Cheap Grace and the Pew Survey

The much heralded Pew Forum study on the U.S. religious landscape is only one of numerous such reports by numerous such research groups. However, the Pew folks seem to be more adept at public relations and media publicity than their lesser known rivals. The findings in the report may present an exaggerated picture of reality (as most such surveys usually do), but the media, not surprisingly, have honed in on the increase in the number of persons who now say they are "unaffiliated" with any religious group.

More than one-quarter of American adults (28%) have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion - or no religion at all. If change in affiliation from one type of Protestantism to another is included, 44% of adults have either switched religious affiliation, moved from being unaffiliated with any religion to being affiliated with a particular faith, or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether.

The survey finds that the number of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith today (16.1%) is more than double the number who say they were not affiliated with any particular religion as children. Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion.

Looking to capitalize on the publicity generated by the report, CNN conducted its own online insta-poll during its morning newscast yesterday. The results were more reflective of the audience appeal of CNN than of the actual religious landscape of the country. A whopping 59 per cent of the participants said they had "called it quits" with regard to religious affiliation.

It will be all too easy, and many in the media will doubtless follow CNN's dubious lead, to use the Pew survey as a launching pad for stories about the waning influence of religion in American life. The secularists among us would like to think that more and more people are "calling it quits" because religious faith in general, and Christianity in particular, places too many demands on their lives. But the truth is likely the opposite. In his classic work, The Cost of Discipleship, German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw the decline of the church in his country in the years prior to World War II as the tragic consequence of its failure to take up the cross.

Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our church. Our struggle today is for costly grace.

Cheap grace means grace as bargain-basement goods, cut-rate forgiveness, cut-rate comfort, cut-rate sacraments; grace as the church's inexhaustible pantry, from which it is doled out by careless hands without hesitation or limit. It is grace without prices, without cost . . .

Cheap grace means grace as doctrine, as principle, as system. It means forgiveness of sins as a general truth; it means God's love as merely a Christian idea of God. Those who affirm it have already had their sins forgiven. The church that teaches this doctrine of grace thereby conveys such grace upon itself. The world finds this church a cheap cover-up for its sins, for which it shows no remorse and from which it has even less desire to flee. Cheap grace is, thus, denial of God's living Word, denial of the incarnation of the word of God.

Cheap grace means justification of sin but not of the sinner. Because grace alone does everything, everything can stay in its old ways. "Our action is in vain." The world remains world and we remain sinners "even in the best of lives." Thus, the Christian should live the same way the world does. In all things the Christian should go along with the world and not venture . . . to live a different life under grace from that under sin . . .

Cheap grace is that which we bestow on ourselves.

Cheap grace is preaching forgiveness without repentance; it is baptism without the discipline of community; it is the Lord's Supper without confession of sin; it is absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without the living, incarnate Jesus Christ.

The effect of preaching cheap grace was so devastating, Bonhoeffer observed, that it called for a radical remedy.

The word of cheap grace has ruined more Christians than any commandment about works . . .

For integrity's sake someone has to speak up for those among us who confess that cheap grace has made them give up following Christ, and that ceasing to follow Christ has made them lose the knowledge of costly grace. Because we cannot deny that we no longer stand in true discipleship to Christ, while being members of a true-believing church with a pure doctrine of grace, but are no longer members of a church which follows Christ, we therefore have to try to understand grace and discipleship again in correct relationship to each other.

Certainly, "grace" and "discipleship" are popular terms in American churches today. But, as in the days of Bonhoeffer, "grace" is little more than a doctrine, a principle, a system. Worse yet, "discipleship" is little more than a program, a course of study, a curriculum. Cheap grace produces cheap disciples who will all too easily "give up following Christ" when worldly opposition becomes the least bit intense. It is not the burden placed upon them by the church but, rather, the burden placed upon them by the world--a burden which the church has not equipped them to bear--that leads them to "call it quits."