This morning as I was on my treadmill doing an imitation of a hamster in pursuit of lower cholesterol scores, I listened to NPR’s “Morning Edition.” Among many items was a letter from a listener who dismissed a story from the previous day about “Fatwa shopping” a phenomenon that is occurring among some Muslims. If, for example, a Muslim asks a religious authority for a judgment call on some behavior, and the judgment call differs from what he wants to do, he may simply shop for another religious authority with a different perspective. The listener said that such behavior is typical of all religions. The faithful all “drink the Kool Aid,” and if they don’t get the flavor they want at first, they look around for another flavor that suits their taste.
Obviously there’s some truth in this reading of contemporary religious culture. Christians also know the phenomena of “church shopping” and “church hopping.” And since Feuerbach and Freud we have recognized the tendencies among some of the faithful to externalize their desires, hopes and fears and to name these “God.” But, of course, our Reformed tradition calls it idolatry when we craft gods in our own image. Don Henley’s “Little Tin Gods” is Calvinism with a strong backbeat. And a purely cynical view of religious faith and the reasons why people adhere to faith (and others do not) does as little justice to the subject as any naïve or superficially pious one does.
If you will allow me to gallop through reports that deserve much more careful study I will try to arrive at my point.
A few weeks ago, many of us received the summary report of the American Religious Identification Survey by Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar (March 2009), and noted that the category of persons with “no religion” grew from 8.2% in 1990 to 15.0% in 2008, meaning that there are as many now in that group as there are among all Baptists (the largest Protestant group in the United States), and apparently without the benefit of the massive evangelistic efforts the latter sometimes employ. The core message of this report was conveyed by its authors (and I doubt if there’s a minister or priest in our country who would dispute what they have to say): “The challenge to Christianity in the U.S. does not come from other religions but rather from a rejection of all forms of organized religion” (Highlights, p. 1).
A few days ago, however, we received the report of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life titled, Faith in Flux: Changes in Religious Affiliation in the U.S. (April 2009). One of the most striking findings in the Pew report led to a fascinating Op-Ed piece by Charles M. Blow, “Defecting to Faith,” last week in The New York Times (May 2, 2009). Blow observes that a surprising number of children of agnostics and atheists are making their way to church. According to the Pew report, most people who grew up in families without faith affiliated as adults with faith communities because their spiritual needs were not being met (18).
Where does this leave us?
The answer is in a third study, this one a couple of years old, and of a smaller group in our society, college age adults. W. Robert Connor reported on this study in a fascinating essay, “The Right Time and Place for Big Questions,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 9, 2006), where he observed that many young adults were frustrated that the big questions of life, the questions of meaning, of purpose, were not being addressed in their classrooms or by their professors, many of whom were hesitant to speak beyond the limits usually permitted in the public marketplace of ideas.
Young adults are searching for meaning that is not just of their own making and for purpose that transcends; they are looking for answers to life’s most persistent questions, the big questions, and they are finding in themselves longings unmet in a culture obsessed with itself and lacking a reference point for meaning beyond its own preoccupations. The fact that the parents of many of these young people do not believe doesn’t mean that the game is over. In fact, it means just the opposite. These young people, incidentally, are not asking to be entertained. They are seeking something much deeper. They are seeking faith. And faith is as much (if not more) about reverence, awe and wonder for the Holy who utterly transcends us as it is about a set of beliefs we may or may not share.
I know that today’s blog has rambled through a lot of material, and has not done justice to any of it. But I want to introduce one more resource to the mix, Paul Woodruff’s remarkable (and humanistic) study, Reverence: Recovering a Forgotten Virtue (Oxford, 2001). Paul has taught undergraduates for many years and is now dean of undergraduate studies at The University of Texas at Austin. If anyone has his hand on the pulse of young adults, it is Paul. He senses (rightly, I believe) the need for a recovery of reverence, “the well-developed capacity to have the feelings of awe, respect, and shame when these are the right feelings to have” (8). Maybe this is what young adults are saying they have not experienced. Maybe this is what’s at the heart of their big questions. Maybe this is why they are coming again through the doors of the church. If so, let’s make sure they are greeted by something more thoughtful and reverent than just a sacralized version of the popular culture that is not meeting their needs.
MICHAEL JINKINS is academic dean and professor of pastoral theology at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Austin, Texas. His most recent book Called to Be Human: Letters to My Children on Living a Christian Life was just published by Eerdmans Press.
[1] The title borrows from Stephen Carter, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (BasicBooks, 1993). Carter observed: “In contemporary American culture, the religions are more and more treated as just passing beliefs – almost as fads, older, stuffier, less liberal versions of so-called New Age – rather than as the fundaments upon which the devout built their lives” (14). The message that many people receive in this culture is: “pray if you like, worship if you must, but whatever you do, do not on any account take your religion seriously” (15).
