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Posts Tagged ‘religion’

Stating the Case for Religion

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

The Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life recently released a study on the United States’ most religious states and, in a stunning non-shocker, the most religious areas of the country lie below the Mason-Dixon line.

When asked how important religion was in their daily lives, residents of Mississippi were the most religious in the country, with 82 percent saying religion was very important to them, followed by respondents from Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Tennessee. In fact, nine of the top 10 most religious states hail from what we’d normally call “the South,” and No. 7 Oklahoma isn’t exactly too far north, either.

New England, meanwhile, is the nation’s hotbed for secularism, with six of the bottom seven states hailing from the northeast. Only 36 percent of folks in either New Hampshire or Vermont say that religion’s very important to them. Alaska, oddly enough, was just in front of those two, and a couple of other western states — Oregon and my home state of Colorado — were quite secular, too.

All of this is pretty interesting, but what does it really tell us?

Political wonks might suggest the study says something about our political red state/blue state divide … except that Alaska, home to Sarah Palin and a reliable Republican stronghold for the last 50 years or so, is quite secular.

New England secularists will point out that New Englanders are far more educated than folks down south. And it’s true that 33.6 percent of Vermont’s population has bachelor’s degrees, compared to just 18.9 percent in Mississippi. But Wyoming — far more secular than, say, Georgia or North Carolina, has far fewer college graduates per capita than either.

Oddly enough, just a few days before Pew released its study, a separate report measured states on their comparative happiness — and the results were pretty interesting.

Louisiana topped the list, followed by Hawaii, Florida, Tennessee, Arizona and Mississippi. Check these states’ religiosity, and only Arizona registers as being below average in religiosity — and even there, 51 percent of Arizonans still say religion is very important to them. The bottom-dwellers on the happiness index were Indiana, Michigan, New Jersey, Connecticut and (bringing up the rear) New York — all states that, according to Pew’s figures, were less religious than the national norm.

Now, far be it from me to suggest that religion can make one happier, but …

Tags: atheism, blue state, church, conservative, happiness, liberal, red state, religion
Posted in North America, Uncategorized | Permalink

‘I’m Sort of a Buddhist, New Age Type of Christian’

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

USA Today published a fascinating story by Cathy Lynn Grossman yesterday. The subject: How Christians are augmenting their faith with elements — sometimes pretty big ones — from other religions. The top starts off like this:

Going to church this Sunday? Look around.

The chances are that one in five of the people there find “spiritual energy” in mountains or trees, and one in six believe in the “evil eye,” that certain people can cast curses with a look — beliefs your Christian pastor doesn’t preach.

In a Catholic church? Chances are that one in five members believe in reincarnation in a way never taught in catechism class —that you’ll be reborn in this world again and again.

As I said, fascinating — and a little shocking. Grossman says that 65 percent of U.S. adults — a good chunk of whom claim to be Christian — have incorporated Eastern religious thought or New Age doctrine into their lives. Hard to believe that folks could deviate so much from what their religion teaches, isn’t it?

Isn’t it?

While this mix-and-matching of religion would seem, at first blush, to be very postmodern, mixing and matching one’s faith with other spiritual elements probably isn’t all that new. I know Christians who are deeply committed to their faith, but nevertheless read their horoscopes daily or believe in ghosts. And many of them are in their 60s or 70s — not exactly poster children for postmodernism.

I recently watched “The Princess and the Frog,” a charming little Disney film that just happens to incorporate Voodoo — a mishmash of Catholicism and animistic religions brought from Africa to the New World on slave ships. And, while we might tsk-tsk Voodoo, how many of us at one time have engaged in another vaguely spiritual and certainly not Christian rite popularized by Disney — wishing upon a star?

We humans are amazingly inconsistent (and easily bored) creatures, and we tend to tinker with everything we touch, whether it’s a computer desktop, a car engine or a 2,000-year-old religion. Cherry-picking from other faiths is something that has always been rather tempting for us. And, while I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with, say, going to a yoga class, it’s still critical, I think, to stay grounded in the Word of God. It’s the only way I know of to know what our faith allows — and what it doesn’t.

Tags: Bible, Catholic, church, faith, religion
Posted in church news, interfaith | Permalink

Pot, Meet Kettle

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

Minarets from the masjed e jomeh Yazd. photo by Fabien Dany

Man, I wanted to write a nice, long, thoughtful and much overdue post today on AIDS — the progress we’ve made, the work still to be done and how the Church is making a big difference.

But it’s been a deadline-heavy week on other fronts, so I’m just going to have to postpone the AIDS post and instead direct you to some musings from our friends at GetReligion.com, all about the latest flap over Switzerland declaring their skylines to be off-limits to Muslim minarets — a reaction, some say, to Europe’s growing unease over Muslim immigration. While lots of folks got pretty angry over the Swiss decision, Mollie points out that it’s not like traditionally Islamic countries have been particularly vocal about protecting the rights of other religions within their own borders.

Much of the post is made up of quotes from other sources, so I’m not going to requote Mollie’s requotes. But I’d encourage you to check out the post.

Tags: church, Muslim, persecuted Christians, religion, religious freedom, Switzerland
Posted in Europe, Middle East | Permalink

A Window to Truth

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

A portion of Yale's "Education" window

Mark I. Pinski, one of the better-known names in the realm of religious journalism, offers a pretty salient look in yesterday’s USA Today at the sometimes fractious relationship between faith and science, looking both to the past and the present.

Pinski suggests (rightly, I think) that President Barack Obama’s appointment of renowned scientist Francis Collins (a committed evangelical Christian and author of one of my favorite books, “The Language of God“) to head the National Institutes of Health, is an effort to heal some of the riffs between science and faith. He also finds inspiration in Yale’s famed Tiffany window called “Education,” which has graced the university for around 120 years.

The window, commissioned by businessman Simeon Baldwin Chittenden back in 1889 puts science and faith on center stage, flanking an angelic-like woman with her eyes cast upward. Pinski notes that a thumbnail picture of the window can be found on the Web site for the BioLogos Foundation (an organization founded by Collins).

Collins earned his Ph.D. in chemistry at Yale in the early 1970s, and I find no mention of the Chittenden window in his writings, or whether the NIH head has contemplated its significance to his own life. But in a commentary for the Christian Broadcasting Network, he displays sentiments consonant with the window’s message.

“The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome,” Collins said. “God can be found in the cathedral or in the laboratory. By investigating God’s majestic and awesome creation, science can actually be a means of worship.”

It’s a beautiful window, reflecting I think beautiful, and truthful, sentiments. Collins is one of my heroes, and I hope he does fantastic work in his new position.

Tags: Collins, education, Francis Collins, religion, science, stained glass, Yale
Posted in culture, education | Permalink

The Truth of Faith

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

I’ve never quite understood these so-called “new atheists,” folks like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the like. I mean, it’s one thing to say you don’t believe in God, or a god. I don’t agree with that point of view, naturally, but I can grasp how people get there.

But new atheists, or “angry atheists,” as they’re sometimes called, seem to not disbelieve as much as the hate the very concept. They consider faith not just a fallacy, but a dangerous delusion: It, not the love of money, such atheists argue, is the root of all evil. The title of Hitchens’ bestselling book denouncing religion says it all: “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.”

But anyone who looks at history with just a smidgen of fairness can see that religion doesn’t poison everything: It flavors it. Even those who deny God as the source of all creation can’t, in good reason, deny that the belief in God has influenced and, arguably, improved, everything that it’s touched: Art, architecture, literature, law, music … we all owe a tremendous debt to people who celebrated their Creator through their own creativity.

And while some atheists shout their denial at such evidence, others seem willing to acknowledge their debt to faith.

“More than any other institution, religion deserves our appreciation and respect because it has persistently encouraged people to care deeply — for the self, for neighbors, for humanity, and for the natural world — and to strive for the highest ideals humans are able to envision,” writes Bruce Sheiman in his new book, “An Atheist Defends Religion: Why Humanity is Better Off With Religion than Without It.”

The Religion News Service (via USA Today) offered a fascinating take of a movement it calls “Atheism 3.0″ — a pretty sudden movement, considering Hitchens’ and Dawkins’ 2.0-version of atheism really just got off the ground less than a decade ago. These new, new atheists, as RNS author Daniel Burke calls them, want to make peace with their religious brethren, not war. They want to, if not embrace religion themselves, at least acknowledge that it holds a place in the public square and that it can be a catalyst for good behavior.

That’s great, of course, on a couple of different levels.

For one, it’s so much easier to talk with those who disagree with you when they’re not shouting all the time. And we’ve got a lot to talk about. As Greg Epstein, Harvard University’s humanist chaplain, tells the RNS, it really behooves believers and non-believers alike to not fight with each other, what with the world facing so many problems. “When our goal is erasing religion, rather than embracing human beings, we all lose,” Epstein says.

But that dialogue may open up new, more spiritual avenues, as well. Because when one looks at the benefits of faith rationally, one can’t help but wonder whether there’s something to it, after all — more than just a benign fairy tale. Statistically, people of faith live longer, happier lives than those without faith — and the more religious you are, generally the happier you think yourself. Religion has been a tremendous source of beauty, of justice, and societal advancement. It’s survived and thrived in times of war and peace, famine and plenty, superstition and skepticism. And, with science and nature so ruthlessly efficient, is there really a better explanation for the enduring power of faith other than … it reflects the truth?

” … you have to have a purpose in life bigger than yourself, and that not everything is all about you,” Epstein says. But that purpose, if atheists give the matter enough thought, almost assuredly points to the possibility of Divine purpose. It almost has to. Faith is, in many ways, both gloriously implausible and relentlessly logical. We must never forget that what we believe is not just beautiful — it is true. We can’t definitively prove it to be true, of course — I think God likes the mystery — but every indicator points us in the right direction, if we give it enough thought.

And I think it’s possible that, when folks are given a glimpse of that truth, it might lead them back home.

Tags: atheism, beauty, faith, religion, truth
Posted in Body Parts | Permalink

Faith Outside The Box

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

Picture by Hay Kranen

The Washington Post’s William Wan wrote a fascinating story about Facebook and faith — specifically, how people fill out the “religious views” box on their profile pages:

Such public proclamations of beliefs used to require a baptism in water, or a circumcision, or learning the five pillars of Islam. Now Facebook users announce their spiritual identity with the stroke of a few keys. And what they are typing into the open-ended box offers a revealing peek into modern faith and what happens to that faith as it migrates online.

Wan says the box gives us insight how the religious landscape has changed in the Internet age. “Christian” — or a Christian denomination or sect — is still by far the most popular way to fill in the box, followed by “Islam” and “atheist.” But, as Wan points out, people describe themselves in a myriad of ways: “Jedi” is actually the 10th most popular “denomination” on Facebook. More than 2,000 people list “Heavy Metal” in the box. Many typed in “beer.”

And then there are the cryptic or witty one-liners, including my favorite: “Agnostic, but accepting offers.”

All of this makes these Facebook theologians sound rather light and trite. But for many, wrestling with how to fill in the box was a very serious matter. Some, according to Wan, wrestled with the question for days or weeks. For a few, considering “the box” led them to a line of thought they’d long ignored. Some eventually type in favorite Bible verses or an obscure line of poetry. Others gave up and simply wrote, “it’s complicated.” Religious descriptors on Facebook are almost as numerous and varied as the faithful themselves.

Is this another example of how we’ve turned religion into a “mix-and-match” experience? Are we so uncomfortable with organized religion that we shed labels altogether and piece together our own individual faiths?

Well, partly. But I think it gets at something more basic: Faith, for most of us, is big. Faith is complicated. And the essence of faith requires more than a box to describe it.

My Facebook page tells the world I’m a “Christian.” I’m comfortable calling myself, even, an evangelical Christian. It is, after all, what I am.

But it doesn’t tell people how I cringed at that very label for much of my life, or how proud I am, in many ways, of that label now. Or how I found my faith, lost it, and found it again. Or how I was baptized at age 7 so, in part, I could see what the inside of the baptismal looked like. Or how — well, you get the point.

A friend of mine asked me one time to talk about my “testimony,” and found myself saying, “which one?” Faith for me — and I expect, for many people — isn’t very neat and tidy. It’s a messy, often chaotic journey, and I don’t think I’m anywhere near the end of mine.

My Facebook “religious views” box, really, should come with an asterisk beside the word “Christian”: Not an asterisk as a modifier — not a “Christian, but …” but rather an extended footnote: “Christian, and let me tell you about it.” Because let’s face it: Christianity is meant to be lived outside the box.

Tags: Facebook, faith, religion, spirituality
Posted in Body Parts, pop culture | Permalink