Here's what I mean when I say churches have unwittingly participated in their own disenchantment. Over the last two generations, pastors and preachers have sensed the creeping disenchantment among their parishioners and congregants. They have witnessed fewer and fewer people in the pews. They faced the New Atheist storm. The rise of "deconstruction." The pivot away from dogmatic religious beliefs toward being spiritual-but-not-religious.
Sensing this thinning out of ontological beliefs, many Protestant churches pivoted toward the moral. The gospel could be made relevant by connecting it to things like social justice. Something similar happened in the humanities and social sciences in the academy. What could make a literature class relevant? Connect it to radical politics. Suddenly, pouring over dusty old books was imbued with revolutionary importance. People often wonder how the humanities became so political, and I think this is the reason, the desire for relevance. The humanities had a crisis of confidence in itself, literature as literature as an intrinsic human good, and lacking any obvious vocational application, it made itself relevant by becoming a political movement.
A similar thing has happened in many churches. Having lost confidence in God as an ontological reality, churches have tried to make themselves relevant by becoming a political movement or a local non-profit.
Relevant to the topic of this series is how you can see this drift toward moralization affect how we talk about the sacraments in Protestant spaces.
In my church, for example, the Lord’s Supper is often narrated as a sacrament of our love for each other. The Eucharist is described as a family meal where "all are welcome" and where "everyone has a seat at the table." Jesus is mentioned, but what is highlighted about Jesus is how his love provides a model and exemplar for our love.
This is an increasingly common move in Christian spaces pivoting away from penal substitutionary atonement. The sacrificial imagery of the Eucharist is traded in for a moral influence view of the atonement. What saves us isn't Jesus' death upon the cross for our sins. What saves us is our love for each other and the world.
Now, I have no problem talking about love during the Lord's Supper. But when the Supper is evacuated of ontological content, to become a sacrament of love, we’ve moralized the Eucharist. I’ve described this sort of thing as “functional atheism” because the Supper becomes a sacrament of ourselves, in this instance a symbol of our love for each other.
And it’s precisely here where we’ve unwittingly disenchanted ourselves. In seeking to make the sacraments relevant we point toward ourselves. You can see the appeal here, for what can be more relevant than ourselves? But this incessant moralizing and politicizing becomes, over time, functionally atheistic. Christian symbols, stories, and sacraments no longer point toward God. Christianity becomes, rather, a symbolic and convoluted way of talking to ourselves about ourselves.
