On Growing up Christian

Religion in North American society shows a curious and disturbing paradox. A post-war boom in church membership, Sunday attendance, building expansion, and other organizational activity has strangely produced a so-called religionless and secular society.

Although the precise nature and quality of this boom is still being debated, it is evident that after World War II church-giving, church-going, and church-building increased significantly. The expected result of all this activity was a society more “Christian” in its ideals, attitudes, and actions. Yet the opposite has occurred. Instead of a more robust and mature Christian expression in the population at large, the actual result has been a stage of spiritual chaos in which our society has been described as post-Christian.

This increase of church-related activity and decline of Christianity in our society has taken place before our eyes and within merely one generation. Only a small bit of comfort may be found in a cyclical theory of growth and decay. It is becoming increasingly evident that a growing proportion of the population is standing in the dark shadows of the Christian faith and sees the Light at only a murky distance.

The heart of the matter is that our consuming interest in the statistics of institutional growth has blinded us to the need for introspection and self-examination. In other words, it is easier to try to remedy an inadequacy by changing a program or procedure than by critically assessing our own Christian growth and that of our congregations.

The fate of Christianity is dependent not on the corporate, somewhat anonymous and amorphous body called the church so much as on individual Christians with a living faith. Currently popular criticism of the church erroneously shifts the blame away from the individual Christian, the real carrier and representative of the faith. Our concern for an increase in quantity has not been paralleled by an equal concern for an increase in quality. Although we have made tremendous efforts to introduce people to the faith, we have made only feeble efforts to foster the maturation of that initial response. But adjustment and reform of the corporate image can come only after individual commitment has been strengthened.

If the future of Christianity centers on individual Christians, then we must look to them in order to understand the present condition of faith in our society. What we must examine here is not how many believe a particular doctrine or engage in a certain religious practice but rather how people come to believe what they do. One means of discovering this is by analysis of the social process whereby Christians interact with others.

Every child is born into an ongoing society of prevailing norms, mores, and attitudes that he must learn and “internalize” if he is to function within that society. This learning process, known as socialization, depends on parents and other “representatives” of that society who know and value those patterns. These persons carry or teach the patterns to the child. Through selection and example, they not only determine the content of what the child learns, but also predispose him to react either positively or negatively. This they do by the manner in which they attempt to introduce the ideals and patterns. Although this process begins in early childhood, it does not end with maturity; all people learn and make decisions on the basis of their response to others in social interaction.

How do we learn about Christianity? In the evangelical tradition perhaps it is too strong to say that we learn the faith. But we can say that we learn about the faith. We depend on bearers of the faith or “significant others,” not only to tell us what being a Christian means, but also to show us through their lives the significance and consequences of the faith. Directly or indirectly these people influence our conceptions about religion and either hasten or retard our intelligent decision. If most Christians can cite particular persons who helped them develop their own Christian commitment, it is probably not too much to say that most “dropouts” or marginal Christians can relate their lack of commitment to “significant others” who failed to challenge them properly. These social factors are not solely significant, of course, but they provide an important clue to both the wholehearted acceptance and the apathy and rejection that Christianity encounters today.

Few people learn about Christ through private revelation or in a vacuum. Most learn as part of or from an ongoing Christian community whose members confront them with the faith. Christian socialization, then, is a process by which we learn moral prescriptions and theological tenets from other Christians. But of greater importance is a Christian’s continuing challenge to us through his own example; this encourages us to mature in our conception of what Christ’s love means to a world in need and to seek to understand our own role in that great task.

It is most illuminating to take a church’s membership list of ten years ago and try to ascertain the current spiritual state of each person. Inquire especially about those who have since left their parents’ home. The number who have shown an alteration, radical shift, or complete rejection of Christian commitment will be somewhat surprising—even among the most active church families. It may well be that many such persons are reacting to an unbalanced presentation of Christianity as a patterned response that evoked from them only superficial involvement.

Belief As A Social Problem

The non-Christian, the weak Christian, or the young Christian seeks for signals from mature Christians about what it is he is to embrace. But what are the signals he receives? For many people the extent of the socialization into Christianity is merely being socialized to a pattern, to a habit of regular church attendance or an unvarying order of worship. Others are primarily socialized to an institution: loyalty to the Methodist or Baptist way of doing things becomes a cardinal virtue. Both these types of socialization stress conformity as a Christian necessity and therefore become an easy target for rebellion. For a large majority, religious socialization is centered in a particular doctrine or a few Bible stories, neither of which are consciously related to daily living. Bible stories are often hazily remembered as children’s folk tales and have not been invested with enough contemporary application to be of much value. Over-exposure to a minor doctrine tends to pervert the faith; a part of Christianity assumes the place of the whole.

Certainly it must be very disillusioning to a seeking Christian to see bearers of the faith around him overplaying these aspects. A limited diet becomes indigestible in the long run. When either institutional loyalty or doctrinal loyalty becomes the essence of faith, the belief system is much more easily discarded, or at the least spiritual growth is stunted.

Coupled with an unbalanced content is an unbalanced intensity of Christian activity and experience. The first type we call over-socialization, that is, constricting the pattern of Christian experience or overdoing its demands to the exclusion of alternatives. Too many hellfire-and-brimstone sermons or continual insistence that the church be the center of all leisure-time activity has had this effect. By contrast, other persons have only vague conceptions of what Christianity is; they are afflicted with weak socialization. Worship participation only on special occasions and devotional activity only in time of crisis leads to a “crutches” Christianity, the supports for which can be discarded at will. A third type is a negative socialization to the faith in which, for example, known believers make Christianity unattractive through personality quirks, argumentation, or division. In other cases, children conceive as mere rhetoric what parents teach but do not practice, and rejection easily follows. Perhaps most distressing is that many people have no socialization whatever into the Christian faith. They have absorbed certain Christian ideals from the culture while remaining outside the purview of Christian teachings. Any judgments they make about Christianity from this distance are likely to be superficial and uninformed.

Perhaps one explanation of the present spiritual apathy and decline is that people believe what we have taught them to believe. Intentionally or unintentionally, we have made faith appear to be a series of patterned and learned responses instead of a process of confrontation and growth.

Belief As A Social Challenge

Since we are speaking in sociological terms, what can be said sociologically about this problem of evangelization and conservation? Most significant is the fact that all Christians are representatives of their faith. They are not only image-bearers but image-creators; they show the non-believer what it means to be Christian. Human beings require social support, and we have the responsibility both of supporting other pilgrims and of providing an image that will attract non-pilgrims to the journey.

Ministers and church leaders are particularly important socializing agents. They have a responsibility to be convinced and yet broad-minded, to set priorities and yet encourage diversity of interests, to encourage participation of all believers and yet stress meaningful activity. To be sure, parents are still the primary socializing agents. Unfortunately many families leave the bulk of a child’s religious socialization to the mother. Experience has taught us that the lack of a father’s support often contributes to a peculiar conception of religion that over-emphasizes feminine needs. The role of faith in parents’ lives is inevitably transmitted to their children, who then pass judgment on the faith.

We are now reaping what we have sown. Churchgoing, church-building, and church-giving, as patterned responses, are no substitute for a community of believers who support and admonish one another in the quest for Christian maturity.

Christian socialization is not close-minded indoctrination. It is the provision of the necessary tools and encouragement by which people can intelligently and fairly decide to organize their lives around the person of Christ. Only in the light of this common goal can Christians engage in mutual stimulation to improve on the frail institutional constructions of man.

Harry H. Hiller is a Ph.D. candidate at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He received the Th.M. from Princeton Seminary, and he was a research fellow at Oxford University 1970–71. His field is sociology.

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