It's a reminder to exercise a little skepticism when you hear of America’s religious exceptionalism. Yes, America is far more devout than most of western Europe; but it is not immune to the broader crises facing established religion in the West. The days when America’s leading intellectuals contained a strong cadre of serious Christians are over. There is no Thomas Merton in our day; no Reinhold Niebuhr, Walker Percy or Flannery O’Connor. In the arguments spawned by the new atheist wave, the Christian respondents have been underwhelming.
The article is from the Sunday (London) Times. Catholicism hasn't developed any significant thinkers in our day. Think back to the fifties- so much was happening, it is hard to comprehend (to me it is a far more significant decade than the sixties)- when a Catholic monk and intellectual, Thomas Merton, wrote widely read, lucid, learned, deeply affecting books on faith, doctrine and spirituality, and had a profound engagement with poetry and with Zen Buddhist practice. It is is the kind of life possible only as a monk, and a path that some former Catholics (like myself) believe was crucial to the faith and practice of all.
The a slightly later passage jumped out at me:
[the Evangelical movement] has spawned its own shadow pop music industry, coopts the popular culture as any brand-conscious franchise would and has a completely informal form of worship. Go to one of these places and it feels like a town in itself – with shops, daycare centres, conference rooms and social networking groups. The car parks feel like those in sports stadiums; and the atmosphere evokes a big match. In 20 years, the number of Americans finding identity and God in these places has soared from 200,000 to more than 8m.
This is not, one hastens to add, an intellectual form of faith. It is a highly emotional and spontaneous variety of American Protestantism and theologically a blend of self-help, biblical literalism and Republican politics. This is, in many ways, how George W Bush reframed conservatism in America – and with one in three Americans now calling themselves evangelical, you can see the political temptation. The problem was that the issues the evangelicals focused obsessively on – abortion, gays, stem cells, feeding tubes for those in permanent vegetative states – often came to seem warped to many others. Those who might once have passively called themselves Christian suddenly found the label toxic, if it meant identifying with such a specific political agenda. And so as evangelicalism rose, atheism and nonaffiliation emerged as a reaction.
I would suggest two things: one, that American entrepreneurial Christianity is rooted in pretty shallow soil. Religion is partly about community. It used to be about communication. In the midwest, as it was being changed over from prairie to farmland (read Willa Cather's wonderful novels, especially My Antonia, or Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson), the Methodist circuit rider was one of several cords that slowly bound the region together:
In American Methodism circuits were sometimes referred to as a "charge." A pastor would be appointed to the charge by his bishop. During the course of a year he was expected to visit each church on the charge at least once, and possibly start some new ones. At the end of a year the pastors met with the bishop at annual conference, where they would often be appointed to new charges. A charge containing only one church was called a station. The traveling preachers responsible for caring for these societies, or local churches and stations, became known as circuit- riders, or sometimes saddlebag preachers. They traveled light, carrying their belongings and books in their saddlebags. Ranging far and wide through villages and wilderness, they preached daily or more often at any site available be it a log cabin, the local court house, a meeting house, or an outdoor forest setting. Unlike the pastors of settled denominations, these itinerating preachers were constantly on the move. Their assignment was often so large it might take them 5 or 6 weeks to cover the territory. (General Commission on Archives & History, United Methodist Church)
Communication: The local Catholic parishes, the crucial Congregational churches of New England, the freemasonry halls in the first half of this country's history, the black churches, the abolition, child labor, and temperance movements...each was brought into being within a dynamic communication nexus. My guess is that technological changes have begun to displace this function of religion.
Community: American has always been a nation of displaced persons. The rise of mega-churches is utterly linked to the rise of the sunbelt and the huge gap between economic 0pportunity and established social linkages. The decline in Catholicism is no doubt partly attributable to both industial decline in the northeast and the inability of the Church to adequately address the sexual abuse scandals. More changes are coming, and they will be felt quite firmly in the evangelical movement as economic and demographic shifts pick up speed in the south and west.
Christianity- in its Evangelical, Mainline Protestant, or Catholic forms- no longer seems to have a spiritual practice that it trains its adherents in. In Zen, one learns how to meditate. In Yoga traditions, there are rigorous techniques. Are people taught to pray in Christiantiy? Are protestants provided with a map of sorts of what to expect as one's practice deepens? How many young christians have any intellectual grasp of their tradition?
As an aside, does the term "christian" include Catholics any longer? It doesn't if you ask many older evengelicals.
If religious practice is merely meeting social and economic needs, it will vanish when those needs change.
No comments:
Post a Comment