Chesterton reveals the reason why Orthodoxy will never be a mega-church

Here are two quotes (and a minor middle one). The first is from GK's sharp little book entitled, scandalously and simply, Heretics. The second (and less English) quote is more recent: Alan Wolfe's latest offering in the March issue of The Atlantic, entitled "And the Winner Is ..."

G. K. Chesterton, Heretics:

The truth is that it is quite an error to suppose that absence of definite convictions gives the mind freedom and agility. A man who believes something is ready and witty, because he has all his weapons about him. He can apply his test in an instant ... a man with a definite belief always appears bizarre, because he does not change with the world; he has climbed into a fixed star, and the earth whizzes below him like a zoetrope. Millions of mild black-coated men call themselves sane and sensible merely because they always catch the fashionable insanity, because they are hurried into madness after madness by the maelstrom of the world ... Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.

Orthodox Christianity, in its Trinitarian and Christological society, is the fixed star in a whizzing world. It is not fashionable, and it is strange. And it will not win. In Philip Jenkins' spooky book, The Next Christendom: the Coming of Global Christianity, Orthodoxy is a sure-fire failure in the polling stations:

Falling birth rates will ultimately be more destructive to Orthodox fortunes than Muslim or communist persecutions ever were. Taking an optimistic population projection, Orthodox believers will be 2050 have shrunk to less than 3 per cent of the world's population, pathetically smaller than the early twentieth-century figure. In the worst-case scenario, the total number of Orthodox believers in the world by 2050 might actually be less than the Christian population of a single nation like Mexico or Brazil (p. 96).

(I should note that the new U.S. Religious Landscape Survey (2008) from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life finds that the Orthodox Church accounts for 0.6% of the American adult population. I was interested to look at these numbers to see how the influx of converts may have affected the population size of the American Orthodox community. The answer is not much. Less than 0.3% of American adults "converted into" Orthodoxy: the very same percentage "converted out.")

"Put not your trust in mortal princes," David tells us in the Psalms. Put not your faith in numbers either. Programming for attendance brings down curses, as David himself discovered in his disastrous census. Besides, Orthodoxy should not worry about census so much, as churches to do have to pay a prize in what G.K. would call "fashionable insanity."

Check out what "wins" in the numbers game of American religion ...

Alan Wolfe, "And the Winner Is ...", from The Atlantic:

The most important religious phenomenon in the United States ... has nothing to do with the number of atheists. It concerns another trend that, like modernization, is changing the trajectories of religion worldwide: the creation and spread of a free religious marketplace, which partly (though by no means completely) revives religious devotion wherever it reaches, but also tends to moderate the religions offered within it.

Religious monopolies or near-monopolies, such as state-sponsored churches, generally throttle religious practice over time, especially as a country becomes wealthier; the European experience amply demonstrates this. Lacking any incentive to innovate, churches atrophy, and their congregations dwindle. But places with a free religious marketplace witness something very different: entrepreneurs of the spirit compete to save souls, honing their messages and modulating many of their beliefs so as to appeal to the consumer. With more options to choose from, more consumers find something they like, and the ranks of the religious grow.

The key precondition for this sort of marketplace is the presence of rudimentary secular values. (emphases added)

Alan Wolfe is writing, tragically, with the assumption that he has something to say about religion. He may be describing a sociological phenomenon. But phrases like "entrepreneurs of the spirit" who "modulate many of their beliefs so as to appeal to the consumer" indicate an absence of religion, and the presence of something rather else.

Comments

[Visibilium]

I'm sure that Jenkins is happy that someone takes his linear extrapolations seriously. Naive pattern recognition is a primitive human capacity that sometimes leads us astray by projecting chimerical parabolas. God created copulation to be subject to free will, not mathematical necessity.

I'm not sure that Orthodoxy is immune from the free marketplace of religion, and I'm not sure that I'd want it to be immune. The manner in which Orthodoxy reiterates a fixed revelation changes according to time and location. This is what Orthodoxy calls a living tradition.

A consumer-oriented religious marketplace replaces a failed model in which hierarchs and their tyrannical secular bedfellows impose religious preferences on political victims. American Orthodoxy won't unite under a single Patriarchate until American Orthodoxy, through the disparate experiences of competing jurisdictions, comes to terms with a Church/State symphonia that isn't characterized by an Orthodox monopoly.

[Fr. Jonathan]

I don't think Jenkins' predictions are all that farfetched. His views on the population shift of Christianity to the belt between the fortieth parallels are well founded.

I consider state religions despicable in this age, mainly because the responsibility for the state is corrosive to the church. The state itself might benefit from this association: the church plainly does not -- at least, not in the modern age.

I do not doubt that religious communities succeed in the marketplace by hybridizing themselves into new "iterations." Moreover, you are correct, V., in your observation that Orthodoxy articulates the Word in the vernacular of contemporary culture.

But I am sure that you and I are at odds with regard to the degree and nature of "reiteration." You mean too much in that word: you will think I mean too little.

Finally, you are too idealistic about the promise of a "consumer-oriented religious marketplace" displacing the state church or caesaro-papist model. There is nothing spiritual about the marketplace. There is no hidden hand -- at least, nothing going upward.

[Steven Paul]

As "free market churches" proliferate, they will follow the free market principles of "branding" and offering goods and services according to consumer research rather than the Gospel. The confusion is that the self perception is that what is offered IS the Gospel. With no grounding in anything other than an ancient self interpreted text that has been subjected to the lens of western philosophy for 6 centuries to guide the definition of "gospel", the free market church is doomed to become either a Walmart or mom and pop corner deli offering a small menu to a devoted clientele until the chef dies.