When is a religion Dead?

I apologize for not posting for the last several weeks. I wish I had a wonderful reason, but I don’t. I’ve been thinking a lot, working on my master’s, being a father, and everything has just caught up to me the past couple of weeks. A few months ago I posted a blog about what I saw as the death of Christianity in America. Since then I’ve been spending quite a bit of time thinking about how to really define when a religion is dead.

Is a religion dead when there aren’t any people claiming it anymore? That’s the simplest explanation, but doesn’t really fit. I can claim to be Zoroastrian and yet not practice anything that the ancient Zoroastrians did. In that case, the ancient religion would still be dead and instead of rebirthing it, I would be practicing something completely different. Perhaps we could say that a religion is dead when it is no longer growing, but while that is a good indication of health it doesn’t equate with true death as the group could grow again.

Perhaps we could talk about whether the early beliefs of the religion are still being practiced. But then we have to find a cut-off point that defines “early”. In Christian circles, we have abandoned much that defined the early Church. We no longer sell everything we have and live communally. We no longer practice love feasts, or the Sabbath, or live in such radical faith. We are not persecuted either, which was a huge part of the early Church’s faith. And even if much of what we believe is different, there is always the chance that it will come back full circle. So while a difference in belief and practice are good indicators, they don’t seem to completely define the death of a religion. It needs something else. What about if we talked about a religion being dead when it no longer changes people like it did in the beginning? A religion catches on with people because it brings change into their lives, change for the better presumably. But when that change no longer comes, what drove that religion is gone. The faith is dead, even if people still claim to be a part of it. Individual ideas, beliefs, and actions can change in a religion as the times change, but if that change in their lives does not appear, or significantly changes, then the religion is dead, or is no longer the same religion it once was.

So is Christianity dead or alive in America by this criterion? I would say it’s pretty well dead. When people come into the Church today, we ask them to change their behavior, but not in ways that the ancient Church would have understood. The most strident ways we urge people to change are in their dress, their language, and their voting habits. There are many churches that are faithfully leading people to God and seeing people changed to serve others, to give sacrificially, to study and care for people together. But the dominant view of Christianity in America today is one of ethics and politics. That is not a change the early Christians would have understood. So if not dead, I would say that Christianity in America has kept the name, but changed into a new religion for many of the believers here, one that is more about “being good’ than showing love in service.

But there is always hope. Christianity is founded on rebirth, and that includes not only the individual but the Church as well. I only pray I help to keep the faith alive and lives changing, instead of stagnating and dying.