The Decade in American Christianity

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If you’ve been exposed to any sort of media the last week or so, you’ve likely seen a number of year and decade recapping lists.  Lists are generally fun to write, allow the composer to bask in the genius of their own opinion, and can be prepared to run in the dead week between Christmas and New Year’s.  It’s a perfect storm of narcissism and laziness.

So, saying that, we feel like we might have a slightly more noble reason for this list.  The decade we’re about to put behind us has been a tricky one to define on a number of fronts.  While the events of September 11th are probably what we’ll frame the decade by, otherwise, it’s been a slightly confusing time as we try to make sense of what happened.  We can’t even come up with a singular name for the 2000-2009 time period as a culture, so maybe we shouldn’t expect to be able to wrap things up with a cheerful bow.  The end of any semi-definable span of time should be an opportunity to learn from the past and American Christians, in general, tend to have a short term memory, focusing on the now or the coming soon.   We’re trying to remedy that a little bit, spending some time looking back, re-considering what we missed, what we’ve forgotten.

In compiling this list, we polled Burnside contributors and consulted our friends on Facebook.  We asked a simple question: “What were the most important events in Christianity this decade?”

One suggestion rolled in that threw us off: the rise of Christianity in China, and the shift of Christian cultural centers from West to East.

Even as the world gets smaller through outsourcing and social media, the truth is the typical American Christian knows precious little about our brothers and sisters across the world.  To us, the Ted Haggard scandal and Prop 8 are infinitely crucial, the 2000 and 2008 elections of supreme importance.  In the international view of our faith, these events were nothing.  Our lack of knowledge of the explosion of Christianity in China rivals our ignorance of the AIDS crisis in the ’90s.  Would we have cared about Prop 8 if we knew Palestinian Christians were under siege in Ramallah?  Would we have invaded Iraq if we’d known the removal of Saddam Hussein would result in unprecedented persecution of Iraqi Christians?

Still, they say “write what you know”, so rather than a crash course on what the Church faced across the world, we decided to to go with what happened here.  It was a big decade for the American Church, after all, one of triumph, soul-searching, reactionary shift, and emerging faiths.  We asked a number of contributors, old and new, to submit their thoughts on these past ten years.  Without further ado, we present the decade’s trends and events in American Christianity.

Just remember: for all that strife and change, compared to our fellow believers around the globe, we had it pretty easy.

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