Kierkegaard On Easter Weekend

Christendom Is Dead. If You Want Christianity To Survive, Then Act Like It

Soren Kierkegaard

It’s Holy Saturday for Christians in the West, which is to say, most Christians who read this newsletter. Many, I suppose most, of you are planning to be at midnight mass tonight, or if Protestant, at services tomorrow. This missive is not for you. It is for the readers who identify as Christian, but who do not plan to go to church this weekend, to observe the holiest feast of the Christian year.

The English writer Ben Sixsmith says that like many Britons, he has been troubled by the open public acknowledgements of Ramadan in his home country, with no parallel notice paid to the faith that has been that of the United Kingdom since more or less the fourth century. (St. Augustine’s mission began in 597, but archeologists have found evidence that there were Christians in Roman Britain before this.)

This is bad, says Sixsmith. And yes, British elites bear some responsibility for this terrible state of affairs. But they are not the ones most at fault. Of the complainers, Sixsmith says:

They are very exercised about Easter not being marked appropriately. Yet how many of them even go to church? How many of them will even go to church this Easter?

Say what you like about Muslims in Britain but they turn out for their faith. More people in Britain — one can guess from the available statistics — are regular attendees of mosques than Anglican churches.

True, Christianity remains, and should remain, the traditional faith of Britain. Again, I agree with Embrey and Rice on patriotic grounds alone. But traditions will not endure if they are only recognised as traditions — ornaments we keep around for old times’ sake until we die and our successors casually bin them.

Sixsmith, who is a Millennial, says he is guilty of this as well. He doesn’t want to see Christianity disappear from Britain either, but he doesn’t care so much to actually show up at church. (True, he lives in Poland, but you see his point; he’s acknowledging that he is as much to blame as the people he’s criticizing.) More:

Of course, someone could object to Ramadan lights on purely secular grounds if they didn’t want to see them. But if they are going to object in the name of the Christian tradition then it seems fair to ask what they are doing for that tradition. It will not maintain itself — any more than a restaurant will keep its lights on if no one wants to eat there.

This is a painful but necessary truth. You who have been reading me for some time know that my late father was shocked and hurt that I left the Methodist church to become Catholic. “But the Drehers have always been Methodist,” he said, perplexed and wounded. Maybe so, but our Drehers – him, my mom, my sister, and me – rarely went to church. This sent the signal to my sister and me that religion was not important.

Now, my sister grew up, started her own family, and was faithful to our Methodist church until she died. In my case, I left Methodism, but after ten years of wandering through insincere agnosticism, became a practicing Christian – first Catholic, then Orthodox. This doesn’t happen often. Most kids raised in slackly observant homes abandon the faith.

I have a friend back in Louisiana whose adult children don’t go to church, and have raised their own kids without religion. We talked about this not too long ago. She’s troubled by it. The kids — all of whom are married with their own families now — aren’t hostile to the faith, and can even be counted on to show up on Easter and Christmas, sometimes. But not always, and anyway, they’re doing it just to make Mom and Dad happy, or out of a vaguely felt sense that it’s something they ought to do.

Their children – that is, my friend’s grandkids -- almost certainly won’t even have that much of a connection to Christianity. I lost touch with my friend for a long time, so I don’t know if she and her husband were regular churchgoers with their kids, but I doubt it. Though of my generation, not our parent’s generation, I suspect they were like my own parents: only occasionally observant as young parents, but drawn back to the faith as they grew older. But by then, their kids were grown and gone. The patterns were set.

Parents can’t force their kids to be religious. The best you can do is set a good example, and hope it takes. I saw some Italian social science research a few years back showing that the faith is in full collapse in Italy, and even among Catholic families that were regular churchgoers, only 22 percent of them reported that their adult children had remained faithful mass attendees. Only one in five – this, from families who had been at mass every Sunday and holy day, in the imaginative heartland of Roman Catholicism.

Reading Sixsmith’s column, I tried to put myself back into my childhood in the 1970s. I grew up in a socially conservative, rural part of the South. People went to church there. But if memory serves, most people did not. It wasn’t a huge number, but I recall as a kid being surprised if I would learn that I had a classmate who went to church regularly. They were usually Catholic. I recall our Catholic neighbors, who had kids my age, and being amazed that those kids had to be in church every single Sunday. Sounded rough.

Kids like me were raised to think that of course God exists, but that does not have a lot to do with what we do on Sunday morning. The church was like the electric company: always there, whether or not you paid attention to it. You only ever needed to pay attention to it when you needed something — a baptism, a wedding, a funeral. I have I recall the Southern Baptists were the most pious Protestant congregation. Still – and we know that memory is faulty – I don’t remember that churchgoing was such a big deal for most of us kids. I honestly don’t want to impose my own memories on the entire community, so I hasten to say that I could be wrong. Yet the fact remains, I grew up in a social environment in which everybody was Christian, but most people only went to church on Easter and Christmas.

And even back then, churchgoing was primarily a middle-class thing. You rarely if ever saw working-class people in church. We now know, forty and fifty years later, that this trend has held.

To be fair to my folks, it was easy for them to behave as they did. When I was in college, and read Kierkegaard, I was struck by his bold statement that in a society where one is counted as a Christian simply by the fact of being born into it, Christianity ceases to exist. It was a very Protestant point, one that Catholics and Orthodox (and other Protestants, perhaps) could object to by saying that baptism makes one Christian. One can be a bad Christian if one is unfaithful to one’s baptism, but one is still a Christian.

That’s a fair point as a purely theological matter. But the de-Christianization of the West has given weight to Kierkegaard’s point, in a way that the formal sacramental theology of the older Christian churches cannot answer persuasively. Kierkegaard’s fundamental point is that being a Christian is not like being a member of an organization. It requires a choice, an individual choice, and then to live out that choice in concrete ways. What angered him so much was that the state Lutheran church in his native Denmark — a church of which he was a member — treated Christianity as the Danish nation at prayer, nothing more.

In SK’s view, Danes could get the idea that they were doing just fine as Christians, simply because they had been baptized and confirmed. The interior drama of conversion, of ongoing repentance, of growing in the faith — all of that could be denied to them, because the institutional church made them think that they were in good with God, by virtue of their membership in the church. For Kierkegaard, Christianity was not, in its heart, a set of intellectual propositions to be affirmed, but a life to be lived.

This is true whether one is Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox. Reading Kierkegaard, that radical Protestant, can make us all better Christians, whatever our confession. Paradoxically, immersion in what he called “Christendom” — the external trappings of Christian culture — could give one the structures of thought behind which one could hide from an encounter with the living God. For SK, the church and all the things that come with Christian culture only had value insofar as they led one to that encounter, and kept one in that encounter; if they were used by Christians as a substitute for meeting God, then they were not only worthless, but were actively harmful. Kierkegaard lived in the mid-19th century, but he knew about Moralistic Therapeutic Deism long before our time.

When I read all that (in SK’s “Attack Upon Christendom”), I immediately realized that that’s how I grew up. It wasn’t just my family; it was a many, many of us. I wasn’t a Christian then, but reading Kierkegaard, along with Thomas Merton’s memoir The Seven Storey Mountain, was the first time Christianity began to make sense as a path for me.

Toward the end of my college career, I started dabbling in Christianity, but I had Kierkegaard front to mind the whole time, realizing that I was a fraud. I wanted the psychological and spiritual comforts of Christianity, without having to make any sacrifice of my own will. I was kind of haughty about my mom and dad’s relationship to the church, but I was no different. I wanted God, but only on my own terms. Kierkegaard tells us it doesn’t work like that, and anybody who tells you that you are fine with God because you profess to believe is lying to you. It’s what you do with those convictions that tell you what you really believe. “Faith without works is dead.”

Among those works that demonstrate faith is to come to church on Sunday. Kierkegaard would be the first to say that churchgoing is not necessarily a guide to true fidelity! But he would also say that if you can’t be bothered to show up faithfully at worship, are you sure that you are the Christian you think you are?

“I meet the Lord in my own way,” I’ve heard people say over the years, to explain why they don’t go to church. Who am I to say what the true condition of their souls are? Yet when I hear that, my first thought is that this is a rationalization. I used to try it myself when I was younger, and wrestling with God, but I could not get out of my mind the experience I had in childhood. Our family did not want to go to church, but we did not want to think of ourselves as the kind of people who don’t go to church. So we invented stories to explain why we did — or did not do — these things. And we were not alone.

A couple of years ago in Hungary, I joined in a friendly debate about Christianity and this country. As you know, Hungary’s government is openly pro-Christian — yet Hungary has low rates of churchgoing. My interlocutor advanced the argument that it was sufficient for Hungary to be culturally Christian. If people wanted to go to church, that was their business; the important thing was to maintain a Christian moral framework for public policy and politics. His was a political argument, not a theological one; we were not there to debate theology per se, but to talk about politics and religion.

I countered by saying that any cultural Christianity that is not supported by meaningful levels of churchgoing will only be ephemeral. Hungary is today relatively conservative, culturally, but Christian only in the sense that my own home culture was in the 1970s. That is to say, the memory of Christianity is residual, and it still maintains some hold on the people’s moral imagination. But without a commitment to living out the faith in concrete ways, at least by going to church faithfully, this will pass, and pass more quickly than you think.

That is what has happened in Great Britain. This is what is happening in the US. Here, from a recent analysis by Ryan Burge, is America’s future:

“Rarely” stays high; “never” has taken off like a rocket. Now, 69 percent of US high school seniors rarely or never go to church. The old pattern of American kids moving away from religion as teenager and young adults, but returning as they age and start families of their own, no longer holds. The decline is not equally distributed. From a different Burge graf:

This makes sense to me. Evangelical Christianity emphasizes the personal relationship with Christ. It puts more emphasis on what Kierkegaard said was the core Christian way of responding to the Gospel: as something to be lived out actively, requiring personal conversion, not just a social habit.

Burge continues:

But this graph actually tells the most important story - it’s the nones that are pulling down attendance. If you just restrict your sample to people who identify as part of a religious tradition, there’s pretty strong evidence that they are just as likely to attend weekly now as that same group five decades ago. The devout are staying devout, if not actually becoming more religiously active.

The impulse to provide positive news to an audience is immense. I love telling people what they want to hear. The smiles and nods of approval make me feel good. It’s not nearly as fun to tell them that things are looking bleak. I am reminded of the prophet Jeremiah who constantly told the Israelites that the Babylonians were going to destroy them. He was kicked out of the temple and throw into a cistern for being the bearer of bad news.

I am in no way comparing myself to a biblical prophet. I’m just a lowly academic with access to lots of data. But I don’t think it’s my calling to be the orchestra who started playing on the deck of the Titanic as it began to take on water. I would rather be part of the crew who helped get passengers into life boats. The hull is breached, the ship is beginning to list. I think it’s high time for most people of faith to start formulating a plan for which life boat you are going to grab.

As we know, the Nones — those with no particular religious affiliation, even if they profess belief in God — have been sharply rising among Millennials and Zoomers, and now account for 28 percent of Americans. What Britain is living through today, Americans will be living through tomorrow. Like Burge, I see my role as to help passengers get onto lifeboats.

This weekend, if you are not a regular churchgoer, take that first step onto the lifeboat, and go to church. And keep going. Nobody is coming to save you, or any of us. God will help us, but He will not force himself on us. If Christianity, even at the mere cultural level, matters to us, we have to show up. There is no substitute for showing up. None.

Christ rose from the dead! Christianity will only be resurrected in the post-Christian West if each and every one of us chooses to live as if the Resurrection really happened.

I wish you Christians observing the Resurrection this weekend a blessed time. Remember, the future is not fated. We can always choose life, and the Lord of life. Don’t forget that your kids are watching you, and learning from you.