Recently I spoke to a class of college students — by way of Skype — in southern Minnesota. It was a media and religion course at a Lutheran liberal arts college. They talked about their dismay with the narrow and often-inflammatory way religion is discussed, especially in the context of politics. I asked if they felt at all represented in these discussions, or how they might. One young man in the back of the classroom said, "I don't think there is any real, public expression of what it means to be religious now. It's different."
He's right. There has been a dramatic break with ways of being spiritual and religious that held, in the West, for many generations. And there is a new evolution underway.
In the mid-1990s, I spent two years interviewing people across the Christian church — from Armenian Orthodox to Nazarene Holiness — who had in some way been involved in the ecumenical movement that surged after World War II and through the 1960s. Sitting with them, probing their memories, I relived the absolute shock and thrill of unprecedented first encounters between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. It's not just that faith looked new; the whole world looked full of possibility and kinship that had not been there before.
I remember sitting with one 93-year-old Benedictine monk, a giant of twentieth-century liturgical reform, Father Godfrey Diekmann. He told me about going to Yale to work with a small group of Catholic and Protestant scholars who were creating the first ecumenical translation of the Bible — what became the New Revised Standard Version. Someone suggested they pray before they begin. But the awkward question arose: would it be a Catholic prayer or a Protestant prayer? Someone spontaneously spoke the first line of the Lord's Prayer, the prayer of Jesus in the New Testament: "Our father, who art in heaven..." Everyone joined in without needing to think, as this prayer is Christian muscle memory across traditions high and low. By the final line, as Godfrey Diekmann described it to me, they had all met each other's eyes and most had tears in them. They had only now realized they had this in common — a simple reality internalized but a profound discovery.
Growing up in the 1960s in the Bible Belt, I had no idea such encounters were happening. My small town was still segregated along religious lines. My mother fell in love with the boy next door, a Methodist, and my grandfather — a Southern Baptist preacher — forbade the relationship.
Thirty years later after she had divorced my father, reader, she married him. I digress, but not completely.
Rigid, rule-bound ways of being religious — of being utterly identified not merely by the same denomination, but perhaps the very same church or synagogue your parents and grandparents attended before you — have transformed utterly in a handful of generations.
Strong religious identities survive and thrive. But more than ever before, even in their most conservative iterations, they are chosen. And alongside them is a world of flux and questioning — a new phenomenon of people who have been raised with more questions than answers, more options than givens. They are not abandoning religion, though, or revealing it as something primitive that modernity has outgrown, as thinkers since the Enlightenment have predicted they would. They are rediscovering and reinventing it.
Recently, I interviewed the editor of Poetry magazine Christian Wiman, who has become something of a surprised voice for this transformation and renewal of faith in our time. His own story has the arc of an iconic American story: a violence-tinged, charismatically-churched Texas upbringing followed by a period of agnosticism after he left home, traveled the world, and became a writer.
For many people who were never religious or who leave the religion of their childhood behind, it's the experience of having children of your own that brings an urgency to the question of what you believe. For Christian Wiman, it was the experience of love — of falling profoundly in love with the woman who would become his wife. Because he is a poet, perhaps, he became unsentimentally articulate about the power of love to make life more vivid, to make us hunger for the best in ourselves, to feel we have touched transcendence. And then, hard on the heels of that, he was diagnosed with a mysterious blood cancer that might kill him in 30 days or 30 years.
So Christian Wiman became more aware of his mortality that most of us. And he became more aware of his own and his contemporaries' robust and aching grappling with the ancient existential quandaries of theology and philosophy. But we cloak them in secular terms, he realized. We talk about how to manage our technology, about never finding time for ourselves and what we care about, about feeling overwhelmed by life.
Christian has himself become overtly religious again, but not satisfied with the forms on offer. He describes a huge cultural grasping towards "clarity and austerity" — "something that won't be so frou frou and slip out of our grasp and just make us think it's ridiculous. And yet also something that is open enough to engage those parts of us that we don't understand."
This points at the most fascinating aspect of the emerging religiosity that is genuinely new — its aspiration at one and the same time to be serious and open, devout and hospitable to difference. The new religiosity reaches across boundaries of faith and across boundaries of belief and non-belief. Christian Wiman says this, "I am convinced that the same God that might call me to sing of God at one time might call me at another to sing of godlessness. Sometimes when I think of all of this energy that's going on, all of these different people trying to find some way of naming and sharing their belief — I think it may be the case that God calls some people to unbelief in order that faith can take new forms."
Such words echo the longing of that student in a Minnesota classroom, and a longing I pick up everywhere I go. This is theology for a world in which our kinship with people across the globe is no mere Bible verse but something that can become incarnate in an instant through Skype. It's a world in which New Age spiritual promiscuity has yielded to a real curiosity about ancient texts and hard core theology; this is evidenced, not least of all, in undergraduate classrooms at universities across the country. It's a world in which traditional religious language and rituals make a new kind of sense to people and clearly have their place — and yet in which new language and new forms are needed too.
There are dangers and pitfalls here too, to be sure, cautions that people I deeply admire would rightly raise. The late, great historian of religion at Yale, Jaroslav Pelikan, talked to me after he had completed his last epic project — a compilation of Christian creeds across history and cultures. He reminded me that Emerson — who was a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and a Unitarian minister — believed that everyone should compose his own creed. Emerson said to the divinity school students at Harvard in 1838, "You must be yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Spirit and sing it out." The trouble with that, Pelikan reflected, is that "you do it and then you do it a little bit more, and pretty soon you have to teach your children something, and so the best you can do is to teach them what you have. And you do that a generation or two, and all of a sudden, there you have a new creed."
A champion of the enduring value of tradition to the end — he converted from Lutheranism to Eastern Orthodoxy in his 80's — Pelikan believed starkly that the only alternative to tradition is bad tradition. But there is something in the intelligence and questioning and twenty-first century pragmatism of the new religious thinkers and seekers that makes me curious at least and hopeful at best about the creeds they will give voice to. We will see.
Wallace Best, Ph.D.: In Spite of It All.. A Glorious Easter
Diana Butler Bass: The End of Church
Christopher P. Scheitle and Roger Finke: A Road Trip Across America's Religious Landscape (PHOTOS)
Philip Goldberg: America the Mystical: Oh Beautiful for Spacious Minds
Krista Tippett: The Real Environmental Crisis: Lessons From the Green Patriarch
Reverend William E. Flippin, Jr.: Thou Shalt Not Live By Street Food Alone
Religious doctrine is hearsay, "holy" books written, edited, published and interpreted by men.
Religion is a man-made political power tool fueled by fear and need and greed.
Sometimes it is used for the "good" of humanity; other times not. What is "good" is often purely a matter of opinion. Mostly it is used by the few to get paid for telling the many how they should live--even though most adults already know right from wrong.
It is child abuse to use the "carrot and stick" of religion to teach them right from wrong--to threaten children with etermal damnation/hell is the ultimate terrorist threat.
Abandoning the much abused power of religion in favor of a mindset that requires integrity and common sense would be a VAST improvement over the status quo.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Why, just today at Mt Hope Cemetery in San Diego, according to Yahoo, a man was tackled by security after slashing the forearms of one of his kids and yelling, "we're going to Jesus! we're going to Jesus!"
Neither believers nor atheists can claim any moral high ground when it comes to murder.
I have a clear memory of a September morning when nearly three thousand people were killed in the name of ISLAM. Doctors are killed in the name of Christianity because they also provide abortions. The war between Jews and Muslims has been going on since everyone now alive was born.
Oh it must feel great to look down on the billions of intellectually inferior fellow humans who happen to enjoy the comfort, social connection and meaning of religious fellowship and ritual.
As for the "comfort, social connection and meaning of religious fellowship and ritual", I wouldn't use the word "meaning" so much, but I have no problem with that overall concept and understand it very well. I was raised as a believer, indoctrinated, yes, but I also saw some of those benefits. I don't begrudge people that, but know very well, through first-hand experience, that the same can be done without any supernatural belief required.
And plenty of believers are not "intellectually inferior". Again, I was one myself. That simply shows the incredible power of indoctrination-from-birth combined with the fear of mortality.
Don't claim arrogance belongs only to atheists. The arrogance of many believers is simply breathtaking, and the vast majority of atheists are very quiet. (I assure you, someone you know doesn't believe in your god, but you are unaware of it. Likely more than one person. There are _clergy_ who don't believe, but hide it completely.) Luckily I was never like that when I believed; I had humility and questions and the wisdom not to speak with authority for God himself, which so many religious people seem perfectly happy to do.
In this sense, anyway: http://bit.ly/4AnwYf
Sorry, I think I'm about to vomit. Imagine a world where people lived their lives based on what was actually true, and not what they wished to be true.
Moreover, given the stakes at hand and the importance of getting it right, this is not about personal anecdotes and feelings. Krista, I honestly think you don't get it. Religion is one of the most powerful forces in our society. We have to talk about this seriously. That might mean factoring in how individuals feel about and experience their religion, but it might also mean dispassionately pointing out that their religion is wrong, no matter how they feel about it. We are trying to have an adult conversation here, not just share feelings and be moved by anecdotes.
For the atheist part, we are concerned about how powerful and dangerous religion already is and we are interested in what is true. Personal feelings and anecdotes about religions don't make religions true. Facts and evidence make religions true. I care primarily about what is true. I don't think anything Tippett said had any remote relevance to that.
Um, if you don't like the current nature of the discourse, then you need to present a better way to discuss the topic. And you need to present it in a way sensitive to the concerns already being discussed. Don't just whine about you don't like the current conversation. It honestly sounds like those students only noticed how narrow and heated the discourse is without ever bothering to learn about what is actually being discussed and without ever bothering to try to enter the conversation and interject their own concerns.
Part of what I think needs to be understood is the political and intellectual discourse is not about making people happy. It's not about us all getting along or pandering to individual sentiments. Unfortunately, when it comes to politics we have a nation to run. When it comes to intellectual matters, we have a universe and interesting concepts to understand. This is serious stuff, we had better put some work into it and get it right. What is being discussed and argued over is there because people have thought about this issues -- some very very carefully, some not -- and those are the issues many have felt are essential to getting it right. ...
Let's stop pretending any set of beliefs based on magic and superstition hold the key to anything of value. A good story here and there, yes. Otherwise those religious texts belong in the remainders bin.
Progress! Yay!
Believing in God does require them to act in a certain manner, for which many do not.
2/3rds of the world may claim some form of religion but of that how many would be false worshippers, if even unbeknowst to them? The biggest threat to religion today is God. How is that for irony? And maybe that helps to explain the many problems within the religions today.
So do science and religion have something in common today? Most definetly, a fear of god, or anything even that could possibly be associated, perhaps, more directly with God. Given todays technology science could quite likely prove that appearances indeed can be deceiving. But would they? Do not many in science today believe that humanity is the pinnacle of all creation? The universe is to be theirs and none other? And what if that illusion were to be burst? That same argument can be made for the religious leaders of today. It is one thing to prance around and do all the little rituals but when confornted with the possibility of "events" actually happening? I think many people would be surprised at the lack of belief from some leaderships.
It is all just a grand scheme, until one of us happens to show up.
I too studied at Yale, and Pelikan thought some of my work to be tolerably good. I still have a postcard from him. He sent it after he completed the Christian Tradition. It says, "now I know how Moses felt!"
Jesus was often annoyed with questions of ritual, scrupulous laws, places of worship, status, power, control........The leaders and the people were missing the point entirely. [Sample Matthew 25].
He did not come to found a new religion, blend them all together, pit one against the other, destroy one or all of them.
He addressed by living example how people should live fully, love completely, and assured us that not even death will destroy what is good.
I'll stick with science, math and physics, thanks.
But human beings cling to traditions, and resist change. In fact, they usually wait until things reach crisis mode before they act to deal with the crisis. And as it is with economic and environmental problems and crises, so it is with religion.
Personally, I believe religious creeds will evolve through reform, or reformation. And I think the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) will evolve and be reformed perhaps more than other religions, even though all need to be reformed and updated to bring them into the modern day and age and establish or recognize the true family of religions, races, cultures and nations.
I like what a dying man says about it in his songs, at http://www.soundclick.com/ttap