Jim Henderson, the man with a lien on Hemant Mehta’s soul, has a new book coming out titled The Resignation of Eve. Like some of Henderson’s previous works, this book tries to understand the problems that evangelical Christianity faces from within. In this case, Henderson is interviewing women and finding out where their churches are failing them, and backing his findings with Barna Group surveys.

Lisa Miller talks about the book at the Washington Post:

Between 1991 and 2011, the number of adult women attending church weekly has declined 20 percent. The number of women going to Sunday school has dropped by about a third, as has the number of women who volunteer at church.

And although the Barna data have been disputed by other researchers, Henderson goes further. Even those women who go to church regularly, he says, are really only half there: Their discontent keeps them from engaging fully with the project of being Christian. He calls this malaise among women “a spiritual brain drain.”

This echos a theme we’ve been hearing for several years now. We’ve been told that people are no longer content with their family church. People are leaving in single numbers, and soon they will be leaving in droves.

But Felice Lifshitz at the University of Chicago Divinity School points out that these problems are as old as the Bible itself, and yet the patriarchy still remains.

The current wave of “resignations” fits squarely into a 2000-year-old tradition of tension over gender and spiritual authority; if proponents of patriarchal forms of religious organization do not feel particularly threatened by the alarm bells Henderson has rung for them, it is because historical precedent encourages complacency on their part. After all, their predecessors always managed to hold on to power. “The men of the right” have found, in every generation, a substantial number of Christian women who considered the limited roles and secondary status allotted to them to be quite comfortable. It is certainly easier to execute simple, circumscribed tasks such as meal preparation than to shoulder the responsibility for major policy decisions. But every generation has also witnessed rebellion and discontent.

I’m going to have to side with Lifshitz. Christianity has a history of offering Christian women half a loaf, and finding women who will be satisfied with that.

Christian Piatt, author of such books as Banned Questions About the Bible, has two posts up at Red Letter Christianity about why young adults are leaving the church: Seven Reasons Why Young Adults Quit Church and Four More (Big) Reasons.

My first thought after glancing at these is: hasn’t it always been this way? I used to hear a bit of common wisdom in the Episcopal Church: young adults quit going to church only to come back once they become parents. Now that we’re keeping closer watch on the numbers of the “unchurched,” maybe we’re just noticing it more.

Piatt suggests that “Young adults today are the most un-churched generation in a long time.” That’s probably true, but only because we’re still feeling the effects of the Second Great Awakening and the rise of Evangelical Christianity. Before this period, the majority of Americans were probably unchurched, particularly in the south.

Be that as it may, Hemant points out that many of Piatt’s reasons are self-serving. He never even hints that some might leave the church because they are told they must give intellectual assent to certain historical and scientific propositions that are simply not true.

Hemant comments:

My guess is that most of you are thinking Piatt forgot the most obvious reason people leave church: They figured out God doesn’t exist. [...]

As fun as it would be to pat ourselves on the back and give ourselves credit for Christians leaving the church, we don’t deserve it. Turns out the Church just keeps shooting itself in the foot.

It seems that Christianity cannot fail, it can only be failed.

I’ve noticed this pattern with any number of groups. Once a member has left, or has become unpopular, they are quickly branded as “not a real” member of whatever. For example, as George W. Bush’s poll numbers plummeted, it was very amusing to hear certain conservatives explain why he was “not a real conservative,” despite having previously argued that his election was a victory for conservatism.

Any failures on the part of a conservative can never be the fault of the ideals of the conservative movement. There’s always some way to shift the blame, and avoid facing the idea that maybe movement conservatism just doesn’t work as a political philosophy.

At least Piatt isn’t pretending that all those that have left the church were never really Christian, although there is a bit of condescension towards those who think Christianity is not relevant. But he’s still shifting the blame towards everything but the doctrines and traditions of Christianity.