Thin faith and hard times

"And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God — what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Romans 12:2

Jonathan Rauch, in Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy, names something many mainline Christians have felt but have not wanted to say out loud: much of our Christianity has become thin.

Not false. Not irrelevant. Not without compassion or moral instinct. Just thin.

Thin faith still uses Christian language, but it no longer forms Christian people deeply enough to withstand hard times. It can bless the values of liberal democracy, inclusion, pluralism, human dignity, and justice, but it often forgets how to root those values in worship, scripture, repentance, sacrifice, courage, and the costly imitation of Jesus. It can affirm the Beloved Community, but it may not have the spiritual muscle to build it when resistance comes.

Rauch puts the problem sharply when he says that the church suffers from a cultural “trade deficit” when it becomes “a net importer of values from the secular world.” When that happens, the church becomes “morally derivative rather than morally formative. Rather than shaping values, it merely reflects them, and thus melts into the society around it.”

That is a hard word for the mainline church, but it is not an unfair one.

At our best, mainline Protestantism helped shape the moral imagination of progressive liberal democracy. We helped teach the language of human dignity, public responsibility, education, civil rights, care for the poor, institutional trust, and the common good. We helped build schools, hospitals, civic organizations, relief agencies, seminaries, settlement houses, and movements for justice. We helped form citizens who believed freedom was not merely private preference, but moral responsibility.

But somewhere along the way, many of us began to confuse the fruit with the root.

We assumed that because many of our values had entered the culture, the culture would continue to carry them for us. We assumed that compassion, democracy, pluralism, racial justice, gender equality, and concern for the vulnerable would remain self-sustaining. We rested on our wins. We celebrated the progress already made toward what Martin Luther King Jr. called the Beloved Community, but we did not continue forming people deeply enough to carry that vision through backlash, fatigue, resentment, fear, and organized resistance.

King’s Beloved Community was never a polite synonym for niceness. It was not merely diversity training with hymns. It was a vision of justice rooted in agape love — a society where racism, poverty, and militarism were confronted, where human dignity was non-negotiable, and where reconciliation required transformation, not sentiment. King understood that the Beloved Community required both “a qualitative change in our souls” and a “quantitative change in our lives.”

That is thick faith.

Thick faith does not merely agree with justice. It trains people to suffer for it. It does not merely admire Jesus. It practices his way. It does not merely oppose Christian nationalism as bad politics. It exposes it as bad theology — a rival gospel built on fear, grievance, domination, and idolatry of nation.

And this is where the mainline church has been exposed.

When Christian nationalism began building its bench, it did not begin with a press release. It built institutions. It formed imaginations. It trained people to see politics as spiritual warfare. It created media ecosystems, legal strategies, donor networks, school boards, conferences, curricula, and congregational loyalties. It catechized people in Christian schools and colleges. PRRI reports roughly 30% of Americans are Christian Nationalists or sympathizers.  Barna researchers note that these Christians have been formed in “Christian World View” rather than Biblical and theological education.

Meanwhile, too many mainline churches were still trying to be liked.

We became fluent in welcome but hesitant about formation. We became good at saying “all are welcome” but less disciplined in asking, “Welcome into what?” We preached inclusion, but not always discipleship. We affirmed justice, but often avoided conflict. We valued education, but sometimes substituted information for transformation. We wanted churches to feel safe, but forgot that the gospel also makes us brave.

The result is that when the culture war intensified, our bench was not deep and our reach was not high.

We had people with good instincts but thin formation. People who believed in democracy but could not always explain why democracy needs humility, truthfulness, restraint, forgiveness, and moral accountability. People who believed in justice but were exhausted by the work. People who opposed cruelty but had not been trained in nonviolent courage. People who wanted the church to matter but had inherited churches that had become chaplains to the status quo.

This is not a call for the mainline church to become reactionary. It is not a call to abandon progressive commitments. It is a call to thicken them.

The church does not need less justice. It needs deeper roots for justice.

It does not need less welcome. It needs welcome that leads to belonging, belonging that leads to formation, and formation that leads to public courage.

It does not need less concern for democracy. It needs to remember that democracy depends on virtues democracy cannot manufacture by itself: truthfulness, patience, neighbor-love, reverence, self-limitation, repentance, and hope.

So what must the church do?

First, we must recover formation as central, not optional. Sunday worship alone will not form people deeply enough for this moment. We need scripture, prayer, moral reasoning, theological conversation, practices of service, intergenerational mentoring, and communities where people learn how to tell the truth without contempt.

Second, we must stop outsourcing our moral imagination. The church can learn from secular movements, but it cannot become morally derivative. Our commitments to justice, inclusion, democracy, and human dignity must be rooted in the God who creates, liberates, judges, reconciles, and makes all things new.

Third, we must teach people how to recognize counterfeit Christianity. Christian nationalism is not simply a political problem. It is a discipleship problem. It forms people in fear rather than love, domination rather than service, grievance rather than grace, and loyalty to tribe rather than loyalty to Christ.

Fourth, we must rebuild the church’s public courage. The mainline church does not need to become louder for the sake of being loud. It needs to become clearer. There are times when ambiguity is not humility; it is cowardice dressed in pastoral language.

Finally, we must reclaim the Beloved Community not as nostalgia, but as vocation. King did not give us a dream so we could admire it from a distance. He gave us a moral horizon. The Beloved Community is not inevitable. It must be formed, practiced, defended, and embodied.

The mainline church is thin and getting thinner when it forgets that faith is not merely a set of values we affirm. Faith is a way of life that forms people capable of living those values when they are costly.

The question is not whether the mainline church can regain cultural dominance. It should not want that.

The question is whether it can become spiritually deep enough, morally serious enough, and publicly courageous enough to help form people who can serve the common good in a time of fear.

If we cannot do that, we will continue to melt into the surrounding society.

But if we can, then perhaps the church can again become what it was always meant to be: not the chaplain of the status quo, not the echo of progressive culture, not the mirror image of Christian nationalism, but a community formed by Christ for the healing of the world.