Here is a fascinating article that is a must read for anyone who is concerned about the decline of “mainline” Christian denominations.
It is written by Mary Eberstadt who is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. She is writing in response to Pope Benedict XVI’s historic invitation to Anglicans to become members of the Roman Catholic communion. She analyzes the theological and ethical drift in Protestantism generally and makes some profound observations. I think she is on to something important here, so I wanted to share it with you.
Below is a brief excerpt, but click on the link to read the whole thing.
“Christianity Lite”
By this I mean the multifaceted institutional experiment, beginning but not ending with the Anglican Communion, of attempting to preserve Christianity while simultaneously jettisoning certain of its traditional teachings—specifically, those regarding sexual morality. Surveying the record to date of what has happened to the churches dedicated to this long-running modern religious experiment, a large historical question now appears: whether the various exercises in this specific kind of dissent from traditional teaching turn out to contain the seeds of their own destruction. The evidence—preliminary but already abundant—suggests that the answer is yes.
If this is so, then the implications for the future of Christianity itself are likely to be profound. If it is Christianity Lite, rather than Christianity proper, that is fatally flawed and ultimately unable to sustain itself, then a rewriting of much of contemporary thought, religious and secular, appears in order. It means that secularization itself may be fundamentally misunderstood. It means that the most unwanted and unfashionable traditional teaching of Christianity, its sexual moral code, demands of the modern mind a new and respectful look. As a strategic matter, it also means that the current battle within the Catholic Church between traditionalists and dissenters must go to the traditionalists, lest the dissenters or cafeteria Catholics take the same path that the churches of Christianity Lite have followed: down, down, down.
All these are just preliminary examples of what is at stake in contemplating the great experiment of Christianity Lite—which is why the evidence for its failure is so compelling and important.
Let us note at the outset that this use of the phrase Christianity Lite is not intended to describe all of contemporary Protestantism—far from it. Plenty of non-Catholic churches have not rejected the traditional Christian moral code, including some of the most vibrant in the world today. Nor is the phrase intended to imply that sexual issues are the only theological issues dividing Christendom these days. Obviously, all kinds of differences—at least, official differences—remain over perennial lightning rods: papal infallibility, the theological status of Mary, the role and ordination of women, predestination, justification, and the rest of the theological controversies historically responsible for tearing Christendom apart.
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/01/christianity-lite