve Sundays you attend each year and never guilts you about shirking your attendance. It says Christianity isn't a religion; it is an experience not defined by any requirements or doctrines (except "The Gospel" and being vaguely nice and giving). It is about you and God and growth at your own pace and defined in your experience. It never makes you uncomfortable or makes any unreasonable demands on you. In fact, it makes itself pathetic in its groveling gratitude when you give to the building fund or support the pastors in the lifestyle to which upper middle class Americans have become accustomed.

* The title of this is unfortunately a bald attempt at procuring clicks. It is not really consistent with my theology, which would suggest that any "deconverted" Christian was probably not a Christian in the first place. Alas, that topic will have to wait for another day.