Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life U.S. Religious Landscape Survey

An extensive new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life details the religious affiliation of the American public and explores the shifts taking place in the U.S. religious landscape. Based on interviews with more than 35,000 Americans age 18 and older, the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey finds that religious affiliation in the U.S. is both very diverse and extremely fluid.

More than one-quarter of American adults 28% have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion - or no religion at all. If change in affiliation from one type of Protestantism to another is included, 44% of adults have either switched religious affiliation, moved from being unaffiliated with any religion to being affiliated with a particular faith, or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether.

The survey finds that the number of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith today 16.1% is more than double the number who say they were not affiliated with any particular religion as children. Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion.

The Landscape Survey confirms that the United States is on the verge of becoming a minority Protestant country; the number of Americans who report that they are members of Protestant denominations now stands at barely 51%.

Munson: Krauthammer is a neoconservative whose views on foreign policy are myopic–to put it mildly. But this column demonstrates that neoconservatives can be quite sensible when not discussing foreign policy.

Charles Krauthammer, An Overdose of Public Piety, washingtonpost.com, December 14, 2007

Mike Huckabee explains his surge in the polls thus: “There’s only one explanation for it, and it’s not a human one. It’s the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people.”

This campaign is knee-deep in religion, and it’s only going to get worse. I’d thought that the limits of professed public piety had already been achieved during the Republican CNN-YouTube debate when some squirrelly looking guy held up a Bible and asked, “Do you believe every word of this book?” — and not one candidate dared reply: None of your damn business.

Instead, Giuliani, Romney and Huckabee bent a knee and tried appeasement with various interpretations of scriptural literalism. The right answer, the only answer, is that the very question is offensive. The Constitution prohibits any religious test for office. And while that proscribes only government action, the law is also meant to be a teacher. In the same way that civil rights laws established not just the legal but also the moral norm that one simply does not discriminate on the basis of race — changing the practice of one generation and the consciousness of the next — so the constitutional injunction against religious tests is meant to make citizens understand that such tests are profoundly un-American.

Wheatcroft, The Church in England: Downright Un-American, New York Times, November 25, 2007

The authoritative Catholic paper The Tablet of London now writes that, some time before Christmas, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair will at last be received into the Roman Catholic Church by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales.

The historical resonances and political overtones of this are as significant as the event itself — which also illustrates again the great trans-Atlantic gulf. Not only are the English now a notably irreligious people; in striking contrast to America, religion plays no part in British political life.

For years it has been rumored that Blair would one day convert, the culmination of a journey that began when he discovered religion at Oxford. An Australian clergymen named Peter Thomson introduced him to the work of another writer. “If you really want to understand what I’m all about, you have to take a look at a guy called John Macmurray,” Mr. Blair has said. “It’s all there.”

Little read now, Macmurray was an academic theologian and proponent of “communitarianism” who died at 85 in 1976. Not everyone was as enthusiastic as Mr. Blair. George Orwell, for one, was suspicious of Macmurray as a “decayed liberal” who was even susceptible to totalitarian rhetoric.

However that may be, Mr. Blair joined the High or “Anglo-Catholic” wing of the Church of England, whose adherents, from John Henry Newman on, have been inclined “to pope” (as they used to say) and go the whole way. His wife, Cherie Booth, is a Catholic, and for years he went to Mass with her and their children, even taking holy communion, irregularly and sacrilegiously in Catholic eyes.

All of which sets him far apart from his compatriots. When an interviewer once tried to raise the question of faith, Mr. Blair’s press officer, Alastair Campbell, snapped, “We don’t do God,” and on that occasion at least he was quite right.

AFP

John Micklethwait, In God’s name | Economist.com, Nov. 3, 2007

Formerly communist countries are also getting hooked again on the opium of the people. Russia’s secret police, the KGB, hounded religion: its successor, the FSB, has its own Orthodox church opposite its headquarters. In the Polish parliament the speaker crosses himself before taking his seat. Some of China’s technocrats think that Confucianism, which Mao condemned as “feudal”, is useful social glue in their fast-changing country. But they brutally repressed a Buddhist sect, the Falun Gong, and they are worried that Christian churchgoers may already outnumber Communist Party members.

In Western politics, too, religion has forced itself back into the public square. The American president begins each day on his knees and each cabinet meeting with a prayer. The easiest way to tell a Republican from a Democrat is to ask how often he or she goes to church. And although European liberals sneer about American theocracy, American conservatives claim that secular, childless Europe is turning into Eurabia.

Many secular intellectuals think that the real “clash of civilisations” is not between different religions but between superstition and modernity. A succession of bestselling books have torn into religion—Sam Harris’s “The End of Faith”, Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” and Christopher Hitchens’s “God is not Great—How Religion Poisons Everything”. This counterattack already shows a religious intensity. Mr Dawkins has set up an organisation to help atheists around the world.

Part of that secular fury, especially in Europe, comes from exasperation. After all, it has been a canon of progressive thought since the Enlightenment that modernity—that heady combination of science, learning and democracy—would kill religion. Plainly, this has not happened. Numbers about religious observance are notoriously untrustworthy, but most of them seem to indicate that any drift towards secularism has been halted, and some show religion to be on the increase.

Social conservatives fracture as Robertson endorses Giuliani, McClatchy Washington Bureau, November 7, 2007

WASHINGTON — Televangelist Pat Robertson endorsed Rudy Giuliani’s campaign Wednesday, a surprising embrace that underscored the divisions among Christian conservatives about the field of candidates for the Republican presidential nomination.

By itself, Robertson’s support of the former New York mayor was an unusual partnership between a Christian conservative who once blamed the 2001 terrorist attacks on American sins such as abortion and a social liberal who supports abortion rights and gay rights.

But coming the same day that another prominent Christian conservative — Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas — endorsed Sen. John McCain of Arizona, and two days after influential conservative Paul Weyrich endorsed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, it was a fresh sign that one of the most influential blocs of voters in the party remains splintered.

Raised arm of evangelical woman praying, by Christopher Morris/VII

Evangelical Movement, Presidential Election of 2008, New York Times, October 28, 2007

The hundred-foot white cross atop the Immanuel Baptist Church in downtown Wichita, Kan., casts a shadow over a neighborhood of payday lenders, pawnbrokers and pornographic video stores. To its parishioners, this has long been the front line of the culture war. Immanuel has stood for Southern Baptist traditionalism for more than half a century. Until recently, its pastor, Terry Fox, was the Jerry Falwell of the Sunflower State — the public face of the conservative Christian political movement in a place where that made him a very big deal.

With flushed red cheeks and a pudgy, dimpled chin, Fox roared down from Immanuel’s pulpit about the wickedness of abortion, evolution and homosexuality. He mobilized hundreds of Kansas pastors to push through a state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, helping to unseat a handful of legislators in the process. His Sunday-morning services reached tens of thousands of listeners on regional cable television, and on Sunday nights he was a host of a talk-radio program, “Answering the Call.” Major national conservative Christian groups like Focus on the Family lauded his work, and the Southern Baptist Convention named him chairman of its North American Mission Board.

firstamendmentcenter.org: news, September 24, 2007

WASHINGTON — Sixty-five percent of Americans believe that the nation’s founders intended the U.S. to be a Christian nation and 55% believe that the Constitution establishes a Christian nation, according to the “State of the First Amendment 2007” national survey released Sept. 11 by the First Amendment Center.

Divine politics | Salon, September 24, 2007

Westerners now talk blithely about the need for a “reformation” in Islam, apparently oblivious to how bloody and traumatic the Christian Reformation actually was. Lilla finds this situation perilous. As long as we refuse to acknowledge the madness of the religious wars and persecutions of the 16th century, he argues, we remain in danger of loosening our grip on “the Great Separation” (of church and state) that resulted from it. By not understanding how easily any politics infused with any religion can drift in the direction of fanaticism and terror, we put ourselves at risk of drifting that way ourselves.

Mark Lilla, Politics of God, New York Times, August 19, 2007
Today, we have progressed to the point where our problems again resemble those of the 16th century, as we find ourselves entangled in conflicts over competing revelations, dogmatic purity and divine duty. We in the West are disturbed and confused. Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.