For years, it was not uncommon for everything related to Christianity, religion, and traditional values to be scorned and rejected as something whose time had come and gone. That attitude, however, seems to be slowly shifting.

Case in point is the following video of feminist author Louise Perry, who confesses her quest for faith and her desire to provide a way to belief for her children.

“I kind of think of myself as an agnostic Christian,” Perry says. “I go to church. Some weeks I believe and some weeks I don’t.”

But one of the things that my husband and I have committed to do – he’s in the same boat as me – is … we are so convinced that it is sociologically true and we would so like it to be supernaturally true that we want to give our children the best chance possible of believing both truths and the way to do that I think is to expose them to Christians. So not just take them to church but, you know, we want to send them to Christian schools. And I read Rowan Williams actually saying just this in an interview in The Spectator recently and he said that the best way to believe is to be around people that are really good at believing, to just expose yourself to faithful people and spend time with them.

Although a surprising acknowledgement, Perry’s wrestling with Christianity is nothing new. One of the most prominent Christians of the 20th century – C. S. Lewis – experienced similar difficulties, writing about them in “Mere Christianity.”

Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. … Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods “where they get off,” you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the State of its digestion.

Wise advice. But have we followed it in recent memory? Consider American churches. For many years, worship became a production, something meant to stir up emotion and good feelings. This entertainment mentality often extended to the teaching that went on in the church, with sermons growing shorter and more superficial. Add the fact that many Americans no longer read or study on their own, and it’s no wonder that many drifted from Christianity in recent years. If there is no grounding, if Christianity is only presented as a superficial belief that doesn’t “teach your moods ‘where they get off,’” then faith will be weak and few will continue the practice.

That’s likely why many have fallen away from religion in recent years, abandoning church and even Christian belief entirely. But various indicators – including Perry’s statement above – show that many realize the void this abandonment of faith is bringing to their lives, and they want to reignite the spark. The question is, will our churches know how to replace feelings-based Christianity with substance?

Here again Lewis offers wise advice, saying that the way to get rid of such “dithering” is to “train the habit of Faith.”

“The first step is to recognize the fact that your moods change,” Lewis writes. In other words, don’t base your faith on feeling. Common sense recognizes the truth of this. If we base anything – faith, love, job, political viewpoints – on just how we feel at the moment, we will never have the settled security essential to a peace-filled life.

The way to avoid being tossed about by feelings is to place anchors in our lives. “[I]f once you have accepted Christianity, then some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day,” Lewis writes. “This is why daily prayers and religious reading and church going are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe.”

Perry seems to be coming to this realization as she seeks to place herself, her husband, but especially her children in situations where they will be surrounded and grounded by Christian influences and doctrine.

But can the same be said about us in the American church? Will we be content to go with the status quo of superficial feelings, or will we take Lewis’ advice, reject a feelings-oriented Christianity, and ground ourselves in prayer, in biblical and other helpful religious readings, and in regular community “to be continually reminded of what we believe”?

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image Credit: Piqsels