(This is a talk I gave at a conference held by the Foundation for Interreligious Diplomacy
this past weekend here at USC. FID was started by Mormons who are
seeking deeper mutual understanding with people of other faiths. Many
of them are part of a large "Mormon underground" of progressive-minded
people - some still in the church, some dropouts. See more at Sunstone. Particularly fascinating was a talk given by Kristine Haglund, editor of Dialogue, in which she opened a window into the "pre-verbal" theology of the LDS church.)
A few days ago I met with a group of 25 students here at USC to orient
them to the work of our Office of Religious Life. I think they are a
fairly random sample of the undergraduate population of this
university. At one point in my talk I asked how many of them were
religious. About 16 of them raised their hands. Then I asked how many
were spiritual but not religious. Several of the “religious” students
objected, saying that if they had been given that option, they would
have raised their hands. So I started over. 17 of the students said
they were spiritual but not religious – and 10 of those 17 had earlier
raised their hands to say they were religious! 6 of the students said
they were religious, and 2 said they were neither religious nor
spiritual.
That moment with freshmen leads me to this question: what does
“interfaith dialogue” mean among the rapidly increasing number of
people who have no formal faith affiliation at all?
SBNR – Spiritual But Not Religious – is clearly a category that is
gaining ground in America. 23% of young people between the ages of 18
and 29 do not have any religious affiliation, according to the Pew
Center’s latest survey results. This is a very substantial increase
in the unaffiliated, from decades past. The trends suggest that this
figure will accelerate in the future. America is headed in the
direction of Europe, which has experienced a drastic decline in
religious affiliation over the past few generations.
I’m an ordained United Church of Christ pastor, a theologically and
socially progressive Protestant Christian. My denomination is in a
steady numerical decline that has been going on for decades. I was
ordained in 1981, and since that time our denominational leadership has
been reorganizing and restructuring, more or less rearranging the deck
chairs on the Titanic. For a long time, people thought evangelical
megachurches were attracting away our members. Now it’s clear that it
doesn’t have much to do with which theology we espouse. Christianity
as a whole in America is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Megachurches thrive and minichurches fold, people move from one
denomination to another, or to nondenominational churches. But
native-born Americans are, as a whole, less and less likely to have any
Christian affiliation at all. The Southern Baptist denomination, once
the bogeyman to liberal denominations like mine, now is shrinking. A
few decades ago, church pundits were sure that the conservative
Presbyterian Church in America would grow substantially and the more
moderate Presbyterian Church USA would shrink. Now the statistics show
that both denominations are declining in membership.
I think the ten students who were at least partly religious, even when
they preferred to be called spiritual but not religious, spoke volumes
during that hand-raising exercise. I have had long chats with many
such students over the years, here and in my previous work as
ecumenical Protestant campus minister at Stanford. They very much
experience a spiritual dimension in their lives, and in the reality
around them. They have what I would call religious experiences, though
they may be ambivalent about what language to use in describing them.
They see great value in the many religions of the world. They are
pluralistic in their view of religion: they can’t imagine how any one
religion could claim to have the only and complete truth about matters
spiritual. They know too many sincere, lovely people of too many
different faiths to be able to go with the exclusivist concept. This
kind of exposure to world religions is becoming ubiquitous in America,
as mosques and Hindu temples appear even in the Bible Belt. SBNR’s
are not out to convert anybody to anything, and they don’t think they
have a religion that is superior to others. They don’t want a wall
between them and other people, and they think religious identities tend
to become such barriers. SBNR people may have an at least nominal
connection to one or another faith community, but are often iffy about
being loyal to it. They often have only the most rudimentary knowledge
of the religious traditions of their families. They were too busy
playing soccer or taking violin lessons to go to Hebrew School or
Sunday School. Getting a religious education is not perceived as
being a very significant thing to list on one’s application to college,
so it is routinely sacrificed to make room in the schedule for
resume-padding activities. So they are Catholic, but…. They are
evangelical Christian, but….. They are Muslim, but…. They are Jewish,
but…..
I do not have any science to back it up, but what I see in them is the
consequence of the effect of the ceaseless, ubiquitous work of
evangelism that has gone on for a couple of hundred years in this
country. In the early 1800’s it was said of upstate New York that it
was the “burnt-over district” – after the fired-up revivalists who
swept over and over it with tent meetings. At this point in history,
all 50 states have been burnt-over districts for a very long time.
More and more people have come to associate organized religion in
general with aggressive evangelism, and increasingly they are burnt out
with it. Today, this kind of conversion-oriented evangelism
un-evangelizes many more people than it converts. Retention rates –
the degree to which converts to a new religion “stick with it” for any
significant period of time – are increasingly problematic for many
conversion-oriented groups. It’s part of a long-term trend toward
“easy come, easy go” with religious affiliation.
Here at USC, I can report that it is a rare day when Campus Crusade for
Christ converts a native-born American student to its version of
Christianity. I watch the evangelistic Christian student groups in
action. Mostly, the people they succeed in converting to conservative
Christianity on our campus are international students. They attract
them with friendship, free food, and practical and emotional help with
adjusting to a new culture. They do well with Chinese students, who,
for a variety of sociological and cultural reasons, often resonate with
strict evangelical theology. But the Indians come to the evangelical
events for the free food, smile politely at the preaching pitches, and
leave. They already recognize Jesus as one of the many manifestations
of Brahman. They already have God – maybe too much God – where they
come from.
In my decade as ecumenical Protestant campus minister at Stanford, I
observed that the only reason that the level of religious affiliation
among students remained steady overall was because of the major influx
of students of Asian ancestry. I sense that the same sort of statistic
prevails at USC, as well.
Our thousands of Hindu students at USC have much to teach us. I think
that America is rapidly moving in the direction of a Hindu approach to
religion. There’s an apocryphal story about a Western Christian
missionary who went to a village in India and preached Jesus to them.
They were very moved by what they heard, and they all got baptized and
built a church sanctuary in the village and came to worship every
Sunday. But the missionary was angry when he saw the same villagers
doing puja to Krishna and Durga and Hanuman and Ganesha the rest of the
week. “You can’t do that!” he objected to them. “Jesus is the only
way!” “Yes, of course Jesus is the only way!” they answered. “And so
is Krishna and so is Durga and so is Hanuman and so is Ganesha!”
India’s deeply rooted heterodoxy has been, up till now, a foreign
concept in America, where we have been taught for so long that you have
to choose a religion and stay inside of it and stick with it and look
at other religions as false at best or evil at worst. But now,
Americans are becoming consumers of religion rather than subjects of
religious authority. More and more people find it easier to hold
heterodox beliefs culled from many different traditions, despite the
protests of their priests and pastors. We’re witnessing the
Hindu-ization of American religion.
Yet another group is emerging, to my great surprise, in the last few
years. They keep showing up in my office, more and more, to chat.
These are students who are gay or lesbian evangelical Christians. Ten
years ago, even five years ago, these students would have dropped out
of their churches, seeing no hope of ever being included and accepted
for who they are. Most of them would drop out of organized religion
altogether. But now, there are more and more of them who are staying
in their churches and coming out of the closet and not worrying about
what people think. They have found each other – they even have big
conferences – they have found ways to reconcile their natural sexual
orientation with the Bible. They take their floppy Bibles into their
pastors’ offices and argue the finer points of scripture with them on
the subject of sexuality. They’re fighting back instead of hiding or
leaving. They expect the church to change, not themselves.
People are claiming their own spiritual authority. The recent Pew
Center data document a huge increase in the last few decades of people
reporting that they have had some kind of personal mystical or
paranormal experience. God is talking to them directly. Within
Christianity, there has been a powerful shift towards Pentecostalism,
which rests on the idea that God is still speaking directly to and
through ordinary people today. Lots of evangelical Christians now
believe in reincarnation and astrology. Today, a majority of young
people who identify as evangelical Christians say that they think other
religions can be as valid for others as their religion is valid for
them. This is very much at odds with what most of their pastors are
preaching.
Increasingly, people are registering to pray as independents! The
decline of the two political parties is mirrored by the decline of
formal religious affiliation. There is a huge market for SBNR media:
new age, self-help, and meditation books fly off the shelves of
bookstores, adding more ingredients to the spiritual soup all the
time. People go to evangelical megachurches on the weekend and then
during the week watch Oprah interviewing Eckhart Tolle about his
non-faith-specific spirituality. The Pew Center’s statistics indicate
that people are increasingly inclined to change religious affiliation
repeatedly over their lifespans, just as increasingly they change jobs
and careers. This applies to the non-religious, as well – many of
those who aren’t affiliated today will someday be religiously
affiliated. And many of these folks, who do eventually join a church
or temple, will eventually drop out or change affiliation. It’s a
constant churning of religious membership and identity, reflecting the
attitude that religion is something you more or less invent for
yourself, rather than being something to which you must be subject.
Even those who still belong to religious communities are less rooted in
their traditions. They are getting less education about their faiths,
as people experience so much competition for their attention. One
manifestation of this is the current trendy term, “nondenominational
Christian”. At USC, when students come to us looking for a fellowship
group, I ask them about their faith tradition. Often the answer is
“Christian”. “What kind of Christian?” I ask. “Just Christian,” they
say, innocently believing that there is only one kind, namely, their
kind. “I used to be Catholic but now I’m Christian” - I have heard
that one a lot, which reveals a truly remarkable lack of awareness
about the history of the Christian faith. One new group came to
register with us recently. “What’s the name of your club?” I asked.
“The Christian club.” “What kind of Christian club?” “Just
Christian.” I probed further and finally figured out they were part of
the Watchman Nee sect, an evangelical group that started in China with
a unique history and culture. The students had no real awareness of
this history: I was the first person to explain it to them! The
denial of so many evangelical Christians that their churches have any
particularity other than what they read in the New Testament is
breathtaking. A lot of churches have erased the entire history of the
faith from the time of St. Paul until the era of American evangelical
and fundamental Christianity in the past 150 years. So it is no
wonder when their members have only a rudimentary education in
Christian tradition.
The sum effect of all these trends is intense interest by most people
in matters spiritual, but a marked weakening of bonds to any one faith
tradition or institution. There is a breakdown of religious authority
from within and from outside of faith institutions.
I am unequivocally religious, and would raise my hand for that category
rather than just “spiritual”. People in my category may despair at the
statistical trend toward non-affiliation. But I can tell you that from
where I am situated here at USC, I have no despair about this situation
at all. Fascination with matters religious and spiritual is very much
alive and well, whether students are religiously identifiable or not.
I even know atheists here on campus who are fascinated with religion,
and are eager to talk about it and check it out. My office will not be
going out of business any time in the foreseeable future. Many
religious institutions will collapse, but they will replaced by
different kinds of organizations that are adaptive to the trend toward
SBNR. Retreat centers, speaker series, study groups, service projects,
and periodic events are increasingly becoming the means by which people
gather to express and explore their spiritual impulses.
So what is interfaith dialogue, when so many people are having inner
faith monologues as they try out a lot of different religions over
their lifespans, and sort out mixes of practices that work for them?
At USC we host a student Interfaith Council that meets weekly over a
vegetarian meal. I am the group’s advisor and its meetings are the
high point of my week. About 20 students show up – some come and go,
several are solid regulars. It is a mix of students who have strong,
active commitments to faith institutions and others who are
practitioners of what Wayne Teasdale called “interspirituality”. What I
find is that the SBNR and weakly affiliated students eagerly learn a
great deal from the students who are strongly affiliated. And the
strongly affiliated students learn a lot from each other. The
strongly affiliated students are the primary informants for the whole
group. On the other hand, the SBNR students inspire everyone with
their curiosity and openness. They add tremendously to the richness of
the conversation and the depth of the relationships in the group. For
the SBNR students, the Interfaith Council is their religion! So far,
at least, the strongly religious students are okay with that.
Interfaith dialogue isn’t their religion, but it is an important part
of their expression of it.
There are a lot of different motivations for people to participate in
interfaith dialogue, and accepting these differences is just another
form of diversity for interfaith groups to observe with respect.
Interfaith dialogues, councils, and service groups will attract more
and more people for whom these forums are the only kind of organized
religion that makes sense. So I leave you with this question: are we
who are committed to organized religions ready to include inner faith
dialogue as part of interfaith dialogue? Because that is where the
culture is headed.