The Perfect Storm: Why Liberal Christianity Faces an Existential Crisis

Tripp Fuller

This is an audio essay from my SubStack, Process This. ?You can head over here to read or watch the entire essay.

I’ve been tracking the peculiar contradictions of American religious life for years now, and there’s one puzzle that keeps me up at night: Why does liberal theology keep producing brilliant scholarship while liberal churches empty out? It’s not just a marketing problem or bad leadership—it’s what my friend Bo Sanders calls a “perfect storm.”

In this episode, I dig into the fundamental incompatibility between liberalism’s love affair with individual choice, Christianity’s call to communal formation, and consumer capitalism’s corrosive effects on both. We’ve got a faith tradition that’s too secular for believers, too religious for secularists, and too academic for everyone else. Meanwhile, 55% of mainline Protestants voted for Trump, so we can’t even claim the “liberal” label fits the folks in our pews.

I walk through five predicaments killing liberal Christianity—from what Henry Nelson Wieman called “spiritual thinness” to what I’m calling “liberal laryngitis,” the inability to speak clearly on anything that matters. Add cultural shifts that make Sunday just another day for Target runs, and you’ve got churches with pipe organ endowments bigger than their mission budgets, wondering why nobody shows up.

But here’s the thing: something valuable dies if we lose thoughtful faith entirely. The question isn’t whether liberal Christianity deserves to survive—it’s whether we can build something sturdy enough to weather this storm. Maybe it’s time to take Whitehead’s advice and “disembark on Mount Ararat” to build something entirely new.

Fair warning: This one’s going to make some folks uncomfortable. But as Niebuhr reminds us, Christianity always stands under judgment—including its liberal expressions.

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