A 75 Year Story That Has Shaped Us is Ending

We are waking up to the reality that we’re living in the wrong story. In North America we grew up in a story called “the American Dream.”[i] It has taken numerous forms including that of progress, suburbanization, individualism and Christian nationalism. This story came into full bloom right after WWII when a Golden Eraemerged (the French called it Trente Glorieuses), promising a future of growth and progress for everyone.[ii]The terrible ideologies of the early 20th century had been displaced by the bright sunlight of technological progress, democratic institutions, a managerial class and cheap goods. For those inaugurated into the middle classes through post WWII educational systems, this story came to be the one, true story. We became convinced that the world was ours for the taking and, if we worked hard enough and got the education required, we’d climb the ladder of prosperity with a secure job, our own home and God’s blessing. This story fueled the expansion of congregations and formed a professional class of managerial leaders right up to the present moment. In the post-COVID world, this story is coming to be seen as a tragically failed story that has created generations who are angry and anxious about their future.

This story that has characterized our societies for the past seventy-five years is a competing theological worldview to the gospel. Yet, it became the dominant story of the West and its churches. A seductive worldview became the dominant system shaping the actions of the churches. As David Lyon’s states in Substack, it is a worldview that has “successfully seized and merged itself with the state’s power across the Western world, and is rapidly going global.”[iii] Inside this story lie specific understandings of leadership and of how the churches are to function. Training schools (seminaries) and institutional systems (denominations) produced a new bourgeois professional class of managers for the churches, shaped around the modern narrative of method, prediction and control.[iv] We created middle class, white collar (no pun intended) elites, “leaders” as caregivers (pastors as therapists), trained to be the managers and strategists for this modern story within the churches.[v] These leaders would direct denominations and congregations in a post WWII rocket-ride to success. An outcome of this narrative’s power is that the churches lost their identity in a liquid, globalized world. Their leaders lost their vocations as agents of God’s future, becoming little more than therapists and purveyors of middle class values for a narcissistic culture; its strategists of progress.[vi]

That post WWII ride went deep into our collective imaginations, colonizing our understanding of the world, reshaping the practices of newly educated, middle class elites. They became our leaders. This story still reigns in our processes of training and credentialing. It continues to determine how congregations and denominations are addressing the unraveling. 

All of us born after the end of WWII (which means all those now in leadership) are the products of this leadership story. This is the kingdom we constructed through this era. The story is coming apart, but its seductive power still colonizes in our responses to the unraveling. Christian identity confronts an existential struggle around the story that will shape it, in this unraveling. We’re on a road we’ve not travelled before. To form communities of hope in this dark time, we need to be clear about this story and the precarity of identity it has produced in the Euro-tribal churches.[vii]

The opening lines of Lamentations are a theological reading of what is happening to our churches:

How lonely sits the city

that was full of people!

How like a widow she has become,

she who was great among the nations!

She who was a princess among the provinces

has become a slave.

(1:1-2) 

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[i] The “American Dream” is the belief that every citizen has an equal opportunity to be successful and economically prosperous if they work hard and show initiative. It is presented in the Scott Fitzgerald novel The Great Gatsby (1925), but also see Robert Putnam’s Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (2016).

[ii] Technically, a thirty year period of unparalleled economic growth across the West between 1945 and 1975. 

[iii] See the Substack interview with N. S. Lyons: https://substack.com/profile/33861109-ns-lyons/note/c-15206207

[iv] We’re not saying schools and denominations were formed after the end of WWII but that the narrative world of these pre-existing systems came into a new shape in the post-war era. 

[v] See, for example, Christophe Guilluy, Twilight of the Elites (2019).

[vi] A term to describe this group that is borrowed from church language is clerisy coined by Samuel Coleridge in the 1830s to refer to a class of people charged, like the medieval clergy, with instructing and directing the masses.

[vii] The “Euro-tribal churches” are those churches which have their origins in the 16th Century European reformation.