Stage Actors

By David Crush | | Religion | 5 min read

Colored-pencil illustration of the same small white clapboard country church at nightfall under an indigo sky with a few stars. Red theater curtains frame its open front doors, and a spotlight shines on a man in a dark suit standing on the steps with both arms raised in prayer while a small crowd in front of him applauds. In the foreground, a teenager in a hoodie with a backpack walks away down the dirt road, and far ahead another lone figure is already walking toward the horizon.

My fear is simple. A new generation is going to look at what the church is doing in public, see the cruelty, and decide that the cruelty is Christianity.

Part 1 was about the church and the gift it took. This part is about the people watching from outside.

Stage actors

Jesus had a word for people who wear the faith like a costume. In the Greek of the Gospels it is hypokritēs, and before it meant “hypocrite,” it meant an actor on a stage. (Blue Letter Bible)

He used it for people who perform their religion: “when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.” Then he gave the alternative: “enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret.” (Matthew 6:5–6)

In Matthew 23 he said it to the religious leaders’ faces, seven times. They were “like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones.” (Matthew 23:27)

Most of the faith Jesus asked for happens in the closet, where nobody sees it. What a generation sees is the stage. And it’s not like we’re putting out the greatest marketing material right now; Part 1 has the catalog.

The numbers

Pew’s Religious Landscape Study, the largest survey of American religion, found in 2023–24 that 62% of American adults call themselves Christian, down from 78% in 2007. The decline has leveled off since about 2019, and I don’t want to oversell it.

But the age gap hasn’t closed. Among adults 18 to 24, 46% identify as Christian. Among adults 74 and older, 80% do. And fewer young people who were raised in religious homes stay religious as adults. (Pew Research Center)

Why they leave

It would be easy to say young people just stopped believing. The research says something harder to hear.

In 2002, the sociologists Michael Hout and Claude Fischer looked at the Americans who had started telling surveys they had no religion. Most of them still held conventional religious beliefs. They had left the institution, not necessarily God. The increase was confined to political moderates and liberals, and Hout and Fischer called it “a symbolic statement against the Religious Right.” (American Sociological Review) Twelve years later, with better data, they found the causal arrow likely runs from politics to religion: people’s politics were changing their religious identity, not the other way around. (Sociological Science)

The political scientists David Campbell, Geoffrey Layman, and John Green tested it directly in Secular Surge. In their experiments, exposure to religion fused with conservative politics caused people to drop their religious identity. (Cambridge University Press)

The Religious Right they were reacting to was built on purpose, and I wrote about how in How Churches Got Used. The bargain didn’t only cost the church its witness. It cost the church people.

I was one of them

I grew up around Southern Baptists, and the ones I saw up close looked to me like hypocrites: bad actors performing a faith they didn’t seem to live. Stage actors. So I left. For most of my life I called myself an atheist, and I took it out on Christianity and on God himself. That was my own human limitation, not theirs. But I didn’t know yet that the actors were the problem, not the book they were reading from. It took me nearly two decades to find my way back, and that’s Part 3.

Read it for yourself

The answer I found is one the Psalms gave a long time ago: “Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? by taking heed thereto according to thy word… Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee.” (Psalm 119:9–11)

That goes for both sides of the footlights. If you’re watching from outside, don’t let the actors tell you what the book says. And if you’re inside, the book is how we keep our hearts set on God’s word instead of our own desires. Without it, we can’t tell a prayer from a performance.

The hypocrites on the street corner get what they came for: “They have their reward.” The rest of us are sent into a small room with the door shut, where the only one watching is the Father which seeth in secret.

Further Reading

Scripture quotations are from the King James Version (KJV).

Companion essay:

Sources:

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