It is clear to even the most casual observer of the religious world in America that churches today face significant challenges to their public reputation, challenges that have undermined everything from their capacity to speak with authority in the public square to their ability to command loyalty from their own members. Is there any hope that this situation may be reversed, or are the churches in the West now doomed to slow but inexorable decline? As Matthew Arnold likened the sea of faith receding in Victorian society to the long, melancholy groan of the tide withdrawing along Dover Beach, are we merely to resign ourselves to a retreat into oblivion that might at best have some scrap of dignity but at worst merely continue the embarrassing chaos of the past two decades?

To answer that question, it is first useful to outline the nature of the problems that have brought traditional Christian churches to this moment. There are, of course, the obvious matters of hypocrisy and moral corruption. The child abuse and financial scandals within the Roman Catholic Church, combined with the institutionalized cover-ups of the same, are the most infamous examples of such. Yet Protestantism, too, has its equivalents and the only reason it has perhaps proved less notorious in the public imagination is due to its fragmentation, rendering the scandals more piecemeal and less visible on the national scale. For both expressions of Christianity, however, such corruption renders any public statement that claims the moral high ground on a wide variety of issues implausible, if not downright hypocritical, in the eyes of the public and indeed many Christians.

Beyond the scandals, there is the general tilt against traditional institutional authority. This does not merely affect churches, as attitudes toward political institutions indicate. But it does hit churches particularly hard because, unlike the Senate, for example, they are not necessary for society to function. Churches have a voluntary dimension that has always meant that their authority is highly attenuated. Freedom of religion is a very good thing, but it does shift power toward the congregant, who can easily behave like a customer, and away from the clergy, who may find that they have to behave more like salespeople to attract and keep their flock. And in a world where institutional authority in general is seen as less and less plausible, today even the attenuated church power of the recent past starts to look exceptionally ambitious.

To all this we might add the role of technology. The invention of the automobile might be said to have been the real shattering blow to church authority, as it allowed individuals easy access to an even greater range of churches. Now the internet has more or less abolished geography in its entirety. A person in Florida can, if they wish, be part of a church service in Rome as long as it is streamed on the web. And this can be at a time of the person’s choosing. We might say that technology in the form of the internet has not only further eroded institutional power in practice, but it has also reshaped how we imagine our relationship to the church. The customer now really can be king over space and time. And the time of COVID served to supercharge this because most, if not all, Christians had to worship online for a time, and many priests and pastors have seen their returning congregations diminished as a result.

In light of these problems, how might the church recover its integrity and authority?

The first thing to note is that credibility with the world outside the church is not something to be desired in an unqualified manner. The New Testament makes it clear that the church is not a continuous part of the wider culture. The message of the cross is foolishness to Greeks and an offense to Jews, as Paul argues in 1 Corinthians. That sets limits to the church’s plausibility in the wider culture and indicates that a church that is not at some level offensive to that wider culture is likely not articulating the gospel in a correct manner. Christians are, to use Peter’s language, sojourners and exiles or, in the cliche of earlier generations of believers, in the world but not of it. This is not an excuse for gratuitous offense or implausibility, but it is a reminder that being repudiated by the secular world is not necessarily a sign that the church is at fault.

This is particularly true today. For many centuries, the terms of recognition, or membership, in  civic society have been broadly consistent with the terms of recognition in the church because both shared the same broad moral vision. For example, in the year 1900, while Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and atheists disagreed over significant religious issues, most were in agreement over, say, the fact that marriage should be between one man and one woman, and that for life except in exceptional circumstances. And when the moral vision of society as a whole is shared broadly, religious differences can then be happily assigned to the pre-political realm, where they will cause little or no broader social tension.

This is not the situation today. The broad moral vision of America in 1900 has crumbled and been replaced by competing moral visions that have created a highly contested public square. Further, the politics has become increasingly psychologized in response to the rise of the therapeutic self for whom inner feelings are central to well-being. In this new world, the failure to affirm particular identities is seen as an act of oppression and even at times described using the language of violence. Combine this with the rise of social media, whereby all of life can be performed in public, and we have a world that has erased the boundary between public and private and also abolished the pre-political realm.

This new situation makes personal religious convictions a matter of heated public interest. Now to hold to the traditional view of Christian marriage is to run afoul of one of the terms of recognition in secular society, because in doing so the Christian fails to affirm the legitimacy of an identity and a relationship that said society has already deemed legitimate. The Christian’s belief looks like bigotry, and there is no context in which holding such a view is deemed warranted or permissible. Christians are faced with a situation that has perhaps not been seen widely in the West since the fourth century: To be both a good church member and a good citizen has become increasingly difficult. Difficult choices will have to be made in the coming years.

Two things now seem obvious. First, the church will become smaller. We have already witnessed this over the past few decades, and COVID has served merely to accelerate the process. As church membership becomes more costly, the decline will likely continue for some time. Second, the church will lose even more credibility in the wider culture because it will look increasingly bigoted and detached from what society regards as reality. This is not a cause for rejoicing, but neither is it reason for despair. It is simply the cost it pays for fidelity in the world in which she—and we—now find ourselves.

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