Institutional Neglect: What the Church Won't Name

A piece examining what a recent Christian Century essay on institutional neglect and the Holy Roman Empire reveals about where American religious life actually stands — and why the honest diagnosis is harder than any partisan crisis.

There's a particular kind of intellectual restlessness that shows up when someone is watching something familiar fall apart. You start reaching for historical analogies not because the past is a solution, but because you need to know whether what you're seeing has a name.

A recent essay in Christian Century captures that restlessness precisely. The author, writing during a high-stakes election year, finds herself unable to stop thinking about the Holy Roman Empire — that "cobbled-together network of principalities, cities, and bishoprics" that covered central Europe for nearly a thousand years. On its surface, the connection to contemporary American Christianity seems loose. Look harder and it becomes uncomfortably precise.

The Holy Roman Empire lasted from the coronation of Otto I in 962 CE to its dissolution by Napoleon in 1806 — approximately 844 years. Voltaire's famous quip was that it was "neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire." And he wasn't wrong, exactly. By the time it collapsed, it had become something like institutional scaffolding — a legal and political framework that persisted largely because no one had the energy or authority to formally dismantle it, not because it was actively governing anything.

That's the analogy I keep returning to. Not the empire's collapse, but its long twilight.

What Institutional Neglect Actually Looks Like

I want to be careful here, because "institutional neglect" is a phrase that can mean almost anything and therefore sometimes means nothing. Let me try to give it some precision.

Institutional neglect is not the same as institutional decline. Decline can be external — demographics shift, cultural contexts change, the world moves and the institution doesn't quite keep pace. That's painful but not necessarily a failure of stewardship.

Neglect is internal. It's what happens when the people responsible for an institution's health stop doing the difficult work that health requires. And the genuinely tricky thing is that neglect doesn't announce itself. From inside a neglected institution, the choices that constitute neglect usually feel like reasonable, even prudent decisions. A budget cut that avoids a painful structural conversation. A leadership transition that sidesteps an accountability question. A theological retreat that's framed as pastoral wisdom but is actually conflict avoidance.

Each decision, in isolation, is defensible. What you don't see — what you can't easily see from inside — is the cumulative direction.

This is where the Holy Roman Empire is genuinely instructive. The empire didn't collapse in a dramatic moment of failure. It drifted into irrelevance over generations, each generation making choices that preserved the form of the institution while hollowing out its function, until Napoleon arrived and formalized what everyone already knew: the structure had long since ceased to correspond to any real governing power.

I have come to think that this is the most dangerous pattern in institutional life — not the spectacular collapse but the long, comfortable drift toward irrelevance.

The Numbers Are Hard to Ignore

American religious institutions are in the middle of something that, by any honest accounting, looks like accelerating decline. In 2022, Gallup found that only 31% of Americans expressed confidence in organized religion — down from 68% in 1975. That's a loss of more than half the confidence American adults place in religious institutions across roughly one generation.

Pew Research data from 2023 found that approximately 63% of U.S. adults identify as Christian, compared to roughly 90% in the early 1970s. The religiously unaffiliated — people who describe their religion as "nothing in particular," atheist, or agnostic — now represent approximately 28% of American adults, up from around 16% in 2007.

These are not numbers that lend themselves to easy reassurance. And the pattern inside the numbers matters as much as the top lines. The departures are concentrated among young adults, who are leaving at higher rates than previous generations did at the same age, and who are less likely to return. Gallup's confidence data shows the sharpest drops among people under 40.

Confidence in organized religion among U.S. adults has fallen by 37 percentage points since 1975 — one of the steepest institutional trust declines recorded across any major sector in Gallup's long-running tracking data.

What's striking is that these numbers don't seem to be generating the kind of urgent institutional response you'd expect. There's a word for the gap between the severity of a problem and the urgency of the response, and the word is neglect.

Neglect vs. Reform: A Distinction That Actually Matters

Here's where I want to push back against a common conflation. Decline is not automatically neglect, and change is not automatically reform. There's a real distinction worth holding.

Institutional reform is painful in the short term and generative in the long term. It requires honest diagnosis, willingness to name what isn't working, and the courage to make changes that will alienate some stakeholders. It looks like disruption because it is disruption — but disruption aimed at preserving or restoring genuine function.

Institutional neglect is comfortable in the short term and corrosive in the long term. It avoids painful conversations, protects incumbent interests, and tends to look like stability. Until it doesn't.

The painful truth is that from inside an institution, neglect and stability can be nearly impossible to distinguish — at least for a while. Both feel like the absence of crisis. The difference only becomes legible over time, and by the time it's legible, significant damage has usually been done.

What This Costs — and Who Pays

I want to be careful not to make this abstract, because the costs of institutional neglect in religious communities fall on real people.

When a church loses its capacity for honest self-examination, it's usually the most vulnerable members who lose the most. Abuse that could have been caught earlier continues. Grief that could have been named is instead managed. People who needed the institution to be a genuine community of accountability find instead a system that has quietly reorganized around protecting itself.

This isn't a fringe phenomenon. The last two decades have produced substantial evidence of what happens when religious institutional neglect reaches its most acute form — when the failure to do the maintenance work of accountability creates conditions where serious harm goes unaddressed. The Catholic Church's abuse crisis. The Southern Baptist Convention's reckoning. The various high-profile collapses of evangelical celebrity-pastor culture.

Each of these was, in some sense, a story about neglect. Not about an institution that set out to cause harm, but about an institution that had stopped doing the work — stopped asking the hard questions, stopped welcoming the scrutiny, stopped building the structures of accountability — that might have caught the harm earlier.

Institutional neglect in religious contexts is rarely the result of malicious intent; it is almost always the cumulative product of individual decisions that each seemed reasonable in isolation and together produced a system incapable of self-correction.

That sentence is worth sitting with. Because it means that the solution is not primarily a matter of removing bad actors. It's a matter of building institutions that structurally resist neglect — that have accountability mechanisms, transparency norms, and cultures of honest self-examination built into how they function, not bolted on after the crisis arrives.

For more on how institutions protect their own frameworks from genuine outside critique, see my earlier writing on how systems resist outside thinking — it's the same pattern, just wearing different clothes in different contexts.

The Question Nobody Inside Wants to Ask

Here's the thing I keep coming back to: the election-year frame in the Christian Century piece is actually a distraction, even as it's an honest description of where our attention goes. Elections feel like crises because they're loud and high-stakes and produce clear winners and losers. Institutional neglect is quiet. It has no election night. It doesn't produce a single dramatic moment when you know it's happened.

What if we're making the same mistake the Holy Roman Empire made across its long twilight? Attending to the visible conflicts — the border skirmishes, the succession disputes, the territorial arguments — while failing to maintain the underlying structures that gave any of it coherence?

The question I want to ask religious leaders, and that I suspect most of them are not regularly asked, is this: what are you doing right now that is specifically designed to tell you what you don't want to know? What accountability structure, what feedback loop, what process exists to surface bad news before it becomes a crisis?

In my experience, this question tends to produce silence. Not because the leaders are bad people — most of them aren't — but because institutions that have developed cultures of neglect tend to have also, gradually, removed the mechanisms that would have generated uncomfortable information. The prophetic voice gets quieted first, usually in the name of unity. The honest data gets reframed second, usually in the name of faith. The accountability structure gets softened third, usually in the name of grace.

By the time any of this registers as a pattern, the institution is operating without the early-warning systems it would need to catch the next crisis early. And you can find this across the theological spectrum — progressive churches that can't examine whether their commitments are producing anything, conservative churches that can't examine whether their structures are protecting anything. The neglect pattern is genuinely ecumenical.

Related: the relationship between institutional self-protection and theological drift is something I've written about separately, and it's worth reading alongside this analysis.

What Genuine Renewal Would Require

I'm genuinely uncertain what the path out looks like, and I want to be honest about that uncertainty. But I have some instincts.

Genuine renewal tends to require, first, a naming. Someone has to be willing to say what is actually happening — not in the most inflammatory possible terms, but honestly and specifically. This is harder than it sounds. Institutions develop sophisticated immune responses to honest diagnosis, and the people most positioned to offer it are also usually the people with the most to lose from offering it.

Second, renewal tends to require outside pressure. Not hostile takeover, but accountability that can't be deflected by insider dynamics. This is part of why prophetic traditions exist — not as a luxury feature of religious life, but as a structural necessity. Institutions without genuine prophetic pressure tend, over time, to optimize for their own perpetuation rather than their stated purpose.

Third, and most practically, renewal requires that someone actually does the maintenance work. The boring, unglamorous, conference-room work of examining data, surfacing hard questions, building accountability structures, and following through on what the data says. This is the work that neglect, by definition, stops doing. It's also the work that almost never appears in vision statements or stewardship campaigns, which tells you something about why neglect is so common.

The Holy Roman Empire survived nearly nine centuries partly on the inertia of its own complexity — so many overlapping interests, so many vested parties, that nobody could quite organize a dissolution. American religious institutions don't have that kind of structural protection. The exit option is real, and people are using it in significant numbers.

What they're exiting toward matters too, and that question deserves more attention than it's getting. People don't stop needing community, meaning, accountability, and transcendence just because they leave a religious institution. What happens to those needs when the institutions that used to meet them start failing? That's a question with real stakes for the surrounding communities, not just for the institutions themselves.

I don't have a clean answer, and I'm not sure one exists. But I think the honest starting point is the one the Christian Century piece gestures toward: naming the pattern for what it is, rather than reaching, one more time, for the language of existential political crisis to describe what is actually a quieter and more structural problem. The empire in twilight never looked like it was ending. That was rather the point.

Jared Clark is the creator of Christian Counterpoint, where he examines institutional patterns in religious communities through the lens of critical analysis and honest inquiry.

Last updated: 2026-06-27