Check out the article on Salon.com.
Here’s what happens if you google it:
I’m not quite so sanguine as Justin Elliott that:
In 2011, the “ground zero mosque” story will probably live on — but primarily on Fox News and Pamela Geller’s blog. It’s unlikely that anyone else will pay much attention ever again.
If it was effective in 2010, there’s no reason to think it won’t be tried in 2011.
Employers use them; businesses use them to find out why customers leave them; William Byron in this week’s America wonders whether churches should use them as well. He’s reflecting on responses to an earlier article he wrote for another Roman Catholic publication:
As a long-time writer of a biweekly column called “Looking Around” for Catholic News Service, I devoted a recent column to the exit interview idea and was inundated with responses from readers. Many indicated that they had been waiting to be asked why they left. The high response rate is all the more unusual because the column appears only in diocesan newspapers around the country. Evidently, respondents who claim to be no longer “in the boat” are still keeping in touch. Many of my respondents identified themselves as older persons.
He includes in this article a number of the responses he received; nothing too unexpected: the church’s teachings on contraception, women in the priesthood, end-of-life, and of course, the clergy sex abuse scandal. All of that is unique to the Roman Catholic Church. But there were other things, too.
They are soliciting feedback on America’s facebook page.
We might think about doing exit interviews ourselves. But what should we ask?
Surveys fascinate me, especially surveys of religious belief and practice. I suppose I should have been a Sociologist of Religion. There’s an article on Slate.com that explores the reality behind survey results that show high percentages of Americans attending weekly services.
In contrast to self-reporting surveys, some social scientists have tried alternatives. For example:
This neutral interviewing method produced far fewer professions of church attendance. Compared to the “time-use” technique, Presser and Stinson found that nearly 50 percent more people claimed they attended services when asked the type of question that pollsters ask: “Did you attend religious services in the last week?”
In a more recent study, Hadaway estimated that if the number of Americans who told Gallup pollsters that they attended church in the last week were accurate, about 118 million Americans would be at houses of worship each week. By calculating the number of congregations (including non-Christian congregations) and their average attendance, Hadaway estimated that in reality about 21 percent of Americans attended religious services weekly—exactly half the number who told pollsters they did.
Perhaps most shocking: Philip Brenner concluded:
Americans attended services about as often as Italians and Slovenians and slightly more than Brits and Germans. The significant difference between the two North American countries and other industrialized nations was the enormous gap between poll responses and time-use studies in those two countries.
The full article is here. The first couple of paragraphs of the article are somewhat misleading, beginning with the question “why do Americans say they are more religious than they actually are?” In fact, church attendance may not correlate to beliefs or self-identification as Christian. The article then goes on to cite percentages who claim to believe in God.
Perhaps even more interesting would be to try to figure out whether rates of church attendance have fluctuated over the centuries. Certainly there’s an assumption that it was very high in the 1950s, but as I recall from reading a bit about the problem, that may have been an aberration.
There was another one of those conservative Christian tempests in a teapot last week. It was caused by Elizabeth Edwards’ last facebook post which seemed to conservatives to deny the existence of God:
“You all know that I have been sustained throughout my life by three saving graces–my family, my friends, and a faith in the power of resilience and hope,” she said in a statement on her Facebook page. “These graces have carried me through difficult times and they have brought more joy to the good times than I ever could have imagined.”
One conservative wrote:
Clearly Elizabeth Edwards wants to put her faith in something, be it hope or strength or anything. But not God. I wonder if it’s just bitterness … At her death bed and giving what most folks are calling a final goodbye, Elizabeth Edwards couldn’t find it somewhere down deep to ask for His blessings as she prepares for the hereafter? I guess that nihilism I’ve been discussing reaches up higher into the hard-left precincts than I thought.
For a more thoughtful perspective, read this article from Politics Daily.
For a longer perspective, here’s Michael Shermer on Einstein’s God. He concludes the essay with a quotation from a letter Einstein wrote in 1949:
I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.
The call for humility is even more necessary, and less heeded, than it was sixty years ago.
According to his Op-Ed in the NYTimes today, the first Thanksgiving undoubtedly included turkey. More importantly, Hall, a professor at Harvard Divinity School, attempts to set the record straight on the misconceptions we have about the early New England colonists.
Hall stresses the political legacy of the Puritans. They were suspicious of hierarchy, both political and religious and sought to keep rulers on a short leash. Their congregational polity invested power in the laity, not in the clergy. Politically, they required annual elections and required that any law needed the consent of the governed to be valid. In 1648, the Mass. Bay Colony published the first code of laws in the Anglo-American world.
According to Hall, they also sought the common good:
Contrary to Hawthorne’s assertions of self-righteousness, the colonists hungered to recreate the ethics of love and mutual obligation spelled out in the New Testament. Church members pledged to respect the common good and to care for one another. Celebrating the liberty they had gained by coming to the New World, they echoed St. Paul’s assertion that true liberty was inseparable from the obligation to serve others.
Another reminder of the importance at getting history right.
I linked a couple of days ago to an article highlighting a study about the importance of spirituality to college students. Now comes an article from the venerable Christianity Today that examines the growing exodus of young adults from Christianity. The author, Drew Dyck, cites from a number of studies that young people are leaving church 5-6 times faster today than in previous generations; that up to 3/4 of those who grow up in church leave. It’s a dire prognosis, and Dyck places much of the blame on the response doubters get when they raise questions about their faith. He also suggests “moral compromise” contributes to the problem.
If you read my blog, you know by now that I’m not terribly concerned about such statistics; in fact, I think they offer the Episcopal Church an opportunity. Anglicanism used to be a tradition that encouraged intellectual reflection and fostered serious questions about the faith. We are also openly and publicly struggling with issues with which people struggle everyday.
The full article is here: The Leavers: Young Doubters Exit the Church | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction.
But there’s an irony here. How is it that a study can find college students engaging spiritual questions more deeply, while at the same time they are leaving institutional churches? Perhaps because those churches are not safe places for engaging spiritual questions. I hope Grace Church and the Episcopal Church are safe and welcoming environments for such spiritual questions.
An interesting study reported on in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The study, Cultivating the Spirit: How College Can Enhance Students’ Inner Lives, is a longitudinal study of the religious and spiritual views of college students.
The key findings:
The authors use the term spirituality broadly, to mean people’s inner, subjective lives. They found that students’ level of spiritual quest, or seeking meaning and purpose in life, rose during college. By the second survey, eight in 10 students were at least “moderately” engaged in a spiritual quest. Students were more likely as juniors than as freshmen to say they wanted to develop a meaningful philosophy of life, seek beauty, become a more loving person, and attain inner harmony. …
And the authors found that students’ level of religious struggle, or questioning their beliefs, increased in college. However, their level of religious skepticism or religious commitment stayed about the same, even though their engagement in religion declined. Students also became less religiously conservative, measured by their responses to questions on issues like abortion and casual sex.
I recently complete reading Courtney Bender’s The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2010)
Bender’s new work is widely acclaimed. Telling the stories of a spiritual practitioners who call Cambridge, MA their home, Bender uses their lives to rethink how scholars understand contemporary spirituality and the study of Religion. She begins by trying to locate some historical connection that binds the array of new age religious practices found in Cambridge to the city’s history as the locus of 19th century metaphysical speculation. And connection she does find, at least insofar as William James The Varieties of Religious Experience continues to shape, often implicitly, the way new age practitioners approach their own experience and attempt to enter into dialogue with social scientific analysis. The stories she tells are gripping, often of “lost souls” who through some experience have found a connection to something that seems much deeper than themselves, much deeper than the reality they experience in day-to-day life. We see them trying to make sense of their experience, and make connection to others whose journeys seem to converge with theirs.
For scholars of religious studies, Bender offers some provocative suggestions about how to understand and interpret contemporary spirituality, and by extension, religion in general. For example, she begins by noting
“that spirituality, whatever it is and however it is defined, is entangled in social life, in history, and in our academic and nonacademic imaginations.” She continues by observing that most recent definitions of spirituality attempt to define it as “a distinct category of action or activity (or mental state); and that they attempt to “extract something essential from it.” (p.5)
In her conclusion, she argues that she has demonstrated in her study that neat and tidy distinctions between the spiritual (or religious) and the secular are inadequate to explain the reality of religious life in America and the production of spirituality. Perhaps most interesting is that she sees the development of American spirituality and the scholarly analysis of religion and spirituality in the early 20th century as impacting one another.
While there is considerable material here for scholarly reflection, Bender also raises questions for those involved in congregations and religious institutions. Her argument that what is important is not so much the direct experience itself but how it is interpreted, explained, and how individuals incorporate that in their lives and in their social environments. One gets the sense that the “new metaphysicals” with whom Bender speaks are actively attempting to make sense of their experience and draw on a wide variety of resources in doing so.
She distinguishes between experience in “congregations” and spiritual networks. While such distinctions may be useful for her analysis, one wonders about the relevance of that contrast. It is likely that there are people who have had similar experiences but remain embedded in congregations, even as they try to integrate those experiences into their lives. It is also likely that some congregations may push people with such experiences to the margins. I’m also reminded of those studies that say among the most important roles that clergy can take on is that of spiritual guide.
All in all, there is much food for thought here.
There’s a lively comment thread on the Episcopal Church’s Facebook page about last night’s episode. It was interesting, especially in light of several themes repeated on this blog–the relationship between religion and secularism, contemporary American spirituality, and the role of religious knowledge. Much of the show seemed sensitive and thoughtful–teens dealing with questions of faith, for example, and the struggle with loved ones who are suffering.
Well-done, too, was the debate about the role of religion in public schools. How far can teachers and students go in proselytizing? What religious themes or topics are valid for public school classrooms?
Still, I found it ironic that after the debate about what students could and couldn’t sing in the school room, when the scene shifted to church, instead of a straightforward gospel number, we heard a version of “Bridge over Troubled Water.” I’m just not sure what to make of that. It’s almost as if the show’s producers were as uncomfortable about an openly-religious song in their show as school administrators tend to be.
Preaching Grace on the Square 