Category Archives: Religion in America

LGBT inclusion in American Christianity

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While The Episcopal Church continues to struggle toward full inclusion of LGBT Christians, other denominations do as well. The United Methodist General Conference voted down by 61% to 39% a proposal to drop language from its Book of Discipline that reads:

“The United Methodist Church does not condone the practice of homosexuality and considers this practice incompatible with Christian teaching.”

One reason for the lopsided vote is that United Methodist General Conference includes delegates from other United Methodist conferences throughout the world. More here.

Meanwhile, Billy Graham has put his stamp of approval on the proposed North Carolina Amendment 1, that would enshrine discrimination against LGBT citizens in the state’s constitution.

 

Bad Religion: Bad Theology (on Ross Douthat)

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Ross Douthat’s book Bad Religion has received considerable attention. Having read a number of reviews, I don’t think I’ll bother reading it. From all accounts, his historical retelling of American religious history is full of errors, and his understanding of “orthodox” Christianity is equally mistake-ridden. First, from the camp of his supporters:

Alan Jacobs writes here:

If you’re a Christian, it’s tempting to say (drawing on the Perfidious-Mainstream-Media account) that we were forced into these subaltern modes by the relentless hostility of the cultural elites. That’s a very comforting narrative: we get to cast ourselves as the persecuted minority, and who can resist that temptation? Ross is offering a less consoling explanation: that Christians lost their cultural influence in large part because they lost their connection to historic orthodoxy, preferring comfortably flaccid theologies — of the Right and the Left — that were pretty much indistinguishable from what most religiously indifferent Americans believed anyway.

So for those readers especially hostile to Ross’s account, I have a queston: Are you sure it’s not because he’s telling you something you don’t want to hear? — That if you have a marginal place in American culture, the situation may be largely your own fault?

Now from those who find his perspective inadequate. The Catholic author, Michael Sean Winters writes in the The New Republic. He begins:

ROSS DOUTHAT’S ANALYSIS of religion in America is more sophisticated than the analysis of, say, Rick Santorum—but not by much. There are many ways to be simplistic and coarse. In contending against what he sees as an America afflicted with too many heresies, Douthat’s book, like Santorum’s speeches, is riddled with mistakes of fact and interpretation that would make any learned person blush.

And he concludes:

My problem with Douthat’s book is not that his opinions differ from my own. My problem is that he does not seem to have any idea what he is talking about. In the West, there has been no universally accepted authoritative voice on orthodoxy since the Reformation. “What am I to do when many persons allege different interpretations, each one of whom swears to have the Spirit?” asked Erasmus in 1524. But Douthat does not see the larger picture that he aims to explain, and his treatment of his subject is so pitifully mistaken in things large and small that what we are left with is a meandering, self-serving screed. The book has the same reliance on private judgment that anyone who was really concerned with heresy would recognize as part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Randall Balmer’s review is here. Ballmer is an Episcopal priest and a prominent scholar of American religious history. He points out weaknesses in Douthat’s argument, and the numerous factual errors (as well as several egregious errors of interpretation). Ballmer writes:

Although Douthat’s grasp of American religious history is sometimes tenuous — he misdates the Second Great Awakening, mistakes Puritans for Pilgrims and erroneously traces the disaffection of American Catholics to the Second Vatican Council rather than the papal encyclical “Humanae Vitae” — there is much to commend his argument. Yes, the indexes of religious adherence are down, and the quality of religious discourse in America has diminished since the 1950s, in part because of the preference for therapy over theology. Theological illiteracy is appalling; many theologians, like academics generally, prefer to speak to one another rather than engage the public.

But the glass-is-half-full approach, to borrow from the famous Peace Corps ad of this era, looks rather different. I’m not sure that the enervation of religion as institution since the 1950s is entirely a bad thing; institutions, in my experience, are remarkably poor vessels for piety. An alternative reading of the liberal “accommodationists” Douthat so reviles is that they have enough confidence in the relevance and integrity of the faith to confront, however imperfectly, such fraught issues as women’s ordination and homosexuality rather than allow them to fester as they have for centuries. I suspect, moreover, that Douthat has overestimated the influence of intellectual trends like the Jesus Seminar. The thinkers he quotes are important, but I would also recommend the lesser-known work of writers like Roger Olson, Jean Sulivan, Doug Frank, Miroslav Volf and David James Duncan as evidence of the vitality of Christian thinking; they may occasionally poke provocatively at the edges of orthodoxy, but most do so from well within its frame. Finally, the fact that we are having this conversation at all (much less in the pages of this newspaper) is testament to the enduring relevance of faith in what sociologists long ago predicted would be a secular society.

Like any good jeremiad, “Bad Religion” concludes with what evangelicals would recognize as an altar call. Douthat invites readers to entertain “the possibility that Christianity might be an inheritance rather than a burden,” and he elevates such eclectic phenomena as home schooling, third-world Christianity and the Latin Mass as sources for renewal.

Religion in the rearview mirror never looked better.

An hour-long video conversation between Douthat and Andrew Sullivan:

The Failure of Institutions–In Middletown and across the country

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After reading my post about institutional failure in the Episcopal Church, a friend pointed me to an article in National Journal (via Salon) about the failure of institutions in Middle America. It looks at Muncie, Indiana. Muncie is famous as Middletown, USA, an early twentieth-century sociological study of the city.

The article includes a lengthy comparison of a downtown United Methodist Church and a suburban megachurch. The authors do little more than compare the optics, however–attendance, demographics, the gym and coffee shop at the megachurch, and don’t explore some of the other dynamics at play. In fact, they seem not to notice that in an article focusing on the failures of a city’s institutions, the one megachurch member they quote moved there, not from a downtown church, but from a rural congregation.

And although the authors want to blame institutions for the decline in Muncie, institutions including mainline Christianity, the Gallup chart they reproduce shows that confidence in “church and religion” has increased by 3%.

Alex Pareene comments:

The piece as a whole lays blame for the sorry state of affairs in Muncie at the crumbling of institutions — church, school, government — but Whitmire is actually a victim of elites. It’s elite consensus that loan modifications have to be limited and difficult for homeowners in order to preclude “moral hazard” and save banks from having to overexert themselves. Mitch Daniels, a leading GOP presidential contender among George Will-style Republicans, slashed state payrolls, in the name of fiscal responsibility. The sorts of people who pay for National Journal subscriptions are actually responsible for this guy’s life going to hell.

I’m tempted to side with Pareene on this one.

What’s in a name? Or, what is a “Christian”?

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I remember a conversation I overheard twenty-five years ago, after a presentation I gave to a congregation concerning some aspect of the history of Christianity. I had used the term “Christian” repeatedly to refer to the tradition to which I was referring as well as to the doctrines, practices, and practitioners. One matron said to another, “I don’t like that term, ‘Christian’.”

Tim Noah and Ed Kilgore had a conversation this week about how, in the twenty-five years since that conversation, “Christian” has been totally coopted by some Christians, and used in the secular media to refer to Christians of a particular religious and political bent.

Noah writes:

“Christian” has become a euphemism for “acceptable to the type of Christian (in most instances Protestant) who frowns on homosexuality and wishes Saul Alinsky had minded his own business.”

According to Pew, only about one-third of Christians call themselves “evangelicals.” That’s about 26 percent of all Americans. The other two-thirds  self-identify as Catholics (23 percent) and with either mainline (18 percent) or historically black (7 percent) Protestantism. (A smattering of Mormons, Orthodox Christians, and other tiny subgroups make up the remaining 4 percent.) To suggest that conservative Christians are the only Christians is like saying Hasidic Jews are the only Jews. It’s a cartoonish misconception that the Christian right has managed to sell to a largely secular news media that’s too sensitive to accusations of anti-religious bias.

And:

Broadly speaking, of course, nearly all of contemporary western culture is rooted in Christianity and the Bible one way or the other, if you trace it back far enough. So the idea that Hollywood needs to create small subsidiaries to attend to some niche it calls “Christian” seems absurd. What Hollywood is really doing is creating small subsidiaries to attend to Christian conservatives. And why not? Conservatives like movies, too, and maybe some of these will be good. But let’s call them Christian conservative films, because everyone knows that’s what they are. Evangelicals shouldn’t get to claim one of the world’s great religions as their exclusive property.

Kevin Drum points out the changing demographics in American religion. According to his statistics:

  • Membership in religious organizations had gone steadily up over the past century, from roughly 40% of the population in 1900 to 70% today. Lack of belief was more common and more public in 1900 than it is today, even if it was called “freethinking” or “skepticism” or some related term.
  • Conservative Protestant denominations have also been growing very steadily over the past century. It wasn’t a sudden boom that burst onto the public scene when Jerry Falwell became famous. The Pentecostal movement started up in 1906 and it’s been growing ever since. Ditto for evangelical sects, which have grown steadily from perhaps a third of all Protestant denominations in 1900 to something like 60% of them today.

His takeaway: That conservative religious groups have become large enough and powerful enough to constitute an important voting bloc (and marketing demographic for film and music, et al) at the same time that America is becoming more secularized.

He’s writing in response to a piece by Julian Sanchez. Sanchez wonders why so few people in Washington self-identify as atheist or agnostic.

Reflecting on earlier essays to which I’ve linked, Andrew Sullivan asked whether conservative Christianity was “breeding Atheists.” His answer? Yes.

So Christianity in America, as Ross Douthat’s excellent forthcoming book explains, is undermined by both the political temptation and degeneracy on the evangelical right and the failure of mainline Protestantism to advance a Christianity that is both at ease with modernity but also determined to transcend its false gods of money, celebrity, and power, and to require more from its adherents.

We need a via media that lies not in between these models, but transcends both.

He also reported on readers’ responses to his question.

More on “Leaving Church:” the “nones,” young adults and the future of Christianity

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Skye Jethani weighs in, building on Berger’s essay.

So, we are left with a narrow path. Veer too far to the cultural right and the young will dismiss the church as a puppet of Republican politics. Veer too far to the theological left and the power of the Gospel is lost amid cultural accommodation.

The younger generations, and our culture as a whole, needs evidence of a third way to be Christian. It will require more than individual voices, but an organized and identifiable community of believers that reject Christianism and stands for Christ’s Good News, manifested in good lives, and evident in good works.

So does Jonathan Fitzgerald:

Now, after spending much of my adulthood trying to find a place to belong, I’ve turned into the opposite of a None — I’ve become a proud Joiner. Since college, my own search has found me desperate to join. I have considered Roman Catholic confirmation, Presbyterian church membership and, most recently, Episcopalian identification. To that end, I have been attending confirmation classes at my local Episcopal parish since last month.

As I look around at my fellow Joiners, I see that it is specifically those who have lived the life of the unaffiliated who have decided, Sunday after Sunday, for several hours following Mass, to gather and discuss the rhythm of the liturgical calendar, the purpose of baptism, the history of the church and the beauty of the Book of Common Prayer. I’m not sure whether I’ll be confirmed when the class ends in eight weeks, but there is certainly something attractive about the prospect.

It would be foolish to think God requires affiliation as a means of access. We humans however tend to corral into formal groupings, whether it’s organized religion or political parties. In the absence of tried-and-true tradition, we begin to create our own. My guess is that, as the numbers of Nones continue to increase, they will begin to develop traditions, create rules and define their orthodoxy until, ultimately, something like a new denomination will arise. Perhaps in 2022 someone will declare “The Rise of the Joiners” as one of the life-changing ideas of the moment.

He wasn’t really ever a none. He was a Christian, grew up a Christian, but outside of Christian community.

Yesterday was one of those days of grace at Grace, surrounded by the ministry and faith of young (and older) adults. A fine sermon by Lauren Cochran (young adult herself); a presentation on our companion diocese relationship with the Diocese of Newala, in Tanzania.

The first session of a spontaneous confirmation class which bears out some of the discussion I’ve been linking to here. Four of the five who attended are young adults who have come from more conservative religious backgrounds; the fifth an older adult who was baptized and confirmed Roman Catholic. During our conversation, I pointed out that these demographics were pretty typical for Episcopal gatherings in that a majority (in our case all, including the two clergy in attendance) were not “cradle” Episcopalian.

Later in the day, I celebrated the Eucharist and shared dinner with the Episcopal Campus Ministry. We had planned on getting home by 7, but lively conversation and fellowship kept us lingering until almost 8. As we chatted, I noted to myself the rather different dynamics: of the six or eight who stayed till the end to help with cleanup, it was half and half–half had grown up Episcopalian, the other half not. The importance of that community to those who were there was palpable. Gathered together around the altar, gathered together to share a meal and working together to clean up; all the while talking to one another, asking questions about matters Episcopalian and theological, and checking in on how each other was doing.

That’s the work of Christian community, important work, and evangelistic work, as among those in attendance were people who had been coming every week, and some who had come for the first time; experiencing hospitality, welcome, and the love of Christ. When we do that, and do it well, we don’t have to worry about the future–and our work this semester is building a solid foundation for the chaplain we will call to that ministry.

Understanding Religious Experience: Tanya Luhrmann on Evangelicals

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Joan Acocella’s review of Tanya M. Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. Luhrmann is an anthropologist who has written extensively and insightfully on religion in the contemporary world. In this book, she writes about her experiences in two evangelical churches associated with the Vineyard Fellowship. It’s on my reading list.

Acocella’s review highlights the religious experiences stressed in these communities and their members’ understanding and experience of God:

This casualness carries over to conversations with God. The Vineyarders asked him “for admission to specific colleges, for the healing of specific illness—even, it is true, for specific red convertible cars.” Some Vineyard women had a regular “date night” with Jesus. They would serve a special dinner, set a place for him at the table, chat with him. He guided the Vineyarders every minute of the day. Sarah told Luhrmann how, one day, after a lunch at a restaurant with fellow-parishioners, she was feeling good about herself, whereupon, as she was crossing the parking lot, a bird shat on her blouse. God, she explained to Luhrmann, was giving her a little slap on the wrist for her self-satisfaction.

We may find the religion described here odd; but the appeal is obvious and apparently Luhrmann also entered into the experience more than as a researcher:

Indeed, she tells us at the end of the book that she cannot call herself a Christian, and that she doesn’t believe in “a God who sits out there, as real as a door post.” At the same time, she repeatedly says, with no qualification, that she prayed with the Vineyarders and by herself under the guidance of a “spiritual director.” Like them, she kept a prayer journal, recording “what I said to God followed by what he said to me.” If she didn’t believe in a God who sat out there, whom did she think she was saying things to? And who was saying things back to her?

A deeper look at Luhrmann’s perspective. She is interested in the social construction of sensory experience, in particular, how people make sense of their experiences. She assumes of course that hallucinations begin with sensory experience in the brain, and that we make sense of that experience through culture and training:

It is also true that spiritual training may make sensory overrides more likely. Inner sense cultivation — and mental imagery cultivation, in particular — is at the heart of shamanism and is central to many spiritual traditions….[T]wo dominant forms of mental techniques in effect train the human mind to experience the supernatural: techniques that focus attention on the inner senses and those that train attention away from thought and sensation. Examples of the former include shamanism, Tibetan vision meditation, and the Ignatian spiritual exercises; examples of the latter are Zen meditation and Centering Prayer.

Both train the attention, and they probably train the capacity for absorption. Although the psychological literature is largely silent about whether these training techniques generate sensory overrides, the ethnographic and historical literature strongly suggest that inner sense cultivation produces sensory experiences that are interpreted as signs of the supernatural.

The full “primer” to Luhrmann’s perspective is here.

Young adults, older adults, and leaving church

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Roman Catholics are asking the question, too.

We may acknowledge some of their criticisms, but we are quicker to point out that they don’t understand. “Kids these days!” we exclaim in so many ways, throwing up our hands—while millennials walk out the door. “Will we continue to preach to the (aging) choir?” Fullam asked.

Answering that question may mean the difference between a vibrant religious community 20 or 30 years from now and a truly post-religious society like that of Western Europe. Every sociological measure is showing that the youngest members of the church aren’t staying, and it would be foolish to hope that they will return when they get married or have kids.

We can either keep repeating the same lines or we can zip it for a while and listen to what they are really saying. Maybe if we are quiet long enough, they might ask us why we stay. If they do, we better have a good answer.

Rachel Held Evans gives fifteen reasons why she left the church, and fifteen why she returned. Both posts should be read by everyone interested in young adults and the good news of Jesus Christ. There’s a story behind each of those thirty reasons, stories that play themselves out in the lives of young people every day.

The great American sociologist of religion Peter Berger reflects on the article by Putnam and Campbell to which I’ve previously alluded. He points out that many of the “nones” may be believers without belonging (certainly Held Evans, to the extent that she left church, belonged to that group). About the “nones,” he posits two groups, one consisting of those who have been convinced by the “new atheists;” the other made up of descendants of the counter culture of the 60s. I doubt there are very many in this latter group. Berger is intrigued by the socio-economic status of the nones cited in the Pew survey. They are not, mostly, members of the elite, but of the lower class, often lacking high school education. This suggests something else, that they are profoundly alienated from institutional religion, and probably profoundly alienated from other institutions of American life. I wonder whether we are not reverting to the state of affairs that existed in the nineteenth century.

To see the alienation from institutional religion in action, from someone who is perhaps moving away, unlike Rachel Held Evans who has made her way back, apparently; read the piece by Michael O’Loughlin: a flickering light:

I’m no longer surprised when a close female friend, successful and well educated, looks askew at a male-dominated church and cringes before she walks away. When those charged with teaching the faith tell their flock to believe or act a certain way because their authority gives them the right to do so, it becomes easier to see why many chuckle as they interpret this as a parent scolding a toddler: do this because I said so. Gay men and women rightly refuse to succumb to bullying in their professional and familial lives, so it’s not a surprise when they leave a church that calls them disordered. And though we are over a decade removed from the revelation of clergy sex abuse of minors, many in my generation will never again give the benefit of the doubt to the Catholic hierarchy on matters of faith, morals, or much else.

The question is, given the profound distrust of institutions among millennials, a distrust much deeper than anything we’ve seen before, how can those of us who are clergy, representatives of the institution, speak authentic good news?

Another perspective on ads against religion

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This time in response to a billboard sponsored by American Atheists, targeting Jews.

I Saw God on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway | Stay Attuned | Big Think.

Unfortunately, it is questionable whether or not people can extricate themselves from the power of myths that they have once sanctified. If they can’t, even when they want to, then the billboard might as well hover over a poor, jobless, stigmatized, crime-ridden, environmentally polluted neighborhood and read: “Be Happy!”

The billboard that I saw is apparently one of several. There are others targeting other myths. They ought to be welcomed onto roads that also offer “Jesus Is The Answer.” Nevertheless, on American roads these billboards may ultimately prove self-defeating: they lack the gravity necessary to ground the myths that they evoke.

 

Quitting Church

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This week there’s been a good bit of discussion around the web about quitting or leaving church.

I’ve been thinking about this theme myself, in part because of recent encounters with a number of Roman Catholics who are struggling with their faith and their membership in that Church. Some can no longer find a spiritual home there and have embarked on a journey that leads them away. Others are struggling to find some way of finding peace with a hierarchy from which they are alienated and finding peace as well with a personal history and family tradition that still binds them.

Over the weekend, our neighbors down the street at the Freedom from Religion Foundation had an ad in the NYTimes urging Catholics to quit the church. Here it is:

The ad has produced its desired result: considerable response from various quarters. Sidney Callahan wrote about it for America magazine’s “In All Things,” observing that:

Helpfully, the free from religion folks provide a long list of oppressive “dark age” errors that “must be stopped.” One can become a member of their cruade by sending checks ranging from $40 (Individual) to $100 (Sustaining) to $500 (Life) to a puzzling category of (After Life) for $5000. This pitch for money prompted one wag to reply, “Hey people, you can quit for free you know.”

I’ve long joked that I would love to run an ad campaign directed at Roman Catholics with tag-lines like “The Episcopal Church: All of the Liturgy, none of the Guilt.” I do believe that the Episcopal Church can offer a home to at least some Roman Catholics who can no longer be at home in their church. But at the same time, to make such a direct appeal seems problematic. Here’s another version, from Rev. Matthew Lawrence.

A generous, pastoral response is necessary; and above all, humility that the Episcopal Church might not be the appropriate place for everyone who is estranged from the Roman Catholic Church.

One Catholic who left the Church and an order, Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, is Mary Johnson. An interview with her  is here.  Her story of leaving is An Unquenchable Thirst.

My doubts in the convent were more questions about my call than doubting God or my Catholic faith — that came later. Though I’d felt called to serve the poor, I was assigned years of administrative work. Eventually when I was superior of a house that cared for refugee women and their children, I was forbidden to start programs that would have helped the women toward self-sufficiency; my superiors insisted that I limit myself to providing food and shelter. As Mother Teresa aged and her health failed, I clashed with two powerful sisters who had pulled the community very far to the right. I also realized that I needed deeper human connections than the rules allowed. I kept hearing within me the words of Jesus in the gospel: “I came that you may have life, and have it to the full” — and life in the MCs didn’t look very full. I felt as though I was suffocating.

Lisa Miller points out that women are giving up church in growing numbers. According to the Barna Group, regular attendance by women has dropped by 20% between 1991 and 2011. Her focus is on conservative Christianity.

One woman who struggles with church-going is Elizabeth Drescher, who writes about  “Giving up Church for Lent.”

Dave Kinnaman (The Barna Group) on their current research findings, postulating “two worlds” one of active, engaged Christians; the other consisting of secular people completely alienated from religion and Christianity. He suggests that perhaps whole segments of our population and culture have given up church. That is to say, religion is no longer of any significance or interest to them.

College and faith

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I know the controversy is so last week. But I finally got around to reading Garry Wills‘ eminently reasonable response to Santorum’s complaint that colleges destroy religious faith:

Minds grow by questioning things, and adolescence is a great period of questions. Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken learned to cross-examine the Bible all on their own, without any help at all from college. An unquestioned faith is not faith but rote recitation. The opposite of such questioning is not deep belief but arrested development.

A report on research by Richard Putnam (Bowling Alone) and David Campbell on young adults, Christianity, and the culture wars: . A free summary of the Putnam and Campbell Foreign Affairs article is here. To quote Putnam, young Americans are saying, “If religion is just about conservative politics, I’m outtahere.”

But it’s not just conservative Christianity that turns college students and young adults away. There are significant cultural factors as well. Christian Piatt cites seven, not one of them connected with conservative politics or the culture wars.  Instead, he mentions:

  • that there’s no natural bridge to church when teens leave home
  • distraction
  • the need to filter out the vast quantities of information (and advertising) that assault young people.

In other words, we’ve got our work cut out for us. Especially in light of Christian Smith’s ongoing research, which I’ve mentioned before. Another take on that is here: