Is There an Echo in This Sanctuary?

Amy Welborn points to The Unraveling of Christianity, an essay by Clifford Orwin:

There is another, opposite danger in the seamless integration of the churches into the forces of social progress. This process raises the question of the “free spirit” and “honest animal” of a democrat who unexpectedly bursts in upon the argument of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals.

Does the church today still have any necessary role to play [in aiding the progress of democracy]? Does it still have the right to exist? Or could one do without it?... Certainly it has, over the years, become something crude and boorish, something repellent to a more delicate intellect, to a truly modern taste.

Once encouraged to conceive Christianity primarily as a buttress for progressive morality, we might come to see it as superfluous. If we welcome religion only because we cherish liberal social policy, why can’t our commitment to the policy roll happily along on its own? Of course, the mainline churches have continued to participate in public debate. If anything, they have defined themselves ever more in terms of their social activism. What they have increasingly lacked is anything distinctively Christian to bring to the table.

Thus, mainline religion, despite its efforts to please, has become merely incidental to the lives of so many who continue to profess it. When I was growing up as a Jewish kid in Chicago in the 1950s, America still seemed very Christian. (Our Reform rabbi said it was “Judeo-Christian.” We wanted to believe him, but the fists of the Irish kids enforced skepticism.) In retrospect, the country looked more Christian than it was. Today, by contrast, it looks less Christian than it is.