I did not know it was possible, a mainline church that was growing, vibrant, socially active, multi-generational, theologically progressive, and quite large. Plymouth United Church of Christ in Des Moines, Iowa is a delightful congregation that gives me great hope that traditional theologically liberal mainline churches are not all in decline.

It was my privilege to be with the good folks in Des Moines a couple of weeks ago. I preached for their contemporary worship service on Saturday, and for both traditional services on Sunday. Sunday’s 9:00 am service included two youth choirs with scores of young people. The 11:00 am service included a chancel choir that was every bit as good as any I’ve heard in a church anywhere. The building was full for both services.

I also had the privilege of speaking to a between-services group of about 50, and a whole church luncheon after the second worship service. I definitely used up my allotment of words in my five speaking opportunities, and answered probing questions asked by knowledgeable folks who surprised me with their understanding of the issues facing the queer community. Jared Wortman, the senior pastor, is well-educated, brilliant, and pretty-much half my age. I don’t know how you amass a library that large when you are that young.

I have seen the statistics. Throughout most of the twentieth century seventy-percent of Americans identified with a local religious body. Between 1999 and 2021 that number dropped to 47 percent. That is a 23 point percentage drop in 22 years, by any measurement a precipitous decline.

Our species never began to thrive until we moved from the level of blood kin to the level of tribe. That is when civilizations began to develop and huge strides forward became the norm. What brought us together as tribes? As I’ve written before, it was not man’s need for safety, it was man’s search for meaning. We have always best searched for meaning in community. The myth of the ruggedly individual American is just that, a myth. We have always come together in community to seek meaning.

If we look at the period after World War I we see the great joining of America. It was not just houses of worship that benefitted, it was all social networks, from the Rotary Club to the Kiwanis, Masons, Elks, and Shriners. Today they are all in decline. The builder generation, those born before 1946 were the last to participate in community gatherings at such a high level, the church included.

The last quarter century has seen huge changes in how we do community. More time is spent at work, often in multiple jobs. More parents are involved in their children’s sports, and not in their own social clubs and endeavors. Extended families no longer participate in life together, be it church, synagogue, or any other social endeavor. The church has suffered, and I believe humanity has suffered.

We were made for community, and thrive within it. It is where we cross-pollinate and grow. It is where we challenge and are challenged. It is where we bond together as a cosmic benevolent force, or a cosmic malevolent force, depending on the nature of the community of which we are a part. I believe we need the church, so when I see a congregation like Plymouth, I am buoyed.

Maybe left-leaning mainline Protestantism is not dead. Maybe it can help restore the notion that we have more in common than what separates us, that the extremes of standpoint theory, or progressive separatism can be countered by those committed to core universal principles. What guarantees a strong future are communities that foster real integration and encourage people to find what they have in common, not what separates them.

From all appearances, Plymouth UCC is one such community. I am by nature an optimist. It is difficult to be very optimistic in America nowadays. My weekend in Des Moines renewed my optimism, as did the next week at TEDWomen and the following weekend at the Evolving Faith Conference in Minneapolis.

On dark days we all need glimmers of light. That is where the hope lies. Thank you Jared, and the good people of Plymouth UCC for being a glimmer of light for me.

And so it goes.

Turns out we cannot turn loose of Jesus. The 1,200 or so people at the Evolving Faith Conference this past weekend, and the larger number watching online, just can’t turn loose of Jesus. Most of us come from evangelical backgrounds, and while we’ve jettisoned the baggage of fundamentalism, we have somehow managed not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

James Fowler’s book Stages of Faith is a classic. He describes the stages of faith development with the language of a social scientist. The first two stages are the magical faith of children. First, mom and dad are the gods, quickly exchanged for dinosaurs and such. Stage three is where a lot of folks get stuck. It is traditional faith, full of rules and regulations and angry gods, reluctant to allow anyone onto their heavenly real estate.

On this side of the Abrahamic divide, stage three residents are evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. The fundamentalists are a tad more conservative than their evangelical cousins, though evangelicalism has taken a hard right turn over the last couple of decades. Thanks Paige Patterson, Focus on the Family, Franklin Graham… Well, I shouldn’t have started listing them. We’d be here all day.

Stage four is the stage of disenchantment, in which we begin to question the duality of in/out theology and reject the notion of an angry God who would fry his own offspring. In America most people get stuck in stage four, sometimes smugly so. I was talking with a woman who said, “My first Sunday at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I went to mass. The second Sunday I stayed in bed. I’ve ever been back.”

Since we’ve always best worked out the meaning of life in community, I find that sad. I also find sad the statistic that throughout the 20th century 70 percent of Americans had a local religious community to which they belonged. Between 1999 and 2021, that dropped to 47 percent, not a good sign for organized religion.

Some people still recognize that community is the best place in which to work out life’s meaning, and those good people move on to Fowler’s stage five, in which there is a re-enchantment of faith. The journey is usually back to the religion of childhood, but with a much broader, non-dualistic perspective. If you happened to be raised Christian, then it’s a return to Christ, but it’s the Christ described by Richard Rohr in the Cosmic Christ, not the Christ of fundamentalism.

Those are the folks I was with in Minneapolis, post-evangelicals who made it through stage four and on to stage five because they never lost sight of Jesus. You know, the one who on his last day of public ministry said religion is all about loving God, neighbor, and self, and said it so convincingly that from that day on, no one dared to ask him any more questions.

We listened to preachers like Sarah Bessey, Alicia Crosby Mack, Randy Woodley, Amy Kenny, Krista Tippett, and in the session I preached in, Barbara Brown Taylor, Wil Gafney, Joyce del Rosario, and yours truly. We had long conversations and bought lots of books (it was kinda nice to have both my book sell out and Jonathan’s as well.)  And we talked a lot about Jesus.

What brought me to tears was none of that, rich and salient as the sermons were. What brought me to tears was 1,200 people singing How Great Thou Art in four-part harmony, while The Many led us with the heartfelt fervor of old time revival musicians .

Pretty much everyone in attendance came from the same stock, generations of families capable of singing all four verses in four-part harmony without opening a hymnal. I wept for the memories of good people with a simple, yet powerful faith, formed through generations spent in communities of faith, whether in urban neighborhoods, rural white clapboard church buildings, or suburban sprawls.

The old time religion does not work for these folks anymore, stage three a distant memory. But the music still has power, words redolent with meaning beyond most worship songs written in the last half century. We sang with joy and sorrow. Joy that we had found one another. Sorrow that we have lost so many who have not joined us on the road less traveled by.

After the conference ended, a number of the speakers and musicians gathered for dinner at the hotel where we stayed. Eating together, talking about our love for the church, glad to be rid of the rage and anger that had driven us in stage four, showing grace for those still there. It was all so good.

My week began at a thriving mainline UCC church in Iowa (I will write about that next week) followed by TEDWomen in Atlanta (I will write about that the following week,) and ended with the strains of How Great Thou Art in the Minneapolis convention center.

Fate had it that Dr. Wil Gafney, my fellow-speaker on Saturday, was on my flight from Minneapolis to Dallas. For three hours we talked animatedly of life and its joys, both buoyed by our time at Evolving Faith. As I bade her farewell at Dallas, to head to my connecting flight to Denver, these words were on my lips,

Then sings my soul, my savior God to thee

How great Thou art, how great Thou art

Then sings my soul, my savior God to thee

How great Thou art, How Great Thou Art!

The phrase has become as common as the air we breathe. Whether on the right or left, old or young, everyone talks about “my truth” and “your truth.” The first time I heard the term was when Oprah used it on her show fifteen or twenty years ago. I thought, “Oh dear God, don’t let this catch on.”

It caught on. The octogenarian with whom I occasionally have lunch, many of the people in my church (maybe most of them), my granddaughters, and every pundit on television all talk about “your truth.” I’ve even heard fellow-counselors use the term. “My truth” and “your truth” has entered the American lexicon without so much as a whimper. Well, I’m whimpering.

It all began with the discoveries of Quantum physics and the arrival of postmodernism. Physicists discovered objective truth does not exist. The scientist is always a part of the equation. Subatomic particles do different things depending on whether or not they are being observed. The scientist, with his or her purposes, is always a part of the observation.

I liked the way a friend of mine put it in the 1990s in a book chapter on postmodern apologetics, There Is No Such Thing as Objective Truth, and It’s a Good Thing, Too. I loved the chapter. As long as humans or anything created by humans is involved in the measurement, objective truth is not attainable.

The problem is with dualistic thinking. If the only option is dualistic thinking, then if something is not objectively true, it is not true at all. It’s objective truth or nothing. That is what professors in my conservative seminary taught, the all or nothing plan. Such dualistic thinking is neat and tidy, but it does not square with life as we live it.

Recently the British Prime Minister succumbed to the same mistake so many other conservative politicians have made. He is quoted as saying, “There are males and females and that’s it. It’s common sense.” Except it is not. There are dozens of intersex conditions, and study after study show gender is a spectrum. It is the same as saying, “There’s straight and there’s gay and nothing in between.” You won’t find many takers for that statement. We know a lot about bisexuality and many of the other subtleties of sexual identity.

But back to the notion of truth. Those who depend on dualistic thinking have quite a dilemma. If something is not objectively true, then there is no such thing as truth. That is the narrative that has won the day in America, hence the capitulation to “my truth” and “your truth.”

Just because absolute truth or objective truth is not possible, it does not mean we cannot attain something extremely close to objective truth. My friend’s article suggested we name it, “rigorous intersubjective truth.” In other words, with every tool available, we get as close to objective truth as is humanly possible.

That is the kind of truth we’ve been building civilizations upon for millennia. It is the truth obtainable through the scientific method. It has brought us cures for cancer, trips to the moon, the JWST telescope, cell phones, and the computer you’re probably reading this blogpost on.

The truth is determined to be that which is generally agreed upon through rigorous intersubjective study. Some things require more study than others – say Chaos Theory or the Big Bang. Others are fairly simple, like the fact that the New York Mets were terrible this year. Doesn’t take a lot of intersubjective study to reach that conclusion.

All of this to say that truth is best modified by the word “the” and not the words “your” or “my.” Postmodernism, with its need to deconstruct anything and everything, is obsessed with the slippery nature of truth. After the modern age and its conviction about the immutability of reason, I understand this tendency to ride the pendulum to the other extreme. But just because every culture, ethnicity, and people group has its own perspective that will shade the truth, a perspective that needs to be taken into account, it does not mean there is no such thing as truth.

I believe when most people say “my truth” or “your truth” what they are actually referring to is not truth at all, but their preference. I believe green is the prettiest color. You might believe blue is the prettiest color. We each have a preference and opinion, but it is not the truth. The truth is that green and blue are colors, period.

I’m reading a marvelous new book by Yascha Mounk, The Identity Trap. He speaks eloquently and I believe accurately about the state of communication and truth in these tumultuous times. He believes giving up on the notion of truth will not bring us together. It will only separate us, just as giving up on the notion that there is more that unites us than separates us, will also keep feeding America’s ever-increasing divide.

I believe there is more that unites us than separates us, and I believe that is the truth.