The Logic of Intersubjectivity. Darren M. Slade
rarely attend services, roughly two-in-five Americans do not believe religion can help solve today’s problems, and one-in-five have no religious affiliation whatsoever. In 2018, three-in-five Americans have little to no confidence in Christianity, and 43 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with how religion has affected the culture.18 In total, there exists a growing disdain for how conventional paradigms have conditioned believers to behave in society (cf. BMF, 293; SWFOI §34, 258‒59).19 McLaren observes that despite the growth of church plants, religious entertainment, and religious publications, Christianity is still losing its cultural influence. For him, the answer is not more churches: the answer is adapting to the church’s natural evolution through different stages of faith.20
1.2.1.1 Stages of Faith
In essence, Western Christianity has experienced what James Fowler labels the six “stages of faith,” only on a wider social scale. In the first stage (“intuitive-projective faith”), believers view their religion in magical terms and use it to explain life’s mysteries. In stage two (“mythic-literal faith”), people uncritically accept folklore as literal truths. With stage three (“synthetic-conventional faith”), believers focus on what feels right and comfortable over what is intellectually sound. In the fourth stage (“individual-reflective faith”), believers question conventional paradigms, relying on their own experiences to develop a personalized belief system. Stage five (“conjunctive faith”) is a synthesis of affective and rational elements where people simply accept the existence of divine mystery. Finally, the sixth stage (“universalizing faith”) focuses almost exclusively on universal principles of love, justice, and compassion as religion’s defining goal.21 Significantly, McLaren delineates four parallel stages: 1) the “simplicity” phase is dichotomistic and naïve; 2) “complexity” then focuses on the pursuit for absolute truth; 3) “perplexity” is the disillusionment that results from this pursuit; and 4) “maturity” is accepting epistemic humility and divine mystery (AMP §16, 249). For McLaren, Western Christianity’s current paradigm shift is the natural growth toward a more universalizing religion that seeks to reverse the ossification of earlier stages of faith (cf. FFR §9, 172, 183).22
1.2.1.2 Reversing Christian Ossification
In his pursuit of a “mature” faith (NKOCY §1, 6), McLaren asks several questions: “What kind of God do we believe exists? What kind of life should we live in response? How does our view of God affect the way we see and treat other people?” (LWWAT §Intro, xii). For him, what has most atrophied the church is its repeated suppression of paradigm shifts (FFS §1, 41‒46). For centuries, Bible-appealing Christians had endorsed patently wrong ideas, such as white supremacy, Ptolemaic geocentrism, slavery, and apartheid, which has caused McLaren to question if there are other sacredly-held beliefs that are also false (GSM, 41). He reasons that if Christians today can engage in (or tolerate) torture, war, and sexual abuse, then something must be wrong with conventional Christianity (COOS1 §2, 29). “A message purporting to be the best news in the world should be doing better than this. The religion’s results are not commensurate with the bold claims it makes. Truly good news . . . would confront systemic injustice, target significant global dysfunctions, and provide hope and resources for making a better world—along with helping individuals experience a full life” (EMC §5, 34; italics in original).23 McLaren’s solution is that believers ought to reinvest the church with interpretations that are socially relevant and reflect a more mature understanding of God (cf. CIEC, 208‒9).
Here, McLaren highlights the evolutionary nature of Christian beliefs over time (COOS1 §5, 65‒71), insisting that the church is, in fact, a complex organism of interdependent relationships (AIFA, 272‒74, 277; GO §12, 191‒93). Hence, as a “living tradition” (LWWAT §15, 93; cf. NKOC §4, 49), Christianity ought to appropriate new insights and new moral sensibilities (GO §12, 191‒92). “To be a living tradition, a living way, [Christianity] must forever open itself forward and forever remain unfinished—even as it forever cherishes and learns from the growing treasury of its past” (WMRBW, xii). He clarifies further,
An important question today: if the Gospel of Jesus, a Jew, could be radically reinterpreted in the framework of Greek philosophy and Roman politics in the church’s first five centuries, is it forever bound . . . to function within those exclusive parameters? Or is it free to enter and engage with new cultures and thought patterns, including our own—learning both positive and negative lessons from its earlier engagements?24
As an organic body, the church will either mature and grow or it will stagnate and regress (cf. WMRBW, xi). Labeling this growth as a “continuing conversion,” McLaren concludes that without repeated change, believers will increasingly become arrogant, selfish, inflexible, and fraudulent in their claims to represent Christ (GSM, 13). The result is a loss of credibility with younger generations for being impractical and unrelatable (SWFOI §34, 258‒59). “The point isn’t to replace one mandated structure with another, but rather to realize that structures need to be created, adapted, outgrown, replaced, and reinvented as needed” (AIFA, 93). Hence, the significance of studying McLaren’s philosophy of religion centers on correctly understanding how he wants to “change the framework” through which Christians approach their faith.25 In so doing, readers can then comprehend and, perhaps, even empathize with how McLaren’s new paradigm applies to the current socio-political destabilization of institutional Christianity.
1.2.2 Broader Socio-Political Context
In 2006, almost one-in-four Americans identified as white evangelical; but by 2016, that number dropped to less than one-in-five. Today, the religiously unaffiliated are seven percentage points higher than white evangelicals.26 According to Gallup, in 1951, only 1 percent of Americans had no religious preference; by 2017, one-in-five Americans now list “none” as their affiliation, and 25 percent say religion is “not very important.” However, the vast majority (87 percent) of Americans still believe in God, and the top two reasons why people seldom attend church is because they prefer to worship in private or because they dislike institutional religion.27 Rather than being anti-God, the reality is that a sizable portion of the population simply favors the label “spiritual” instead of “religious.”28 Thus, it is no surprise that McLaren describes his audience as “the seeking mind” (COOS1§6, 79), who are “spiritual questioners” and “spiritual seekers” (AMP §6, 105; MRTYR §4, 48; italics original to both). He writes, “If you’re like a lot of people I meet, you might describe yourself as ‘more spiritual than religious.’ You’re seeking meaning and depth in your life . . . but you don’t feel that traditional ‘organized religion’ helps very much” (NS §Intro., 1).29 McLaren’s goal is to help people embrace Christ without swearing allegiance to obsolete paradigms. “I’m especially hopeful that [I] will be helpful to people who consider themselves spiritual but not religious, or interested in Jesus but not Christianity” (SMJ §Intro, xvii).
Not surprisingly, Christian disillusionment has only been exacerbated because of America’s polarized political environment. “We feel as if our founder [Jesus] has been kidnapped and held hostage by extremists. . . .he often comes across as antipoor, antienvironment, antigay, anti-intellectual, anti-immigrant, and antiscience (not to mention protorture, pro-inequality, proviolence, pro-death penalty, and prowar). That’s not the Jesus we met in the Gospels!” (GSM, 6).30 Here, McLaren’s earlier warnings about right-wing authoritarianism have now manifested in what he labels the “Trumpcult,” an uncritical allegiance to President Donald J. Trump, where conservatives now proclaim, “We have no king but Caesar.”31 The question is then raised, How could conservatives, the “moral majority” advocating for “family values” (cf. COOS1 §11, 147), so easily embrace someone who boastfully flaunts his sexual immorality, misogyny, bigotry, corruption, and cruelty toward others? As Mark Labberton writes,
The ease with which some on the right could affirm an evangelical faith connected to campaign rhetoric that was racist, sexist, and nationalist was disorienting to an extreme. It left many evangelical people of color gasping in despair and disorientation that so many white brothers and sisters in Christ could vote for someone whose words and actions were so overtly inconsistent with their common faith in Christ.32
The disillusionment