Church affiliation declining in Canada....God, not so much!

 The 2021 Canadian Census, from Stats Canada, as reported today in The Star, in a piece by Dhriti Gupta, indicates:

The latest data shows the proportion of no-religious Canadian has more than doubled in the past 20 years- to 34.6 per cent, up from 16.5 per cent in 2001. Meanwhile, though Christianity remains the majority religion in Canada, only 53 per cent of the population reported an affiliation with a Christian religion, down 14 per cent from 2011 and 24 per cent from 2001.

Cited as a reason for the decline in Christian responses is the obvious disparity in demonstrated moral values by the institution(s) that are purported to be the  protector, preserver and designer of moral values, the church. Holding “sacred” principles, like unmarried clergy, as if such an institution were ever part of the ‘mind of God’, has never been a tenet that any institution could uphold and sustain. That is not some “Delphic oracle’ speaking and writing from some elevated perch in history.

That is a statement whose basic truth is so self-evident as to be the Achilles Heel of any theology that puts God on the side of abstinence outside of a marriage between and man and a woman, and evil on the side of all other sexual activity. While procreation remains at the heart of all human aspirations and is integral to the fulfilment of many human beings of all faiths, cultures, ethnicities and traditions, intimacy, without the prospect of procreation between consenting adults is an essential ingredient for not merely pleasure and comfort but for one’s notions of acceptance, value, worth and even as a foundational feature of one’s well-being.

Having started from an unsustainable ethical, moral, theological, and natural perspective, as if to deny oneself as indication of a higher sacrifice to God, in the belief that God either needs or wants such a sign of obedience and that such sacrifice is also a healthy discipline for humans, and then stretching the premise to exclude all those who do not fall easily, naturally or willingly into the binary male-female categories, the church has in effect, been hoisted on its own petard.

And for those who reject the church’s objectification of morality, under the various rubrics of sanctity, spirituality, discipleship, and worship to then be considered self-indulgent narcissists whose lives fail the ultimate test of worthiness for an after-life in Heaven, by the ecclesial institution, and those charged with the responsibility and duty to defend that institution and its faith cornerstones, creeds, traditions, fathers, and liturgies is only an exacerbation of the original hubris, of those whose thought, prayer, writings and legacies have encumbered the institution and its generations of “leaders” for centuries.

Constructing a metaphoric moat around the ordination of men, for example, is just another of the many exclusions that are indefensible, from a moral/ethical perspective as well as from a theological perspective. The false and paradoxical crippling of the ordained, in a “socially elevated, morally unsustainable, politically and corporately designed status”, in order to enhance the community standing of the church, and the sanctity of those donations that are essential to build buildings and maintain them, to heat them, to purchase sacramental elements, and to pay clergy both salaries and pensions, is counter-intuitive to the deeply needed and extremely engaging  developmental work of pastoral care.

Pain and the plethora of faces it presents, in the lives of men and women, lies at the heart of all faith communities’ theory and praxis. The compassion, empathy, understanding and patience including the silence of the ministry of “presence”, along with the innumerable “service” components of care for those in crisis, in the immediate aftermath as well as for prolonged periods afterward are all notable, and indisputable occasions for those on both sides of the pain, those directly experiencing it and those ‘ministering’ to them, are all moments when “God” is or can be so profoundly experienced by both clergy and lay person. No moment of a death, a divorce, a life-threatening illness, a still-birth, a serious accident, a natural disaster, a spirit-threatening betrayal can be either fully comprehended or fully appreciated and empathized. The ‘victim’ of such intense darkness often is so overwhelmed that s/he wants total isolation, aloneness, quietude, and reflective time. And the training and development of the instinct to “care” as in “talk” and “process” and “hold” or bring a meal, or a coffee, or a seemingly relevant “resource” gives way, effectively, to the truth that there are really no formulaic, predictable, patterned and conditioning stimuli that might be appropriate.

These moments, are, in a word, “beyond the scope of human comprehension and appropriate support” and yet….thank God there are those who still try. And many make those gestures, prayers, pastoral visits, in the name of God, and in a spirit that they umbrella under a rubric that hope and believe the God would “approve” and endorse. Truths are frequently told at moments when we are most “unnerved” and “unarmed” or “disarmed” from the social and political and psychological expectations  and demands of the daily “encounters” in the public and professional world. Feelings that we did not know we had, and were certainly not prepared to face, flood our eyes, our bodies and our minds and hearts. “A puddle” is a cliché by which we often refer to ourselves in those moments. And the essential criterion most of us ascribe to how we got through such moments is encapsulated in the words, “Thank God I was not alone!”

Being alone, in a very dark and distressing and seemingly endless pain and place, is a description of those moments for which none of us is either prepared or equipped. And while social workers are trained to accompany us in those moments, and are now included in the staff rosters of most hospitals, thankfully, the “religious” professional, the chaplain, while available for “comfort” and “kindness” and “compassion” and even hopefully “empathy” (agape love in the Greek tradition), is a visible symbol of a relationship, not only with theory and psychological and therapeutic counsel, but with a “higher power”…some other ‘symbol’ of something or some force or some comprehension of the inexplicable.

From the beginning, humans have deferred to one or more ‘deities’ as a way of confronting the indiscernible, the “beyond” reason, beyond the senses, beyond the explainable and beyond the expanse of human perception and imagination. In fact, the deity (or dieties) and our relationships with it/them, have been and continue to be integral to all cultures and civilizations, beginning with an attempt to describe some origin of life, human life and the universe. Beginnings and final endings have been both instrumental and experimental in our developing world views, our belief systems our ideals and our fears and dreams.

And while that core seed is unlikely ever to be exorcised from the human consciousness and unconsciousness, in spite of the numerous labs and currently energized in the many aspects of neuroscience, astrophysics, and the new insights into the complexities of both human beings and the universe. The mystery of humans, and of the the galaxies and the inexhaustible curiosity we all share to pursue the multiple frontiers that continue to emerge, will not likely ever remove whatever it is that continues to link us, psychically, metaphorically, and somehow spiritually/religiously, to some other mystery.

The capacity, willingness, perseverance, diligence, probing thoughtfulness, intellectual and theological disciplines, and the capacity to both self-reflect and self-correct, among the various religious institutions and their respective seminaries and colleges, while ebbing and flowing int and out of historic periods of desert and flood, will likely continue to harbour some imaginal notion of something beyond the human.

And whether those attempts to explore, investigate, embrace, worship, venerate, celebrate, contend with, and even question the potential of a relationship between humans and one or more deities veer toward the mystical or more toward the scientific, nothing, literally nothing within our imagination can or will be “out of bounds” for humanity to consider and to reflect upon.

A while back I heard a wise person refer to God not as a noun, neither male nor female, but rather as a relationship, embracing both the activity of verb and the solidity of noun…another person once referred to tennis game as an act of prayer, symbolically, of course. Androgyny, that condition in which characteristics of both genders are clearly expressed in a single individual, is another of the depictors that have been applied to God, in a spirit of “inclusion” and respect for “diversity”.

These now highly politicized cultural terms of inclusivity and diversity, come from a moment in human history whcn the sanctity of the traditional “church” (therefore religious, and therefore moral and ethical, by inference, if not by definition) position on sexuality is being so utterly dessicated and defamed, and when political action on behalf of representative minority groups, including racial minorities, whose abuse throughout history has been both sanctioned and championed by the religious establishment. It is no accident that these social and cultural (and moral and ethical movements) coincide with a steep decline in church affiliation. It is not accident that the churches, themselves, really have no legitimate answer for centuries of fossilizing of religious belief, religious creed, and religious practice.

And, to think, as too many church leaders continue to think that, by amending the liturgies to include popular musical compositions and lyrics will attract new adherents, is a vision extending about as far as a marketer’s nose. Marketing, the ecclesial word for “evangelizing” or “prosletyzing,” is a word that those still in the corporate world, including too many bishops, defer to when noting and considering how to stem the tsunami of disaffection. Presenting the ‘benefits’ of church affiliation, however, is not and never can be similar to and certainly not equitable with selling a product or service.

In fact, the whole notion of “corporatizing” the church, by “upgrading” the liturgy, and by generating “connecting” and community-building moments and experiences, and inserting new hymnody, and new instruments into the sanctuary, and also by continuing to venerate the balance sheet, and the numbers of new ‘convert’ or adherents, as measures of success…these are all counter-intuitive to the basic notions at the heart of the gospel. We all know, irrespective of our church affiliation and those of our parents and grandparents, that while liturgy and ritual have a legitimate place in our lives, especially as they tend to create moments of significance, a birth, a baptism, a confirmation, a bar-mitzvah/bat-mitzvah, a wedding, a funeral….these are all landmarks in the life of both individuals and families. And they are all worthy of celebration and memorializing…and there is no reason to exclude a deity from sharing those moments.

For the church to “own” those moments, along with the strings of expectation that have been wired around their legitimacy, however, seems recently to be a step too far for many.

We all know, too, if and when we enter a space, whether that space is welcoming, inviting, and supportive and sustaining…and we are not completely clear about how we know. Just as Leonard Cohen says in one of his songs, “ I know I am forgiven, but I do not know how I know/”….so too we know that we feel welcome and when or if we feel “a part” of something that we seek to learn more about, to investigate and to experience as a comfort/challenge/support/encirclement in which we “feel” (and that means far more than elemental emotions) we belong.

Naturally, we all have different thresholds and expectations for what we “want and need” in our willingness to “volunteer” to participate in a church setting. And, given the west’s fixation on money, churches, by definition, exist and survive on the “willing” and “enjoyable” and “reciprocal” and “mutual” sharing of both gifts and resources. And volunteering, as a component of the secular culture, has both a negative and a positive colouration: for some it invigorates and challenges and rewards; for others it is an exhausting and isolating experience, primarily because of the sociological “determinant” that 10 per cent of the people always “do” 100 per cent of the work…and that fact alone can and does only breed resentment.

It is not only the church that suffers from that resentment, and the disaffection that inevitable accrues; God, however s/he is envisages, also weeps at that disaffection.

And, while there have been renowned historic movements denoting the “death of God” and so many obvious reasons for those movements, God is not a “thing, being, entity or even force that any human desire, wish, activity or impulse can or will extinguish from our lives. And how we integrate whatever relationship we deem appropriate with God, we are all in fact, doing that just this moment, in both the writing and the reading of this piece.