The church in America is hurtling toward a demographic cliff. So say the experts, and they have the numbers to back it up. Boomers make up a significant percentage of evangelical church membership, and though there are signs that younger generations may be poised to return to church, a true revival is still unrealized.
Combine that with the reality that Americans of all stripes aren’t having a lot of kids and suddenly the future of the American church seems a bit murky. Yes, it has been promised that the gates of hell will not prevail against the church, yet the question remains: Who will fill the pews?
For a generation or two, church planters like Tim Keller embraced a ‘winsome’ style of evangelism, attempting to minimize the potential friction between theologically orthodox Christianity and politically centrist to center-left urbanites. Cities were the future, many evangelicals believed, and so adopting a missiological framework that would not be burdened by political baggage associated with the Moral Majority of Jerry Falwell Sr. seemed essential. By strongly emphasizing that Christianity need not be tied to the Republican Party specifically nor conservatism generally, church planters sought to open up new audiences for the Gospel.
Then 2016 happened. And COVID-19. And the summer of 2020, when it seemed like all kinds of progressive gatherings were acceptable even as churches were banned from meeting. As hard as it may be for older Americans to accept, the reality is that American culture has changed so much in the span of just a couple of decades as to beggar the imagination.
For example, the sociologist of religion Ryan Burge recently shared a chart showing that in the 2008 presidential election, while Obama voters were 58.2% Christian and 36.5% non-religious, in the 2024 presidential election, Harris voters were 45.3% Christian and 48.3% non-religious. For the first time in our nation’s history, one party, the Democrats, are defined primarily by support from voters without even the thinnest veneer of religiosity. This would have been simply unthinkable a generation ago.
Similarly, in March of last year, Senate Democrats voted unanimously to block the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, legislation that would have barred biological males from competing in women’s sports. Given the unanimity of the Senate Democrats, it is effectively beyond the pale to be a Democratic politician who is not wholly bought into transgender ideology. At the same time, the American Right has not been immune from anti-Christian developments, with neopagan ‘vitalism,’ as exemplified by figures such as Bronze Age Pervert gaining traction. The uncomfortable truth is that the assumptions evangelicals have taken for granted the last few decades about the relationship between conservative Christians and society at large seem more and more passé.
So what is the appropriate response from Christians?
One of the more interesting commentators has been Redeemer University theologian James Wood and his work on “reality respecters”: freethinking nonbelievers who will not deny the objective truths of biology nor embrace perspectives on history and current events defined primarily by analyses of power structures. Finding no other reasonable explanation for these convictions, they find themselves drawn to Christianity as a necessary moral framework for understanding human dignity, cupidity, and objectivity. Examples include public intellectuals like the historian Tom Holland as well as former New Atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali and her husband Niall Ferguson, but there are also podcast bros like Joe Rogan who are increasingly drawn to Christianity as the most consistent answer to life’s greatest questions.
The latter category is significant for many reasons, but let’s just focus on the issue of numbers. There are simply a lot more Rogan-type reality respecters than tweedy Oxford-educated nerds. And, there is perhaps no greater repository of Rogan-esque, podcast-listening reality respecters than the U.S. military.
The military as an institution retains a fundamental sort of conservatism because it is predicated on respecting reality. We see this not only in the unflinching physical standards for combat arms positions, but also in the very purpose of raising armies. The threat of force by foreign adversaries has been, is, and will remain a fact of life on this side of glory. There’s a reason the pacifist utopia remains a figment of John Lennon’s imagination.
Besides the military’s instinctive resistance to the worst elements of progressivism for practical reasons, there is also a deeper, spiritual affinity between church and the military that has seldom been articulated.
In his book, The Western Way of War, Victor Davis Hanson describes the spirit of ancient hoplite warriors that continues to shape Western military strategy and ethics today. On the one hand, these citizen-soldiers felt a moral imperative to keep the bloodshed brief and decisive at whatever cost, even if it meant pitched hand-to-hand combat that was brutal and unimaginably terrifying. On the other hand, the natural duty to defend home and hearth was sustained by their love for the men beside them and their families behind them.
Remember that these were men fighting centuries before the advent of Jesus, let alone the “dominion” of Christendom which continues to define the imagination of Westerners today, whether they acknowledge it or not. So, as a pastor and theologian, what I hear Hanson saying is that the West’s earliest warriors not only respected reality but also understood, on a granular level, the tragedy of the Fall and the only hope of redemption being a kind of self-giving love.
It makes sense, then, that warriors have historically gravitated to the Gospel and found the church’s message and mission almost intuitive. It’s there in the earliest chapters of the New Testament. Soldiers are drawn to John the Baptist who does not tell them to lay down their arms but to wield their swords justly (Luke 3:14). And Jesus’s interaction with the Roman Centurion suggests that his experience as a soldier prepared him to receive the Savior in a marvelous way. Jesus emphasizes the point, saying, “With no one in Israel have I found such faith” (Matthew 8:5-13). In his letters, Paul uses martial imagery to describe the fundamentals of Christian life (Ephesians 6:10-20) and our understanding of the citizenship language he introduces in Philippians is made all the richer when we realize that a good portion of his Gentile audience were probably military veterans.
Much could be said about the early church’s stance toward converted soldiers and military service in general. There is undoubtedly a tension in the writings of the early church fathers between Christ’s message of peace, the biblical witness of lawful soldiering, and the concern that Christian soldiers in Rome’s army were inadvertently defending state actions like emperor worship.
However, those who interpret the tension as indicative of a principled pacifism inherent to Christianity go too far. Peter Heather, for example, examines the success of early evangelistic efforts to the warrior classes of the European world and concludes that it must have been a result of kerygmatic compromise. Why would men committed to lives of violence be so compelled by the Prince of Peace?
Besides ignoring the nuances of a long theological tradition, what Heather and others fail to consider (and what Christians cannot afford to miss either) is that maybe many of those warriors were the reality respecters of their day, willing to stand against the assaults of evil on what they loved most but also striving for a just and lasting peace.
The Christian faith gives warriors, past and present, a framework that explains and affirms their natural inclination to protect and defend the innocent with violence if necessary. It also draws them to Jesus and his ministry which culminates in his sacrifice to save his own people. Finally, it directs them to the day when they will know their sacrificial stand for good was not in vain and their toils will give way to rest in the final victory of their Lord and Captain.
If churches are to remain full and vibrant in the future, perhaps Christians should remember their message to peacemaking warriors ready to receive it.
