Wisdom from Babylon

Leadership for the Church in a Secular Age

Gordon T. Smith

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780830853267
• eBook ISBN: 9780830853274
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

What does it mean to provide leadership for the church in an increasingly secular context? When religion is privatized and secularism reigns in the public square, Christians are often drawn toward either individualist escapism or constant cultural warfare. But might this context instead offer a fresh invitation for the church to adapt and thrive?

Gordon Smith is passionate about the need for capable, mature leaders to navigate and respond to a changing society. In this book, he draws on his extensive experience as a university president, pastor, and international speaker to open a multidisciplinary conversation about the competencies and capacities essential for today's leaders.

After analyzing the phenomenon of secularization in the West and charting common Christian responses, Smith introduces four sources of wisdom to help guide us through this new terrain: the people and prophets of Judah during the Babylonian exile, the early church in its pagan environment, contemporary churches across the Global South, and Christian thinkers in post-Christian Europe. From these resources he identifies practices and strategies—from liturgy and catechesis to mission and hospitality—that can give shape to faithful, alternative communities in such a time as this.

In cultures fraught with fear and division, Smith calls for leaders who can effect change from the margins, promote unity and maturity among Christians, and provide a non-anxious presence grounded in the presence of Christ. Educators, church leaders, and those seeking to understand the times will find this book to be an indispensable resource for cultivating distinctively Christian leadership.

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SECULARITY

AN INTERDISCIPLINARY CONSIDERATION

I GREW UP IN LATIN AMERICA as the child of missionary parents. Every five years we would take a year back in Canada for what was then called “furlough,” a time to reconnect with supporting churches. That meant living for that year in Belleville, Ontario, near my grandmother. There we would attend the Alliance Tabernacle, my mother’s home church. Since then, that church building has been sold and the church community now worships in a newer facility on the outskirts of Belleville. The original building is now a mosque and Islamic center.

The university where I serve as president is located in Calgary, Alberta. If you take the light rail from the city center to our campus, the last building you see before you head underground is a mosque. And in Richmond, British Columbia, just south of Vancouver, you can drive along No. 5 Road and see an amazing sequence of buildings: a mosque, a Hindu temple, a Sikh temple, a Jewish learning and community center, a Buddhist temple, and a string of churches.

These are merely indicators that highlight the religious pluralism of Canada. Here Christianity is but one of many religions—perhaps the largest, but still only one of many. What does it mean to be Christian in this pluralist context? And what does leadership for the church look like in such a context?

In addition to religious pluralism, there is another dynamic at play: secularization. In many respects, the growth of a secular mindset is the most significant development of the last fifty to sixty years. Secularity does not mean no religion; it means rather that religion is privatized, no longer occupying a privileged voice in the public square. It is different from secularism—that is, the assumption in the public square that the default response to any issue or concern is a secular one, whether it be political, economic, or ethical. On the one hand, this means that the state does not endorse any one religious tradition or perspective. But it also means that secularity has become the arbiter of the public square, in effect negating the religious voice. We not only live in a time and place of religious pluralism in Canada, the United States, New Zealand, Australia, and so many other societies (for the moment setting aside Central and Western Europe, who are much further along), but we are also increasingly secular.

Secularity is a highly complex issue, of course. But we need to get some kind of handle on it before we can consider the implications for theological education and leadership formation for the church, so that we are cultivating the kind of church leadership that is needed for this time and in this place.

In this chapter, we will begin to get a read on secularity using an interdisciplinary approach that looks at history, sociology, and philosophy. First, we will consider historical perspectives and how historians document and make sense of the “decline of the church” and the end of Christendom. Second, sociology provides the perspective of those who examine the social and cultural dynamics in which the church is now located. Then philosophers take us to another level, inviting us to look beneath the surface of these developments and giving an additional lens through which to understand our times.

HISTORY AND SECULARIZATION

In the West, notably in Western Europe and those nations whose original settlers came from Western Europe—New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States, for example—each nation was at some point largely Christian. In Europe, this meant a tight link between church and state. But even in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, it was assumed that a Christian perspective and ethic shaped the national vision. Christians dominated the political stage, and it was taken for granted that Christian morality would be evident in the nation’s legal system.

Students of Christianity in the West consistently point to the 1960s as the significant turning point away from Christendom. While many of the signs of a growing secularization were evident as early as a century prior, this decade—including the late ’50s and early ’70s—was clearly significant. Callum G. Brown puts it this way: “For the historian of religious decline, there is no period of history as important as the 1960s.”1 He goes on to stress that previous levels of religious decline had been, as he put it, “non-simultaneous, appearing staggered between different nations,” but with the 1960s we see a collapse of religious culture as a whole.2 The contrast or shift in the 1960s was perhaps most dramatic in British culture and British institutions, and Brown makes the point that in the case of Britain at least the change was permanent. Trends were cemented. A century earlier there was an unquestioned consensus regarding what one should believe and how one should live and behave. Anyone who challenged or questioned this was viewed as marginal or even as deviant. By the end of the 1960s, it was almost the reverse: the default religious position became that of the agnostic, at best; religious convictions and perspectives were moved to the margins.

Historian Mark A. Noll is an astute observer of developments in Canada, which he compares to trends in the United States. He noted in 2006 that any semblance of a “Christian Canada” was gone; any reference to God in public documents was at most a concession to a historic legacy. Now the privileged principles that shape the public square are privacy, multiculturalism, tolerance, and public religious neutrality. Religious language was once standard; it is now absent.3 Church attendance has plummeted, particularly since the 1960s—a benchmark decade in the de-Christianization of Canada. Quebec, once deeply influenced by the church, is now dominated by what Noll calls “secular nationalism”; public symbols and rhetoric are no longer religious but instead represent “a vision of universal multicultural toleration.”4 Tensions between Catholic (Quebec) and Protestant (English Canada) that defined early Canada are now framed along political and economic lines5; any measure of Quebec separatism is now entirely a secular aspiration.6

What about the United States? Was it a Christian nation that is now increasingly secular? If the answer is “yes,” it is often assumed that it is on the same trajectory: Western Europe is secular and Canada increasingly so (though Quebec is remarkably similar to Europe on this score), and now it seems that the United States is also becoming secular such that Canada is at about the halfway point between Europe and the United States.

And yet there are differences. One important point of reference is that the original founders of the United States were unequivocal that theirs was not to be a Christian nation; they insisted on the separation of church and state, saying that no religious expression or entity would be privileged. The aspiration toward life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, was hardly a Christian vision—not explicitly so, at least. This was the language of John Locke and the Enlightenment.

And yet religious rhetoric has dominated the national identity and aspirations of the American people. Further, until the 1960s at least, most Americans would have said that their country was and is unequivocally Christian, such that only a person of Christian faith should be the president. It was also assumed that Christian institutions, Christian sacred holidays, and a Christian ethic should continue to guide the national consciousness. That is, there is a strange dual identity to the United States. On the one hand, there is the insistence from the beginning that it is secular, with the formal and even essential-to-American-sensibilities separation of church and state. And, on the other hand, there are voices that persist in calling America a Christian nation. For our purposes, we can ask the question: Is the secularity that was built into the DNA of the United States—the insistence that church and state are separate—becoming more and more evident in public life in the last fifty years? Even if the answer is yes, we still need to acknowledge that just as Europe and Canada are not monolithic, the same can without doubt be said of the United States: secularism would be more tolerated and affirmed, for example, in Oregon than Alabama.

To answer the question of whether secularity in the United States is increasing, Daniel Cox’s 2017 study “America’s Changing Religious Identity” is telling.7 He observes that those who are religiously unaffiliated —that is, those who self-identify as atheist, agnostic, or with no particular affiliation—represent one quarter of all Americans, three times what it was twenty-five years ago. This is predominantly so among younger Americans. The same study confirms what anyone following the news of American elections hears again and again: evangelical Christians—more specifically white evangelicals—consistently vote Republican. This voting pattern arises from a conviction that with the Republicans they have a greater chance of keeping America what they have always viewed it to be: a nation under God, evident in a particular moral orientation and with the continued prominence of Christian religious symbols in the public square.

But if the growth of the “nones”—that is, those with no particular religious affiliation—continues in the United States, secularity may well be a definite trend. If so, the United States will follow Western Europe and Canada. Despite government policies that limit Muslim immigrants, for example, this country will become increasingly secular, even if there are pockets—so called Bible belts—where a preponderance of Christians creates its own religious ecozone.

Thus while the establishment clause of the First Amendment is about the neutrality of the state regarding religion, it increasingly means that religion is to be kept out of the public square and that non-religion will be the privileged voice. In 2017, for example, a forty-foot cross in a Washington, DC, suburb was declared unconstitutional. It stands on public land and is a memorial to World War I veterans. The court ruled that “the cross unconstitutionally endorses Christianity and favors Christians.” In other words, however much it has been the experience of Americans that Christian faith—including the symbols of Christian faith—are given prominence in public spaces, courts in the United States are beginning to apply the establishment clause consistently.

What all of this means for the church in North America, and I am suggesting as well for New Zealand and Australia, is that the Christian voice will no longer be a privileged voice in the public square. We can no longer speak of these countries as “Christian” nations. The dynamics between the United States and Canada are of course different, and historians (including Brown and Noll) stress that there are significant differences. Those leading the church in Quebec are in a rather different cultural context than those who serve the church in Alabama. Yet in both places there is a reality that one and all need to recognize: the rise of secularity, particularly since the benchmark decade of the 1960s.

SOCIOLOGY AND SECULARIZATION

Sociologists who study the phenomenon of religion in the West—beginning with Central and Western Europe and then North America and Australia and New Zealand—consistently observe that religion is in decline in Western societies, and this decline is irreversible. If there are exceptions, they are at most only temporary or, perhaps, aberrations. Any religious affiliation is entirely through voluntary association. Religious influence in the public square is limited at best and, in time, will be nonexistent. Sociologists of religion, in short, observe that Western societies were once highly religious and specifically Christian. Now these societies are increasingly secular.

Joel Thiessen, Canadian sociologist of religion, references the work of Belgian sociologist Karel Dobbelaere, who focuses on Belgium as a kind of core example within Western Europe. Thiessen notes that for Dobbelaere there are three kinds of secularization: societal, organizational, and individual.8 This trend or development signals that “Christian influence over several other social institutions, such as education, health, or the family gradually diminished, and religion lost its taken-for-granted status in . . . public life.”9 Over time, religion is marginalized; it no longer informs the public square. Religious conviction and expression are no longer assumed or even recognized in schools, in the political arena, and in the judicial-legal system. Thus Thiessen notes: “[Peter] Berger and [Steve] Bruce argue that if religion plays a diminishing role in key social institutions it is only a matter of time before individuals look on the world through a lens that does not include much religion.”10

David Martin offers another perspective. He recognizes the general theory of secularization advanced by Bryan Wilson, Steven Bruce, and Karel Dobbelaere, but he also references such voices as Rodney Stark and William Bainbridge, who speak of the persistent presence and power of religion in societies. Secularity has marked Western Europe, and church participation has dropped off dramatically over a generation—he references France and Holland as primary examples. But Martin is not convince...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction: The Times They Are A-Changin’
• Part 1: Reading and Understanding the Times
• Part 2: Forming the Alternative Community: Competencies and Dispositions
• Conclusion: Hospitality, the Gospel, and Leadership in a Secular Age
• Essential Reading List for Leading the Church in a Secular Age
• Name and Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Notes
• Praise for Wisdom from Babylon
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright