A pall hangs over America and her churches. There is a sense not merely that our economy has fallen into a slump, our political system has deteriorated, and our culture has lost its way, but that something essential to our national character has been lost and may never be recovered. A sense not only that the greatness and prosperity of America have dimmed, but that whatever produced them in the first place may be gone.

As Peggy Noonan wrote not long ago, ”The biggest political change in my lifetime is that Americans no longer assume that their children will have it better than they did.” I won’t pretend to foresee a “coming collapse” of our society or our Church. But I will say that I’m increasingly concerned not only that the material conditions of our prosperity are disintegrating, but that the deeper moral and spiritual conditions of our prosperity have long since degenerated. What made America’s democracy and economy so uniquely successful was not only the genius of her founding documents but also the character of her people, a character born from faith and nurtured in houses of worship. Yet now it appears that our collective moral musculature has so severely atrophied that it can no longer power and guide the engines of the American economy and government — indeed, can no longer prevent those engines from flying off the rails.

With regard to the economy, we find ourselves asking whether this is not the middle of a Great Recession but the beginning of a Great Decline. The American economy was never driven primarily by greed, but by a strong sense of familial responsibility and the virtues of industry and self-reliance. A free market flourishes when the people within the marketplace believe in the dignity of work, the value of working hard, and the pride of working well. It flourishes when the culture emphasizes saving and spending wisely, living simply, dealing with one another honestly, and building loyalty between employee and employer, vendor and customer. Shame functioned as a hedge against shoddy work, broken promises, conspicuous consumption, and foolish debt. Today these virtues seem quaint, and shame is politically incorrect. What if the moral and spiritual capital that once sustained the growth of our nation is now spent, and we have begun to slide in reverse?

With regard to the government, the debt-ceiling crisis has done a fine job of illustrating its dysfunctions.  But what if the problems that beset us cannot be rectified by a new President, a new party, new policies? What if the problem is us, that we no longer hold our representatives accountable; that we no longer vote and legislate on the basis of principle but according to the whims of fashion and self-interest; that we too (and not just our representatives) are addicted to government spending and unwilling to confront the appalling realities of our collected indebtedness and the sacrifices it will require of us; that we have self-segregated into a thousand warring camps, and would rather bicker and demonize than stoop into the trenches of social problems and strive together with every bone, muscle, and tendon to solve them?

With regard to the Church, the intuition is felt especially among younger believers: that the American evangelical Church, in spite of the good it still accomplishes, has lost its way. In the vision of Christian life that has been passed down the stream of generations, something essential seems to have been lost. Call it a hunch, buried deep in the inner folds of the spirit, that Christ calls us to something more than this. God did not become incarnate, endure the indignities and humiliations of the human condition, suffer rejection and persecution, torture and death, so that we could live comfortable lives of suburban complacency, lives more characterized by rampant consumerism than radical obedience, by cultural accommodation than counter-cultural witness, by potlucks and stewardship seminars than the persecutions and sufferings of the saints. Again, this is not a matter of leaders who indulge in extramarital affairs, who are quicker to squabble than serve together. It’s a matter of us, all of us. We must be who we are called to be.

Each of these intuitions, in my view, is correct. And all are related. Christians are existentially committed to the proposition that Jesus Christ is the hope of the world. The Church is the bearer and messenger of that hope. If our nation has lost its hope, it is because the Church has failed to be the Church. If the light of our nation is fading, it is because we are failing to be the light.

Yet what exactly is the disease that ails the Church, that prevents the church from shaping and enriching the culture in the way it should? Interpreting an intuition is no easy matter, and evangelicals have differed in their sense of it.

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