How incredibly kind of you to write, Pat. Thank you. I'm glad you find this stuff useful! I'm especially interested to know how this comes across in an interfaith context. Please do let me know.

Thank you, Kevin. I'm glad you're part of the conversation.

Your instinct to resist blaming culture per se, as you might guess, seems right to me. Culture is too complex to "blame." Blaming or defending culture seems to me to be the equivalent of blaming the air for holding the pollution people pump into it or defending the make up of air for having the right constituents to support human life.

Thank you all for your thoughtful engagement. I appreciate your ideas, and I offer my sadness to those who have been witnesses to or recipients of, what I take to be, the church's misplaced attention. There are a range of comments here, so let me respond with some broad observations. First, I take Frida's critique seriously about the fact that what I'm proposing could easily be taken for a baptized version of liberal/progressive politics. It's easy to think that the means (partisan politics) are the ends (faithfulness to Jesus). However, what I'm suggesting is not that churches become more "Democratic" in order to appeal to young people; in fact, just the opposite--churches need to worry about aligning themselves with Jesus, rather than the correct political programs. If those programs are congruent with the aims of the gospel, using them thoughtfully is defensible. It's a subtle distinction, but on which my argument turns. As to whether doing all the right stuff (Marcus-Borgy, MoveOn.org-y) will "work" or not in bringing young people back isn't my primary point (some will come back, some won't--for a variety of reasons that often don't have much to do with the church--which is my sympathetic response to Wendy, since I have a teen going through the same stuff). My point is that churches should be fundamentally concerned with being faithful--and the rest will take care of itself (or not); but that's really God's area of responsibility. Congregations need to act like Jesus not because it's successful, but because it's right. Second, as to Bob's point about the kind of change that is necessary, I'm inclined to agree that the easiest way to accomplish this is through new manifestations, since congregational transformation is painstaking work. However, I'm being primarily descriptive here--which, I think, means that my concern has less to do with faithfulness gets embodied than with it gets embodied. As Bob says, and as i say i the article, tweaking is a distraction.

Christy: Thanks for giving such a thoughtful response. As to your first thought about the way language about the divine as mediated by the person of Jesus, I hear you. In my experience (for whatever it's worth), most of the people I talk to who've walked away or decided against Christianity give as their reason something like "hypocrisy," or "dead ritual," or that it's "intellectually compromised," etc. I didn't mean to suggest, however, only that Christianity is perfectly acceptable theoretically; it's Christians who screw it up by failing to put it into practice--because it's possible to have real problems with Christianity in theory, before one ever gets to the embodiment. In regard to your second point about the connection between using religious terms and belonging to a religion, I agree with your conclusion that doing the former doesn't imply a need to do the latter. My argument is with the idea (held by many of my university students, for instance) that spirituality can be created, if not "ex nihilo," then certainly unaided by anything or anyone other than individual creativity.