Kitsch religion.

WHEN the New York Times wants the opinion of respectable religion on an issue of the day, its reporter inevitably seeks out an Episcopal bishop, a Presbyterian minister, or a Reform rabbi; and so those Americans who rely on the Official Media for news can be forgiven for thinking that the liberal ''mainline'' churches represent the mainstream of religious faith. At the same time, despite random signs of life -- such as the ever-presence of Unitarian minister Robert Fulghum on the bestseller list -- there is a sense among those who follow such things that liberal religion is on the decline, that in the marketplace of faith the conservative denominations have got the upper hand.

This isn't what children growing up in liberal Jewish or Christian homes were told to expect. These children have long been taught that orthodoxy and fundamentalism are dying anachronisms -- that, in the modern world, a ''contemporary,'' enlightened view of God and man is the only viable stance. And yet that opinion has itself turned out to be an anachronism. What has happened to liberal religion?

The numbers are not debatable. The fastest-growing American denominations are the Southern Baptists and Mormons; whereas the mainline Episcopal, Unitarian, Congregationalist, Presbyterian, and Methodist churches have been bleeding members since the mid 1960s, so that by the beginning of this decade they had experienced losses in membership ranging from a fifth to a third. More depressing, from the perspective of the churches themselves, is that they have suffered this decline mainly among younger members. A study published in 1994, All in the Family: Religious Mobility in America, rated denominations on their ability to keep believers in the fold. Conservative Protestant groups such as the Southern Baptists and Assemblies of God did best, followed by the Roman Catholics. Of men and women interviewed between 1988 and 1990, only 63 per cent who had grown up in a liberal church had remained there -- compared with 83 per cent among conservative Protestants and 81 per cent among Catholics.

Discussing mainline decay in the journal First Things, Benton Johnson, Dean R. Hoge, and Donald A. Luidens wrote about sitting ''today in the balcony of a typical United Methodist church and look[ing] over a congregation of greying and balding heads.''

I've had the same experience in synagogues affiliated with the liberal Reform movement and the misleadingly named Conservative movement in Judaism. (At its inception more than a hundred years ago, Conservative Judaism proposed to ''conserve'' the bulk of traditional Judaism; but since about 1950, Conservative leaders have parted ways with traditional Judaism on a variety of issues, resulting in the death of Conservative Jewish law by a thousand small cuts.) Walk into a typical Conservative synagogue in New York City, and you will find a small audience of senior citizens mixed with some middle-aged adults and a few thirtysomething stragglers, all sitting passively, as if stunned, while the rabbi and cantor perform on a stage in front of them. Meanwhile, Orthodox synagogues overflow with observant Jews, including couples in their twenties and their babies.

Though Reform remains the largest body in Judaism, and frequently gains new members through intermarriage (when a non-Jewish spouse can be prevailed on to sit through a nominal ''conversion'' to Judaism), the only Jewish denomination that has been able to hold onto its young people against intermarriage and assimilation is Orthodoxy. In fact, many of the young Orthodox Jews you meet in stronghold neighborhoods such as Manhattan's Upper West Side grew up in Reform or Conservative homes but became disillusioned and made the decision to embrace traditional Judaism.

If observers of the religious scene too frequently consider liberal Christianity in isolation from its Jewish counterpart, it is because they don't take the trouble actually to define liberal religion. If they did, they would find that liberal Judaism has a lot in common with the Protestant mainline. To remedy the problem, let me propose a three-pronged definition, which will become clear from an account of an exemplary event of religious liberalism: my bar mitzvah.

Taking place in 1977 at Temple Beth El, a Southern California Reform synagogue, this event consisted of three main parts. First, my reading of the Torah: a passage in Hebrew from Deuteronomy. Though I had spent three years in Hebrew school, it was a typical Reform Hebrew school. Instructed by a series of indifferent Israelis, all I really learned was to pronounce Hebrew letters; I understood hardly a word of my brief Scriptural text.

Second came my bar mitzvah speech about the sad plight of Soviet Jews, an oration of little direct relevance to my passage from the Torah and written by my mother.

Finally, the third and main part of a Reform bar mitzvah: the party. This last had absolutely nothing to do with the ostensibly religious rite of that morning. Instead, at my insistence, at a nearby hotel in Long Beach called the Golden Sails Inn, I was the proud center of a living tableau of all that was most embarrassing about the 1970s. My guests danced to the Hustle, led by two specially hired lady disco dancers in brown suede jumpsuits. When the guests weren't hustling, a professional cartoonist wandered the large ballroom, drawing humorous caricatures. He drew me riding a surfboard on a large wave, though I've never surfed.

The differences between this and a traditional bar mitzvah illuminate the differences between liberal and traditional religions. An Orthodox boy reads a much longer passage from the Torah, and he understands all of it because he has been studying Hebrew as intensively as a Reform Jewish grammar-school boy might study Spanish or German. He also gives a brief sermon, or davar Torah, elaborating on themes arising from the chapters he has just read -- again, because he has studied those chapters and understands their relationship to Jewish law, his acceptance of which is the whole point of the exercise. Then all adjourn to the synagogue social hall for pickled herring and a shot of whisky.

SO we see in what direction liberal religion diverges from the tradition it comes out of. I mentioned a three-pronged definition. Here it is.

First the matter of discipline and education. On turning 13, a boy should, in traditional Judaism, be able to read and understand the Hebrew Scriptures from which the system of halacha, or Jewish law, derives, because on his 13th birthday the boy is suddenly responsible for carrying out that law. As a 13-year-old Reform boy, I was not asked to shoulder any new responsibilities. Though that morning I read from the Book of the Law, I didn't understand what I was saying, so I could hardly assent to it. (Actually, Reform Judaism holds that Jewish law -- in such Biblically mandated specifics as Sabbath observance and the lists of prohibited foods -- is no longer operative.) For the most part, liberal religion eliminates the concept of a bar mitzvah, literally a ''son of the commandments,'' an individual on whom the responsibility falls to fulfill quite serious requirements imposed by God.

In researching their article in First Things, Johnson, Hoge, and Luidens focused on the Presbyterian Church and listed some of the traditional Presbyterian standards of behavior that have fallen into desuetude: ''Rules against worldly amusements and immodest dress went by the boards after World War I, standards of Sabbath observance were widely ignored by 1940, and in many congregations old norms concerning alcoholic beverages had become obsolete by the early 1950s.'' The Presbyterian Church has also given up its opposition to abortion rights.

For both Christians and Jews the most striking and symbolic evolution in ideas about proper conduct centers on homosexuality. Among leaders of the Episcopal Church, a debate proceeds, with a powerful faction advocating that the church endorse gay marriages and homosexuality in general; openly gay Episcopal priests have been ordained. When homosexual Boy Scouts and Boy Scout leaders became an issue in the early 1990s, the Unitarians asserted their strong support of gay Scoutmasters and Scouts. In 1992, the major ecumenical organization representing the liberal churches, the National Council of Churches, just barely avoided, by a vote of 90 to 81, granting observer status to an avowedly gay denomination called the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Churches. Among Reform Jews, you find no such hesitation. When a gay synagogue in Manhattan installed its first rabbi, the head of the Reform movement, Alexander Schindler, personally presided over the installation.

The first leg of my definition of liberal religion has do with a watering down of moral requirements, and the second is not unrelated. It is the substitution of politics for morality. To return to my bar mitzvah: Notice that, when the time came for me to comment on my Torah portion, I -- or rather, my mother -- chose to emphasize not the mitzvot, religious commandments, that arise from the text, but rather a political issue: the mistreatment of Soviet Jews. ''Social action'' often seems to be the principal concern of Reform Judaism. Nor are the liberal Christian churches uninterested in politics.

If you were handed a hundred public declarations by liberal clergymen, and a hundred newspaper editorials, you would not find it easy to distinguish one from the other. The issues that preoccupy these men of God are various. Take 1994. At the start of the year, the head communications officer at the National Council of Churches declared that violent crime was ''at the top of the churches' agenda,'' with the head of the Council's Interreligious Task Force on Criminal Justice taking the occasion to attack the National Rifle Association with colorful references to a ''bloodstained Constitution'' and ''closed doors of fear.'' In March a group called the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, including heads of the Unitarian and Episcopal Churches, demanded that President Clinton's health-care plan provide funding for abortions. In April the National Religious Partnership for the Environment spent $4.5 million on an Earth Day campaign to endorse ''eco-justice'' and assail ''environmental racism.'' (''It is God, not Gaia, whom we will face on Judgment Day,'' remarked a skeptical Catholic priest.)

A New York Times article produced a Reform rabbi who sells energy-saving lightbulbs and low-flow shower heads in his temple Judaica shop. As he put it, ''the concept of the environment is central to Judaism'' -- though it's hard to see how that could be, given that Biblical Hebrew contains no word for ''the environment'' or ''nature,'' and that in Genesis God grants man mastership, not stewardship, of the non-human world. The year of liberal-religious activism concluded, in California, with Episcopal bishops opposing Proposition 187, the ballot initiative intended to discourage illegal immigration.

In seeking to explain the declining fortunes of liberal churches, conservatives often point to this obsession with politics and other non-spiritual matters. According to these critics, parishioners in liberal churches are, like most Americans, basically conservative. So they resent the political declarations of their leaders. I doubt it. At Temple Beth El during the Reagan Administration, when the sermons of our own rabbi seemed to deal increasingly with the arms race and nuclear winter, many of his congregants agreed with him. Meanwhile very few, if any, knew about the more radical positions being adopted by the rabbi's superiors at the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, where a portion of their dues money went each year.

Had the well-meaning Jews of Temple Beth El known that the head of the UAHC's synagogue wing supported homosexual temples and homosexual rabbis, many would have been appalled. The same goes for liberal churches. After interviewing five hundred Presbyterians, Johnson, Hoge, and Luidens concluded that most of them ''know little or nothing about the policies promoted by denominational officials.''

WHICH leads me to the third part of my definition of liberal faith. For some decades now the attraction of these churches has been religious only in part. Nor has it been mainly political. It has been largely social. After all, the highlight of my bar mitzvah was the party. When a liberal church ceases to be a body concerned mainly with the dissemination of God's word, it can continue to function for a while as a social institution. As a child growing up at Temple Beth El, I didn't understand the ideology of Reform Judaism: a highly theoretical contraption asserting the existence of God while denying that the Jews or any other people possess a document containing clearly revealed instructions from Him. No doubt our rabbi sincerely believed the theories underlying Reform. He was, however, probably the only such person at Temple Beth El.

What it is in Reform that appeals to Jews now in their fifties and sixties is not Reform theories, but rather the Reform temple as a gathering place of friendly and socially similar adults. My parents' generation loves bar mitzvah parties, the havurot (groups of families that get together for outings to the zoo or the beach), the kiddush after services on Friday night (a benediction over wine and bread, and a schmooze afterward with coffee and cake).

If I'm right, this would at least partly explain why Jews and Christians of my generation have in such numbers dropped out of our parents' temples and churches. As other social organizations have discovered to their distress -- fraternal organizations such as the Masons and the Shriners, do-good groups such as the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League -- young Americans today don't have time for them. We work too hard to spend Friday night at temple, Sunday morning at church, Wednesday night at the Moose Lodge -- whatever -- just to schmooze. For that, we can go to the gym, thereby accomplishing two objectives at once.

That, however, surely doesn't explain the whole phenomenon. After all, not everyone my age belongs to a gym. Critics offer different theories. A few years ago the dean of the Episcopal cathedral in Washington, the Very Rev. Nathan Baxter, expressed his opinion that the decline of the Episcopal Church proceeded from its ''inability . . . to shake [its] European identity.'' Rev. Baxter surely approves of his church's more recent conversion to multiculturalism -- a conversion in which other liberal churches have participated, though without the hoped-for result of winning back the membership they lost under the old ethnocentric ''European'' regime. The Presbyterian Church, for example, doesn't seem to have attracted many American Indians by opening its 1992 General Assembly with an Indian ritual in which a pipe containing sage was smoked, to drive out evil spirits.

A more promising theory appeared recently in The Churching of America, 1776 - 1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy, by two sociologists, Roger Finke and Rodney Starke. According to them, in the religious marketplace, churches rise in a direct relationship to the degree they impose disciplines of faith and action on their members. When a church eases those disciplines, it loses adherents.

Thinking about the problem of liberal-religious decline, I came across a further clue in an unlikely place.

As far as I know, the art critic Clement Greenberg recorded no opinions about Reform Judaism. He did, though, provide the classic definition of kitsch. In an essay published in 1939, ''Avant Garde and Kitsch,'' Greenberg tried to distinguish the avant garde, whether in literature or visual art, from another variety of cultural product called kitsch. As Greenberg saw it, art was real art, avant-garde art, if it refused to depict objects in the world, but rather worked within the constraints set ''by the disciplines and processes of art and literature themselves. . . . These constraints, once the world of common, extroverted experience has been renounced, can only be found in the very processes or disciplines by which art and literature have already imitated the former. These themselves become the subject matter of art and literature.''

In other words, real art refers only to other art. What exactly that means isn't important for our purposes. Greenberg's thoughts about kitsch, though, are very interesting. To appreciate real art is hard, but once the difficult contemplation of it has been done, it offers an enormous payoff, in the form of an aesthetic experience. Kitsch, on the other hand, makes things easy for us by taking the form of real art and, using techniques of its own, seeking to provide a simulation of aesthetic experience right off the bat.

Discussing the difference between experiencing a Picasso, on the one hand, and, on the other, a painting by Repin, a kitsch artist who depicted dramatic historical scenes, Greenberg writes: ''The ultimate values which the cultivated spectator derives from Picasso are derived at a second remove, as the result of reflection upon the immediate impression left by the plastic values [i.e., the picture itself]. It is only then that the recognizable, the miraculous, and the sympathetic enter. . . . Repin predigests art for the spectator and spares him effort, provides him with a short cut to the pleasure of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art. Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art.''

Roughly speaking, liberal religion is synthetic religion, kitsch religion. In a religious system centered on an orthodoxy, the system asks the believer to subscribe to a set of principles, deriving from what it asserts as the Truth about God, from which also follow definite standards of conduct. After the believer has accepted these principles and sought to order his life by them, he gets the payoff: the experience, however fleeting, of God and His transcendence.

Borrowing Greenberg's language, you might say that orthodox religion seeks to reflect not the world, but rather the Truth. Kitsch religion reflects only the world: its political interests, its desire to be free of troublesome moral obligations. The relationship to the Ultimate which the orthodox believer derives from his faith is derived at a second remove, as the result of reflection upon the immediate impression left by the Truth about God. It is only then that the miraculous enters. Kitsch religion, by contrast, predigests orthodoxy for the church- or temple-goer and spares him effort, claiming to provide him with a shortcut to transcendence that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine religion.

Historically, churches and synagogues have been the only organizations whose mission is to seek out and disseminate this Truth. If God exists, if He revealed His will to men at points in history, if His revelations can be found in the often ambiguous document called the Bible, then an institution is needed to explain that document -- to tell us what God wants from us. In rendering decisions about the meaning of the Bible, rabbis and priests have relied on the authority of ancient traditions: the Oral Torah in Judaism, or the papal tradition in the Roman Catholic Church.

Now, say the liberal denominations, Let the people decide! In place of these hallowed traditions, kitsch religion substitutes the prevailing opinions of the secular world. As a result, Reform Judaism is influenced less by the tradition of the Oral Torah than by the editorial page of the New York Times. The Protestant mainline churches increasingly reject the authority of their own traditions, allowing men and women to believe what they wish about virtue, sin, and salvation. After spending a year at Harvard Divinity School, the last word in tony, mainline decadence, Ari Goldman put it bluntly in his 1991 book The Search for God at Harvard: ''Religious truth did not seem to exist at the Div School, only religious relativism.''

Of course many clergymen associated with liberal denominations do not practice kitsch religion. One critic of the Episcopal Church, the journalist William Murchison, himself an Episcopalian, even argues that his church's ''commitment to social liberalism and permissiveness can be, and has been, exaggerated -- through its own efforts, not just the media's.'' An important point. I've read about and spoken to Episcopalians who are every bit as evangelical in their Christianity as Pat Robertson, who oppose abortion with as much fervor as any conservative Roman Catholic. When I wrote a book review recently in which I made a few critical comments about the Reform movement, I got a call from a Reform rabbi who told me that he had lost faith in Reform, that on retiring he wanted to move to Israel and live as an Orthodox Jew.

In my local Jewish newspaper, New York's Jewish Week, another Reform rabbi lamented: ''We have become a vacuous, no-demand, no-standards, no-requirements, no-guilt, do-good enterprise of sloppy sentimentality: a liberal Protestant Christianity without Jesus.''

Where you do find it, though, kitsch in religion seeks to do an end run around Truth, providing a feeling of ''spirituality'' without the requirement of orthodox belief and action. That is its downfall. From a strict marketing perspective, this strategy can never work for long. In the end, the problem is a simple one of redundancy. You can think of many nonreligious institutions in American life ready and willing to provide precisely the benefits offered by liberal religion. The New Age movement promises the feeling of ''spirituality'' -- without God. Want to make friends? Go to the gym. A whole spectrum of political organizations provide the buzzing high of self-righteousness -- without having to sit through an hour-long service. While striving to be relevant, the liberal churches have made themselves irrelevant.

THE liberal project in religion has been tried before. In the Book of Numbers, the modern reader meets a curiously familiar character. While the Israelites wandered in the Wilderness, a Levite named Korah concluded that the authority to interpret God's will should not rest exclusively with Moses and Aaron. Let the people decide! And so, with a group of followers, he rebelled. ''All the congregation are holy,'' he reminded Moses and Aaron, ''every one of them, and the Lord is among them; wherefore then lift ye up yourselves above the assembly of the Lord?'' For their trouble, without even a moment to fret about ''declining membership,'' Korah and his followers were swallowed up by a crack in the earth.

The columnist Don Feder quotes a Methodist theologian at Duke University: ''God is killing mainline Protestantism in America,'' says the despondent mainliner, ''and we . . . deserve it.'' I disagree. I don't foresee any cracks opening up in the earth. Very slowly, kitsch religion is killing itself.