One of the more “interesting” personalities on my seminary’s faculty was Paul Swanson, our professor of pastoral care. He understood the pretense common in church life and that people, both lay and clergy, often tried to hide their true personalities in their interactions with each other. In other words, many have a voice in their heads saying, “I can’t let people know who I really am.”

Swanson was once heard to say to someone, “Let’s have a fight and get to know each other.” In other words, he did not see conflict as something to be avoided but as an opportunity for people to achieve a deeper understanding of each other. But as Swanson understood, the ability to engage in constructive conflict requires a personal sense of security. There has to be a belief that who I really am is okay and doesn’t need to be hidden. As a result, I don’t feel threatened when I engage with someone with whom I disagree.

The institutional church does not have that sense of security, nor do many of its members. Church conflicts are rarely constructive. Different opinions and beliefs are not shared but more often hurled at each other. Opposing sides do not get to know each other better but instead push each other further apart. Differences are viewed in black and white terms of “We’re right and you’re wrong.”

Church conflicts have been increasing in response to changing cultural standards and attitudes, especially regarding sex and gender. Just last week, but after years of struggle, the United Methodist Church agreed to drop its prohibitions on gay marriage and clergy. In getting to this point, however, it lost a quarter of its congregations.

The development of modern culture and the subsequent decline of religion, have left the church confused and defensive. For quite a while it was able to bat away like pesky flies the modern ideas that conflicted with its antique views of life and the world. But by the mid-twentieth century that strategy was clearly failing. The church was losing both members and status.

In response, most denominations adopted one of two strategies. One group tried to reconcile with modern beliefs. These churches adopted critical study methods for the Bible and theology. They championed social justice and began moderating rigid viewpoints on sexuality by accepting gender equity, divorce, birth control, and same sex relationships. Such churches viewed themselves as progressive or liberal.

In contrast, another group of churches doubled down on their conservatism. Often more extreme than during the Middle Ages, these churches insisted on the “literal truth” of the Bible, ancient doctrines, and moral behavior, especially traditional patriarchal gender roles. They often identified themselves as fundamentalist or evangelical.

In practice, neither group has been very successful in their attempts to redefine themselves. Conservative churches have often found it necessary to modify their rigid viewpoints. Divorce was one of the first of these, the result of changing popular attitudes and the divorces of a number of prominent evangelical pastors.

Women’s roles in the church are an ongoing source of controversy. The more progressive attitudes of younger members on environmental issues and inclusion of LGBTQ people is also roiling many conservative churches. The traditionalist ideal, in other words, keeps colliding with the real world in which church members live, with traditionalism often the loser.

On the other hand, progressive churches’ attempts to reconcile with modern culture have often seemed like creating a pushmi-pullyu religion, heading in multiple directions at once. How traditional is too traditional? How progressive is too progressive? These churches are never able to clearly answer to such questions because they don’t really know where they are trying to end up.

Christian verbiage like gospel, salvation, mission, etc. continue to be bandied about but their meaning, especially in contrast with fundamentalism, is never clear. Ask an evangelical pastor what is the “good news” and you will get a one or two sentence answer. As a progressive pastor and you will get a multi-paragraph discourse—and you will often still feel unsure what the answer was.

But the simplicity of the evangelical answer is not any more coherent than the typical progressive Christian’s rambling. Both groups use age-old ideas and language based in a pre-modern worldview that hide more than they reveal. How is going to heaven when we die “good news” if the modern church, in contrast to the ancient or medieval one, can give heaven no meaningful location or content?

Since the 18^th century, a growing number of biblical scholars and theologians began tackling the issues raised by the obvious disconnect between traditional Christian beliefs and the developing modern worldview. Their ideas have not been welcomed by church authorities. After outright opposition and even persecution ended, the church shifted to honoring their work while politely ignoring their obvious, and challenging, implications.

Such treatment of recent figures like Paul Tillich (Protestant, d. 1965) and Hans Kung (Roman Catholic, d. 2021) has essentially led to the end of theology as a serious endeavor in the church. Critical biblical scholarship, meanwhile, is increasingly conducted at secular institutions and universities. So, to be simplistic, conservative Christians have stuck their heads in the sand, while progressives are wandering in the desert without a compass.

What’s to be done? What many people are doing is leaving the church altogether, or declining to join in the first place. Being friendly and having good cake and coffee after worship is obviously no strategy for addressing this. It isn’t church style that needs fixing; the church has a content problem. Borrowing Getrude Stein’s dissing of Oakland, her hometown, for the church today “there’s no there there.”

Institutionally, there seems to be no answer. Both conservative and progressive churches are stuck in endless rhetorical and ideological loops. And that is why I thought of Professor Swanson. Since fighting over who’s right or wrong on these issues hasn’t gotten us anywhere, why not try fighting to get to know each other?

The polarizing and demonizing of opposing sides have become a plague in our culture. How sad that churches have so easily succumbed to this divisiveness. How can we turn down the heat and the rhetoric?

Not by “clarifying the issues” since people aren’t listening to each other. Nor will it happen at the organizational level because denominations and their leaders are too frightened about their future. Instead, churches need to come to the awareness that, above everything else, they are communities of people centered on love.

In truth, most congregations are centered on other things: doctrines, leaders, worship practices, property, prestige, social causes, etc. Today people “shop” for churches and most members would say, “I wouldn’t belong to this church if it didn’t have ______.” As they are, churches are destined to polarize and fragment because what they are centered on is unstable and changing. That’s been the experience for most of church history.

Yet that’s not the way it started out. Tradition says that the early Christians were mocked with the saying, “See how much they love each other.” Paul’s famous testament to love in 1 Corinthians 13 was in direct response to divisiveness that had split that congregation. But the centrality of love in the early church’s life is clearest in Jesus’ discourse on love in the gospel of John: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”

Such a reorientation would be no easy task. Frankly, it would be a revolution. But isn’t that what Jesus intended? As the French Catholic reformer Alfred Loisy said, “Jesus announced the kingdom, and it is the Church that came.” (Loisy was eventually excommunicated.) Recently, I heard a video blogger ask, “Is love a religion?” Since Jesus showed little interest in religion, yet love was at the center of his ministry, that question deserves some long, hard thought.