Category Archives: Religion in America

The Vast Christian Right Conspiracy to brainwash your kids

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Otherwise known as “See You at the Pole.” There’s another in the long line of liberal media-bashing of American Evangelicalism in the Daily Beast. Katherine Stewart writes about the program that has kids gather at flagpoles in schoolyards to pray regularly. While including lurid details about rallies leading up to such events, Stewart wants us to focus on the constitutionality of the practice:

At Starbucks I meet up with students who participated in the SYAP prayers at Bradley High School, another public school in Cleveland. “Everybody basically bumps into us on their way into the school building,” says a boy with a wide, freckled smile, “so almost every kid in the school joined in.”

 

I ask a curly-haired girl, a participant over the past several years, how she heard about the event. “Sometimes they make an announcement during lunch,” she says. “Sometimes your teachers tell you about it.”

I’m shocked! Peer pressure? I read this as I read another in  long line of articles from evangelical (and progressive) Christians about the radical decline in religious involvement among young adults. These liberal conspiracy theorists assume teens have no power to resist the attractions of evangelical Christianity, that such acts turn people into unthinking, conservative Christian robots.

It didn’t happen to me. When I was in high school, we were granted permission to leave study hall to attend movies shown in the cafeteria by a local church. They were cheesy attempts to convert us, silly, really, because we were all already saturated with Christianity.

The reality is more complex than Stewart would have us believe. Yes, evangelicalism is a powerful force in American culture, especially in the South and in the heartland. But there are other powerful forces in our culture. Hollywood and consumerism are powerful as well, and have probably claimed the allegiance of all of those kids already, whether they realize it or not.

The Virgin on a Dollar Bill: The Future of the Religious Right?

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A great deal has been written about the religious right’s role in the current GOP presidential campaign but recent events have left experts scrambling to make sense of it all. There’s the issue of Romney’s membership in the Latter Day Saints; the Catholicism of Gingrich and Santorum, and now, whether Gingrich’s marital history will make it difficult for Evangelicals to vote for him (or if not all Evangelicals, then Evangelical women). There is even the story last week about the religious right leadership meeting in Texas to decide who they should support (and cries of vote-rigging from the Gingrich camp afterwards).

Reflecting on this weird mix, Michael Kazin posits “The End of the Christian Right.” His argument is this: 1) They’ve lost the culture wars–support for gay marriage now tops 50%; 2) They lack the leadership of earlier generations (there’s no Jerry Falwell among the current crop); 3) most importantly, they are losing the demographic battle. Of course, he makes this argument while acknowledging the continuing potency of conservative Christians in the Republican primary fights.

Kazin has received some pushback. Ed Kilgore disagrees.

But if they haven’t been able to pull their muscle behind a single candidate, that’s not a sign that they are on the wane—it’s a sign that, as far as the Republican Party is concerned, they have already won.

Look at the potential nominees: Unlike 2008, no candidate in the field is pro-choice by any definition. Only Ron Paul seems reluctant to enact a national ban on same-sex marriage. Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum. and Herman Cain have been vocal in fanning the flames of Islamophobia; again, only Paul has bothered to dissent to any significant degree.

I’ve got no particular insight on this matter. But an image I came across on a Mother Jones blogpost strikes me as very interesting:

We may yet see new realignments, with closer cooperation among conservative Evangelicals and conservative Roman Catholics. It’s already taking place, of course. That evangelicals might have endorsed Santorum would have been unthinkable a generation ago (and is probably as difficult for many to swallow as voting for a Mormon). But what battles in the culture wars would an army led by the Roman Catholic bishops and supported by the American Family Association and the National Association for Evangelicals win?

Loving Jesus, hating religion

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There’s a video making the rounds in which someone I’ve never heard of recites poetry about the contrast between (true) Jesus and (false) religion. It’s received publicity from Sojourners, among others.

Nadia Bolz-Weber’s response is here.

So…I believe in Religion AND Jesus.  I believe in the Gospel.  I believe in the transformative, knock you on your ass truth of what God has done in Christ.  I believe that I can only know what this following Jesus thing is about when I learn it from people I would never choose out of a catalog when we all gather together as the broken and blessed Body of Christ around the Eucharistic meal.  I believe that I am the problem at least as often as I am the solution. I believe in participating in sacred traditions that have a whole lot more integrity than anything I could come up with myself.  I believe I need someone else to proclaim the forgiveness of sins to me because I cannot create that for myself.  I believe that Jesus is truly present in the breaking of the bread and that where 2 or more are gathered he is there.   That’s religion AND Jesus.  May God make us worthy of it all.

Jonathan D. Fitzgerald is scathing in his response:

See the problem is, Bethke doesn’t mean religion either, but he’s rehearsing a popular evangelical trope, that the freedom that Christians find through Jesus is freedom from structure, organization, and authority. Of course, Bethke, like all Christians, is a member of a religion, he holds “a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs,” as Dictionary.com defines it. What Bethke is actually railing against is people whose expression of religion doesn’t look like he believes it should. Thus, rather than discounting religion, he is just discounting other religions, or even just other manifestations of his own religion.

Read it all: “Lame Poetry, False Dichotomies, Bad Theology.

My question, as someone with an academic background in theology–Haven’t we heard all this before? Remember Karl Barth? Of course, Barth’s critique of religion focused on its human origins, to which he contrasted the divine origin of the Word of God. On a lighter note, as Fitzgerald points out, this critique of religion is something of a trope in Evangelicalism. I would only add that the rise of nondenominational churches is in itself a product of the Evangelical critique of religion.

Football and Religion: Or, the Religion of Football

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I grew up in small town Ohio. Football in the seventies was not an industry. Basketball was still more important. I played in the marching band, cheered on my high school team, though it wasn’t particularly successful. Basketball mattered more, so much in fact, that the traditional rivalry with the closest town had to be suspended in 1968 because passions ran so high. We didn’t pray before games; I don’t think anyone believed that God cared whether Archbold or Pettisville won the game, no matter how much it mattered to us.

I’ve probably posted about this before, because over the years I have become less and less interested in sports contests. Yes, in part it was because I found myself teaching at colleges that had athletic programs. And at those institutions, the values always seemed skewed. For example, one year, members of the volleyball team couldn’t make it to the first class of the term because of an away game (I’ve actually been surprised by my wife’s experience teaching at UW Madison with starting players from the football team in her class).

But the whole Tebow thing takes it to another level. No, God does not care who wins a football game. As the prophet Amos makes clear:

I hate, I despise your festivals,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt-offerings and grain-offerings,
I will not accept them;
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Let’s face it. An NFL game, or a college bowl game, is as close to a festival as we get in the USA.

It’s pathetic that identification as a Christian seems now to be connected with a mediocre quarterback who makes ostentatious display of his piety:

‘And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

Thinking about “the “nones”

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I didn’t get around to thinking about Eric Weiner’s op-ed in the New York Times several weeks ago. In it, he discusses the increased numbers of Americans who identify themselves as “non-religious.” Weiner sees the problem as a result of organized religion. God is not fun, he says and goes on to observe that increased polarization in religion as in politics, leaves growing numbers of people marginalized. He cites his own experience:

In my secular, urban and urbane world, God is rarely spoken of, except in mocking, derisive tones. It is acceptable to cite the latest academic study on, say, happiness or, even better, whip out a brain scan, but God? He is for suckers, and Republicans.

I used to be that way, too, until a health scare and the onset of middle age created a crisis of faith, and I ventured to the other side. I quickly discovered that I didn’t fit there, either. I am not a True Believer. I am a rationalist. I believe the Enlightenment was a very good thing, and don’t wish to return to an age of raw superstition.

We Nones may not believe in God, but we hope to one day. We have a dog in this hunt.

I have no doubt that his experience is shared by many. His proposed solution, though, seems misguided, at best:

We need a Steve Jobs of religion. Someone (or ones) who can invent not a new religion but, rather, a new way of being religious. Like Mr. Jobs’s creations, this new way would be straightforward and unencumbered and absolutely intuitive. Most important, it would be highly interactive. I imagine a religious space that celebrates doubt, encourages experimentation and allows one to utter the word God without embarrassment. A religious operating system for the Nones among us. And for all of us.

It’s particularly ironic, given the response to Jobs’ death. It would seem he is already perceived as a spiritual guru, or even a saint.

I wonder whether Weiner actually experienced religious communities that do not deal with “raw superstition.”

Here’s another take on the same question, from an unlikely source, The Mennonite Weekly Review (hat/tip to Brian McLaren).

Lauren Sessions Stepp writes about the growing trend of young adult evangelicals leaving church which she attributes to this:

I’m not surprised. These young dropouts value the sense of community their churches provide but are tired of being told how they should live their lives. They don’t appreciate being condemned for living with a partner, straight or gay, outside of marriage or opting for abortion to terminate an unplanned pregnancy.

Cathy Grossman at USA Today, covers the story as well, profiling the apathetic or “so whats?” as she calls them. She quotes several conservative religious leaders who see the rise in religious apathy as a disaster for Christians. And other scholars see the rise in non-identification as a significant trend.

But I wonder if that’s the case. Certainly there has been a collapse in institutional religion in the last decade, but does the decline in membership actually reflect a decline in religious interest or affiliation. I wonder how many of those regular churchgoers of a previous generation had rich spiritual lives. How many of them went because of custom, or duty, or civic obligation? The difference may be attributable in part that there are no social consequences for non-attendance at religious services as there might have been fifty years ago.

The Hinduization of death? Please, give me a break!

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An article in the New York Times today about the growing appeal of cremation in the US quotes Stephen Prothero of BU:

“America is becoming Hinduized in this way,” said Stephen Prothero, a professor of religion at Boston University and the author of “Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America.” “We’re increasingly seeing the human as essentially spiritual and gradually giving up on the Judeo-Christian idea of the person in the afterlife.”

He might want to talk to some people involved in caring for those facing decisions about burial. Yes, it’s economic. When I served in Greenville, I could tell people that cremations done by the South Carolina Cremation Society cost $600, as opposed to whatever funeral homes were charging. To choose cremation in those circumstances is not about the resurrection of the body, it is about stewardship. For people who no longer have close ties to particular places, to think about tying their bodies, and the emotions of their loved ones, to a particular place in a cemetery seems inappropriate, especially when they may never return there.

We have a columbarium at Grace where the ashes of former members and members’ loved ones can be inurned. It is a symbol of the community of the faithful that extends beyond death and the grave and includes us all in the great cloud of witnesses.

Yes, there is a transformation in Americans’ attitudes toward the body and how one treats a body at death, but whether that has anything to do with an changing understanding of what constitutes a human person seems to me very much debatable. My father, for example, donated his body to the Medical College of Ohio, not because he didn’t believe in the resurrection of the body, but because he considered his body something that might be of use to society. He died in sure and certain hope of the resurrection, confident that if his body could be raised, so too could his ashes.

A decision like this is often one of the most difficult an individual, or the surviving loved ones have to make. Of course, economics plays a role, so do many other factors, including our transient society, and personal experiences related to places other than cemeteries. I think the choice of cremation has as much to do with the American funeral industry as it has to do with changes in the understanding of the bodily resurrection. And it doesn’t take more than a glance to experience the radically different spiritual experience of a typical cemetery with a beautiful place like the memorial garden at St. James Episcopal Church in Greenville, SC.

I’ve finally found a reason to become a Packers fan

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Aaron Rogers quotes St. Francis of Assisi:

“I feel like my stance and my desire has always been to follow a quote from St. Francis of Assisi, who said, ‘Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.’

Yes, I’ve got an issue with the ostentatious and “in-your-face” display of Christianity. It always puts me in mind of a student I had in my first term teaching Intro to the Bible at Furman. The year was 1999. The kid was completely, 100% secular, a fish out of water at Furman. When we were talking about the Sermon on the Mount, he raised his hand and asked about Matthew 6:5-6

5 ‘And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 6But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

Specifically, he wondered why kids did the “meet me around the flagpole” thing. I don’t know if it’s still popular, but back then, in the first weeks of public school in the fall, there was a designated time when “Christians” would gather together to pray. He found it very alienating and obviously not in keeping with Jesus’ words. To watch  Tim Tebow, or for that matter, any other athlete, pray after a touchdown, may be equally alienating to non-Christians.

 

 

More on Stacy Sauls’ Proposal

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I’m intrigued by the conversation about Bishop Sauls’ proposal to shift money from administration and governance toward ministry and mission. It’s an important conversation and has aroused considerable interest and emotion. Many seem to perceive it as an attack on the laity, particularly on lay governance, in the form of General Convention.

The reality is, things must change. Sauls’ presentation focuses on the financial realities confronting the church. They are real and potentially of enormous impact. But there are other realities, too. The Episcopal Cafe, in the midst of these postings about structural change within the denomination, found time to link to a study  that highlights the structural changes taking place in our society and in the religious life of Americans. The full study is available here: Decade of Change Final_0

The Episcopal Lead quotes:

“There is an overall decline in the numbers of faithful in the pews. Median weekly attendance in American congregations was 130 in 2000 and had dropped to 108 by 2010 . . . More disconcerting is the erosion in spiritual vitality. In 2005 about 43% of congregations reported high spiritual vitality and 5 years later this has dropped to 28%. This is paralleled by a decline in financial health in congregations…”

The conversation within the Episcopal Church may be driven by finances. It ought to be driven by this reality, the increase of those who identify themselves as non-religious and the very different ways in which younger cohorts relate to religious institutions than their elders did.

The burning question ought to be: How do we create vital spiritual communities that proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ in this environment? There are thousands of people who are asking this question and experimenting with possibilities both in our denomination throughout American Christianity. It ought to be our top priority as well. If we can’t adapt to this new reality, no amount of restructuring will matter. Nor should it.

Here’s is Bishop Sauls’ slideshow: Sauls’ presentation.

Here’s a link to the text.

The pushback has begun. Jim Naughton’s is publishing a series of posts examining the proposal. The first, examines “the political context.” It is here. It seems there is outcry that the leadership of General Convention were not consulted  and there is perception that this may be a powerplay from the House of Bishops to reduce the involvement of laity in governance. The second asks about mission. The third explores other ways of reducing overhead, including merging dioceses and rethinking national church headquarters in Manhattan.

A follow-up article from Episcopal News Service is here.

Mark Harris’ continuing commentary is here.

Atheism, Belief, and Intuition

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Brad Hirschfeld, “When Atheism turns Ugly”

Fanatical atheism is no worse and no better than fanatical religion, though it may be more bitterly ironic. There is something pretty odd, dare I say hypocritical, about a bunch of people who call themselves “freethinkers” and “humanists” not only verbally abusing people of faith, but actually tearing up verses from the Bible as an act of protest, as they did on a pier in Huntington Beach, California Saturday morning.

Evidence of a more measured approach:

Jonathan Ree on the “varieties of irreligious experience”

Opponents of religion – anti-clericals, humanists, rationalists or whatever we want to call ourselves – ought to recognise that religion is a complicated box of tricks, containing much wisdom as well as folly, along with diversity, dynamism and disagreement. And we need to realise that many modern believers have moved a long way from the positions of their predecessors

Gary Gutting on Phillip Kutcher’s analysis of the spiritual experiences underlying belief:

Your religious beliefs typically depend on the community in which you were raised or live. The spiritual experiences of people in ancient Greece, medieval Japan or 21st-century Saudi Arabia do not lead to belief in Christianity. It seems, therefore, that religious belief very likely tracks not truth but social conditioning. This “cultural relativism” argument is an old one, but Kitcher shows that it is still a serious challenge.

Finally, “Why are intuitive thinkers more likely to believe in God than reflective thinkers?“