Spong believes that his ideas could kill Christianity, but that if his ideas are not adopted, Christianity will definitely die anyway. Although it is true that his ideas represent a very interesting perspective on Christian beliefs, I think that he gives too little credit to the resilience of fundamentalist and traditional beliefs. The subtitle of his book is "Why Traditional Faith is Dying and How a New Faith Is Being Born" - but is that true?
Granted, many mainline, liberal Protestant denominations are getting smaller and smaller each year. Granted, there quite a large number of people who still go to church but who no longer feel entirely comfortable there - Robert C. Fuller discusses them in his recent book Spiritual but not Religious. At the same time, fundamentalist and conservative denominations are thriving, even in the United States.
Philip Jenkins argues in his recent book, The Next Christendom, that the Christianity of the near future will be much more conservative, apocalyptic, charismatic and fundamentalist than people realize because Christianity is growing fastest in the Southern Hemisphere, where that sort of Christianity is most common.
Most people are unaware of this because what little reporting is done on Christianity tends to focus on the Christian experience in the United States and Europe - especially when that experience involves conflicts between more liberal believers and less liberal authority figures.Spong also appears to be unaware of this and seems to frame his argument on the premise that Western, liberal Christianity is the only sort worth addressing. Yet it is a fact that Spong is aware of these developing trends in Christianity.
During the 1998 Lambeth Conference for the world's Anglican bishops, a progressive statement about the nature of homosexuality was resoundingly defeated due to the votes of Asian and African bishops. Spong attacked them as having "moved out of animism into a very suprerstitious kind of Christianity" and generally found Third World Christianity to be characterized with "religoius extremism."
Thus, Spong's case is based in large part upon a false premise that may completely invalidate his argument. Regardless of how "suprerstitious" or "extreme" the Christianity may be in Africa and Asia, it is Christianity, and the numbers of people who follow this brand of religiosity are growing.
The fact that Spong does not address them in his discussion weakens his points considerably.
Another issue not addressed in Spong's book is that this prediction is simply not new: liberal theologians have been awaiting the demise of traditional Christianity for more than two hundred years. Those who wanted to salvage something of a spiritual community created a church very similar to the one he describes for the future of Christianity - it is known today as Unitarian Universalism and it comprises just 0.2 percent of the U.S. population.
Obviously they did not become dominant and traditional Christianity did not die - so why think that Spong's predictions will come true? He would have made his case much stronger and much more interesting if he had tried to explain why things will be different this time - why the same predictions made in the past did not amount to much, yet in the coming decades will prove to be more accurate. That would certainly have made his book stand out.
Despite these flaws, I imagine that quite a few liberal Christians will benefit from reading Spong's book, and I have no doubt that his words will encourage them to continue questioning the beliefs which they have traditionally accepted. His critiques of those beliefs, like original sin and atonement, are insightful and will resonate with an audience which is already sympathetic to his position. It is possible that a more widespread questioning of traditional Christian beliefs will result in a further liberalization of Christianity in the United States, but there is no reason to think that if this does not happen then Christianity will simply die out.
I would be curious, however, to see how an even more liberal Western Christianity interacts with a very conservative Southern and Eastern Christianity in the coming century. We already have Christians from Africa, South America and Asia engaging in missionary activities in the United States and Europe in an attempt to "rechristianize" these "spiritual wastelands." Perhaps Spong has some ideas on that which he would consider sharing - if he is willing to write one more book...
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