Category Archives: Religion in America

Becky Garrison on Trinity Wall Street

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A new piece on Killing the Buddha raises questions about Trinity’s role and about its Rector, Jim Cooper

Put just about any priest in charge of Trinity Church, a historic Episcopal Church in Lower Manhattan with a net worth of approximately $1 billion due to their holdings as Trinity Real Estate; add to this mixture access to international religious and business leaders, a clergy compensation package valued at $1.3 million in 2010, and the relatively new purchase of a four-floor, $5.5 million-dollar townhouse in Soho to serve as the rectory; this elixir will transform most souls from holy to heretical.

Garrison refers to a Village Voice article on Trinity and Cooper entitled “More Money than God.” The author of the Village Voice piece, Nick Pinto, goes into detail on conflicts between Cooper and Trinity’s vestry.

Previous posts on Trinity: here, here, and here.

The “Nones” in 2013: A collection of links

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Elizabeth Drescher has a thoughtful piece on resisting the impulse to pigeonhole the “nones.” Some may be spiritual but not religious, some may be unbelievers, but it’s important to keep in mind the results of the Pew survey:

  • 68% of the Unaffiliated in general believe in God or a Universal Spirit
  • Among those who self-identify as Atheist/Agnostic, 38% say they believe in God or a Universal Spirit
  • Among those who self-identified as “Nothing in Particular”—the majority of Nones (71%) in general—some 81% say they believe in God or a Universal Spirit

Survey says: Nones are by and large not unbelievers. Not atheists. Not secular humanists. Not anti-religious.

Apparently the growth in the religiously-unaffiliated slowed in 2012, increasing by only .3 percentage points.

Faith beyond Belief: Stories of good people who have left their church behind by Margaret Placentra Johnson shares the stories of people of faith who have abandoned institutional religion. Her book puts faces on some of those included among the “nones.” Some may be “spiritual but not religious” but there are also atheists, mystics, and people who continue religious practice (prayer, for example) outside the confines of institutional religion.

But the SBNR’s may have more mental problems than the religiously affiliated, according to a study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

Mark Vernon has a thoughtful take on the study’s significance:

In Britain, though, it appears that many individuals view religion as an impingement upon their spiritual searching. Christianity, say, is felt to constrain life – perhaps because of the negative attitudes it projects about gay people and women; or because it presents belief as more important than growth; or because it looks more interested in sin than enlightenment. If that is so, the new research is a striking indictment of the failure of British churches to meet spiritual needs

And this:

Finally, the research challenges the stance of those who are spiritual but not religious. It might be called the individualism delusion, the conviction that I can “do God” on my own. And yet, as the psychotherapist Donald Winnicott argued, human beings need to work through traditions to resource their personal creativity. Only in the lives of others can we make something rich of our own life

Tripp Hudgins says he’s a Christian because he is “spiritual-but-not-religious:”

Religions are simply scaffolding for revelation…which is the principal goal of any spiritual practice. Religions are collections of spiritual practices. That’s all they are. Mine is Christianity. I’m Christian because I am spiritual-but-not-religious. I am Christian because Jesus said, “The sabbath is for humanity and not humanity for the sabbath.”

Jesus honored the so-called spiritual-but-not-religious. He lauded the seeker.

The others had him killed.

Then he came back and said, “Come. Follow me.”

How could I not?

Institutional Failure: The Church’s internal struggles and growing irrelevancy

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Yesterday, there was the shocking news that the measure to allow women bishops in the Church of England went down to defeat. Last week came the next step in the dissolution of the Episcopal Church as we’ve known it with the secession of the Diocese of South Carolina.

Outside of Anglicanism, also last week the American Roman Catholic bishops met. They were licking their wounds after a resounding defeat at the ballot box. Having put financial resources and considerable pressure, their efforts to prevent the passage of same-sex marriage failed in four states. The presidential candidate favored by most was defeated, apparently by a majority of their flock. They met with a convicted felon in their midst but no mention was made of his presence or the systemic problem underlying his conviction.

The Protestant religious right, too, is now trying to figure out what went wrong, what God is telling them, and how to move forward. Fortunately, Franklin Graham provides insight for all of us, as he speculates that God intends a total economic collapse in the US in order for us to repent and amend our ways.

Many of us who are passionate about our faith, passionate about the Good News of Jesus Christ, and about building up the Body of Christ, are also deeply committed to and passionate about the institutional church. It has nurtured and shaped us. It is one of the means through which we experience God and the love of Jesus Christ. But the institutional church, like every human institution, is deeply flawed, oppressive as well as life-giving. It can diminish us as human beings as well as enable our flourishing.

It’s pretty clear by now that many (all?) of our institutions are in crisis. Our political system is broken; our economy falters; higher education, the military, you name it. The structures of the Church, the institution of the Church is not only meant to be the means through which we come to know and love God through Jesus Christ but it is also the Body of Christ. It makes Christ present to the world and unites us to Christ’s body throughout history and across the world.

There have been times throughout history when it is very difficult to see how the institutional church incarnates the body of Christ. This may be one of those times, a period when because of human fallibility and social upheaval the institutions of the churches no longer bear witness to the fullness of Christ but have fallen prey to narrow human interest. At such times, prophets and reformers have risen up to breathe new life into old institutions or to create new ways through which God can break in upon us. It may also be that in local settings, in new media and new ways that people come together, we are already seeing hints of the new creation that God is calling into being.

In the meantime, we have to wait patiently, mourn the ways in which the churches and we ourselves fall short of God’s call, and continue to seek God’s will in the present and future. The danger is that our local efforts are ignored while institutional credibility and relevance collapse on the national and global level.

Back to women bishops. The Archbishop of Canterbury has spoken publicly on the measure’s defeat. Thinking Anglicans provides full coverage of that as well as a press round up and reactions from various interest groups.

Reactions are beginning to come in. From Andrew Brown on Guardian: “I think I have just watched the Church of England commit suicide. It was a very long and very boring process.”

A view from Scotland (Kelvin Holdsworth):

Looking on at the passion of the Church of England from outside, one finds oneself trying hard to substitute compassion for pity.

There are many fine women priests and the cause for treating them equally in Canon Law is an easy one to make but one which has not been made often enough. Those female clergy deserved better than this measure. The whole church deserved better than this and now has the chance to try to find its way towards it.

The Church of England gets its chance to prove that it worships at something other than the altar of compromise.

Some thoughtful pieces on Mormonism

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Slate has a lengthy and fascinating essay on Michael Quinn, who was excommunicated by the LDS in large part because of the historical studies he published. A historian with a PhD from Yale he became active at a heady time in Mormon scholarship, when the archives were opened in the 1970s more broadly than ever before. Unfortunately for Quinn, the brilliance of his scholarship did not lead to a brilliant academic career. Forced out of Brigham Young University, he was basically black-balled, prevented from tenured jobs at the University of Utah and Arizona because of efforts from administrators or faculty. On one level, his story is not unlike that of historians of other American religious traditions who have dared to challenge the official story of their communities, but to lose out on jobs at secular institutions because of fear of backlash from the LDS is unconscionable.

Jackson Lears reviews a number of recent works on Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and the history of Mormonism:

As Terry Givens suggests in his probing book People of Paradox, the Mormon divinization of the material, even the banal, is akin to a sacramentalist outlook, but without the sense of transcendence and mystery that a remote God provides. Givens is a practicing Mormon with an uncommon sensitivity to the complexities and the vulnerabilities of his faith. He acknowledges the risk of hubris in the Promethean quest for Godhood, recalling the serpent’s promise in paradise (“ye shall be as gods”). This Promethean impulse is reinforced by a Mormon tendency to use a language of empirical certainty, even for propositions that may seem anything but empirical—a tendency traceable back to Joseph Smith. As a result of his visionary experience, he said, “I have learned for myself that Presbyterianism is not true.” The search for empirical (or pseudo-empirical) certainty, bounded by priestly authority, is one engine of eternal progression. Salvation is a process, not a goal; its core is action, not introspection. Much of this theology resonates with commonsense American sensibilities—the priority of matter, the organizer God, the celebration of doing over being, the faith in progress, the prospect of perpetual personal growth.

Lears links the materialism of Mormonism to its success in fomenting capitalism and in the union of the two finds an explanation for Mitt Romney’s career. That might be going a bit far.

Mormonism continues to fascinate scholars and the general public, in part because of the many secret or semi-secret practices as well as the story of its origins. In the biography of Joseph Smith as well as in the story of finding of the Book of Mormon and the tension between the Latter-Day Saints and mainstream America in the 19th century, there is enough detail to puzzle over. That the modern LDS church presents itself as a denomination within Christianity and that contemporary Evangelicals have embraced Romney’s candidacy, shows how far Mormons have come on the road to respectability. It will be interesting to see what happens between the Mormon-Evangelical alliance if Romney loses.

More about the “Nones.” Who are they, anyway?

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You remember, last week’s Pew survey stirred up a frenzy of speculation (and angst) about what it might mean that the number of religiously unaffiliated in the US has grown by 5% (and yes, I contributed in my own small way, to that frenzy).

There’s been a lot of commentary about the “nones”–who they are, why they have rejected institutional religion. Much of it is like a recent piece by Brian McLaren which focuses on college students who have been turned off by conservative Christianity.

Elizabeth Drescher offers a more nuanced approach, pointing out that the Pew Survey focuses on belief, rather than on practice:

My hunch is that questions about “belonging to a community of people who share your beliefs and values” confuses the idea of community as a gathered social-spiritual network (a tribe) with the fraught subject of doctrinal religious belief and, further, the problematic language of religious values. We know, of course, that attendance at religious services of all sorts is down (except, perhaps, among religious groups in which doctrinal pluralism is something of a core value), but that does not allow us to conclude that religious or spiritual community is not important in the United States among those who identify or formally affiliate with institutional religions as well as those who do not.

Still, it’s clear that McLaren, Drescher, and most Episcopalian commentators on the survey imagine the “nones” to be well-educated, middle-class or upper-middle class, and probably white.

The reality, revealed by the Pew survey itself, is rather different. Jeff Sharlet points out the connection between disaffiliation and economics:

so the Pew study of the Nones has distracted many from what I think are the most interesting numbers: the largest percentage, 38%, is in the under $30,000 income bracket. Another 34% are below $74,999. Which means 72% are poor, working class, or, for a family of four, lower middle class. Those identifying as “atheist/agnostic,” a much smaller group than the “Nothing in particulars,” skew 62% under $75,000. Look at the education demographics and you’ll find more evidence for the hypothesis that what these numbers show is economic absence as much as religious absence. 45% of those identifying as Nothing in Particulars (NiPs) have no college, roughly the same as many religious affiliations.

He also points out the historical connection between disconnectedness from religion and economic downturns. The Great Depression was the last historical period that saw such numbers of the “unchurched.”

If he’s right, that might require rethinking how one does outreach to the religiously unaffiliated (the “unchurched”).

Another Pew Survey: The numbers of religiously-unaffiliated spike again

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Here is the story from Rachel Zoll of the AP. Full results of the survey are available here.

About the “nones,” now approximately 20%: They may believe in God; they may pray; they may be “spiritual but not religious.” But they do not affiliate with any religious organization nor do they want to:

Pew found overall that most of the unaffiliated aren’t actively seeking another religious home, indicating that their ties with organized religion are permanently broken.

Alan Jacobs ponders the significance of this:

The question I would ask is this: Has there been an actual increase in religiously unaffiliated people, or do people who are in fact unaffiliated simply feel more free than they once did to acknowledge that fact? My suspicion is that until quite recently a person born and baptized into the Catholic church who hadn’t attended Mass in fifteen years would still identify as a Catholic; but recently is more likely to accept his or her unaffiliated status. There is less social (and perhaps also psychological) cost in saying “I have no particular religion that I’m connected to” than there once was.

That is, the poll may reflect not a change in behavior but a change in how people think of their behavior — a change that brings their self-descriptions more closely into line with reality. And that wouldn’t at all be a bad thing: there’s always something to be said for the removal of illusions, for “reveal[ing] the situation which had long existed.”

Most striking about all this are the generational shifts. Among “millennials” the numbers are shocking. Of younger millennials (those born between 1990 and 1994), 34% claim no religious affiliation. Older millennials are only slightly more likely to be involved in organized religion (30% now compared to 26% in 2007). The number of unaffiliated Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers has also increased; the latter in spite of recent articles trumpeting the return of Boomers to church.

What are we to make of this? I think it’s right to say that part of it is that there is less stigma attached in saying one does not attend church. On the other hand, I suspect that a willingness to self-identify as non-religious reflects behavioral and attitudinal change.
Growing numbers of Americans simply don’t seem to care about institutional religion. It is irrelevant to their lives.

This certainly has enormous implications for denominations and local congregations. If large numbers of young people have no inclination to get involved in church, no interest in attending services even on Christmas or Easter, or being married in a church, that means they are seeking meaning in other places and in other ways than through traditional religious language and categories. It may be that they are not even asking questions about themselves, their lives and the world that can be engaged in religious terms.

This is what “post-Christian” culture looks like. It’s not simply a matter of a decline in prestige, power, and influence for the churches. If the trend continues, how many young adults will claim no religious affiliation 10 years from now? 50%? More?

How do we proclaim the gospel in this context? What does it mean to be church? For Anglicans, it won’t be enough to say that we offer a “via media” or that “The Episcopal Church welcomes you.” People won’t understand what the former means and won’t even see the latter sign.

Rick Bragg on the Southern Obsession with College Football

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A must read, for Southerners and Northerners alike. It’s a religion, too:

WE BELIEVE SOME things, down here. Some of them, I have lived long enough to question. We believe that if a snapping turtle bites you, it will not turn loose until it hears thunder, but since I have seen a snapping turtle as big as a turkey roaster bite a broomstick in two, I believe it will turn loose any time it damn well wants. We believe snakes have mystical powers and will charm you if you look into their eyes. When I retire, I plan to test that theory on water moccasins at my stock pond, and if they have not charmed me in four or five seconds, I will shoot them. Then, in times of drought, I will hang them in a tree. That, we believe, will make it rain. My grandmother, God rest her soul, told me so, so it must be true.

And we believe — well, maybe all but the Unitarians — that God himself favors our football teams. On Friday nights and Saturday afternoons, our coaches, some of them blasphemers and backsliders and not exactly praying men the other six days of the week, tell their players to hit a knee and ask his favor at the same exact instant the other team is also asking his favor, which I have always taken to mean that God, all things being equal, favors the team with the surest holder on long field goals.

h/t Alan Jacobs

More incidents of Islamophobia

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From TNI, in addition to those I’ve already mentioned, the following:

ONTARIO, California. Worshippers said two women threw the three legs onto the driveway of the proposed Al-Nur Islamic Center in Ontario shortly before 10 p.m. Tuesday and sped away in a white pickup.

NORTH SMITHFIELD, Rhode Island. Muslims from a North Smithfield mosque are asking for extra protection after a sign outside their place of worship was vandalized over the weekend. North Smithfield police confirmed they are studying surveillance video recorded around 3:30 a.m. Sunday. That’s when a person was seen driving into the mosque’s parking lot and smashing the sign with a hammer.

MORTON GROVE, Illinois. The shots were heard by worshipers who were outside the mosque and were powerful enough to damage the building’s brick wall.

LOMBARD, Illinois. The prepertrators hurled a 7-Up bottled filled with acid at the school during Ramadan prayers.

OKLAHOMACITY, Oklahoma. Authorities are investigating after vandals fired paintballs at an Oklahoma City mosque. ‘A car pulled here in front of the main entrance and started shooting paintball guns, but at the time, I didn’t know it was that. I thought it was bullets they were shooting into the building.’

More on the Illinois incidents here. The Lombard incident took place in the congressional district of Joe Walsh who proclaimed last week that militant Islam was taking over the suburbs.

Combatting the Evil of Islamophobia

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We don’t yet know a motive for the shootings at the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek but the perpetrator’s links to white supremacist groups are becoming clear.

A day later, a mosque in Joplin, MO burned to the ground. Authorities have labeled that fire “suspicious” and it had already been targeted by two arson attacks (most recently on July 4). Glenn Greenwald writes about islamophobia in the US providing a catalog of recent attacks on American Muslims. He adds:

All of this reveals a broader truth: Islamophobia in the United States is pervasive and intense, and worse, is as ignored and tolerated as it is destructive. The greatest harm from these incidents is not to the property they damage. It’s the climate of fear that is created for Muslims living in the United States. As I’ve written about before, it’s hard to put into words how palpable and paralyzing this fear is in American Muslim communities. It’s infuriating to behold: perfectly law-abiding citizens and legal residents feeling — rationally and accurately — that they are subjected to constant surveillance, monitoring, suspicion, denial of basic rights, hostility and worse solely because of their religion and ethnicity.

This happens because overt expression of Islamophobia is, far and away, the most accepted form of bigotry in mainstream American precincts. Now and then, certain expressions of it are so extreme as to embarrass mainstream circles — Peter King’s Congressional investigation into The Enemy Within or the Michele Bachmann attacks on Hillary Clinton’s Muslim aide — and are thus roundly condemend, but more often than not, they are perfectly acceptable.

On Salon (where Greenwald writes) there are also articles about anti-Muslim bigotry in the Republican Party (Rep Joe Walsh of Illinois claims “Muslims are trying to kill Americans”) and a piece about Muslim leaders urging Mitt Romney to denounce Michele Bachman’s witch hunt.

I’ve been following the story about the efforts of a group to open a mosque in Murfreesboro, TN. It’s dragged on for years with arson and local groups trying to stop it, and politicians fanning the flames of hate. In the end, only the Department of Justice and the courts ensured the right of freedom of religion would prevail. More here on the anti-Muslim efforts in Murfreesboro. The community will gather there for the first time today for Friday prayers.

In spite of the prevalence of Islamophobia, there are also those who take stands against it. Greenwald highlights online efforts to raise money to replace the mosque in Joplin. In just a couple of days, they reached the goal of $250,000. In Missouri, Ashley Carter, student at nearby Ozark Christian College, has organized a rally in support of the Muslim community for Saturday, August 25.

When the media and our political culture fail to challenge purveyors of hate whether they are in the fringe or elected officials, it’s up to us to take the kind of stand that Ashley Carter has taken.

The Sikh Temple Shootings, Random Violence, and American Culture

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Robert Wright writes about a perceived gap between our attention to the Aurora shootings and to the Oak Creek Temple:

At the same time, one responsibility of journalists and pundits is to see things in terms of their larger social significance. And it seems to me that the Sikh temple shooting, viewed in that context, is at least as frightening as the Aurora massacre. This was violence across ethnic lines, and that kind of violence has a long history of eroding and even destroying social fabric.

Riddhi Shah is thinking along the same lines:

On Sunday night I turned on the TV to find that only CNN was covering the Sikh temple shooting in Wisconsin that killed six. Fox News had a program about a prison in Latin America, and MSNBC, something else that was equally irrelevant.

Compare this with the coverage of an incident that happened only two weeks ago, the shooting that killed 12 people in Aurora, Colo. Networks devoted themselves round-the-clock to the attack: Who was the shooter? Why did he do it? There were entire segments dedicated (rightly) to covering the vigils and a community in mourning.

By the way, my google reader feed had no new items about Oak Creek this morning.

Francine Prose has a thoughtful reflection on evil in the wake of the Aurora shootings:

But if we no longer believe in Satan, then what do we make of our sense that something is wrong with the world, that a random malevolent shooter lurks in the schoolyard or the cinema lobby? Our collective disquiet about the mass murders of our time is intensified by the sense that they select their victims at random; that they have come from different backgrounds and harbor dissimilar grudges, and that we have failed to come up with an “explanation” for their actions, or a reliable template to help predict or avert an attack. And yet we remain reluctant to accept the possibility that evil is not a problem that can be solved or a question that has a solution. How do we reconcile our wish to prevent further violence and to protect ourselves and our families with the suspicion that, as those who believed and believe in Satan would argue, evil is an element in the universal order, an aspect of nature and of human nature, a force and a constant threat that exists—and will continue to exist—despite our best efforts to understand and eradicate it?

 

And she too wonders whether it’s the randomness of the shootings (and the white victims) that grab our attention:

The media’s preference for stories about (preferably white) American victims—as opposed to reports of violence further from home—helps persuade us it’s fine to feel that way: a natural human instinct.

Innocent citizens in Mexico are regularly being sprayed with bullets in the course of their daily lives. But we can’t quite imagine ourselves waiting in line at a clinic in Veracruz, whereas we might think: Hey, I almost took the kids to the premiere of The Dark Knight Rises in my town! The number of Syrian civilians killed daily during the last months surely outnumber the dead in Colorado. But I haven’t seen Assad’s mug shot on a tabloid headlined “Face of Evil.” Am I not supposed to worry about blameless Afghan citizens killed by mistake during a drone attack? Why should intentional violence perpetrated by narcos, soldiers, dictators, or machines—and resulting in the accidental deaths of the innocent—seem less evil to us than the methodical picking out of random strangers in a move theater? Aren’t all such incidents variations, in a sense, on a single theme—the theme being the evil things that crazy or “sane” people will do to one another given the opportunity, license, and a weapon?