Between 1999 and 2021, America went from a nation in which 70 percent of the population identified with a local religious body, to 47 percent, a drop of 23 points in 22 years. This caused the New Atheists to celebrate the death of religion. It turned out to be a short-lived celebration. Since 2021 the number of Americans who identify with a local religious body has remained stable at 47 percent, and now appears to be modestly increasing. What changed?

There has never been a culture in history that did not have robust religious communities. We did not take off as a species until we moved from the level of blood kin to the level of tribe. That is when civilizations developed and our species gained strong momentum.

What brought us together as tribes? As I’ve written before, it was not our need for safety. That was secondary. The primary reason was our search for meaning. Why do you think Stonehenge was built, and why over one million people a year visit the 5,000-year-old historic site? Our left hemisphere dismissively proclaims, “This is just a bunch of rocks in a circle.” The right hemisphere says, “Quiet, there’s something going on here.”

When my daughter Jael and I went to Stonehenge last month, we arrived just as it opened, before the crowds. It was a cold, gray morning, the only cloudy and cold day of our trip, and it felt just right. It somehow enhanced the experience. The last time I was that mesmerized was when I first saw Monet’s The Red Kerchief in the Cleveland Museum of Art. But that’s a different post for a different day.

The modern age was built on the narrow foundation of the left hemisphere and its fixation with categorization and analysis. It only wants data. For the last 500 years we have virtually ignored the right hemisphere, the primary hemisphere, that puts knowledge in context, giving meaning to the bigger picture.

The modern age was also built on the human ego and its tyrannical demand for just two things, power and safety. The right hemisphere is the realm of what Carl Jung called the self, and every major religion calls the soul. The left hemisphere might bring us knowledge, but the right hemisphere is where knowledge grows into wisdom.

Classic liberalism did not kill religion. The two coexisted nicely. Classic liberalism said there is more that unites us than separates us. Religion says the same. Post-liberalism and religious fundamentalism are what brought about the downturn in religious affiliation. The desert religions may have understandably begun as religions of scarcity, but in their mature forms they have become religions of abundance, compatible with classic liberalism. In their fundamentalist forms, however, they remain religions of scarcity, forever fragmenting into ever smaller groups in the fruitless search for power and safety.

Unfortunately, religious fundamentalists of all religions also believe it is all right to force their religious convictions on the rest of us. We used to look at Afghanistan and think, “Well at least we don’t have to worry about that here.” Notice I said “used to.”

And always, there is the other extreme. Post-liberalism also tried to force their worldview on us, becoming ever more extreme until we were left with standpoint theory, strategic essentialism, the rejection of anything approaching objective truth, cultural appropriation, and other teachings that say there is more that divides us than unites us. Only capitulation to the oppressed group, whomever they are, will allow us to move forward, they say. They captured the major universities, but that has now brought about a powerful pushback.

On the conservative side, Christianity gave up Jesus in favor of a Bible they could worship. Not the Bible as it was written, mind you, but the Bible as their religious leaders interpreted it. Instead of Jesus’s preference for metaphor, they reimagined the Bible as a book of literal meaning. Instead of Jesus’s teaching awe of the creation, the Bible became a book of scientific explanation. Instead of Jesus’s embrace of mystery, the Bible became an inerrant book of certainty.

When you abandon Jesus for a simplistic version of the Bible, no wonder you end up leaving a church with a fear-based political perspective that knows nothing of love and forgiveness. There are two kinds of Christianity. There is the kind that focuses on fear, and the kind that focuses on love. They opted for a fear-based faith.

In the midst of all of that madness from the religious right and radical left, where did hope go? I am happy to say while hope may still be elusive, people are at least searching for it again. They are looking for a church that is not going to tell them they are going to hell, but also not going to tell them that because they are white and educated they are the primary cause of someone else’s living hell.

So where are the churches that welcome with open arms, and do not focus their primary attention on telling you that you are the problem? These are churches that boldly preach the good news of loving God, neighbor, and self. They are places in which we can figure out how to be human together, learn to worship that which is beyond our ego, and synergistically serve to lessen suffering.

Do these churches exist? I preach at a number of them regularly. I saw signs of the church moving anew at the Center for Faith and Justice Conference in San Francisco in February. I will see it again next week at the Post-Evangelical Collective Conference in Nashville and this August at the Wild Goose Festival.

If we can focus on love and forgiveness, a movement will flourish that brings hope. I believe it has already begun. In fact, I am getting ready to write a book about it. I will write about what brought us to this point, and how we are digging ourselves out of this current mess. More about that later.

And so it goes.

I was in London a couple of weeks ago and had lunch with Rocky Roggio, the creator of 1946, the excellent documentary about what the Bible says about being gay. We talked a bit about what it would be like to produce a similar movie supporting the transgender community. It was a very preliminary conversation, but it got me thinking.

Marriage equality became the law of the land because the media, primarily comedic television, normalized gay people. As I have written before, it started with Norman Lear’s All in the Family, which introduced the subject in a sympathetic way. From there it went to the scripted Ellen show, in which the protagonist came out as a gay woman. After that is was Will and Grace, a comedy in which the showrunners wanted to focus on the concepts of will and grace and what life is like for those who are gay. From there we went to Modern Family in which one of three storylines was about a gay family. Today, in television, characters are incidentally gay. It is evidence that our culture has come to embrace gay people, a wonderful thing.

Unfortunately, the same has not happened for the transgender population. We could use a few television shows or movies to help our cause. As Jonathan Haidt said in The Righteous Mind, humans do change their minds, but not unless information comes to them in a non-threatening way. As I’ve written before, I do have a life rights deal for a three-season 30 episode television show with a Hollywood studio, but getting the show funded is a whole different story.

Short of a media miracle, what can ordinary Christians do? First, we must return to teaching Jesus. As I have written recently, for the last 500 years we have lived in a culture fixated with the left brain, the hemisphere focused on what it knows rather than what it experiences.  It is the hemisphere that wants literal meaning, scientific explanation, and certainty.

Evangelical Christianity long ago sold its soul to the modern age, which was not good for the teachings of Jesus. Jesus taught in metaphor; they want literal meaning. Jesus taught awe for the creation; they want scientific explanation. Jesus taught mystery; they want certainty.

So they jettisoned the teaching of Jesus and started worshipping the Bible – not as it was written, but as their religious leaders interpreted it. The Bible became a book of literal meaning. Therefore the earth was created in six days and is only 6,000 years old. They wanted scientific explanation, so the Bible became a book of science. They wanted certainty so the Bible became a book without errors, something it never claimed for itself. And they focused on the teachings of Paul, more left brain, rather than the teachings of Jesus, which were decidedly right brain.

Therefore there is nothing more important than returning to the Gospels. If we teach the stories of the Gospels, we will not go wrong.

Second, we can refuse to work from an evangelical hermeneutic. There is no value in getting in debates over exegesis. The Bible is silent on transgender issues. If you wanted to make a case for the New Testament saying anything about trans people, it would be the positive words spoken by Jesus in Matthew 19: 11-12. Do not take their bait suggesting Genesis 1 precludes the existence of transgender people. It is lousy exegesis that absolutely no one taught until being anti-trans became a thing.

Third, stop teaching the rhetoric of the extreme left. Essentialism, standpoint theory, cultural appropriation, and the like have not helped anyone’s cause except the anti-woke cultural pushback. A return to classical liberalism, in which we believe there is more that unites us as humans than divides us, is the only way out of this morass.

Fourth, speak up. There are more than a few similarities between what is happening here now and what happened with Jews in Germany. From vilifying rhetoric to extermination took just 9 years. Look at these striking similarities. Jews were a tiny fraction of the population. Vilifying rhetoric began in 1933. Bureaucratic measures stripped away rights. Jews were banned from the military in 1935. In 1942 mass extermination began. One of the most striking things was the silence of the masses.

Trump in his State of the Nation speech spent five minutes denigrating trans people and ten denigrating immigrants. In the Democratic response there was no mention of trans people and one mention of immigrants. That is not speaking up for a beleagured minority.

The silence of our potential allies is stunning. Back in the day, Francis Schaeffer wrote about modern man wanting only personal peace and affluency. He equated that attitude with the end of the Roman Empire, when people only wanted bread and circuses. It appears most people are too comfortable to do anything about the plight of transgender people or immigrants. It is time to speak up.

Fifth, own what you know. Stop apologizing for being a Christian and start having confidence in the Jesus story, rightly told. No culture has thrived without robust religious communities. We have ceded robustness to the religious right. It is time to properly claim what we know to be true – that loving God, neighbor, and self is the hope of the world.

Yes, I believe a robust church can change the narrative. The reality is that a perverted church claimed the narrative while the rest of us stood by and watched. It is time to return the church to its rightful place as a cultural influencer, and make America what it has never truly been, the land of the free.