Law, Gospel, and the Great De-Churching

In my region of western Pennsylvania, a stretch of route 22 on the eastern outskirts of Pittsburgh close to Delmont is known for a particular stretch of aggressive Christian billboards. They are starkly designed with black letters on a yellow background, and they rotate with a series of messages that feature prophetic judgments like “don’t turn your back on God like the rest of America” and out-of-context Bible verses like “pray and I’ll heal your land.” There is no phone number to dial, no website to visit. There is simply a word of condemnation on a billboard, costing someone tens of thousands of dollars, viewed everyday by tens of thousands of drivers.

It’s hard to imagine a single one of those drivers having a religious conversion or an experience of repentance as a result of this expensive and long running campaign. The only winner here, I would imagine, is the owner of the billboard, who gets to rake in the cash. Perhaps the paying client also feels like a winner, patting themselves on the back for “doing the Lord’s work.” My intuition is that these billboards have not filled up the local pews, but instead send the region’s Christian leaders and clergy into damage control mode whenever they are discussed.

It’s the ineffectiveness of this campaign that came to mind reading The Great De-Churching, a 2023 book outlining the results of a research study asking why American church attendance has precipitously dropped over the past thirty years. In a western nation that’s known for its unusual devotion to religious belief, the authors of the book outline how church attendance since the 90’s has functioned as the opposite of a “great awakening.” Some 40 million Americans used to attend church regularly, and now don’t, which accounts for around 12% of the nation’s population. The trend isn’t leveling off, and the researchers behind the book wanted to figure out the causes of this unexpected exodus with the hopes of stemming the tide.

The study is robust. Sample size, margins of error, respondent diversity, it’s all been accounted for. Some of the results are surprising. For example, one pattern among those in the study is that many stopped attending church simply because they moved. Another surprising result is the shifting way that political action has caused people to leave the church, the surprise now being that after years of connection to political right, there is currently an exodus from the church of those who think the church hasn’t gone far enough to the right. Clergy and church scandals played a role in some people leaving the church, but not as big a role as one might expect. The same is true of the revelations of systemic child sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic church — respondents didn’t say that these revelations were the main reasons they left the church. Indeed, the causes of many people leaving the church do not match up with the headlines we expect.

Three demographic groups in particular shared a common sentiment regarding their exodus from the evangelical church. These were mainstream evangelical youth group dropouts, the exvangelical community who left the church in anger, and the young adults from BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) churches. Calling it a “missed generational handoff,” the study noted that these groups left the church primarily because they didn’t feel welcome, they didn’t feel loved or cared for by the church, or they had bad experiences with church members and left. Individual respondents cataloged a failure of the church to charitably converse about social issues, parents who were callous or ignorant to changes happening in youth culture, and an unofficial ostracism for having differing beliefs on topics not related to the Christian faith. Put simply, the church displayed a shocking lack of compassion, understanding, and sympathy to a younger generation struggling between the faith of their families and the more secular worldview of their peers, colleagues, and coworkers.

To look over the survey data, it’s worth wondering out loud: how many people, especially younger adults under the age of 35, are leaving the church because (pardon my french!) the Christians in their life were just plain ol’ assholes?

Summing up the data, the researchers conclude that the church has a problem with “relational incompetence.” They go on to discuss the need for self-awareness, others-awareness, and an awareness of the cultural shifts in the world around us. Evangelicals, it seems, are really bad at “reading the room,” whether that’s a refusal to thoughtfully engage with a teenager working through questions of their burgeoning sexuality, an ignorance of the idea that they need to “earn the right” to speak into another person’s life, or thinking that a billboard, a t-shirt, or a bumper sticker is going to bring about repentance. Which is to say, evangelicals seem to be struggling with how to be in life-giving relationships with others who have different life outlooks.

Fair enough, everyone in the year 2024 is struggling to be in a relationship with people who are different. That’s not just the left or right or the Christian or the “none” — cross cultural friendships are down across the board. Russel Moore, quoting scholar and author Chris Freiman, notes how uncommon it is to find “cross-cutters” in America culture. A “cross-cutter” is someone whose political beliefs aren’t directive of the rest of their life behaviors and identity. Think of the Republican who drives a Prius and eats a vegan diet, or the Democrat who attends an evangelical church and owns multiple firearms. In contexts with lots of cross-cutters, people are regularly exposed to those who are different from them. They learn the skill of getting along across a whole array of different viewpoints. As the culture war subsumes everything under its widening reach, it becomes more difficult to be a cross-cutter. When trenches are dug by two committed enemies, there’s a reason why the middle is called no-man’s land.

Still, it’s especially disheartening to see this phenomenon take place in the church. The New Testament offers a number of ways for Christians to behave, but outward activity isn’t the primary concern of the bible writers. The primary transformation that the apostles want to see in the Christian involves a change in attitude, disposition, and emotional focus. Yes, there are direct injunctions against sexual immorality and forced circumcision and the like, but the wider ethical focus of the New Testament turns to what St. Paul calls “fruits,” products of the Holy Spirit that transform attitudes and dispositions. These are things like “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” Other writers in the New Testament will add humility to a list like this, or self-denial, or deference to those who are weak in faith.

“Don’t be an asshole” covers a large chunk of the ethical vision of the New Testament: slow to speak and abounding in love and generosity.

This is where the historic distinction between law and gospel provides a unique help. The “art” of applying law and gospel allows the Christian to offer both a word of true judgment and a word of mercy and grace, and to balance those in such a way as to bring the hearer closer to God. It rejects the billboard, as it were, while affirming serious differences. It is a psychologically wise, heart oriented, faithful way of preaching the good news, one that allows the frailty of man and the mercies of heaven to coexist.

An example of effective Law and Gospel preaching during a culture war comes to us in the midst of the Jewish and Samaritan conflicts of the ancient world. The Northern Kingdom of Israel, composing ten of the twelve tribes, was defeated and exiled away by the Assyrians in 720 B.C. To recolonize the region, Assyria sent in their own people to live, where they eventually picked up worship of Israel’s god alongside a pantheon of other Mesopotamian gods. For nearly 500 years, faithful Jews lived just south of more syncretistic Samaritan Jews, who represented everything that they sought to avoid. Both peoples condemned the others to hell, avoided each other’s company, and denied any sort of goodwill should be offered to each other despite a somewhat common ancestry. Their culture war makes our culture war look like minor league thumb wrestling.

And yet, at the beginning of John’s gospel, we find Jesus the faithful Jew cross-cutting his way through Samaria, taking a detour home to Galilee through “enemy” territory. There, he meets a woman at a well, a village pariah, and he strikes up a conversation with her. It’s a conversation laden with law and gospel, where he offers words of hope and grace (“whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again”) but is direct about the hardships and mishaps of the woman’s life (“you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband”). Somehow, between the law and gospel, the woman walks away with joy and peace and love that reflects a transformed heart (“Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?”). Jesus and his entourage of Jewish disciples stay for two whole days in Samaria, preaching and teaching to these enemies of the faith, who ironically proclaim Jesus to be the savior.

If Christians are going to gain the emotional intelligence to face a shrinking church and a secular world, they are going to need to have transformed hearts. This is the other benefit of preaching through a law and gospel lens — it not only works for those outside the church, but it offers a word of hope to those in the pews as well. A constant cycle of humility from the law and mercy from the gospel work to create the humility, repentance, and faith that can meet with Samaritans and not come off as an asshole.

The culture wars have not been good for the church, on the left or the right — or for anyone for that matter. And an increasing number of voices are sounding the alarm that weak church life in America is either a cause of our cultural rancor or an amplifier of that negativity. Perhaps a wider rediscovery of the law and gospel paradigm could help Christians rediscover the humble hearts that the New Testament has in mind, one that can hold both our sinful frailty and our divine belovedness together without fear of loss.

Or, we could just do the billboards. Lord knows that it’s easier to go that route than actually love one’s neighbor.