On The Crises The Church Will Face

By Brendan the Writer (Rated G)

The Church is headed towards three crises, I think. And when I say Church I mean ‘every Christian denomination’. Likely every group outside Christianity too is going to undergo these three cataclysmic problems in the next decade.

1. The Thorough Progressivization of the Christian Intellectual Class

For a long time there’s been a Christian intelligentsia, and for a long time it’s been leaning left. This became more apparent during Trump’s presidency, but increasingly the pressures on academically inclined urban Christians have ramped up. And now we have Phil Vischer comparing people against gay marriage to ‘confederate theologians’, a First Things article being blithely for a more gender neutral translation of the Bible, and a New Lutheran theological instruction manual for the Missouri synod pushing gender neutral language. This trend is subtle, since if it goes out in the open it will gain strong opposition, but it’s very clear that the Christian Intelligentsia, formed in the 1950s as a sort of counter cultural movement, is bound for large scale collapse into progressivism.

Both a substantial amount of the clergy and a substantial amount of young Christian women will likely join into this. It’s increasingly clear that the Church has paid very little attention to catechizing women or really doing anything for them. The Church just assumed that women were doing well just because women are by and large more agreeable and obedient. It really didn’t take into account the insane amount of pressure women were facing. Neither did it really reward women who fought back against culture and kept the faith zealously, since such women were often ‘difficult’. Women were idealized but not helped in any real substantial way, so it’s small wonder that many women who grow up Christian become leftists.

2. The Ethnonationalist Problem

 No-one has been paying attention to young men. Aside from Jordan Peterson, there’s been very few voices concerned about where young men are going. Instead, there is the ‘all stick and no carrot’ approach to young men, the constant guilt tripping over being male. And men have the natural tendency to unruliness. The Church thought it was a fact that men would continue to be Christian was a given; they just need to be brought into line.

And in a way that’s true; young men have stayed much more Christian than young women have. But the “all carrot and no stick” approach has lost men all respect for their pastors, priests, and elders. Men are catechized not in their churches but online. And there they are influenced more by Evola, Nietzche and Andrew Tate than Systematic theology and whatever your book on God du jour is.

Young men are a catastrophic force when dealt with badly.

3. The Crisis of Bad Leadership

Perhaps the root issue here: the Church is not being led well and I think that applies across the board. The sexual abuse crises that plagued both Rome and the Evangelical world show a complete lack of real moral fiber of church leaders when dealing with real actual sin. Most seem to just side with abusers. Those that don’t seem to go overboard and turn men into villains without a fair hearing. While superficially different, in both cases, the root cause is the same in both: weak leaders who do not lead their flock, but instead are led, either by the powerful personalities of narcissistic abusers or by culture.

Also, Church culture is locked in this weird void where we don’t realize how culture has shifted since the early 2000s. I’ve never heard sermons on current culture war issues that are by and large part of everyone’s life now. Not in Rome, not in Canterbury and not in Geneva. I’m sure there are some good preachers out there. But instead of addressing major issues Christians face in the modern world, pastors seem like they would rather give yet another sermon on ‘patience’ or exposit Job for the twenty-fourth time.

Conclusion

Just being doctrinally orthodox is not going to work. I know there’s a whole crowd in the middle, they aren’t far righters, they aren’t leftitsts, they’re just good Christians. When things go bad these double down and say ‘Let’s check out Bible or the Catechism of the Catholic Church’.

In this there’s far too much trust in the intellect. If you think young men and young women are going to stay with the Church orthodoxy just because some dusty old document told them so, you have another thing coming. People need to see the evidence for their faith in their life. If everything in a young woman’s life tells her to be progressive and everything in a young man’s life tells him to be a Nazi, then that’s what will happen. And no amount of theological nerdery is going to stop it. Besides, the Bible and Church History have been very historically fuzzy on some current hot button issues like race. It’s not hard to read them in line with Critical Race Theory or White Supremacy if that’s what you really want to do.

In order to survive the coming deluge there has to be a real development of a Christian ethos, a strong particularly-Christian way of dealing with the world. It’s to our shame that people who are not Christians like Jordan Peterson have been giving this a lot more thought than pastors, priests, bishops and theologians whose entire calling ought have concerned them with this issue decades ago.