New Life

I have some colleagues who claim a bump in attendance this Easter.

Not the regular, more people than every other Sunday except Christmas Eve; but rather, more people than last Easter. I do not know if this is a phenomenon that is repeated in other United Churches or even other denominations this year; but it does give one cause to think.

Someone claimed that the media attention given to the new Pope points to a similar conclusion… are people getting interested in religion again?

I knew a man, a minister, who has been one for a very long time. In fact, of clergy I have heard of he has been doing it the longest, and he pointed out that in his lifetime there have been cycles, up and down; from the relatively non-religious days before the Second World War, through the religious days of the 1950’s, The loss of authority and religious belief of the 60’s etc… up and down.

He is not alone in this belief, in fact, experts agree that there are larger cycles as well. Some, like Karen Armstrong, argue for massive 500 year cycles, or perhaps even longer. The reality they point to is the fact that we are a people who move through our beliefs.

Humans come to know a truth, then we think about it long and hard and abandon it, then we realize we are living without a part of ourselves and embrace it. That is just who we are.

The thing is, all of the 1900’s, all of these relatively small changes we saw over the last 100 years, are all part of a larger cycle of change that we are in the midst of which is only half way done. Take our side of the religious coin alone, and think about Christianity over the last 4000 years.

First there was this belief that there was a god for everything, sheep and farming, rains and sunshine. Then, somewhere, there was this period of religious and social upheaval that led to monotheism, the belief that there was one, all powerful, God who controlled everything. That lasted for a few generations and along came another period of upheaval and change which eventually brought about Jesus and the idea that God is not distant and all powerful but relational and here with us. Then at the turn of the last century this began to change again.

It started changing with the industrial revolution, it changed when more people moved to cities than lived in the country, it changed when we published books, started scientific inquiry and built computers… it has been changing for a while….

Sorry to wax so philosophical, but I am fresh off a month of thinking about what Easter means to us here in the modern scientific skeptical age. It is hard to figure that out, because we truly do live in an age of not yet… the religion that was the cornerstone of our great, great, grandparents; that led to the idea that Christians would conquer and convert the world, that was sure life here had meaning because it would continue in heaven… that religion has been dying a slow death for a hundred years. And here we are a decade into the next hundred and we truly have no idea what it will be like 5, 10, 100 years down the road.

I write these columns to make people think. And for so long I have been hearing about the death of the church; I have been hearing that people are not religious anymore and that the ideas we hold are quaint. But that is not true. We are just changing.

Some people hate it and are holding on with clenched teeth to the traditions. Some people are afraid and do not know what to do. Some people are exploring what needs to change and what makes sense today.

So perhaps things are coming around. Perhaps we are on the other side of the current age of lack of faith and things really are going to start growing again.

Whatever the case, I write these columns in the hopes that you will join the last group, those who want to think about what next. Those that want to work at making sense of what we have been handed. Easter is about new life and I believe there is new life for the religions of the world, for the faithful… I just don’t know what it will look like.

The Times and Transcript has made its online copy a "pay to see" service. So I am going to resume posting my columns on this site after the fact.

FAITH TODAY - Times and Transcript - December 2011

Most of us self-identify in some way. We are happy today, or sad; we are young, or old; we are male, or female.

Some of those identifications get thrown onto us, like whether we are part of the lower economic trenches or the middle class, or wealthy. When people say someone is poor, they have an image in their mind, and whether or not you fit into that, you are labeled.

Some of them are classic genetic differences that we cannot really do anything about, like being left handed; or fitting more into the world as an introvert or an extrovert.

So you are religious or atheist, right?

The best line ever in my education was this story about one of our professors. He was teaching a first year religious studies class at university; those classes are almost always filled with hundreds of curious students by the way and one very angry young man confronted the teacher after a lecture.

“I don’t know why I’m even here,” he said, “I don’t believe in God!”

To which the wise professor replied, “Tell me about this God, perhaps I don’t believe in them either.”

This is what always gets to me when I read books like Christopher Hitchins “God is not great” where he argues against Christians as being silly. Well, I have been ordained for 16 years, I went to church for a couple of decades before that, and I have undertaken four university degrees in religious studies; and you know what, I think the Christians he is talking about are silly too.  

He picked one narrow definition of someone who is religious and attacked them as the stand in for everyone.

Pick any issue of the faith that you are concerned about – were we created or did we spontaneously erupt from protoplasm, for example, and there will be people in the church, the synagogue, the mosque or the temple who will believe every single scientific and philosophical variation of this issue possible.

In other words, religious people are just as human and just as different as anyone.

I guess I mention this for two reasons: the first is that when I say I am a Christian, I am often judged, and judged in a way that is not very accurate of who I am. Most Christians for example, seem to argue I am not. 

Which is neither here nor there, just that we do not all come from a cookie cutter mould.

The second reason is that one of the things that has brought religion to its cast off state is this precise problem. People in the church think everyone has to be the same, or think the same, and act the same. We assume when people come to worship they are all looking for one thing.

Think about it, for the majority of people worship is: 200 year old music, liturgical moments where the leader does something almost magical, prayers that sound the same as they always have.

Now, on the plus side, tradition evokes emotion and allows us to easily enter into the experience. On the negative side, they are all cookie cutter moments designed for one type of person.

Within the pews of my church as an example, I have six generations of people. Some of them grew up listening to swing music, some to hippy folk music, and some to techno pop. What music should I play to inspire an emotional response from them?

There are people out there who firmly believed that moral issues like abortion, divorce, homosexuality and the like are so bad we should not even talk about them; while the people younger than me cannot even fathom why these should be issues.

And when it comes to faith my parents grew up in a world where a Catholic would not talk to a Protestant; by the time I was maturing that seemed silly, but there was no way a Muslim or a Jew or Buddhist was right about anything. For those born today they will not be able to fathom why we thought there was such a big difference between any religions.

Whether we are talking about church or culture, the one thing we need to do as soon as possible is realize that almost everyone is different. So let’s respect that and incorporate it into how we do the things we do. 

Then, perhaps, we can turn this world around.