(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.