Why Some Leave their Churches
Introducing the Traditional Mythic Worldview
Growing Up in the Jesus Path Series – Part Three
The traditional worldview emerged widely about 5,000 years ago as people longed for law and order in the warrior’s chaotic world. External rules and guilt produced a more controlled society. This stage emerged with the great monotheistic religious traditions, and, according to Gebser, this is the first time an “awareness of soul” appears within the self.
This conformist station dominated society until the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The traditional stage is still the primary mode of awareness for the followers of all the world’s major religions today, including Christianity. Its motto is “There’s only one right way, and we have it.”
GROWING UP — from Spiral Dynamics by David Goebal
Individuals at this level appear moralistic, conventional, and tend to give up their individuality in order to conform. Rigid thinking dominates since my God, my country, and my people are right no matter what others say. The right values are what an outside authority such as the church, Bible, country, or political group considers correct. Today it can be found in young children and some teens, Boy Scouts, conservative political groups, and most churches. The traditional structure stage is estimated to include 35% to 40% of the world population. This figure is lower in the United States.
Methodist denomination breaks up over gays
Traditional Church
We can see the conflict between traditional and progressive Methodists as the worldwide Methodist Church is currently splitting into two denominations. The traditional stage Global South Methodists and the postmodern stage Methodists of the Global North are finding it impossible to live with one another over the issue of homosexuality.
However, unlike the Methodists, most Christian denominations have one worldview or stage as a dominant center, with some members at preceding levels and others at following ones.
Christianity is the largest religious group in the world, and in 2020 there were about 2.6 billion adherents globally. The great majority of those Christians are in churches at the traditional level. Traditional churches are filled with good people who fit in with one another and are faithful to their church’s understanding of Christianity. This would include churches such as Roman Catholic and Southern Baptist, among others. Some smaller denominations in the global North are called “mainline” churches—such as ELCA Lutheran, Methodist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Congregational, Disciples of Christ, United Church of Christ, and American Baptist churches. These have moved from the traditional stage to a beginning modern stage.
The Bible
Thirty-nine percent of America’s Christians say the Bible is the word of God and should be taken literally, while thirty-six percent say it should not be interpreted literally. While there is some variation about whether the Bible is accurate word for word, most traditional churches tend to see all the stories in the Bible as historically true.
Seen from later stages, the traditional Bible often feels like a heavy burden of rules and condemnations.
In some circles, the debate about the historicity of the Bible rages. The 60 members of Jesus Seminar hold that most of what Jesus is reported to have said and done didn’t happen. However, most of the 8000 scholars of the Society of Biblical literature who also use critical, scholarly reasoning tend to see that as extreme reductionism.
Reality and Mythical Radiance
Are the stories of the New Testament historical or mythical? Or perhaps some of both as later stages have come to embrace. Meaningful mythic stories are not lies, but can be a revelation of the very character of reality that could not be known or expressed in another manner. Myth in Gebser does not mean “stories that are not true,” or mere “primitive efforts to explain what is not known.”
In The Mythic Character of Reality, Fr Steven Freeman, a priest of the Orthodox Church in America, writes,
Somehow, myth is not just true, but real. The nature and character of the world cannot be described properly without reference to something more. That something more has a nature that gives shape to the stories labeled as myths. They are not just any story, a sub-genre of fiction. Indeed, even stories that would otherwise be labeled “true” and “real” (in the literal sense) have significance precisely in their mythic character. What modernity labels as “fact” is insufficient for human existence.
There is beauty and truth in the mythical radiance resting on our Christian stories. I find it helpful that the traditional stage is called the mythic structure of consciousness by Gebser. Jeremy Johnson, an advocate of Gebser, critiques Wilber’s model by saying that it reduces “the so-called “lower” stages [magic and mythic] to a childlike fantasy rather than a true and now lost mode of participation.
Jesus
Jesus in the traditional stage is seen as both fully divine and fully human. The Nicene Creed and Apostle’s Creed are staples of traditional beliefs about Jesus, declaring him to be one of a kind. At integral, we see him as the model of that which we all are in our True Self and are becoming in reality — true sisters and brotherparts of Jesus.
Prayer
The spiritual shamans of the earlier magic stage with its many gods and spirits gave way to the mystics who began to sense that underneath everything was a Oneness or Supreme Being. This was the move from deficient magical prayer to the traditional thinking of only one God, monotheism, and eventually higher stages of spiritual awareness.
Magical prayer believes that if we can find the right words and rituals, we can control the harmful spirits. Traditional prayer believes that if we can find the right God and ask “him” in the right way, we can control the world around us to keep from being harmed.
Sin and Salvation
Sin is offending God by disobedience and harming others. For the traditional church, the central teaching of the Bible is that Jesus died for our sins. This is the primary theological meaning of the Mass. We are saved by embracing Jesus’ death on the cross for our sins. When asked “saved from what,” the answer is usually “our sins” or “hell.” However, the underlying understanding is that we are actually saved from God. The death of Jesus satisfies God’s wrath. In traditional Christianity, Jesus protects us from God. This is the continuation of the Old Testament image of God as both loving and angry. God the Father has the role of the vengeful God whose “justice” requires a penalty for sin, and God the Son, Jesus, has the part of the compassionate aspect of God who takes the punishment upon himself. It is a bad cop, good cop scenario, which is a manipulative illusion.
Heaven and Hell
Seventy-four percent of Americans believe in heaven. Heaven is usually understood as a place of bliss where those who have gained eternal life dwell with God forever. Belief in hell is cooling off as fifty-eight percent of Americans believe in hell, down from the 71 percent six years earlier. Hell is primarily understood as a place of eternal torment for those who are not Christians. A less official but probably more common traditional understanding is that good people go to heaven, and bad people go to hell.
The Kingdom of Heaven
The Kingdom of Heaven is seen as the reign of God present in Jesus and a future reality, often after a “second coming.” It is the vision of God for righteousness, peace, justice, and oneness in Christ. Traditional Christians are often waiting and longing for this future reality, sometimes even predicting the time Jesus will come back and make all things right.
The Mystical
The traditional church thinks highly of mystics as long as they are dead. The longer they have been dead, the better. Altered state experiences are discouraged in conventional Christianity except for conversion experiences among evangelicals and certain spiritual experiences during worship and ministry among Pentecostal and charismatic groups.
Limitations
While the strength of the traditional church is stability, that is also its most significant limitation. The desire to keep things the way they are and be comfortable in the familiar can hinder spiritual growth. Spiritual breakthroughs and deepening can be a wild ride at times. Of course, we need to be civilized and accommodate ourselves in various social situations. But to overvalue fitting in negates Jesus’ strong words about not fitting in. We can see this at work in how Jesus treated the family of his day. No society ever valued the “traditional” family more than the Jewish people of Jesus’ day. It was powerful and stable, structured according to the religious code of the Old Testament. It was how you survived physically, economically, and spiritually. However, every time Jesus talked about the Jewish family, he attacked it!
He said parents and children would rise up against each other because of him (Mat 10:21–22). When his birth family showed up looking for him, he pointed out to the crowd that his actual family members were those who did God’s will (Mark 3:31-35). He told the man who was a good traditional son when he dutifully wanted to stay with his family until his father died, “Let the dead bury the dead. You come and follow me” (Luke 9:59-60). He taught, “Don’t think I’ve come to make life cozy. I’ve come to cut—make a sharp knife-cut between son and father, daughter and mother, bride and mother-in-law—cut through these cozy domestic arrangements and free you for God. Well-meaning family members can be your worst enemies. If you prefer father or mother over me, you don’t deserve me. If you prefer son or daughter over me, you don’t deserve me (Matt. 10: 35–37, The Message).
Why did Jesus attack the family of his day so passionately? He did so because he knew that the strong family ties of his Jewish religion would keep family members clinging to their traditional religious ideas and practices rather than drinking the new wine of the Spirit. Jesus subverted all systems that kept people from hearing what Spirit was saying that was new and different from the old. This remains true today, whether it is one’s birth family, church family, ethnic family, religious denomination, social circle, close friends, political party, or another group.
Jesus warns us not to cling to our group in any way that will keep us from evolving spirituality. Anything that competes with the call of the new wineskins of Spirit-Breath-Awakened-Consciousness is a disaster, no matter how virtuous it may seem. The very strength and stability of the traditional church can keep it from hearing the “I have more to teach you” of the Jesus’ call.
The oldest thing you can say about God is that God is always doing something new. Doing something new can be extremely difficult for the traditional church. Perhaps a more remarkable reality is that it appears to some of us that the traditional church has difficulty in doing something really old. Many, like me, who leave their traditional church, do not do so because of the Jesus of the Gospels. We do so because the church does not follow that Jesus.
Strengths
Pointing out limitations in the traditional church does not lessen its inherent value in the ever-developing spiritual path. We value and honor the traditional church as it has sheltered and fed multitudes of serious Christians for centuries upon centuries. It is the nurturing place for most Christians in the world today. It has given us profound theologians, great saints, and pioneering mystics. It has provided a launching pad for all the following stages.
The healthy and enduring elements of the traditional stage include honoring traditions, the stability of the law-and-order mindset, respect for authority, and loyalty. People at this level do what is expected to help the world function in established ways. They have a strong sense of faith and a religious foundation that anchors them through the storms of life.
The traditional level of church deserves our respect and gratitude. Most of us on the Christian path today got there via this stage. Those who live at the tribal, warrior, and traditional levels can often only respond to the gospel when presented at the traditional level. They would not be able to hear an invitation from progressive or integral Christianity. We need traditional churches to minister to those firmly rooted in the conventional consciousness and invite people to move up from the tribal and warrior stages.
I am grateful for the traditional-level church. This is where I grew up, learned about the Bible, and found a fascinating Jesus who became a living reality to me later on.
From an integral perspective, any culture, group, church, or individual has every right to be at this level and deserves our understanding and respect. As with any worldview, this station in life only becomes problematic when it uses force or manipulation to impose its beliefs and values upon others. Any part of us that personally remains in the fantasies and magical thinking of the tribal stage or the limitations of the established stage also deserves our understanding, respect, and nurture. Every stage is valuable in itself. Age 12 is not better than age five — it is just different. It is not necessary to be judgmental about these parts of us, even those we may eventually decide to change.
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect. ”