What's Good About the Church? with Anthony Robinson | Episode 180

[0:00] Music.
[0:35] Hello and welcome to Church and Main, a podcast for people interested in the intersection of faith and our modern world. I'm Dennis Sanders, your host. Church and Main is a podcast that looks for where God is at work among the issues affecting the church and the larger society. To learn more about the podcast, listen to past episodes, or to donate, check us out at two places, churchandmain.org. Or churchandmain.substack.com. You can subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app, and I hope that when you do, you leave a review. That helps others find out this podcast. So today, it is an honor, and I'm really excited to speak with theologian and pastor Anthony Robinson.
[1:33] Robinson is an ordained pastor in the United Church of Christ, and he's also the author of 13 books, including the best-selling Transforming Congregational Culture, one that I remember reading and really enjoyed, and the award-winning What's Theology Got to Do With It? Convictions, Vitality, and the Church. He's a frequent contributor to the Christian Century, as well as many other publications, and he writes for the Daily Devotional, which is a daily email of the United Church of Christ. He has served four congregations, most recently Seattle's Plymouth Congregational Church, UCC.
[2:12] Tony Robinson joins me on this episode to discuss his recent blog post entitled, Maybe the Church Wasn't So Bad After All. He wrote about how people have long derided the church, especially for its many sins, but are now seeing the importance of the church in our society and world, especially as church culture and church attendance declines. If you're someone that cares about the church, especially the local church, you'll want to listen to this conversation with Tony Robinson. With that, let's listen in.
[2:47] Music.
[3:23] Yeah, yeah. I'm pleased to do it. Happy to meet you. I kind of wanted to talk, before we kind of go into your specific article, the article that you kind of based this off of, which was from Eric Brunson. And he wrote something in The Atlantic about basically that the lower church attendance was not the kind of nirvana that one would think would have happened. And I'm kind of curious, I mean, we know kind of some of your initial thoughts from the article, but what did you think about the article in general and what he was getting at? Well, I thought it was a great article, and I would say I thought it was a little bit late. I mean, he was not just talking about diminished church participation, but the overall church line in the United States. And he wrote as somebody who self-acknowledged that he's an agnostic or he's not a church person. I think he had a Jewish background, but didn't really have any ongoing faith community or practice. And he said his take had been basically that if the church declined, that might be a really good thing, because he mostly identified it with what he called the noxious political agenda and other weird stuff.
[4:51] But he was kind of saying, gee, I've had second thoughts about that. Maybe it's, you know, maybe there was more of a complex thing than he initially thought. And maybe in missing or in the church declining, we've lost some things. So I appreciated that and I appreciate his candor. I think, you know, most of my life we've been being told that the church was in decline and it was kind of a remnant of a previous superstitious age. And that, you know, we should go the way of the enlightened Europe and become a completely secular society. And so I think he was saying, gee, we seem to be trending that way and it may not be the secular panacea or heaven that I thought it was. Well, that was my initial take. Yeah, I think it was. Go ahead. Yeah.
[6:08] I think it was interesting, something that I can't remember if it was Ross Douthat or it was someone else that said this really back in 2017, that if you don't like the religious right, you really are not going to like the post-religious right. Um kind of talking about the dangers that if you think that that religion is the bane of all existence that something beyond that if we are you know no longer religious that actually is probably going to be a little bit worse than you think it is it's that it's not going to be this wonderful peaceful place um that you might think it's going to be yeah it's not i mean it's kind Kind of like the John Lennon song, imagine there's no heaven, there's no hell, and we can just all live for today. You know, that sounded very benign and very sweet. And I remember churches that sang it in their services, which seemed a little odd to me. But, yeah, I think that was, you know, one of Douthat's points in his various writing is, it's not that we don't have religion today in some forms. We have a lot of it or a lot of spirituality, a lot of religion. It's just bad religion.
[7:31] It's not time tested. It's not community tested. A lot of it's celebrity driven. A lot of it is self-aggrandizing. A lot of it plays on people's fears. So it's not like the answer, you know, it's kind of the old baby in the bathwater thing is you may want to throw out the dirty bathwater, but be careful about throwing out the baby. Maybe because it's just to say religion is the problem, throw it out. No, something is going to fill that spot. And I think, you know, we're definitely seeing if he sort of predicted that in 2017 with the rise of Christian nationalism, we're seeing really an almost anti-Jesus form of religion using the name of Christianity. Right. And I'd say, yeah, pretty idolatrous in many ways.
[8:36] So, yeah, and I think a lot of the more mainline and liberal churches have, and people have taken to heart the many criticisms of church religion and theology. For example, a lot of people during very deeply of the work of Jesus Seminar, which basically said, you know, the idea that Jesus was the Messiah or the Christ, the son of God is a is a late later invention. And Jesus really wasn't, you know, he was more of a wandering guru or teacher.
[9:18] And, you know, so a lot of people bought into that. And then I think some people really bought into what was called the new atheism of Dawkins and Sam Harris and like that. And, you know, religion is easy to, I mean, there's plenty of targets out there. And certainly the growth of the religious right that began in the late 70s and 80s and now has morphed into to Trump, the MAGA movement, and Christian nationalism, I think, you know, turned a lot of people off. And I understand that. I mean, I think that they have a lot to answer for in terms of undermining the church and religion. That said, my hat is off to many evangelical pastors who have not caved into that and who have often been, you know, have really paid a price for that.
[10:19] I can't remember the name of the book. I think it's The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory by Tim Alberta. He's kind of portraying or analyzing the way that Trump and MAGA movement have taken over much of the self-identified evangelical church. But he also profiles a number of churches and clergy in there who have not accommodated themselves to that, who have not made politics of grievance and race baiting and scapegoating their M.O. And have, you know, I think of a famous one being Russell Moore.
[11:05] But really many of the people at Christianity Today magazine, another one being Beth Moore, a famous Bible teacher in the Southern Baptist Convention who has left, partly over, I think, the clergy sexual abuse issues. But there are people, and many of them not well-known, who have stood their ground and have really led a cruciform life as a consequence. So it's not all one or all the other. And I have some hope that there may be an awakening among some of the evangelical church that has so easily accommodated itself to Trump.
[11:56] So one of the things that you talk about in the article and is relating and relating that to what Derek talked about.
[12:09] You may have frozen up. Kind of the role of institutions in our society and especially kind of the importance of a kind of a strong church. And so I guess my question would be, how does church matter to a large society, especially as we've become more frayed, more individualistic, and people are a lot more alone in a lot of different ways than they used to be?
[12:38] Yeah, well, I think, you know, there's no magic solution to that. And then clearly the forces that have eroded strong public institutions, whether we're talking about libraries, schools, public education, some used to speak of mainline churches as public churches by that meaning. They had some high-level involvement in the public community, and they tended to be made up of people from various political stripes.
[13:08] And then government itself. All of these are on the ropes today. And the reasons for that are complex. But institutions, and some of it can be blamed on institutions, institutions, especially when they're feeling threatened, I think revert to kind of risk aversion and brand management and will sacrifice their critics. I mean, for me, I don't know if you've been following this one, but a journalist with NPR came out with a piece about a week ago. And I thought it was a good piece. I thought it was responsible. I didn't think of personal attacks. He looked at a couple of cases in point. Well, as far as I can tell, NPR has done basically what the Southern Baptist Convention did when they were presented with criticisms and circled the wagons and blamed the victim. So he was initially suspended, and then he decided to resign. So we see a lot of that among institutions, and churches are not...
[14:30] Are not without fault in that area of becoming self-protective of the institution. And that would, you know, I was thinking next week's lectionary text, not this Sunday, is the bind of the branches. And Jesus says some branches die and they will be cut off and thrown on the fire. So some of that's going on. But there's other branches that are just not getting enough strength from the roots. And need, I think, to reconnect with deeper sources of energy and imagination. But institutions, you know, it's kind of easy and fashionable to say, well, I'm against institutions or I don't like institutional religion.
[15:20] You know, as soon as you've got two or three gathered together, and they gather more than once, you've got an institution to some extent. Um, now, um, so I, I'm not quite sure what the alternative is, unless it is simply individual spirituality, which seems to be, you know, popular in our culture, I think has some downsides to it as well. But most of us, um, I think human beings need, uh, the support, the guidance, we need guard rails. Fails uh we're not um you know rousseau's kind of vision of of the human being was that we come out uh we're we're kind of perfect innocent beautiful uh and institutions screw us up uh the family starting with the family starting with the church um and and and so on and so forth And, again, institutions are not blameless, but the idea that people don't need social and moral and community formation is, I think—.
[16:32] Erroneous, is really a disaster in many ways. And, you know, I don't know where we are on this now. I'm not active. I have grandchildren, but not. But a lot of parenting got into kind of, and schools really got into, how can we make little Johnny or Susie realize their own wonderful, full potential? And we look resistant to the idea that maybe there's some stuff Johnny and Susie need to learn that hasn't occurred to them. That it's not just a matter of a school providing a platform for their individual self-expression.
[17:17] And so institutions are formative in nature. And we live in a culture that has become performative. So, in Congress, for example, you see people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ted Cruz basically using the institutions that have been so formed over time and curated by many people's sacrifices simply as their platform. Form, and they do not allow the institution to play a formative role that might say to them, hey, you actually have some things to learn about governance. You actually have some things to learn about working with other people. And Trump, of course, was a big example of this. He did not, But he used the presidency and continues to use it as a performance platform.
[18:19] And so we've lost kind of the notion, not only of institutions have deteriorated, but they've deteriorated in part because we are reluctant to think that we may need some formation by traditions, elders, wisdom that we didn't come up with all on our own.
[18:42] Um so so i i yeah i think yeah go ahead i'm just gonna, sorry i think you're frozen again who is a, that's yeah um you've all been who's a scholar has said some of the same things about how, our culture is much more performative instead of um one that is formative um that you know know, allows us to kind of mold us into something. Now it's more of a platform.
[19:15] Um, and I think that that is actually something we're, we're seeing on, you know, how we raise our kids and even with sometimes with, I think within our churches and, and well. Yeah, yeah. There's very much of a consumeristic pressure in our culture and in our churches, you know, kind of make the buyer happy and religion becomes a product to be sold. Well, I'm currently in Mexico where I'm doing a ministry in residence at a church, and my sample of Mexico is small. I'm in a town called San Miguel de Allende. But it does seem to me that there are institutions that play a vital role here, and the main ones are the family and the church. Church and um and we see you know we like to hang out in the kind of the equivalent of the town square in the evening where there's always music and people walking around and you see people there in families all three generations or three generations or more and my wife would just say to me last night that you know here in mexico um she has some family ancestry here but she She said, in the States, I often feel as an older woman, invisible. Here, I don't feel that way. There's a kind of respect as a part of the culture for elders.
[20:44] And we've lost so much in our culture, and that's one of the things we've lost. But there is some kind of, there's something, there's kind of a foundation that has survived here in Mexico. And one of the expressions of it is people are generally quite polite, at least here and where I am now. You know, ordinarily, people will greet you on the street in a polite way. Ordinarily, people will smile at you. Ordinarily, people will, you know, not look at you in a store as if you're interrupting them if they work there. You know, they're there to help you. So there's some aspects of this culture that are an interesting contrast. Now, I'm not saying Mexico doesn't have problems. It obviously has many problems, but it does seem to have allowed to persist some of the institutions that play formative roles in people's lives and that provide them some guidance to go on.
[21:56] Yeah. So one of the things that you say towards the end of your essay,
[22:02] and I'll lift up the quote, is something I want to kind of talk about. So I'll share the quote. And it said, while we've already had a steady shitload of stories about the church's failures, we hear almost nothing about positive contributions, loving communities with mentors and role models, a larger, even sacred framework of meaning for an ordinary person's life, ways to understand and cope with grief and tragedy, encouragement to be engaged with, and people who aren't just like you. All of these I have seen with my own eyes time and time again, in the church, from the church. Are we perfect? No. But tell me which group or institution is. And the thing I wanted to bring up with that is that it seems sometimes, especially in mainlining circles, but you see it in other circles too, we're not good at highlighting those positive aspects. Why? I mean, why do we not talk about those things that I think are vital for our spiritual health and for our society? Well, I think that we've internalized the message of many of our critics that I cited earlier.
[23:23] You could go all the way back to Rousseau, but I'm thinking more of like the new atheists and really just kind of the drumbeat of a secular anti-religious culture. Now, I live in Seattle, which is a very blue, progressive place, and I would imagine that, say, Charlotte, North Carolina, is a different kettle of fish in terms of just the public perception. But I used to write a regular column in one of the papers in Seattle, and I would get –.
[23:56] I'd get a lot of feedback, and that was fine, and I tried to respond to it all. But I'd get one that I eventually called the Crusades, yada, yada.
[24:07] And basically how it went was, don't you realize, Reverend, all the terrible things the church has done? And it would begin with the Crusades and kind of end up with the Holocaust or something like that. And as if, no, I'd never heard any of this. And or that all our other institutions, including U.S. government, have have an equally checkered record. You know, it's it's but it's just people got a script going that I think I don't know what it arises out of. Maybe it arises out of a resentment toward a religion that seemed to be always shaking a finger at them and telling them they were inadequate or they were less than or something like that. But I think our understanding of religion is often very superficial and often very formed by very, I don't know, superficial stories in the media. I think the other thing going against us, which may really be for us, but in this culture is against us, is we live in a celebrity culture and the media can deal with religious celebrities.
[25:36] But by and large, the mainline liberal church doesn't generate celebrities. Uh, we're not, that's not our, um, you know, we're not kind of built that way. And, uh, we, uh, we actually, I think discourage the idea that it's all about, uh, you know, some, some individual and, and rightly so, but that means I don't think we're well positioned in a culture of celebrity, uh, to get public notice, uh, But I do think that we are in some ways our own worst enemy because we have internalized many of the laments of our critics. And so we come off as apologetic. We come off as slightly embarrassed. We're, at least in my church, the UCC, we're often more articulate about, no, we're not like those terrible fundamentalists. We know what we're not but not what we are so that again is a long standing and complex thing but it's, we tend not to be people who are.
[26:53] Who speak of God easily and, often are quite reticent people.
[27:07] So, you know, I think, yeah, that's something we just have been working on and must continue to work on But I just, I think, you know, maybe this fellow's Derek Thompson, I hope is a kind of indicator appearing in a magazine like The Atlantic, that we need to take another look and to not simply lump all religion, all church, all is in with the kind of the, oh, very punitive kind of know-nothing party, as it were.
[27:59] So, um.
[28:03] Yeah, man, there's, okay, I'll stop. You know, I wonder, though, if it also might fall upon those of us that are still within the church to tell stories of healing and wholeness and things that are positive, not to minimize the negative stories, but that that's not the whole story of the church. Right, right. Right. Well, you know, people like you are doing that with the technology like this. I'm a fan of the Crackers and Grape Juice podcast, and they're doing that. And I mostly enjoy what Nadja Bolts Weber does, and she does some of that.
[28:51] And so it's out there, and sometimes it's coming. It's not typically from the official denominational organizations or their mouthpieces, which tend to be have contrived to talk in ways that almost nobody can really understand. So I think, you know, maybe we're seeing new voices using the democratization of media technology such as yourself that will help us to do that better, one hopes.
[29:36] So, how do you think, and looking forward into the future, where do you see and can you see the church as an institution becoming a more vital force in our society? You know, there are a lot of different factors that have led towards it not being such a vital force, and the distrust of institutions. How does a church kind of build itself back to becoming a force in our communities again?
[30:16] Well, I think ironically, perhaps, we build ourselves back, not initially by turning outward, but by going deeper in.
[30:36] And going deeper in, I think, might move us beyond what I think of as, and have written about as, what I call civic faith. I think we need to get reacquainted with Jesus and with Scripture. There's an analogy I used in one of my books. My daughter for a while was on a cattle ranch in Australia. In those cattle ranches, they don't have any fences. It's an arid country, and what they have is wells. And the cattle won't get too far from the well. And I think we've spent a lot of time in denominational era putting up fences. And I think we need to be digging deeper wells. And if the well is deep and the living water is flowing, if lives are being changed, if we believe that God is alive in the world, uh i think i think um there will be vitality and there are points of vitality in the church um uh and people doing amazing work um and so i think i i see signs of hope but um we uh.
[32:01] So we need to support those that haven't given up and are digging deeper wells. And we need to, I guess, acknowledge that we got too accommodated to middle-class American culture and that we became too much, you know, it was hard to tell the difference between at least some of the churches I've been a part of and the Rotary. And there's nothing wrong with Rotary, but it's just church is different. And so, you know, I think we're in a time of struggle, but some people have taken the view, I think, that, oh, well, the institutional church, whatever they mean by that, is going to die and just hurry up and die and then something new will come. I'm not so sure about that as a strategy. There are churches that are faithful, that are serving.
[33:07] And I think rather than paying so much attention to declining churches, we ought to pay attention to the ones that are reasonably healthy. And we ought to pay attention to the leaders that are reasonably healthy. Leadership of the church today is a tough gig, but the media is preoccupied right now with the story of church decline. line.
[33:36] And yeah, it's very difficult for me to imagine mainstream media like Seattle Times, where I live, or New York Times, really doing thoughtful pieces that would illuminate.
[33:59] The life of a congregation in a positive way. It doesn't have to be a whitewashed story by any means, but just, oh, this is interesting. Look at what's going on here. There seem to be people coming here. They seem to be making a difference in their community. I wonder how that's happening. I don't see many of those stories, but I'd like to. Maybe there's some on the religious news service. I don't know. Occasionally. Yeah i do remember one story it still rings true to me all these years later and was actually written actually by a fellow ucc pastor um william daniel and she wrote something about the this was back in the day a kind of the spiritual but not religious thing and one of the things that i remember about that article is how important she felt that she needed church she needed people who who were from different walks of life, people who may have had it all together and people who are barely holding on, but that they come together.
[35:13] And I still treasure that essay and would love to hear more essays like that. Yeah. She did a follow-up book on that. Yes, she did. And yeah, I think she has a real gift for that. And we need more people that are also doing that.
[35:34] But I think in my sense is that as a broader culture, I guess I hope that, think that maybe some people, which could be single people, could be people in alternative family relationships, could be people in family, traditional families, are kind of waking up, looking around in America and say, They, you know, buying more stuff may not save us. Therapy may not save us.
[36:12] And there's nothing that the glue that holds this thing together is pretty tired. And maybe we ought to rethink, you know, maybe we ought to become involved in our community. Maybe we ought to examine the idea that all of us need to be working 24-7 or that we need to have, everybody needs to have a second home. Or, you know, we've neglected our moral and spiritual foundations, which have then been distorted by those who want to claim them as their own exclusively. Right.
[37:05] Well, I'm hoping that people in our society will renew their interest in the things that, you know, that form people, that sustain people in a good life, that make people human, and that allow children to grow up not apparently like the current generation, overwhelmed by anxiety and depression. Yeah.
[37:37] One thing that i you kind of talk about i thought and and i kind of agreed with this you wrote in another blog post that you call sad lefties and this was kind of talking about sadness that you find among people probably more on the political left and you write about how sometimes people come and their basic message that they may hear is that the world's deeply unjust everything's pretty bad.
[38:05] Things are divided between oppressors and oppressed and that they leave the sanctuary basically staggering under the weight of a 65 pound backpack and does that basically amount to kind of what i guess the lutherans would say a works righteousness instead of grace and And how can we make our churches more places of grace that do have concern about the issues of the world,
[38:35] but that you don't feel this burden that you described in that blog post? Yeah, no, I think you're right that it is a kind of works righteousness. Righteousness, you know, Pelagius is really our patron saint, that we can work out our own salvation by working hard and being virtuous. And I remember a line that Desmond Tutu, or a talk that Desmond Tutu gave that helped me a lot. He said, you know, listen, Christianity is not a religion of virtue. A religion of virtue says to you, if you are virtuous enough, if you are good enough, then God will love you. And he said, no, Christianity is not a religion of virtue. It's a religion of grace. I love you.
[39:24] Therefore, live as beloved children of God. I have sacrificed for you. I have given myself for you. Trust this and live. I guess I would say that the church, at least in the parts of it that I know best, but I think in some ways across the the board has done what the culture has done, which is we've divided into sides. And the idea is my side is right.
[39:56] Entirely, and your side is wrong entirely, and my side are the good people, and your side are the deplorable people. And so that's a kind of social works righteousness, where we're part of the good group. And I think what undercuts that is really the New Testament teaching that all All of sin that all fall short of the glory of God. All of us are, you know, flawed.
[40:31] I'll use language. I say sinners, but for some, you know. Anyhow, the point is that all of us stand in need of grace. None of us and not one side has all the truth. But there's a wonderful quote by Pascal, the 17th century ethicist. He said, the world does not divide between saints and sinners, but between sinners who know themselves, who believe themselves to be saints, and saints who know themselves to be sinners. So, and I think where we are now is kind of everybody wants to divide up and say, my side is the saints, and we have no sin in us. And Christianity kind of undercuts that it says no, all of us stand in need of grace all of us are self-deceiving as it was in 1st James if you say you have no sin you are self-deceived and a stranger to the truth.
[41:41] And those are hard words but they're true words And I think they move us away from a kind of self-righteousness and a works righteousness that says, well, because I believe this about LGBTQ matters, I am a superior human being to you who isn't in that place or has some reservations or questions. Christians, because I've got my own people that I think are beyond the pale, you know. And I've got my own parts of myself that I think are beyond the pale. And we only deal with that, I think, by the grace of God and the power of Jesus Christ to redeem us, to free us, and to make us new. But the churches currently mirroring were broken into, we are the Progressive Church or we are the God Save America Church. And...
[42:51] You know, we're just, it's, we've, you know, Pascal's thing, sinners who believe themselves to be saints, we've got a lot of that going on. I mean, St. Teresa said, you know, people are lauding her for all she did. And she said, well, you don't know that I have a Nazi within me, you know. And we all have that potential within us.
[43:25] So if people want to read these essays or follow you, where should they go? Well, my blog is simply my name, anthonybrobinson.com. And they have to include the B. My middle initial, all one word, anthonybrobinson.com. So I blog quite a bit. I've published a number of books. The last one I did was called Useful Wisdom, Letters to Young Pastors. And I don't know if I'll—my best-known books were probably Transforming Congregational Culture and Changing the Conversation. I've done a couple books on New Testament texts, on the Book of Acts, and on the pastoral epistles. I've written a number of Bible study series for the UCC under the rubric Listen Up was the name of the series they can find that at the Pilgrim Press, yeah so I appreciate your asking that and I just.
[44:35] Keep on keeping on alright well Dr. Robinson thank you so much for taking the time to chat today for this really important conversation thank you and uh send me the link to it if you would dennis thank you thanks for your work i appreciate it you're welcome.
[44:52] Music.
[45:24] Well, thanks so much for listening in on this conversation that I had with Tony Robinson. I have placed his essay in the show notes, as well as the article by Derek Thompson for you to read. And I've also have links to his blog. I have read the blog over the last few years. I think it's really kind of a good, insightful read. So I endorse it. So that link is also going to be in the show notes. And the blog is named, for those who don't know, is What's Tony Thinking? So that's it for this episode of Church in Maine. Remember, again, to rate and review this episode on your favorite podcast app. And again, that helps others find the podcast. And while you're at it, pass the episode along to family and friends who might be interested. it. And then finally, consider donating. That helps make sure that I can continue to produce important episodes on important issues. So again, that is it for this episode. I'm Dennis Sanders, your host. Thank you again for listening. Take care, everyone. Godspeed. And I will see you very soon.
[46:44] Music.