RELIGION AFTER 2000ANDREW GREELEY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO (Paper for a Conference at the
University of California at Santa Barbara) |
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| .Introduction | ||
| Let me begin with an
appropriate paragraph: As this millennium fades into the next, American religion faces a decisive crisis. Either it will respond vigorously to the demands of multi-culturalism, environmentalism, the new religions, the new world order, scientific progress, the political crises in our society, the aspirations of minorities women, gays and lesbians, the young or it will fall before the forces of secularization and post-modernism. The turn of the millennium is a last chance for religion in America. |
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.That is the kind of stirring paragraph which should mark a keynote address, a call for repentance and renewal in the face of a major crisis. It would I think be cheered enthusiastically at any meeting of theologians or religious leaders. Alas there is not a word of truth in it. Our human propensity to divide reality into periods that are multiples of ten is artificial and deceptive. American religion is not in crisis, at least not any more than it usually is. Religion is not declining in this country. The demands for political and social relevance come from a small minority and are siren songs which often distract religion from its primary function of providing meaning and purpose for life. There is no such thing as post-modernism save in the divinity schools, the English departments, and, alas, many sociology departments in the contemporary university. Post modern humankind is no more extensive that was modern man (sic) celebrated thirty years ago by, among others, the younger Harvey Cox and Langdon Gilkey, by which both men in fact seemed to have meant neighbors in the corridors of faculty office buildings. In fact most of us are still quite happily pre-modern. Finally, the millennium has actually happened. Due to a mistake of the calendar-making monk back in the middle ages. This is the year two thousand or, arguably two thousand and one. Still no rapture either! For these observations I apologize. If you wanted a barn-burner keynote, you should not have invited a nose-counting, number-crunching, fact-grubbing empiricist. Perhaps a man like Robert Bellah or Robert Putnam who observe major and momentous changes and developments, instead of data-seeker who can find no trace of a decline of either civic virtue or social capital and who indeed sees in the data notable evidence of an increase of both. People like me, for which God forgive us, are programmed to see social reality as gray, complex, ambiguous, problematic and social change as erratic, multi-directional, unpredictable. For that reason we are not good prophets in either sense of that word. The best we can do is outline a litany of phenomena with which religion should be dealing in the present and is likely to face in the years immediately ahead - with the caveat that the good data analyst is dubious about projections beyond five years into the future. Moreover when he ventures into a decade in the future he should be treated no more seriously that a meteorologist who projects weather trends into the week after next. My litany makes no pretense to be exhaustive or ordered. These are some of the areas about which religion might choose to be concerned. If I have left your favorite out, I apologize. If I were speaking to a group of priests I would talk about the most serious problem the Catholic church faces, lack of respect for women, bad sermons and rotten liturgies. One might well have environmentalism and racism and feminism in the litany. However, I suspect those subjects will not be ignored at this conference. I would rather turn to litany invocations that might receive less notice or will be noticed very differently. 1 SECULARIZATION AND SECULARIZERS There is no evidence of a decline in American religious belief and practice or of the importance of religion for the rest of American life over the last half century with the exception of some severe jolts to Catholicism (caused by the birth control encyclical rather than by the Vatican Council). The media maniacs who periodically proclaim that there is a decline or a revival of religion, secularization and resacralization, pace Peter Berger, simply have not looked at the data. Religious behavior may change but that change is not in the direction of decline. If anything the "me" generation and "generation x" are if anything more religious than the "boomers." (I despise these labels and would rather say those who came to maturity after 1976 and opposed to those who came to maturity between 1960 and 1976.) Moreover the recent work of such scholars as Rodney Stark, Roger Finke, Stephen Warner and Lawrence Iannaconne in the "supply side" quasi paradigm seems to have preempted the field in the sociology of religion. There are few American scholars in that field who would hold the Bryan Wilson, village-atheist position on the decline of religion. Some might say that the influence of religion on the rest of society is declining though just now in the United States with importance (real or alleged) of the Religious Right that seems to be an absurd position. (Even in Europe the secularization theory is being re-examined, particularly in light of the surge of religion in some of the former socialist countries, most notably Russia. The only two bona fide cases of secularization in Europe are East Germany and perhaps Holland.) It does not follow that the data or the new theory will have any impact on most academics in either the social sciences or the humanities or journalists in the upper media or quasi academic types in the Beltway. For such folk secularization is a religious dogma that is beyond challenge. When that dogma drifts across the line which separates the descriptive from the normative, the secularizers appear, those folk who wish to drive religion completely out of public life. There is a culture of unbelief as Stephen Carter argued and there are culture wars as the occupants of the culture of unbelief strive to impose their values on the rest of society (and the religious right tries to do the same). The culture wars are elite battles and have little impact on the general population, including those groups which the culture war organizations claim to represent. But the battles give us some sense of just how far the secularizers are willing to go to drive religion out of public life. They don't have the votes of course, but they do have the legal theories with which to bombard the courts and much of the elite media. Religion is just plain naïve if it doesn't recognize the threat of the secularizers and their determination to play hard ball. They assume as a given that religion is absurd and harmful and are shocked that it still has, as they see it, residual influence in America. Thus a writer for the New York Times finds it "sinister" that the Fathers of the Sacred Heart provided the money for the film Spitfire Grill a position kind of endorsed by Rolling Stone and by an article in the arts and leisure section of the Times. Freedom of religion for them means freedom from religion. Those who think the Supreme Court is a conservative bulwark against the secularizers should realize that a law had to be pushed through congress to protect the free exercise clause from a decision (about peyote) authored by that exemplary and ineffable conservative Nino Scalia. The secularizers are not about to go away. 2 RELIGION AND POLITICS Closely related to the controversy over religion in public life is the anxiety created by alleged increase of religious influence on politics. The Pew Center has recently announced ex cathedra that there is more attempt by religion to influence politics in this country. Relative to what, one must reply, in the words we use at the University of Chicago to respond to the greeting "good morning!" The Pew Center has apparently not heard of abolition, prohibition, or the civil rights movement. In fact, the reality of the religion and politics debate is that it depends on whose ox is being gored. This point is nicely illustrated by the case of Bishop Maher, sometime Ordinary, of San Diego who excommunicated racists in his diocese to liberal applause and then excommunicated pro-choice folk amid cries of horror about separation of church and state. Priests and nuns were hailed as folk heroes when they stood next to Martin Luther King at Selma and are denounced now when they demonstrate outside abortion clinics. The religious right is the new bogeyman of American politics. As Chicago Democrat, I personally rejoice that it has almost taken over the Republican party. Granting that, I see no reason to raise a hue and cry when they exercise their constitutional right to try to influence the course of politics in accordance with their values. Moreover, the bogeyman doesn't have much clout. I calculate that no more than five percent of Americans are likely candidates for the religious right, and less than ten percent of the Southern Baptists. The biggest of the big lies told about American religion is the identification of the evangelicals with the religious right and indeed identifying religious conservatism with political conservatism. One should not legitimately identify Southern Baptists with the pronouncements of the Southern Baptist Convention any more than one an identify Catholic voters with the pronouncements of Cardinals Josef Ratzinger or John O'Connor. In fact only 57% of Southern Baptists believe in the strict literal interpretation of scriptures, less than half of those under forty, even when one considers those who attend church services regularly. Finally one must note that presumed winners a few weeks from now are Southern Baptists. Ask them if they believe in literal interpretation and they will respond in the affirmative in the same fashion that, let us say, Senators Kennedy and Moynihan might respond when asked about papal infallibility. The Southern Baptist agenda is not mine, heaven knows (and neither as far as that goes is Cardinal O'Connor's agenda) but they have the right to have the truth spoken about them just as much as I do. In the words of the Irish politician, half the lies told about us are not true. All religion must demand truth instead of elite media lies (and Pew Foundation stupid analyses) about individual religious groups in our society. Incidentally, the Big Lie of this political season (repeated since 1976) is that Catholics are prime targets for the Republican candidate (I seem to have forgotten his name) because of abortion. In point of fact and for weal or woe, Catholics do not differ from other white Americans in their attitudes towards abortion and have not disproportionately drifted away from the Democratic party since 1952. 3 FAMILY VALUES As Mr. Dooley, a fellow Chicago Dimycrat, might have put it, I see by the papers that there is considerable "ajitatun" about "Family Values," most of which is other people's families, especially African Americans and homosexuals. To paraphrase Saddam Hussein, this is usually the mother of all hypocrisies because those who prate most loudly about values are those who have on the record discarded their wives and children in favor of "trophy wives." I am hard put to find among the major Republican leaders in the primary battle anyone who did not have a trophy wife of one sort or another. Divorce happens. I make no judgments about particular cases. Yet I would think that someone who has shed a spouse should be modest in his fulmination about family values. The increase in divorce is largely the result of the increased freedom of women created by the Pill and by greater access to occupations. The increase does not necessarily mean that there is a decline in marital love. Rather it means only that those who are trapped in what they think are intolerable situations might more easily escape. Yet ought not religion be concerned about strengthening marital love, especially those religions like mine which profess to believe that marital passion reflects divine passion? Ought they not be involved in trying to help those married couples who have a chance to overcome the inclination to divorce (a quarter of those who once seriously considered divorce are now happily married)? Can we not make the distinction between the right to a divorce which is a good thing and divorce which is not a good thing, however necessary it might finally be? Alice Rossi's recent work on how Americans spend their time takes the breath away from an outsider like me. How do people do it? How do they sustain any intimate relationships and pleasures under such awesome pressures? It is not enough, I submit, to support the rights of women. Religion must consider the possibility that it should also try to support the men and women who are trying desperately to keep their familial and marital love alive. In this context, religious leaders might keep in the mind the findings of the NORC survey of American sexual behavior that the most satisfying sex is between permanently committed couples. One wonders why it took so long to realize such an obvious truth. Similarly, one does not call for a reversal of the sexual revolution (which means a partial revolution in pre-marital sex for women) much less the feminist revolution when one observes on the basis of the same NORC data that these revolutions have increased notably the vulnerability of women to exploitation and forced sex, including their first sexual encounters. Presumably no one will argue that this is progress. My own research shows that cohabiting men are as happy as married men but cohabiting women are as unhappy as unmarried women. I am reminded of the saying that at heart a woman is a mother and a man a bachelor (or a twelve year old as a woman said to me). I am not, heaven save the mark, citing this as a universal that must be applied to all women and all men, but only as an observable propensity. Many religions are skeptical of both premarital promiscuity and divorce. I submit that one ought to considerable the possibility that there is some useful wisdom in these insights, wisdom that should be taken seriously even if not reduced to rules (and thus often deprived of much of their vitality). One can applaud both revolutions and still face the fact that there are certain latent dysfunctions that have resulted from them. Fidelity (honored by nine out of ten married Americans) and chastity are not necessarily obsolescent. I am dismayed when I encounter theologians who have written them off completely, but then I am reminded of the dictum that theologians always arrive at revolutions a little breathless and a little late. Patently I believe that wisdom
is hard to come by and that we search everywhere, including in the garbage cans and
dumpsters into which contemporary fashion has tossed some possible jewels of wisdom
without proper consideration. 4 MYSTERY Religion is in the mystery business. If there were no mystery in the world, there would be no need for religion. One must wonder then why on both the left and the right, there is so much effort to take the mystery out of religion, to reduce it either to rules taken out of context from the scripture or to explanations which theologians think will persuade those influenced by science that religion is not absurd. Religion is indeed absurd, but only because our existence is absurd. How come we're here, anyway? How come there is anything at all, anyway? Religion is a cautious attempt to respond to mystery with something better than Macbeth's suspicion that it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing, if only with Pere Teilhard's modest, "there is something afoot in the universe, something that looks like gestation and birth." Religion is the unpretentious affirmation in the face of substantial contrary evidence that God is not mad and ask why She seems to know so much higher math. It is the attempt to face the odd fact that the evolutionary process has produced minds that are capable of comprehending (if just barely) both General Relativity and Quantum Theory, when there was no advantage in our evolutionary past of having such an intellect. Religion is finally a tentative response to the question, "how come, anyway?" Many theologians, still a little breathless and a little late, think that science is in the process of eliminating mystery. One need not agree with John Horgan's recent book to understand that the answer seems a long way off, and longer with each new discovery. Horgan may be wrong when he says that having uncovered natural and sexual selection, general relativity, quantum mechanics, the red shift (an apparent expanding universe), and the double helix, scientists have come to an end of major discoveries which the human mind can comprehend. The scientist may also be wrong who told him that when the answer is found we will not be able to understand it. Nonetheless it is clear that the more we know about reality the more mysterious it seems. Only those who want to use the bible to explain away mystery or those who think that's what religion does (not without some reason) can imagine there is a conflict between science and religion when in fact both of them bump their heads against the solid wall of mystery and increasingly both think they hear murmurs of one kind or another from beyond that wall. Religion therefore must be open (once again?) to mystery. I am not suggesting drug induced neo-Dionysian orgies. I am rather suggesting first of all that it is a mistake in our religious services to eliminate all openness to the marvelous, the wonderful, the surprising, to dispense with the poetic, the imaginative, the metaphorical dimensions of religion, to exclude it experiential and the narrative aspects, to forget that religion is poetry and story before it is anything else and after everything else. Here I must note Clark Roof's suggestion that the search for religious experience and for the meaning of religious experience seems to have increased. My guess - and it is not incompatible with Clark's findings - is that religious experience may have become disconnected with prosaic religion and that therefore much of the search is for links between religion and experience which were once more obvious. Clergy persons (especially in my own denomination) seem to assume that their congregations are completely spirit-less and that it is their function to reshape them in the clergy person's own image and likeness so that they give the same answers to questions we propose and which they are unlikely to ever ask on their own. In fact religious experience is endemic in our society, most of it part of and the result of ordinary experiences of life and almost none of it drug-induced. The Holy is everywhere, even if people don't know who (or Who) it is. Religion arises from experiences of the Holy and takes its raw power from such experiences. Religion is poetry before it is prose because poetry is inevitable in telling stories about the experience of mystery. Yet religious leaders think that it is their job to replace poetry with prose, to clarify the experiential with the propositional, and to explain stories immediately and thus explain them away. It seems to me that it is the task of clergy persons to listen to their people as they tell stories of their experiences of the Holy, their explorations into mystery and then to correlate their stories with the overarching stories of the Heritage, often through community ritual. The emphasis here is on listening, on keeping our mouths shut, and on resisting the almost incurable temptation to stretch the stories on to the procrustean bed of our theological categories. Why, I wonder, are we so afraid of mystery? Or to put it another way why are so eager to budget the Holy Spirit's time for Her when on the record She is determined to blow whither she will? I am not asserting that reason and reflection should be abandoned. We are reflecting creatures. We need doctrines and catechisms and creeds theologies (even, in limited amounts, theologians), and even some kind of teaching authority. We must go through our critical period between the first and the second naiveté, in Paul Ricoeur's formulation. My only point here is that we must not fixate, as clergy and theologians often seem to do, between the two naivetés. It may be possible to encounter and respect mystery without art and music and story and ritual. However, I am dismayed that so many in my own denomination seem to think that one can and should, although their own heritage has always believed the exact opposite, from the New Testament hymns on. I have no objections to the architecture of a Quaker meeting house, but I am not impressed when the meeting house turns out to be a Catholic Church without a crucifix, stations, vigil lights, stained glass, and, heaven save us all, a statue of herself. 5 GENEROSITY AND COMMUNITY For reasons which it would probably take those who specialize in abnormal psychiatry to explain, religious leaders delight in sociological theories which disparage their people. Bellah and Putnam are their favorite sociological prophets, indeed Bob Bellah has become a popular speaker on the Catholic clerical lecture circuit. Presumably theories that assert that Americans are selfish individualists appeal to the clergy because they provide them with ammunition with which to denounce and attack their congregations. I guess there is nothing more fun if you are a harassed and frustrated cleric than taking it out on your people. When an empiricist comes along, especially if he also happens to be a cleric, and says that the prophecies of Putnam and Bellah have been thoroughly discredited by the data, he is dismissed as lacking in vision. Are Americans really more selfish and more individualist? Again the University of Chicago morning greeting might be appropriate: Relative to whom? It is not my intent in this presentation to refute either of these false prophets. I refer interested parties to the recent issue of Roper Institute for a thorough devastation of this portrait of selfish Americans. I note in passing that while bowling leagues may have decreased softball leagues have increased. I also note in passing that Americans give a higher proportion of their income to charity than any other people in the world and that Americans are more likely than anyone else to give community and service motivations for their choice of occupations. And also, to turn to my own research, more likely to volunteer. Forty seven percent of Americans volunteer on the average four hours a week and thus contribute almost two hundred billion dollars a year to the economy. Americans are most likely of anyone in the western world to volunteer. Volunteering has increased between the eighties and the nineties. Those most likely to volunteer and those where the increase is the highest are the three youngest age cohorts - the boomers, the me generation, and - highest of all - the frequently denounced Generation X. In all the eighteen countries I studied, religious devotion and religious membership strongly predict volunteering. Moreover the increase continues because even those born during the nineteen seventies and hence at the most only twenty at the time of the 1990 survey are already twice as likely to volunteer than those born in the nineteen sixties were ten years ago when they were in their twenties. And those born in the sixties were twice as likely to be volunteers than those born in the nineteen fifties when they were in their thirties, the prime age for voluntary service. Much of the difference between the United States and other countries is attributable to the higher levels of religious practice in this country. Thus if one takes religion into account the 47% of Americans who volunteer would be reduced to 30% if the level of religious practice in the United States was the same as in West Germany, there would be no difference between the two countries, and the contribution of volunteering to the American economy would go down by some seventy billion dollars. Finally the Americans are the most likely of all volunteers to provide altruistic explanations for their volunteer service. Robert Bellah and Robert Putnam, eat your hearts out! Americans are not selfish individualists, they do not lack civic virtue, they are not diminishing levels of social capital in our society. Moreover, it is precisely their religion that sustains their high level of generosity. Bob Bellah's Sheila, so loved by clergy persons, is not the typical American. Anyone who denies the above assertions bears false witness. Moreover as Professor Rossi points out, it is precisely those with the most responsibilities who are the most likely also to be volunteers. What can be said about the volunteer service of Americans? Someone might have said whatever you do to these the least of my brothers and sisters you do to me. My conclusion: Americans are not
a perfect people and America is not a perfect country. But in efforts to spur Americans to
more generosity, religious leaders ought not to be guilty of the folly of ignoring the
astonishing generosity that in fact exists. 6 DIVERSITY Finally, we are told by no less a person than Professor David Tracy that theology is now a pluralistic venture. By implication so is religion. Since Professor Tracy is in fact the Greeley Professor at the University of Chicago, he must be right. We must be open to wisdom, experiences and stories wherever they may be found. In fact religon should be willing to scavenge in all the trash cans of outmoded systems, old ideas, and discarded experiences in our search for wisdom. It does not follow, however, that in our pursuit of wisdom, in our quest for as many encounters with mystery as we can find, that we should abandon our own base. Some theologians (certainly not Professor Tracy) and many religious leaders are so eager to be open to everyone and everything that they seem to have lost their own identity, so eager to apologize in everyone's name that they stand for nothing at all. For them pluralism means openness to all heritages except their own. One who does not know where one stands, stands nowhere. There can be no objection to those who are interested in Asian mysticism if first they have explored the mysticism of their own heritages. Explore all you want Indian mysticism, so long as in your search you don't forget about the Anglo Saxon mystics - Rolle, Hilton (that is not a hotel), Julianna, and the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, to say nothing of Piers Plowman. Be you Catholic and you plumb Buddhist mystics without first paying some attention to Juan De La Cruz, you have alienated yourself from your own roots. You can't learn from others unless you learn first from who and what you are. Only teenagers, and shallow ones at that, may be excused for turning against all that has shaped them. I think of the nun at a Catholic college who told me that they could not teach courses in Catholic fiction because they had to teach courses in black fiction and women's fiction. Openness does not mean emptiness. Presumably it also means readiness to examine to all wisdom and not just the politically correct fashionable wisdom. Here comes everyone in James Joyce's phrase. Maybe something can be learned even from the Irish. Moreover it is worth remembering the conclusion of Rodney Stark's recent remarkable work on the origins and growth of Christianity: Christianity was successful because of the appeal of its compassion. Heaven knows (and does not like) that we have violated that teaching often in our flawed history, most frequently perhaps because religious leaders tried to replace compassion by rules. But there is nothing to be ashamed about in the teaching itself. CONCLUSION On January 2 2000, the condition of religion in America will not be notably different from its condition in December 20 1999. Nor is it likely to be all that different in 2005. If one is braver than any empiricist has any right to be and projects to the next fifty years from the past fifty years, then religion won't be all that much different from what it is now or what it was fifty years ago (since there are relatively few substantive changes in the last half century. As the Irish would say that will be as may be. I cannot imagine however a situation in American religion where the six problems and possibilities that I have outlined will not be present in some form or another: the secularizers will fight against religion, the debate about religion and politics will continue, family and sexuality will remain major issues, mystery. generosity, community, and diversity will still be subjects of debate. And Christopher Fry's off-quoted but now mostly forgotten yet always true dictum will still apply: thank God our time is now: the floes are cracking open; the enterprise is exploration into God! (insert full quote). If you call God by the name of Mystery, isn't that always the enterprise?
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