Is Christianity in Crisis or Transition? 

We are facing an unprecedented convergence of crises: global warming, climate change, mass migration, and systemic ecological collapse. Our planetary systems are exhausted and no longer able to sustain human life as we know it. While countless non-profit organizations work tirelessly on sustainability and integral ecology, and Christian communities engage in vital works of social justice—addressing poverty, immigration, war, racism, and human rights—the harsh reality is that these efforts, however noble, are not reversing the trajectory of destruction. In some areas, the problems are actually worsening.

This failure points to a deeper truth: the crises we face are not merely environmental or social but fundamentally religious. The way we understand God, ourselves, and our relationship to the natural world shapes every aspect of how we live and act. If our sense of religion or theology is outdated, disconnected from contemporary scientific understanding, or trapped in institutional forms that no longer serve life, then our responses to global crises will be inadequate at best, and potentially harmful at worst.

Christianity is still sought by many but understood by few. It has become an outdated organization fit for another world. If Jesus of Nazareth were to appear today, I do not think he would recognize the Catholic Church as founded on his life and mission. He would probably ask, “What the heck is this?” Men in flowing robes stand around an altar with a gold chalice and paten in the center, one of whom gives a homily on something that sounds esoteric and abstract. “Where are the women?” Jesus would ask.

The Vatican continues to host expensive conferences on how best to listen to one another in the face of different viewpoints, more conferences on global warming and the environmental crisis, still more conferences on the perils of technology. All meant to be signs that the Church is deeply concerned for the modern world. A lot of talk but no action.

There is a bigger question that looms in our midst. How do we know when religion has died? What are the signs of a moribund church? In the Catholic world, the Church continues to operate just as it did in 1200 A.D. The structure is the same, many of the prayers are the same, the same Creed, even the songs are the same: Tantum ergo is still a favorite among Catholics. The Latin Mass has returned here in Washington, D.C., with a nine o’clock Mass on Sunday attended mostly by young men and women who are dressed for a 1950s movie of “Father Knows Best.” Their young children run around playing after Mass, while their parents chat about various things, as “Father” stands by in a long cassock and beretta.

The Catholic Church, which has twenty-three rites, is a collection of competing interpretations, each claiming to represent the “authentic” tradition, but none successfully integrating ancient wisdom with contemporary understanding. The traditionalists retreat into a romanticized past, finding comfort in ritual and hierarchy while largely ignoring the ecological and social crises of our time. The progressives embrace social justice and interfaith dialogue but often lack the theological depth to sustain their activism or connect it to a coherent vision of God’s work in the world. Neither approach adequately addresses the fundamental challenge: how to recover the cosmic dimensions of Christian faith in a way that speaks to contemporary experience and understanding. The Latin Mass community seeks transcendence but finds it in nostalgic recreation of a bygone era. The progressive community seeks relevance but sometimes loses touch with the mystery and grandeur that make Christianity more than mere social work. Both miss the opportunity to discover a Christianity that is simultaneously ancient and contemporary, mystical and engaged, transcendent and immanent.

As a child, I was taught that the (Roman) Catholic Church is the one true Church and there is no salvation outside the Church. Now that I am older, I must ask: Would Jesus really accept this statement? I sincerely doubt it, because he himself brought Temple worship to a whole new level—the level of the human person. “Destroy this temple,” he said, “and I will rebuild it in three days,” meaning the temple of his body (Mk 14:58). Jesus was the end of cultic worship, not the beginning.

The prominent Indian leader, Mahatma Gandhi, said that “Christianity is a great idea but it has yet to be tried.” He further quipped, “I would be a Christian, if it were not for the Christians.” Only someone outside Christianity could read the New Testament without bias then look around the Church and realize, “something is really off here.” A Christianity that promises to protect us from the world cannot help us learn to live responsibly within it. A faith that sees nature as merely the stage for human salvation cannot inspire the ecological conversion our planetary crisis demands. A religion that is primarily therapeutic cannot provide the prophetic voice that challenges the systems of domination and exploitation destroying the earth.

Christianity began as the radical personalization of God but wound up being primarily therapeutic. The Catholic Mass has become like a McDonald’s drive-through: pick up the food and leave. It satisfies the masses by keeping them fed and safe, ignorant of Christianity’s potential to destroy powers of domination and rebuild a new world. For many, the Catholic Mass promotes radical dependency on external power: God is in control and will protect us in this chaotic world. The piety of the faithful ranges from prayer groups to excessive kneeling and bowing, from Martin Luther hymns to Gregorian chant. Christianity has become simply whatever we want it to be—a consumer product designed to meet our psychological needs, rather than a religious transformative encounter with ultimate reality. Therapeutic Christianity continues to treat the natural world as a backdrop for human drama rather than as a sacred community, of which humans are called to be conscious participants. It reduces salvation to a personal rescue mission from a fallen world rather than participation in the world’s transformation.

Was Christianity aborted by the emperor Constantine? Or is it still waiting to be born, as Gandhi suggested? Teilhard de Chardin saw Christianity in its birthpangs. He spoke of religion as a dimension of biological evolution. Religion is the energetic transcendent depth by which organisms are oriented toward more life. He said that religion is “biologically (we might almost say mechanically) the necessary counterpart to the release of the earth’s spiritual energy… born to animate and control this overflow of spirit.”

Paul Tillich’s definition of religion as “ultimate concern”—that which enkindles a passion for life—resonates deeply with Teilhard’s evolutionary vision. Religion, in this understanding, is not primarily about doctrines, rituals, or institutional structures, though these may be important expressions of it. Rather, religion is the fundamental orientation of life toward what matters most, the passionate engagement with existence that gives life meaning and direction.

For Teilhard, religion is a natural phenomenon. Traditional Christianity has often positioned itself explicitly against “natural religion,” which it has viewed as humanity’s insufficient attempt to reach God through reason and experience alone. But Teilhard saw this apparent opposition as a tragic misunderstanding that arose from the “supernatural split” that occurred when Christianity was hijacked by Greek philosophical categories and transformed into a supernatural theism, losing touch with its own deepest insight: that the divine is not separate from the natural order but is the very energy and direction of natural evolution itself. The true function of religion, he said, is “to sustain and spur on the progress of life” and “to nurture the human zest for life.” This places religion at the very heart of evolutionary development. 

Religion is not a supernatural phenomenon but a phenomenon integral to the whole in evolution—religion is faith in the whole. Religion born out of the furnace of cosmic wholeness means that religion is larger than humanity alone and integral to the future of the earth. It is, as Teilhard suggested, an organic counterpart to the awakening of the earth’s spiritual energies. This suggests that the Earth itself is undergoing a kind of religious development, becoming more conscious of its own nature and destiny. Human religion is not separate from this planetary process but is the way the Earth becomes conscious of its own spiritual dimension. Just as mechanisms in nature account for the emergence of life, so too, elements of religion are essential for the emergence of life. On the lower levels of nature, such elements are part of the network of interconnected life, including elements of trust and cooperation. On higher levels of conscious life, religion takes on specific forms of symbolic thought and ritual.

Carl Jung also realized that before there were churches, temples, or formal religious institutions, there was “natural religion”—the spontaneous emergence of the religious instinct from the depths of the human psyche itself. This natural religion is not something we learn from books or inherit from traditions, though it may be expressed through them. It is the soul’s innate capacity to experience the sacred, to seek wholeness, and to recognize its fundamental relatedness to the divine mystery that permeates all existence. Natural religion recognizes that the sacred is not primarily “out there” to be discovered but “in here” to be uncovered. The kingdom of heaven, as Jesus taught, is within. The divine presence that we seek in temples and churches, in scripture and sacrament, is first and always present in the depths of our own psyche, calling us toward wholeness, love, and authentic relationship. Jung’s natural religion is not opposed to traditional religious forms but provides the psychological foundation that makes them meaningful. Without the natural religious instinct, formal religion becomes empty ritual; with it, even the simplest practices can become doorways to transcendence.

This understanding transforms our approach to spiritual practice. Prayer becomes not petition to an external deity but communion with the divine presence within. Meditation becomes not escape from the world but deeper engagement with the sacred dimension of ordinary experience. Service to others becomes recognition and response to the divine light that shines through every being. While religious traditions differ in their external forms and historical expressions, they share common roots in the universal religious instinct that emerges from the depths of the human psyche.

We will continue to unravel because the mind must be free to engage the infinite. A mind governed by external laws and rules will split off from the whole if it is stifled within. This is why artificial intelligence is so alluring, because it meets the needs of our psychic depth. Our religious desires will continue to be sought in artificial intelligence unless we return religion to its dynamic and evolving nature. Academic theology has failed in this regard and the Vatican is too mired in tradition to engage the creativity of evolution. Teilhard had a vision to bring Christianity and evolution into a coherent worldview for the vitality of all life. This vision is the heart of the Center for Christogenesis.

The path forward requires nothing less than a complete reimagining of Christianity—not as a rescue operation from the world but as conscious participation in the world’s transformation. This evolutionary Christianity will recognize that the Christ event is not a supernatural intervention in natural history but the emergence of a new level of consciousness that reveals the divine nature of reality itself. It will understand salvation not as escape from matter but as the divinization of matter, the awakening of the cosmos to its own sacred nature. Such a Christianity will be simultaneously mystical and prophetic, deeply rooted in the contemplative tradition yet boldly engaged with the ecological and social crises of our time. It will offer not therapeutic comfort but transformative challenge, calling us to become conscious participants in the ongoing creation of a more complex, conscious, and compassionate world.