Joining the Death Watch

I grew up among fundamentalists, and there really wasn’t any alternative viewpoints commonly expressed in southern West Virginia at the time. Even people who weren’t particularly religious seemed to believe in fundamentalism. They seemed to believe that they were sinners or just not as good as churchgoers. But none of that sat well with me. I wasn’t quite sure what I believed, but I knew I wasn’t a fundamentalist. When I went away to college, I studied religion and philosophy because I was looking for answers.

In my freshman year, I read an essay in my Religious Studies class called Death Watch. It was written by an academic theologian, I forget his name now, and he proclaimed that many who studied Christianity were now convinced that it was a dying religion. He claimed that our culture had changed so much and so quickly in the 19^th and 20^th centuries that Christianity was unable to adapt.

He pointed out that religions serve the culture in which they exist, and when they stop serving the culture, people begin to gravitate away from it. It finally ceases to be a viable force. It becomes a dead religion. He went on to point out that human history is in fact full of dead religions. It seems that to the author, individual religions weren’t all the important. He seemed to think that religions are merely vehicles that provide a means to express our spirituality and that when Christianity goes, something else will soon come along, something that will better serve our modern culture.

I was blown away by that essay, and I read it over and over again. It really helped me step back from my own personal disappointments and pain and see the religion I was brought up with in a more objective way. We are part of a culture. We’re caught up in it. But it’s only our way of doing things. It’s not essential. There are other ways. Habits can become so ingrained we can forget that we can quit doing what we’re doing anytime we want to.