Religion in American Life

I haven't yet read American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, by Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, but Peter Steinfels summarizes some of its key points in the recent American Prospect:

The evangelical wave has been ebbing for some time now and it is being replaced by the "nones":

The book's story is one of a religious earthquake and two aftershocks. The earthquake was the disaffection from religion occurring in "the long Sixties." Church attendance plummeted. So did the percentage of Americans saying that religion was "very important" in their life. At every stage of their life, boomers would always lag behind their parents by 25 percent to 30 percent in regular churchgoing. The authors know well that these were the years of the civil-rights, anti-war, and women's liberation movements, of pot, acid, the pill, Roe v. Wade, and Watergate. But with a refreshing directness and only a bit of embarrassment, they emphasize sex. Between 1969 and 1973, the fraction of Americans stating that premarital sex was "only sometimes wrong" or "not wrong at all" doubled, from 24 percent to 47 percent, a startling change in four years -- and then drifted up, never to decline. Attitudes toward premarital sex turn out to be one of the strongest predictors of a host of other political and religious changes, including that of the first great aftershock, the evangelical upsurge of the 1970s and 1980s.

That reaction to "the long Sixties" has been extensively analyzed. Less so the second great aftershock, the rise of the "nones" after 1990 when young people, in particular, began rejecting identification with any religion, though not necessarily with a variety of religious beliefs and practices. More and more young Americans, according to polls, came to view religion as "judgmental, homophobic, hypocritical, and too political," overly focused on rules rather than spirituality. "The Richter rating of this second aftershock is greater than that of the first aftershock and rivals that of the powerful original quake of the Sixties," Putnam and Campbell write.

People who go to church contribute more money and time to both religious and secular charities and tend to be more civically engaged:

Churchgoing Americans, it turns out, are twice as likely as their demographically matched secular neighbors to volunteer to help the needy and to be civically active. Not only do those in the most religious fifth of Americans give four times as high a proportion of their annual income to charity as those in the least religious fifth, but they give a higher proportion even to specifically secular causes. Neither this generosity nor this activism has to do with ideology. Cross-checking with other surveys, Putnam and Campbell conclude that on measures of generosity and civic engagement, religious liberals rank as high or higher than religious conservatives and higher than secular liberals.

It is not unusual for Americans to change their religious affiliation. Putnam offers himself as an example:

He and his sister were raised as Methodists. At marriage, he converted to Judaism. His children were raised as Jews; one married a Catholic who is now secular, and the other's spouse was secular but converted to Judaism. Putnam's sister married a Catholic and converted to Catholicism. Her three children became evangelicals! No wonder that so many Americans refuse to believe, regardless of the tenets of their religion, that those of differing conviction are bereft either of spiritual truth or hope of salvation.

Although the jury is still out on whether this will be true as we increasing have interactions with Muslims in America.

Mushy Faith on the Rise

That's the title of a GetReligion piece by Terry Mattingly where he makes fun of a recent Newsweek article by Lisa Miller who looks at polling data in America that suggests Americans are increasingly comfortable with the notion that there is more than one valid spiritual path. We are all Hindus now, Miller claims.

Mattingly says this news has "no news hook" whatsoever; it's old news. Probably true. But I wanted to take aim at Mattingly's title claim "Mushy Faith on the Rise." I would suggest this is not necessarily true. It certainly isn't true for this liberal Christian.

I was raised in a Christian home, in a predominantly Christian town, in a predominantly Christian country. But it might have been otherwise. I think that our choice of faith is likely to be dictated more than anything else by where we were born. It is highly unlikely that I would be a Christian had I been born in India or Saudi Arabia. I might very well have been born into a family of Hindus or Muslims.

That simple fact gives me pause when I think about the truth claims of Christianity that seem to close the door on the validity of other faith perspectives. "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except by me." Really? Can we really say that with certainty anymore when the world has become so interconnected and when our own country has become so religiously diverse? Are we really ready to condemn to eternal death the majority of the population of the world simply because by accident of birth they grew up in other religious traditions that make their own truth claims?

There is nothing mushy about my belief that this kind of thinking is wrong. I am certain it is wrong. I am convinced that there are many valid spiritual paths, even as I choose to follow in the way of Jesus. I am, in fact, fairly intolerant with those who hold these kinds of intolerant views about Christianity and its supremacy over other faith traditions. It's an ironic position to be in, but there is nothing mushy about it.

I suppose that there are some liberal Christians who have a mushy faith believing that anything goes, just as there as some mushy conservative Christians who see no conflict of interest between being a follower of Jesus and being a super capitalist/militarist.

Mattingly closes his post with the three questions that apparently separate, in his view, the true Christians from the mushy ones ("the fault lines in Christian churches and denominations"):

(1) Are the biblical accounts of the resurrection of Jesus accurate? Did this event really happen?

(2) Is salvation found through Jesus Christ, alone? Was Jesus being literal when he said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6)?

(3) Is sex outside of the Sacrament of Marriage a sin?

If you hang your hat on doctrine as the dividing line between "true" and mushy faith then these are your questions. It is all about getting your ticket to heaven and believing the right things and living the kind of life that will get your ticket punched. You want to be up there with your tribe sitting at the right hand of the Father.

Me, I'd rather hang my hat on these three questions:

Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? ³⁸And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? ³⁹And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?

I want to know whether your beliefs lead you to care about the immense social ills in our world today? Have you done your duty by going to church on Sunday and reciting the creed or by bowing in the right direction at the right time for prayer? Or does that faith lead you to care about changing the world and doing something about it. If the fault line is doctrine - any doctrine - and protecting your heavenly turf, then I think your faith is pretty mushy.

The Limits of Liberal Tolerance

From Reason, Faith, and Revolution by Terry Eagleton:

The liberal principles of freedom and tolerance are dogmas, and are none the worse for that. It is simply a liberal paradox that there must be something close-minded about open-mindedness and something inflexible about tolerance. Liberalism cannot afford to be over-liberal when it comes to its own founding principles, which is one reason the West is caught between treating its illiberal enemies justly and crushing their testicles. As British prime minister Tony Blair remarked in a classic piece of self-deconstruction: "Our tolerance is part of what makes Britain Britain. So conform to it, or don't come here." (p. 127)