Scandal hints at decline of U.S. denominations
When World Magazine, an evangelical Christian publication, reported last week that Dinesh D’Souza, the outspoken conservative and president of the King’s College, a small Christian liberal arts institution in Manhattan, had checked into a South Carolina motel with a woman who was not his wife, the first obvious question was how a smart man could do something so ill-considered.
And given that news reports said D’Souza’s college was financed by the Campus Crusade for Christ, an evangelical Protestant group, a second question arises: How did a Roman Catholic become president there?
After all, traditional evangelicals think of Catholicism as idolatry, the papacy as an abomination. Had nobody at the King’s College heard of the Reformation?
L’Affaire D’Souza — the news media affair, not the romantic affair, which D’Souza denies — is further evidence of the decline of denominational importance in U.S. Christianity. Catholic or Protestant, or which variety of Protestantism: The particular theology is less important in 2012, for many Christians, than a church’s style of worship or its politics. Typical for many of his generation, D’Souza, it turned out, had journeyed from one religion to another, disregarding boundaries that once mattered.
ESCHEWING DENOMINATIONS
According to a Pew Forum survey released this month, 30 percent of U.S. adults younger than 30 have no religious affiliation, compared with only 10 percent older than 65. Nancy Ammerman, a sociologist at Boston University, said Wednesday that this was more a “decline in participation in organized religion, not a decline in denominationalism.” She said that nearly all Christian groups had been hit by declining attendance.
But Wade Clark Roof, chairman of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, noted that the churches hit hardest in recent years were from the mainline denominations: Methodists, Presbyterians, Catholics and so forth. By contrast, megachurches that eschew denominational labels are growing.
Those megachurches, often nondenominational “Bible churches,” excel at the “adaptation of music, of drama, of movie clips, the big screens to project lyrics,” Roof said. “All that has made for a kind of religious experience that is so different from what you find in the mainline Protestant and Catholic churches.”
A church service that feels obviously Catholic or Lutheran thus seems, to many people today, old-fashioned and enervated. Or so D’Souza may have thought: In an article on the King’s College website in 2010, the year he became president, D’Souza said he had not been a Catholic for some time, and was attending Horizon Christian Fellowship, in San Diego, a nondenominational Protestant megachurch.
But in defending himself against the charges in World’s article, which reported that D’Souza had introduced his companion as his fiancee, D’Souza cited his ignorance of evangelical mores.
“I had no idea that it is considered wrong in Christian circles to be engaged prior to being divorced, even though in a state of separation and in divorce proceedings,” D’Souza, 51, wrote on the Fox News website, using “Christian” in the evangelical sense, to mean bornagain Protestant.
D’Souza, who has resigned as president, did not answer an e-mail that his publicist had promised to pass along.
DRAWING CLOSER
The days when a Baptist marrying a Methodist was considered an intermarriage are long over. But not everybody celebrates the eradication of denominational boundaries. Joel Belz, who founded World magazine and is a former moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the United States, lectured several times in a journalism program at the King’s College. He was surprised two years ago to learn of D’Souza’s appointment as president.
“The direction of our culture has driven even splinter Presbyterians into closer cooperation with Roman Catholics, Mormons, people from other settings,” Belz said on Wednesday. But “it’s another thing to take someone from a very different allegiance and make him a leader of your institution.”
As Catholics and Protestants have drawn closer together, they have brought Mormons into the fold. For example, after Mitt Romney visited the Rev. Billy Graham at his home in North Carolina on Oct. 11, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association removed a page from its website that had classified Mormonism as a “cult.” The association said in a statement, “We do not wish to participate in a theological debate about something that has become politicized during this campaign.”
Of course, denominational identity has not disappeared entirely. Until recently, a majority of the students at Luther College, in Decorah, Iowa, were Lutherans. When its president decided to step down recently, the college was faced with the question of whether the next president had to be a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the United States.
Ultimately, the search committee decided that it would consider someone who had “a willingness to become an active member” of a Lutheran church, said Richard Torgerson, the retiring president.
Throughout the United States, we see that denominational identity can be unlearned, while at Luther, they are trusting that it can be learned, too.