Many lament the vast diversity of Protestant denominations on the American landscape: Why cannot we Christians agree more often? Denominations allegedly undermine the unity of the church. Let me suggest it is not denominations that undermine the unity of the church, but rather the way in which most Americans relate to church in the first place. The recent massive survey of religion in American life by the Pew Forum on Religion reminded us that church commitment sits lightly on those who attend church. The study told us that Americans shop for church as they might shop for groceries. There is nothing strikingly new in this phenomenon. America has been a nation of choosers for a very long time. Peter Berger, however, wrote nearly thirty years ago that when religion is strictly a matter of consumer choice, the very nature of that religious conviction undergoes a pro-found change. He referred to it as the “Heretical Imperative.” When religious conviction is chosen as one might choose any other commodity, it ceases to have much traction in people’s lives. It ceases to be an integrating center for them. It also puts them into a distinctly different relationship to their local church. When people shop for church they will increasingly see church itself as insignificant.
Though church attendance remained relatively stable over the last two decades according to the Pew Survey, they noticed how frequently people change church and change church traditions. There was no enduring place in people’s lives for a church tradition since people moved so fluidly across traditions. We need an anchor in our church life not of mere religious formalism, but as a restraint on the very commodification of religious life that is the real reason for such superficiality of religious belief. Committing oneself to a church tradition may serve as a bulwark against the increasing irrelevance of religious belief in people’s lives. When church and conviction are separated, eventually both will wither and fade away.
It is not an uncommon lament among postmodern evangelicals that we need to get “beyond denomina-tionalism.” As counterintuitive as it may seem in this environment, the opposite may actually prove more fruitful. Denominations as concrete expressions of theological traditions may serve to situate people in the very living communities that resist being defined by consumer choices. Denominations have historically functioned not as a means of greater independence and self-definition, but as concrete ways to be bound with others who are defined by the gospel across the ages.
Wherever the gospel has gone, there is a protection of the sacredness of time, the sacredness of space, and the sacredness of community. The gospel grants a reorientation to time in the covenantal remembering of the narrative of redemption. The gospel resists being captured by any cultural moment and any unique micronarrative. Instead, the gospel transports us into that strange time of the already and the not yet. The gospel also protects the sacredness of space in the conviction that Christ was incarnate in the flesh and continues to be really present in the Lord’s Supper by the power of the Holy Spirit. This embodiment of the gospel has often been accompanied by an earthy piety among historic Protestant traditions celebrating the con-creteness of redemption. With-out the sacred space of the Lord’s Supper, all of life becomes a fast food meal that will never genuinely satisfy us. The gospel also protects the sacredness of community in the conviction that being bound to Christ entails that we are bound to each other. The “connectional” nature of the gospel is a central dimension of it. Dying to oneself is the other side of the coin of living for Christ. Dying to oneself is also antithetical to the selfish consumerism that leads us to shop for churches. Many young postmoderns desire a genuine community today, but too frequently are afraid of concrete, enduring communities that may impinge upon their actual choices.
Denominations are simply collections of church not only across a geographic space but also across many generations. In this sense, they are embodiments of living traditions. Their demise has been in part a function of the modern revolt against the sacredness of time, space, and community intrinsic to traditions. The church can seem strangely out of place in a culture where technology has radically re-construed our sense of time and space and community. Because of the power of our tools, we lose a sense of belonging to any particular place, since our lives are lived in the ubiquity of everyplace. The Internet is but the latest tool that enables us to transcend older notions of belonging to a place. So it is with time. The power of our tools deceives us into thinking that time is now “controllable.” We can do so much more in such a short space of time. Microwave a baked potato, fly across a vast continent in a day, scour the entire Bible in seconds with an electronic concordance. On the list goes. Since we no longer belong to space and time, the impulse is to abandon belonging to an enduring community as well. The counterintuitive reality is that the more powerful our tools are, the more we are controlled by them. Think of the stress you feel in an ordinary day by how much you “should” accomplish. Would it not be nice to belong to a specific time and place, removed from the burdens of being omnipotent and omniscient?
We should be reminded that collections of churches connected together (i.e., denominations) have served as a dissenting voice against religious hegemony and against cultural idolatries. Historically, denominations were the means to protect dissent while also remaining loyal to the larger social project of liberal democracies. The dissenting churches of England in the early eighteenth century (Presbyterian, Baptist, and Congregationalist) sought civil protection from the established Church of England while remaining loyal to the British crown. They saw themselves as prophetic corrections to the state church too closely allied with political self-interest.
Denominations with rare exceptions in the West have never viewed themselves as the “one true church.” They saw themselves as branches of the one true church removed from essential control by governing authorities. This permitted and at times encouraged a wider confessional conversation among the various branches of the Protestant churches. Unlike Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, Protestants had a built-in structural context for dissent. Under the increasing pluralization of modernity, denominations became all too fiercely independent of each other; and under the conditions of a consumer culture, they became fiercely protective of their “market share.” The result was the inability of people in the pews to see any remnant of the visible unity of the gospel beyond local congregational life. It may be understandable that the people lament the divisions of modern denominational life, but the greater tragedy has been the autonomy and anonymity of religious life unhinged from enduring religious traditions.
The dynamics of denominational identity underwent a significant shift through the middle decades of the twentieth century when the major denominations on American soil divided along critical sociopolitical lines. These sorts of divisions split denominations into two parties, conservatives and liberals. Religious identity became more and more identified with one’s sociopolitical convictions. Religious conservatives and religious liberals were the two great parties of American religious life in the second half of the twentieth century. These great culture war definitions had the unintended consequence of flattening out the differences among the denominations. Evangelical Presbyterians and evangelical Methodists were likely to see themselves as allies and their liberal counterparts as foes. The increasing importance of the state during the period was reflected in the political template (liberal/conservative) being the primary framework defining church life. Even the formations of new denominations in the period tended to emerge either as conservative or liberal in the cultural space they inhabited. The rise of parachurch and nondenominational ministries in this period did not escape the liberal/conservative divisions either. They simply reinforced the notion that religious people were more centrally identified by the political tradition they belonged to rather than any religious tradition grounded in a peculiar creed or confession. The difficulty of Roman Catholics to assimilate into the democratic culture through much of the twentieth century was in part a function of their sense of belonging to a different sacred political order. So it continues with confessional Protestants in our day who seem oddly out of place on the liberal/conservative spectrum.
The captivity of current ecclesiastical identities along the political spectrum betrays the more fundamental identity of the church as the bearer of a sacred wisdom of an entirely different order than the political sphere. Denominationalism is neither the cause nor the consequence of the political captivity of the church. That captivity is owing rather to the loss of wisdom about the sacred matters by which the church is constituted, and conversely the embrace of a conventional wisdom by which Christians pragmatically live out their concrete existence in highly commercial contexts.
Peculiar to the witness of the gospel in the New Testament is the embrace of diverse tribes, races, and cultures. The apostle Paul notably grounds this claim in the reality that Christ is our peace who has “broken down the dividing wall of hostility.” A distinctive dimension of the gospel ought to be made manifest in the reconciliation of those who belong to the same Lord. This serves as a pungent testimony against those fractured churches or fractious denominations all too prevalent today. Justifiably, many of the young postmodern evangelicals echo this criticism against the “traditional” church. The overcoming of diversity, however, happens not by greater isolation nor by great anonymity, but by the honest reconciliation of disagreements. Reconciliation is accomplished in the breaking of bread together in the Lord’s Supper. It is accomplished in the sharing of one baptism. It is accomplished when living traditions bump up against each other seriously. Reconciliation is not possible if there are no enduring relationships. And it is precisely those enduring relationships that are so countercultural to our present postmodern and consumer moment.
