Evidence of a decline in religious affiliation has dropped. Andrew looks at the decline of Catholicism in the Northeast, Ross wonders if this will mean an attenuation of the culture wars, Rod Dreher elaborates on the impending evangelical collapse. How ironic that this should come out after a mother in Brazil is excommunicated for procuring an abortion for a 9 year old incest survivor whose pregnancy was life-threatening? If ever there was a case where abortion was warranted, it would have to be this one.
One of Sullivan's readers asks, if abortion is just considered murder, does the church regularly excommunicate for murder? Indeed, I would be very surprised if it did, and if that were the case then I guess that you could just shut down prison ministries right now. Hmm, see I was under this impression that God forgave all sins. This is what I was taught in Sunday School. Perhaps he does, except for the whole being gay and having abortions sins, which are so heinous that even a celibate gay man cannot be a priest. Let's be frank: religious authorities are ultraconservative these days, while the West is not moving in that direction. The obsession with abortion and gays seem to me to be largely about the subversion of ancient gender roles of the sort that continue to ensure that only men are ordained priests and can move up the Vatican hierarchy. The Vatican is unlikely to give it up, and are consigned to running a shrinking group of stalwarts while most everyone else moves on. The picture is looking very similar for evangelicals.
Of course, my take on Christianity is highly eclectic, and there's quite a bit of fusionism of various sorts in there. I don't, for example, believe that God is responsible for everything that happens in the world, we are. If God were responsible I would have to submit that, with all due respect, He could do a better job. And I tend to take liberal social positions, some of which I have little trouble squaring with Christianity (show me the verse where abortion is condemned) and others which require a bit more squaring, but that I don't feel are incompatible. But all this is largely because I've thought about things quite a bit. My experience with Christians has been that many of them are fine people (though quite a few aren't) but that the problem with them is the larger problem of a cultural inability to accept complexity and difficulty. Things like loving your enemies, simple as they sound, are actually incredibly difficult. Things like opposing abortion are actually pretty easy--for most people, you just have to say it and maybe vote for like-minded people, and revel in your righteousness. Doing something like dedicating your life to others is really, really hard and cuts against human nature. Doing something like opposing gay marriage is actually very simple. You can just say it, and maybe vote for like-minded people. Is it any wonder why religious people take those avenues, which aren't that hard, rather than focusing on the real substance which is much tougher? And while it is laudable to go to church every week it's simply not enough, and in the case of most churches that I went to as a child it was actually pretty worthless. Between the 30-45 mins. of singing banal Christian pop songs, the 15 or so minutes of announcements, and the 30 or so minutes of self-help pablum dressed up with a little bit of Christ, it's a case study in avoiding difficulty, of an MBA culture run amok where the goal is to get as many asses in the seats instead of nurturing souls. And it's not worthless--lots of people do it, and get something out of it--but the amount of challenging messages I've heard in megachurches can be counted on one hand.
So, I guess it's not surprising that many Christians tend to focus on ephemeral cultural issues, like gay marriage. It's easy to take a few verses, ignore the context, and deliver an unambiguous condemnation of such things. That Jesus Christ--he of Christianity fame--was never known to comment on the issue matters not to these folks. Most of them haven't even read the Bible anyway, or at least looked into what the Bible actually says about the issue. The past few decades have seen mainstream Christianity turn into a feel-good parade of cheesy cultural artifacts and contentless messaging. In the meanwhile, figures like Jim Dobson and Pat Robertson have managed to concoct an alternate version of Christianity that is almost 180 degrees opposite of the simple message of loving and serving others. Those dudes seem to hate everyone who is different from them. I don't know their hearts, obviously, but their words have got to count for something.
My own solipsistic response is to encourage more variety on the matter of interpreting scriptures. The notion that there's a "right way" and a "wrong way" to understand these things that anyone other than God knows is a notion that I find absolutely infuriating. This is not to say that there aren't some non-negotiables in there: the Bible says quite a bit about morals and right and wrong, of course, but Jesus's message isn't really a list of thou shalt nots, and the emphasis has to be in living according to the stuff he actually said, rather than scratching a belief system out of Old Testament and Revelation arcana. Judaism doesn't subscribe to this notion of "one correct reading of the scriptures, as determined by man"--in other words, hubris--but rather embraces debate and alternate interpretations, to the extent that one of their holy books is basically a collection of theological arguments. The one "acceptable" Christianity strikes me as being too political, too divorced from modernity, too stolid and monolithic, and too narrow to permit variety. One cannot but laugh at the irony of a religion that emphasizes how, unlike other religions, Christians have an unique relationship with their god, and then go out of their way to insist that everyone's relationship with God must be the same. The irony goes even further still when Protestantism, a denomination formed by questioning the orthodoxies of another large, monolithic strain of Christianity. Or maybe not: Luther wanted his own monolith, not a diaspora from Catholicism.
Ultimately, I can see a rockier patch for religion in America on the horizon, and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. A rise in skepticism will perhaps lead to an abandonment of some of the sillier notions among religious extremists, just like cleansing fires actually help forests grow.
