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Showing posts with label Christianity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christianity. Show all posts
Jun 27, 2010
Newsletter 54 | International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS)
Apr 4, 2010
Global Voices Online » Morocco: Are Christians at Risk?
by Jillian York
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In early March, observers watched as around 20 long-time Christian orphanage workers were expelled from the country they called home. The incident, and others which followed it, have brought to light the debate surrounding Christianity in the Kingdom.
While the official Moroccan line is that 98.7-99 per cent of the population is Muslim (the remainder being approximately 1% Christian and 0.2% Jewish), that statistic includes ethnic Europeans residing in Morocco. Proselytizing is illegal, as is conversion away from Islam. Still, foreign Christians are allowed to practice freely, and a number of churches, mostly from the era of French colonization, remain. In contrast, the country's tiny Jewish population is almost entirely native, and is also allowed free practice of their faith.
Despite guarantees of freedom, it would appear that the government is taking a stronger approach of late to proselytism, both real and perceived. The Moroccan Dispatches shares a recent incident in which an Egyptian Catholic priest was expelled from the country:
Evangelicals have operated for years in Morocco, with their main purpose being the conversion of Muslims. Catholics have operated for longer, but purposefully have not engaged in proselytizing. So it came as a surprise that a Catholic priest was also detained and then exported during last week's crackdown.
The blogger shares a message he received from the church in Casablanca:
On Sunday the 7th of March, five minutes before mass began; the police in the city of Larache entered our friary and arrested one of our confrères, Rami Zaki, a young Egyptian friar still in initial formation who was spending a year with us. He was ordered to go with the police, had no possibility to collect anything, and was given no explanation for his arrest…
…When Rami was put on the plane, his passport was taken from him and given to the pilot who later surrendered it with Rami to the police in Cairo. He was detained by the police in Cairo for another seven hours for interrogation before he was permitted to telephone his community of friars. From Sunday, the morning of his arrest, to Tuesday afternoon, when he was released – a total of more than 50 hours – Rami was deprived by the police in Morocco and Egypt of any of his human rights.
In another post, the blogger demonstrates that the public has joined in the crackdowns, citing a recent incident in which a cross was removed from its site of many years:
Where a cross once hung in Meknés
This is the place where a cross used to hang in Meknes' medina. The Catholics who teach Moroccans languages and career skills in this building do not engage in proselytism but have caught up in the anti-Christian sentiment following the recent expulsions of Christians. Last week, the cross was knocked down and beaten into pieces.On a positive note, Moroccans who have benefited from their services have volunteered to reconstruct the cross.
In a more recent post, the same blogger assesses a TelQuel article on the situation, and says of it:
In the main article, it points out that most Moroccans convert to Christianity more as a result of Arabic media and not from foreign missionaries. This jives with my experience: a number of Moroccans I know have had long conversations with Christian missionaries about religion and none have converted. Some defended Islam while smoking hashish just to piss off the Christians, it that gives you an idea of how many Moroccans understand their Islamic identity. This observation about foreign missionaries, of course, undermines the rationale behind the recent expulsions of many foreigners.
To conclude, the blogger notes the recent media crackdowns and laments:
Other media critical of the government have been shut down recently. And the same could happen to Tel Quel. But as long as they are still around, there will be at least some debate and critical thinking about current events.
Jan 7, 2010
Clashes in Egyptian town after Coptic killings
Clashes have broken out in the southern Egyptian town where seven people died in a drive-by shooting outside a church after a Coptic Christmas Eve Mass.
A BBC correspondent in Cairo said protesters clashed with police at the hospital in the town of Naga Hamady.
The shooting happened as churchgoers left midnight Mass to welcome in the Coptic Christmas on 7 January.
The attack is thought to be in revenge for the alleged rape of a 12-year-old Muslim girl by a Christian man.
Following the reported rape in November there were five days of riots in the town, with Christian properties set on fire and damaged.
The BBC's Yolande Knell, in Cairo, said more than 1,000 Christians had gathered at the hospital to collect the bodies of six of the victims.
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Stones were thrown at security forces and ambulances were smashed as they vented their anger, she added.
Three people are reported to have pulled up outside the church in Naga Hamady on Wednesday evening, killing at least six Coptic Christians and a security official and injuring 10 others, including two Muslim passers-by.
Police say the chief attacker in Wednesday's shooting has been identified but no arrests have yet been made.
The church's Bishop Kirollos said there had been threats in the days leading up to the Christmas Eve service - a reason he decided to end his Mass an hour earlier than normal.
"For days, I had expected something to happen on Christmas Eve," he told the Associated Press.
He said he left the church minutes before the attack.
"A driving car swerved near me, so I took the back door," he said. "By the time I shook hands with someone at the gate, I heard the mayhem, lots of machine-gun shots."
Witness Youssef Sidhom told the BBC that the attack shocked everyone, including police guarding the church.
Harassment claims
Naga Hamady is 40 miles (64km) from Luxor, southern Egypt's biggest city.
Coptic Christians - who make up 10% of Egypt's 80 million population - have complained of harassment and discrimination.
Some Copts argue that previous attacks on them have gone unpunished or have resulted in light sentences.
Most Christians in Egypt are Copts - Christians descended from the ancient Egyptians.
Their church split from the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches in AD451 because of a theological dispute over the nature of Christ, but is now, on most issues, doctrinally similar to the Eastern Orthodox Church.
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Dec 1, 2009
Inside Indonesia - Locating culture in the church
Minahasan Christians reinterpret their cultural history and identity through religion
Kelli A. Swazey |
Members of the cultural committee perform a contextual liturgy in Tombulu during Sunday service at |
The waxing moon takes central position in the sky above us as the calendar turns to 7 July 2009 in Minahasa, North Sulawesi. An eerie chant cuts through the chatter of the musicians who have been jocularly testing each other’s knowledge of local songs played on the guitar, tambour and ‘ting-ting’, a small metal xylophone. Pastor Paul Richard Renwarin from the local Catholic seminary school stands facing a crowd of thirty or so attendees as he inaugurates the evening’s multi-denominational Christian service with sounds drawn from the Minahasan past.
For many in the hushed crowd, the Tombulu language he uses is familiar, and for some a mother tongue. Although the language is old, the concept behind this service marks the beginnings of a new kind of Christian practice. Instead of standard Catholic liturgy, the focal point for this service is a section of a traditional poem relating the mythical origins of the Minahasan people. Described by the pastor as a local version of the Biblical creation story found in Genesis, the verses have been set to new music and are delivered in the call-and-response style familiar to anyone who has ever attended a Catholic mass.
This is the third year that a mixed group of Protestants and Catholics has gathered to participate in a midnight worship service at Watu Pinewetengan, the stone of division. As the central physical representation of local identity, this large, pictograph-covered stone located in the heart of Minahasa is said to record the division of the region into separate tribal groups during the pre-Christian era. Today, those tribal borders are roughly analogous to the surviving language groups in North Sulawesi. This tangible symbol of divided parts united in one unshakable whole is a fitting representation of both the people and the land called Minahasa, a name that means ‘to unite’ or ‘to become one’.
Protestant Christianity is one cultural commonality that the majority of Minahasans share, whether their first language is Tombulu, Tonsea or Tondano. Almost 90 per cent of the colonial region of Minahasa had converted to Christianity by the late seventeenth century, and contemporary Christian practices are as much a part of local tradition as more recognisable aspects of pre-colonial life such as dances used to celebrate the annual harvest. The line between religion and tradition is not easily defined in a region where Christianity has been part of everyday life for well over 100 years, and is complicated by historical rivalries between denominations that have different approaches to the inclusion of traditional practice in the church environment.
Including tradition
The Catholic Church in Indonesia has historically been more open to including traditional dances and other ritual practices as part of regular worship. In Minahasa Catholicism has played an important role in the preservation of ritual knowledge that was deemed inappropriate and subsequently suppressed by Protestant missionaries. Collaboration between the two denominations has been limited since colonial-era restrictions on Catholic missionaries sparked discord between Catholics and Protestants in the late nineteenth century. However, a new spirit of ecumenism is emerging between the region’s two oldest religious identities. Driven in part by changing ethnic and religious demographics that throw the link between Christianity and Minahasan identity into question, greater cooperation between Catholics and Protestants is also a result of inter-denominational competition and the growing popularity of newer Christian denominations such as the Pentecostal and Seventh Day Adventist Churches.
The appropriateness and meaning of traditional practices has long been a subject of debate among members of the largest Christian denomination in the region
Today in this northernmost province of Sulawesi, the process of deciding how pre-Christian practices and beliefs should fit within the lives of Christian people is an important aspect of the continuing definition of what it means to be Minahasan.
Questions about the appropriateness and meaning of traditional practices for Christians have long been a subject of debate for members of the largest Christian denomination in the region, the Evangelical Church of Minahasa (Gereja Masehi Injili di Minahasa, GMIM).
Over 800 GMIM churches in Minahasa are part of a standardised system, with everything from the salary of religious clergy to the contents of the hymnal book dictated by a central authority. This has left less room for GMIM members to use the church as a vehicle to preserve the various pre-Christian practices that continue to define who they are at the village level. However, decentralisation policies have changed the face of politics in North Sulawesi, creating an opening for public discussion and debate about local identity. As important centres of social life that are intimately connected to the flow of local politics, GMIM churches are also drawn into new discussions about what constitutes regional identity and what it means to be Minahasan in Indonesia today.
Rediscovering the past
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Dancers from Rurukan, a village practicing contextual liturgy, perform the Maengket harvest dance |
A small but determined group of academics from various Christian denominations has renewed efforts to reconnect with a regional past, to unearth traditions that may have been left behind or driven underground by Minahasan Christians trying to be modern, educated Indonesian citizens. These academics have put denominational divisiveness aside in order to gather pockets of knowledge about Minahasan history, ritual practice, and the evolution of contemporary religious terminology with roots in the pre-Christian era. Their goal is not to return to a purer, pre-Christian past, but to engage the question of how to understand and preserve the past as part of a Christian present.
Yet, these new alliances also bring cultural differences to the forefront. Just as the symbol of Watu Pinewetengan acknowledges the self-conscious unity of several sub-ethnic groups within an overarching ‘brotherhood’, contemporary Minahasans must actively work to smooth over the discrepancies that emerge in discussions about regional history and ritual practice. Part of the process of unearthing the past is to decide on what, exactly, should constitute the shared history of the Minahasan people.
For Pastor Renwarin, including local traditions in religious practice is an opportunity to ‘make people fall in love with adat (tradition or customary law)’ and gain better awareness of their own cultural heritage. Furthermore, he sees the development of new liturgies that combine aspects of pre-Christian belief with contemporary theology as a means to enrich contemporary Catholic practice. Over the past few years he has conducted traditional marriage rituals alongside standard Catholic weddings. Unlike the orthodox Catholic ceremony, he explained, local marriage rituals focus attention on the parents of the bride and groom, and the effect that their union will have on the extended family and larger community.
Pastor Roeroe, known for delivering fiery sermons in Tombulu in Protestant churches around the region, argues that older, pre-colonial patterns of leadership have made Minahasans into exemplary Christians
Pastor Renwarin’s contemporary, Wilhelmus Absalom Roeroe, a GMIM pastor and professor at the Christian University in Tomohon has a similar perspective. Pastor Roeroe has been an outspoken advocate for the inclusion of Minahasan cultural practices in the GMIM church. Known for delivering fiery sermons in Tombulu in Protestant churches around the region, he argues that the influence of older, pre-colonial patterns of leadership have made Minahasans into exemplary Christians. For these leaders, the value of returning to the ‘traditional’ practices of the past lies in their ability to improve and distinguish those Christian traditions that punctuate contemporary life in the region.
It is not only academics and religious practitioners who are interested in using the church as a vehicle of cultural preservation. Grassroots efforts by youth groups, Christian cultural organisations and individual churches attest to the fact that changing attitudes about the boundary between church and culture are not necessarily restricted to one particular sector of society. At the El-Fatah GMIM church in Lolah village, Tombariri district, a cultural committee composed of church members and clergy has been preparing ‘contextual liturgies’ to use during regular Sunday services. These liturgies are conducted in Tombulu and use repetitive melodies taken from pre-colonial harvest rituals. The original goal of the committee, according to founding member Hendrik Paat, was to preserve the Tombulu language and ensure its transmission to the younger generation.
In this case, including cultural practice in the church is less about participating in a regional identity than about maintaining the distinctive traditions and stories that make ‘Tou Lolah’, the Lolah people, distinctive within Minahasa. For some Lolah residents, there is little difference between preserving a Christian history and preserving Lolah’s local history. As one villager in his eighties told me, ‘The people of Minahasa in the past already knew God or Empung before Christianity arrived – but they had yet to know Jesus.’ Just as the Indonesian word for God has come to be used interchangeably in Lolah with the Tombulu term indicating a higher power, the boundary between the beliefs of the past and the religion of the present continues to be redrawn as Minahasan Christians reinterpret their history.
Making minorities?
Making the church a centre for cultural renaissance does raise the issue of how non-Christians will continue to fit within the frame of reference used to identify a person as Minahasan. Within the small but highly integrated Muslim population in North Sulawesi, there are many families who consider themselves to be Minahasan. They base this identification on ties of descent from the pre-colonial period when Muslim merchants immigrated and intermarried with local populations, or simply on the shared ethnic characteristics that make Minahasans or urban ‘Manadonese’ recognisable amongst other ethnic groups in Indonesia. One local Muslim, whose family members refer to themselves as ‘fourth generation Minahasans’, related how Muslims from other regions of Indonesia have questioned her religious identity due to the enduring association between ‘Minahasa’ and Christianity.
Locating the essence of Minahasa in the church risks making the boundaries of cultural identity coterminous with religious ones
In this region, where people take great pride in a history of openness and adaptability, where locals brag about their multi-religious extended families and Muslim and Christian neighbours celebrate important life events together, locating the essence of Minahasa in the church risks making the boundaries of cultural identity coterminous with religious ones. The extent to which religion will come to define local identity in a rapidly changing Indonesia is an important question not only for Minahasan Christians, but for the future of Minahasa itself. ii
Kelli A. Swazey (swazey@hawaii.edu) is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology from the University of Hawai’i Manoa and a Graduate Fellow at the East West Center. Currently conducting dissertation research in Manado, North Sulawesi, funded by a Fulbright grant, she has documented the lives of Minahasan Christians in Indonesia and the United States.
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Sep 4, 2009
Born Again in the U.S.A. - Foreign Affairs
The Enduring Power of American Evangelicalism
September/October 2009Timothy Samuel Shah
TIMOTHY SAMUEL SHAH is Senior Research Scholar at Boston University's Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs and a co-author, with Daniel Philpott and Monica Toft, of a forthcoming book on religion and global politics to be published by Norton in 2010.
In international politics, religion has been the elephant in the room for most of the modern age. And in recent years, it has only grown larger and louder. Policymakers and political theorists have adopted the mostly unpromising strategies of ignoring it in the hope that rationality and modernity will eventually push it out; using laws, coercion, or public opinion to remove it from the political sphere; or pretending that it is only a matter of culture and treating it accordingly.
The authors of God Is Back are an exception. They admit that religion is here to stay and seek to find out what it is really all about. John Micklethwait, editor in chief of The Economist, and Adrian Wooldridge, its Washington bureau chief, work for a publication that has been notably dubious about religion's long-term viability in the face of modernization and economic globalization. The Economist boldly published God's obituary in its millennium issue, declaring that "the Almighty recently passed into history." Micklethwait and Wooldridge, for their part, were not so sure about God's demise. To investigate God's place in the world today, the two men traveled thousands of miles to talk to religious leaders and ordinary believers across the world and spent hundreds of hours visiting mosques and temples, attending religious services, sitting in on Bible-study groups, and picking the brains of theologians.
Micklethwait and Wooldridge entered dangerous territory. They faced the literal dangers of encountering real live religious radicals and investigating religion's impact in all kinds of tough neighborhoods -- from inner-city Philadelphia to the northern Nigerian city of Kano. And they faced literary dangers by walking into a field thick with theological crossfire between believers and nonbelievers, epitomized on one extreme by Dinesh D'Souza's What's So Great About Christianity and on the other by Christopher Hitchens' atheist manifesto, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. The confessionally diverse duo of Micklethwait and Wooldridge -- the first is a Catholic and the second an atheist -- steers clear of polemics and focuses instead on reading God's vital signs rather than identifying his virtues or vices. What they find is that many of the forces that were supposed to consign the Almighty to the ash heap of history -- or to a quiet corner of the living room -- have only made him stronger.
Beyond discovering that God still has a pulse, Micklethwait and Wooldridge give a firsthand account of how religious groups all over the world -- from family ministries in the United States and megachurches in South Korea to televangelists in Egypt -- use modern methods to convert people. The result is more Robert Capa than Max Weber: arresting snapshots of bubbling religiosity rather than elaborate theories about the causes and consequences of the global religious revival. But the snapshots support an argument: that the United States' increasingly competitive religious market has incubated a form of entrepreneurial faith -- a religious style that is conservative at its doctrinal core but restlessly innovative in its techniques of organization and communication. Micklethwait and Wooldridge focus on this U.S. brand of religion partly because it has been the key to reconciling God and modernity. It also attracts their attention -- and admiration -- because it is contagious, increasingly winning practitioners and followers across the globalized world.
MUNDUS CONTRA DEUM
A happy marriage between God and modernity was never widely expected. In the eighteenth century, some members of modernity's self-appointed vanguard -- especially those writing in French -- considered traditional faith a skunk at the Enlightenment party and made God persona non grata in their Parisian salons. The revolutionary Jacobins even turned on Robespierre when he pushed his Cult of the Supreme Being further than their Voltairean tastes permitted. These radicals endeavored to displace God, not accommodate him. The nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet expressed the hope that the French Republic would "take the place of the God who escapes us."
God's partisans returned the favor. In 1864, the Vatican pointedly condemned the idea that the pope should "reconcile himself with progress, with liberalism, and with modern civilization." Even thinkers sympathetic to the church, such as the historians Alexis de Tocqueville and Lord Acton, feared that an unbridgeable chasm was opening up between Christianity and modernity. By 1882, the anticlerical French philosopher Ernest Renan was exulting, "We have driven metaphysical and theological abstractions out of politics."
Across the world, the mutual hostility between divinity and modernity deepened further in the century between 1864, when the pope declared God antimodern, and 1966, when Time magazine asked whether he had died. In Europe, the cradle of Christendom, republican and socialist revolutionaries branded God and the church enemies of the people. God was hardly better off under conservative, monarchical, or royalist regimes -- such as Bismarck's Germany, Victorian England, and Franco's Spain -- where the church depended on government largess and kowtowed to those in power.
In the twentieth century, a worldwide march of the Jacobins' heirs attempted to get rid of God once and for all. From the Bolsheviks in Russia to the Kemalists in Turkey, the monarchists in Iran, the Nazis in Germany, the Maoists in China, and the Nasserists in Egypt, secular regimes seized church-held land, destroyed monasteries, evicted missionaries, criminalized religious movements, banned religious symbols, proscribed religious political parties, and even attempted to exterminate entire religious communities.
Over the last two centuries, most observers of world affairs took these partisans at their word. They assumed that truly modern men and women would never welcome God into their polite and educated company. And they assumed God's attitude would remain roughly that of Groucho Marx, and he would think twice about joining a club that would have him as a member. Sociologists, historians, anthropologists, and even theologians all concluded that God and modernity would inevitably go their separate ways.
But God did finally find refuge in the modern world, and Micklethwait and Wooldridge make a fresh case that it was thanks to the United States.
AMERICA BLESS GOD
The revolutionaries who founded the American republic respected God without patronizing him. Despite representing a broad spectrum of religious conviction, ranging from the deism of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin to the evangelicalism of Patrick Henry and John Jay, the founders welcomed God as an ally and a cornerstone of their ultramodern political revolution. At the same time, they sought to free religion from its historical dependence on state patronage, which they feared would debilitate and corrupt the church and the state alike. Immediately after the American Revolution, Christians squabbled with one another, and some state governments -- unlike the federal government -- kept churches dependent on direct government financing. (The last of these state "mini-establishments," in Massachusetts, was not abolished until 1833.)
At first, Christian ministers in the young republic were much like their European counterparts: indolent wards of the state who nonetheless expected perfect devotion from the masses by virtue of their position in the social hierarchy. This traditionalism initially helped keep more than half of the United States' increasingly freedom-loving inhabitants from joining churches at all.
In time, however, organized religion became part of the fabric of American culture. Micklethwait and Wooldridge draw on the work of such historians of religion as Nathan Hatch, George Marsden, and Mark Noll to narrate God's rapid adjustment to the New World. In the early nineteenth century, churches became less dependent on state support, and in the absence of state sanctions compelling church attendance, they adapted their messages and methods to a society that was increasingly mobile, freethinking, and egalitarian. God rapidly became less European and more American -- less clerical, theological, and communal and more entrepreneurial, pragmatic, and individualistic.
In contrast to the influential interpretations of the historians Henry Steele Commager and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., both of whom viewed the American mind as essentially skeptical and this-worldly, Micklethwait and Wooldridge argue that Christianity became more literalistic and evangelical as it became more American. By 1860, close to 85 percent of the United States' churchgoing population was evangelical, upending Jefferson's famous prediction in 1822 that "there is not a young man now living in the US who will not die an Unitarian." Religion in the United States also reflected a powerful affinity between what the sociologist Peter Berger has argued is the individualistic and voluntaristic core of evangelical Christianity and the voluntaristic impulses of American democracy. As Berger has written, among evangelicals, "one cannot be born a Christian; one must be 'born again' to meet that designation," which makes evangelical Protestantism a "peculiarly modern religion." A variety of evangelical churches and movements -- Methodist, Baptist, and others -- were thus well suited to a rapidly modernizing United States.
Over the next 150 years, evangelical leaders such as Charles Finney, Dwight Moody, and Billy Graham used their revivalist techniques to popularize evangelicalism among successive generations of Americans: deploying modern communication strategies and building specialized voluntary organizations. They also succeeded in creating a new entrepreneurial style of religious propagation, which hinged on leaders who began their careers outside of established and respected religious institutions, who saw alienation from religion as an opportunity to be seized rather than a condition to be condemned, who preached a practical and parsimonious message, and who believed that people needed to respond freely and individually to the call for redemption. Their theology has long been well suited to a constantly churning and mobile nation: from a time when static and agrarian communities gave way to an industrialized and urbanized society down to the present day, filled with suburbanites seeking spiritual meaning. The genius of this American-style religion is that it respects individualism while equipping people to survive its excesses.
Micklethwait and Wooldridge are most perceptive and thorough -- and most entertaining -- when they document the continuing vigor of the United States' contemporary evangelical subculture. They take unexpected detours into evangelical vacation spots, such as Holy Land U.S.A., in Bedford County, Virginia, which features a 250-acre replica of the Holy Land in Jesus' time. Although some secular liberals fear that evangelical leaders are harboring a theocratic agenda out of step with mainstream Americans, God Is Back demonstrates that these ministers win large followings precisely because they are attuned to the struggles and aspirations of ordinary people. The Purpose Driven Life, a book by Rick Warren, the pastor at the Saddleback megachurch in Southern California, has tapped into consumerist Americans' undeniable anomie and hunger for spiritual direction. Twenty-five million copies have been sold, making it the second-best-selling hardcover book in U.S. history -- after the Bible. When Warren delivered the invocation at President Barack Obama's inauguration, he offered vivid evidence of evangelicalism's continuing influence.
DIVINE DECLINE?
If it is an error to equate God's relationship with modernity to Superman's with kryptonite -- a point God Is Back drives home -- religious triumphalism is also unwarranted. God may be back after a century of attempted deicides, but he still faces stiff resistance. Even in the United States, the most religious nation in the industrialized West, those who choose not to identify with any particular religion -- the "unaffiliated" in pollster parlance -- constitute the fastest-growing "religious group." Rather than flocking to more theologically relaxed denominations, an increasing number of Americans are abandoning organized religion altogether. According to the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life in 2007, 16.1 percent of the respondents said they were unaffiliated.
The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) found that 15 percent of the U.S. population had no particular religious preference, almost double the figure for 1990. In his April 2009 article "The End of Christian America," the Newsweek editor Jon Meacham used the ARIS study to argue that the United States is passing into a "post-Christian" period. "This is not to say that the Christian God is dead," Meacham explained, "but that he is less of a force in American politics and culture than at any other time in recent memory."
Meacham is onto something. Evangelical Christians in the United States now find themselves in the political wilderness after one of their own -- George W. Bush -- left the White House with one of the lowest presidential approval ratings in U.S. history. Many of the most politically powerful evangelical leaders of the last two generations, such as Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, and D. James Kennedy, have either died or retired, passing their organizations on to younger and less influential successors. Obama, the man almost all evangelical leaders vociferously opposed during the 2008 campaign, was elected president. And the trends they have fought, such as the rising acceptance of same-sex marriage and abortion, are increasingly entrenched in the country's laws and social mores.
When Dobson stepped down as head of the Christian organization Focus on the Family in April, just after Meacham's article appeared, he gave a decidedly downbeat farewell speech about issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion, and pornography. "We are right now in the most discouraging period of that long conflict," Dobson reflected. "Humanly speaking, we can say we have lost all those battles."
In other countries, too, the armies of God seem to be in full-scale retreat. In the last two years, Islamist parties have fared poorly in electoral contests across the Muslim world, including in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, and Morocco. In Iran, the hard-line clerical establishment succeeded in retaining power only by blatantly rigging an already skewed electoral process and crushing protests. Fundamentalist terrorist groups such as al Qaeda and the Taliban are on the run from Iraq to Pakistan, as they lose battles and sympathizers. In India, the coalition led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party received a surprisingly decisive drubbing in national elections held in April and May. As Meacham observed about evangelicals in the United States, the problem is not so much that God is losing popularity as that many of his self-appointed representatives are suffering a palpable decline in social and political authority. Nietzsche may have been right after all: as an unquestioned arbiter of public culture, perhaps God is dead.
But the many attempts on God's life have made him remarkably resilient as an object of private devotion. The same survey that inspired Meacham to pronounce the end of Christian America found that just as many Americans identified themselves as Christian in 2008 as did in 2001 (about 76 percent). Meanwhile, the number of unaffiliated barely grew, remaining around 15 percent. Although the ARIS reported a big decline for Christians and a big jump for the unaffiliated between 1990 and 2001, these changes almost certainly stemmed in part from the increasing willingness of some nonreligious people to identify themselves as such, perhaps induced by a perception that secularism is becoming more socially acceptable. Since 2001, with most secularists already out of the closet, unaffiliated growth has slowed. Micklethwait and Wooldridge note that the link between faith and fertility may also be slowing secular growth: numerous studies, including the World Values Survey, which covers 80 countries, show that secular people go forth and multiply much more modestly than do their religious brethren. Thus, says Ronald Inglehart, director of the World Values Survey, secularization is its own long-term demographic "gravedigger."
A closer look at survey data also reveals that secular Americans remain surprisingly open to God. An analysis by the Pew Forum found that 70 percent of the unaffiliated surveyed believed in God and more than 40 percent said that religion was either somewhat or very important in their lives. Furthermore, a majority of Americans raised in religiously unaffiliated households adopt a religion later in life, giving the unaffiliated population one of the lowest retention rates of all religious groups in the country. Americans are not marching in lockstep toward a singular secular future, nor are they becoming a monolithic Christian nation. Instead, the United States is moving toward an ever more dynamic religious pluralism.
GREENER PASTORS
Micklethwait and Wooldridge are right to suggest that one effect of the United States' vigorous religious pluralism is to make religion in the country even more entrepreneurial and competitive. American evangelicalism has spawned a "church growth" industry driven by a class of preachers -- some of whom call themselves "pastorpreneurs" -- highly skilled in building megachurches that target the religiously disaffected with "seeker-friendly" services and family-friendly facilities, replete with on-site daycare, basketball courts, and fast-food restaurants. God Is Back reports that one of the United States' 1,000 megachurches -- Willow Creek, near Chicago -- is so successful that it has become the subject of a Harvard Business School case study.
The success of such churches is evident in the survey data: according to the ARIS, nearly half of American Christians now self-identify as "evangelical" or "born-again," and the number of Americans belonging to mostly evangelical and Pentecostal "nondenominational" churches -- which are quintessentially modern and American in their informality, their emphasis on a personal relationship with God, and their indifference to ancient ecclesiastical and theological traditions -- jumped from about 200,000 in 1990 to about eight million in 2008. In its 2007 study, the Pew Forum found that some 3.6 million Americans raised without an attachment to any organized religion converted to evangelicalism later in their lives.
Although God's armies around the world may have suffered a string of political defeats, they will regroup in due course. Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Hindu nationalist movement in India are down, but they are not out. Political dynamics are cyclical, and religious parties will regroup in India and Lebanon when the political winds begin blowing in their favor once again. Most important, as God Is Back suggests, these movements are led by organizations that operate in increasingly competitive political and cultural markets. And these markets will force them to adapt -- or they will die.
The Iranian regime's mendacity and brutality after the June presidential election have driven this lesson home, not least in the minds of the Iranian clerics themselves, some of whom have long argued that men of the cloth should endeavor to gain popular credibility by voluntarily relinquishing political power.
God's partisans in Iran and elsewhere would do well to heed Micklethwait and Wooldridge's argument that their political influence will be minimal if they fail to take to heart the deepest lessons of U.S.-style entrepreneurial religion: let God be God by freeing him from both government regulation and government handouts; do not lash him to the mast of a particular government or political party and in so doing make him a hostage to political fortune. God will indeed keep coming back -- especially in those places where he has not been turned into a fawning palace courtier or a shackled political prisoner.
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Aug 13, 2009
The End of Christian America
The percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 points in the past two decades. How that statistic explains who we are now—and what, as a nation, we are about to become.
Published Apr 4, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Apr 13, 2009
It was a small detail, a point of comparison buried in the fifth paragraph on the 17th page of a 24-page summary of the 2009 American Religious Identification Survey. But as R. Albert Mohler Jr.—president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, one of the largest on earth—read over the document after its release in March, he was struck by a single sentence. For a believer like Mohler—a starched, unflinchingly conservative Christian, steeped in the theology of his particular province of the faith, devoted to producing ministers who will preach the inerrancy of the Bible and the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the only means to eternal life—the central news of the survey was troubling enough: the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has nearly doubled since 1990, rising from 8 to 15 percent. Then came the point he could not get out of his mind: while the unaffiliated have historically been concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, the report said, "this pattern has now changed, and the Northeast emerged in 2008 as the new stronghold of the religiously unidentified." As Mohler saw it, the historic foundation of America's religious culture was cracking.
"That really hit me hard," he told me last week. "The Northwest was never as religious, never as congregationalized, as the Northeast, which was the foundation, the home base, of American religion. To lose New England struck me as momentous." Turning the report over in his mind, Mohler posted a despairing online column on the eve of Holy Week lamenting the decline—and, by implication, the imminent fall—of an America shaped and suffused by Christianity. "A remarkable culture-shift has taken place around us," Mohler wrote. "The most basic contours of American culture have been radically altered. The so-called Judeo-Christian consensus of the last millennium has given way to a post-modern, post-Christian, post-Western cultural crisis which threatens the very heart of our culture." When Mohler and I spoke in the days after he wrote this, he had grown even gloomier. "Clearly, there is a new narrative, a post-Christian narrative, that is animating large portions of this society," he said from his office on campus in Louisville, Ky.
There it was, an old term with new urgency: post-Christian. This is not to say that the Christian God is dead, but that he is less of a force in American politics and culture than at any other time in recent memory. To the surprise of liberals who fear the advent of an evangelical theocracy and to the dismay of religious conservatives who long to see their faith more fully expressed in public life, Christians are now making up a declining percentage of the American population.
According to the American Religious Identification Survey that got Mohler's attention, the percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 percentage points since 1990, from 86 to 76 percent. The Jewish population is 1.2 percent; the Muslim, 0.6 percent. A separate Pew Forum poll echoed the ARIS finding, reporting that the percentage of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith has doubled in recent years, to 16 percent; in terms of voting, this group grew from 5 percent in 1988 to 12 percent in 2008—roughly the same percentage of the electorate as African-Americans. (Seventy-five percent of unaffiliated voters chose Barack Obama, a Christian.) Meanwhile, the number of people willing to describe themselves as atheist or agnostic has increased about fourfold from 1990 to 2009, from 1 million to about 3.6 million. (That is about double the number of, say, Episcopalians in the United States.)
While we remain a nation decisively shaped by religious faith, our politics and our culture are, in the main, less influenced by movements and arguments of an explicitly Christian character than they were even five years ago. I think this is a good thing—good for our political culture, which, as the American Founders saw, is complex and charged enough without attempting to compel or coerce religious belief or observance. It is good for Christianity, too, in that many Christians are rediscovering the virtues of a separation of church and state that protects what Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island as a haven for religious dissenters, called "the garden of the church" from "the wilderness of the world." As crucial as religion has been and is to the life of the nation, America's unifying force has never been a specific faith, but a commitment to freedom—not least freedom of conscience. At our best, we single religion out for neither particular help nor particular harm; we have historically treated faith-based arguments as one element among many in the republican sphere of debate and decision. The decline and fall of the modern religious right's notion of a Christian America creates a calmer political environment and, for many believers, may help open the way for a more theologically serious religious life.
Let's be clear: while the percentage of Christians may be shrinking, rumors of the death of Christianity are greatly exaggerated. Being less Christian does not necessarily mean that America is post-Christian. A third of Americans say they are born again; this figure, along with the decline of politically moderate-to liberal mainline Protestants, led the ARIS authors to note that "these trends … suggest a movement towards more conservative beliefs and particularly to a more 'evangelical' outlook among Christians." With rising numbers of Hispanic immigrants bolstering the Roman Catholic Church in America, and given the popularity of Pentecostalism, a rapidly growing Christian milieu in the United States and globally, there is no doubt that the nation remains vibrantly religious—far more so, for instance, than Europe.
Still, in the new NEWSWEEK Poll, fewer people now think of the United States as a "Christian nation" than did so when George W. Bush was president (62 percent in 2009 versus 69 percent in 2008). Two thirds of the public (68 percent) now say religion is "losing influence" in American society, while just 19 percent say religion's influence is on the rise. The proportion of Americans who think religion "can answer all or most of today's problems" is now at a historic low of 48 percent. During the Bush 43 and Clinton years, that figure never dropped below 58 percent.
Many conservative Christians believe they have lost the battles over issues such as abortion, school prayer and even same-sex marriage, and that the country has now entered a post-Christian phase. Christopher Hitchens —a friend and possibly the most charming provocateur you will ever meet—wrote a hugely popular atheist tract a few years ago, "God Is Not Great." As an observant (if deeply flawed) Episcopalian, I disagree with many of Hitchens's arguments—I do not think it is productive to dismiss religious belief as superstitious and wrong—but he is a man of rigorous intellectual honesty who, on a recent journey to Texas, reported hearing evangelical mutterings about the advent of a "post-Christian" America.
To be post-Christian has meant different things at different times. In 1886, The Atlantic Monthly described George Eliot as "post-Christian," using the term as a synonym for atheist or agnostic. The broader—and, for our purposes, most relevant—definition is that "post-Christian" characterizes a period of time that follows the decline of the importance of Christianity in a region or society. This use of the phrase first appeared in the 1929 book "America Set Free" by the German philosopher Hermann Keyserling.
The term was popularized during what scholars call the "death of God" movement of the mid-1960s—a movement that is, in its way, still in motion. Drawing from Nietzsche's 19th-century declaration that "God is dead," a group of Protestant theologians held that, essentially, Christianity would have to survive without an orthodox understanding of God. Tom Altizer, a religion professor at Emory University, was a key member of the Godless Christianity movement, and he traces its intellectual roots first to Kierkegaard and then to Nietzsche. For Altizer, a post-Christian era is one in which "both Christianity and religion itself are unshackled from their previous historical grounds." In 1992 the critic Harold Bloom published a book titled "The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation." In it he cites William James's definition of religion in "The Varieties of Religious Experience": "Religion … shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they consider the divine."
Which is precisely what most troubles Mohler. "The post-Christian narrative is radically different; it offers spirituality, however defined, without binding authority," he told me. "It is based on an understanding of history that presumes a less tolerant past and a more tolerant future, with the present as an important transitional step." The present, in this sense, is less about the death of God and more about the birth of many gods. The rising numbers of religiously unaffiliated Americans are people more apt to call themselves "spiritual" rather than "religious." (In the new NEWSWEEK Poll, 30 percent describe themselves this way, up from 24 percent in 2005.)
Roughly put, the Christian narrative is the story of humankind as chronicled in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament—the drama of creation, fall and redemption. The orthodox tend to try to live their lives in accordance with the general behavioral principles of the Bible (or at least the principles they find there of which they approve) and anticipate the ultimate judgment of God—a judgment that could well determine whether they spend eternity in heaven or in hell.
What, then, does it mean to talk of "Christian America"? Evangelical Christians have long believed that the United States should be a nation whose political life is based upon and governed by their interpretation of biblical and theological principles. If the church believes drinking to be a sin, for instance, then the laws of the state should ban the consumption of alcohol. If the church believes the theory of evolution conflicts with a literal reading of the Book of Genesis, then the public schools should tailor their lessons accordingly. If the church believes abortion should be outlawed, then the legislatures and courts of the land should follow suit. The intensity of feeling about how Christian the nation should be has ebbed and flowed since Jamestown; there is, as the Bible says, no thing new under the sun. For more than 40 years, the debate that began with the Supreme Court's decision to end mandatory school prayer in 1962 (and accelerated with the Roe v. Wade ruling 11 years later) may not have been novel, but it has been ferocious. Fearing the coming of a Europe-like secular state, the right longed to engineer a return to what it believed was a Christian America of yore.
But that project has failed, at least for now. In Texas, authorities have decided to side with science, not theology, in a dispute over the teaching of evolution. The terrible economic times have not led to an increase in church attendance. In Iowa last Friday, the state Supreme Court ruled against a ban on same-sex marriage, a defeat for religious conservatives. Such evidence is what has believers fretting about the possibility of an age dominated by a newly muscular secularism. "The moral teachings of Christianity have exerted an incalculable influence on Western civilization," Mohler says. "As those moral teachings fade into cultural memory, a secularized morality takes their place. Once Christianity is abandoned by a significant portion of the population, the moral landscape necessarily changes. For the better part of the 20th century, the nations of Western Europe led the way in the abandonment of Christian commitments. Christian moral reflexes and moral principles gave way to the loosening grip of a Christian memory. Now even that Christian memory is absent from the lives of millions."
Religious doubt and diversity have, however, always been quintessentially American. Alexis de Tocqueville said that "the religious atmosphere of the country was the first thing that struck me on arrival in the United States," but he also discovered a "great depth of doubt and indifference" to faith. Jefferson had earlier captured the essence of the American spirit about religion when he observed that his statute for religious freedom in Virginia was "meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination"—and those of no faith whatever. The American culture of religious liberty helped create a busy free market of faith: by disestablishing churches, the nation made religion more popular, not less.
America, then, is not a post-religious society—and cannot be as long as there are people in it, for faith is an intrinsic human impulse. The belief in an order or a reality beyond time and space is ancient and enduring. "All men," said Homer, "need the gods." The essential political and cultural question is to what extent those gods—or, more accurately, a particular generation's understanding of those gods—should determine the nature of life in a given time and place.
If we apply an Augustinian test of nationhood to ourselves, we find that liberty, not religion, is what holds us together. In "The City of God," Augustine —converted sinner and bishop of Hippo—said that a nation should be defined as "a multitude of rational beings in common agreement as to the objects of their love." What we value most highly—what we collectively love most—is thus the central test of the social contract.
Judging from the broad shape of American life in the first decade of the 21st century, we value individual freedom and free (or largely free) enterprise, and tend to lean toward libertarianism on issues of personal morality. The foundational documents are the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, not the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament (though there are undeniable connections between them). This way of life is far different from what many overtly conservative Christians would like. But that is the power of the republican system engineered by James Madison at the end of the 18th century: that America would survive in direct relation to its ability to check extremism and preserve maximum personal liberty. Religious believers should welcome this; freedom for one sect means freedom for all sects. As John F. Kennedy said in his address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in 1960: "For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew—or a Quaker—or a Unitarian—or a Baptist … Today I may be the victim—but tomorrow it may be you—until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped."
Religion has been a factor in American life and politics from the beginning. Anglican observance was compulsory at Jamestown, and the Puritans of New England were explicitly hoping to found a New Jerusalem. But coerced belief is no belief at all; it is tyranny. "I commend that man, whether Jew, or Turk, or Papist, or whoever, that steers no otherwise than his conscience dares," said Roger Williams.
By the time of the American founding, men like Jefferson and Madison saw the virtue in guaranteeing liberty of conscience, and one of the young republic's signal achievements was to create a context in which religion and politics mixed but church and state did not. The Founders' insight was that one might as well try to build a wall between economics and politics as between religion and politics, since both are about what people feel and how they see the world. Let the religious take their stand in the arena of politics and ideas on their own, and fight for their views on equal footing with all other interests. American public life is neither wholly secular nor wholly religious but an ever-fluid mix of the two. History suggests that trouble tends to come when one of these forces grows too powerful in proportion to the other.
Political victories are therefore intrinsically transitory. In the middle of the 19th century, the evangelist Charles Grandison Finney argued that "the great business of the church is to reform the world—to put away every kind of sin"; Christians, he said, are "bound to exert their influence to secure a legislation that is in accordance with the law of God."
Worldly success tends to mark the beginning of the end for the overtly religious in politics. Prohibition was initially seen as a great moral victory, but its failure and ultimate repeal show that a movement should always be careful what it wishes for: in America, the will of the broad whole tends to win out over even the most devoted of narrower interests.
As the 20th century wore on, Christians found themselves in the relatively uncontroversial position of opposing "godless communism," and the fervor of the Prohibition and Scopes-trial era seemed to fade a bit. Issues of personal morality, not international politics, would lay the foundations for the campaign for Christian America that we know as the rise of the religious right. The phenomenon of divorce in the 1960s and the Roe decision in 1973 were critical, and Jimmy Carter's born-again faith brought evangelical Christianity to the mainstream in 1976.
Growing up in Atlanta in the '60s and '70s, Joe Scarborough, the commentator and former Republican congressman, felt the fears of his evangelical parents and their friends—fears that helped build support for the politically conservative Christian America movement. "The great anxiety in Middle America was that we were under siege—my parents would see kids walking down the street who were Boy Scouts three years earlier suddenly looking like hippies, and they were scared," Scarborough says. "Culturally, it was October 2001 for a decade. For a decade. And once our parents realized we weren't going to disappear into dope and radicalism, the pressure came off. That's the world we're in now—parents of boomers who would not drink a glass of wine 30 years ago are now kicking back with vodka. In a way, they've been liberated."
And they have learned that politics does not hold all the answers—a lesson that, along with a certain relief from the anxieties of the cultural upheavals of the '60s and '70s, has tended to curb religiously inspired political zeal. "The worst fault of evangelicals in terms of politics over the last 30 years has been an incredible naiveté about politics and politicians and parties," says Mohler. "They invested far too much hope in a political solution to what are transpolitical issues and problems. If we were in a situation that were more European, where the parties differed mostly on traditional political issues rather than moral ones, or if there were more parties, then we would probably have a very different picture. But when abortion and a moral understanding of the human good became associated with one party, Christians had few options politically."
When that party failed to deliver—and it did fail—some in the movement responded by retreating into radicalism, convinced of the wickedness and venality of the political universe that dealt them defeat after defeat. (The same thing happened to many liberals after 1968: infuriated by the conservative mood of the country, the left reacted angrily and moved ever leftward.)
The columnist Cal Thomas was an early figure in the Moral Majority who came to see the Christian American movement as fatally flawed in theological terms. "No country can be truly 'Christian'," Thomas says. "Only people can. God is above all nations, and, in fact, Isaiah says that 'All nations are to him a drop in the bucket and less than nothing'." Thinking back across the decades, Thomas recalls the hope—and the failure. "We were going through organizing like-minded people to 'return' America to a time of greater morality. Of course, this was to be done through politicians who had a difficult time imposing morality on themselves!"
Experience shows that religious authorities can themselves be corrupted by proximity to political power. A quarter century ago, three scholars who are also evangelical Christians—Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch and George M. Marsden—published an important but too-little-known book, "The Search for Christian America." In it they argued that Christianity's claims transcend any political order. Christians, they wrote, "should not have illusions about the nature of human governments. Ultimately they belong to what Augustine calls 'the city of the world,' in which self-interest rules … all governments can be brutal killers."
Their view tracks with that of the Psalmist, who said, "Put not thy trust in princes," and there is much New Testament evidence to support a vision of faith and politics in which the church is truest to its core mission when it is the farthest from the entanglements of power. The Jesus of the Gospels resolutely refuses to use the means of this world—either the clash of arms or the passions of politics—to further his ends. After the miracle of the loaves and fishes, the dazzled throng thought they had found their earthly messiah. "When Jesus therefore perceived that they would come and take him by force, to make him a king, he departed again into a mountain himself alone." When one of his followers slices off the ear of one of the arresting party in Gethsemane, Jesus says, "Put up thy sword." Later, before Pilate, he says, "My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight." The preponderance of lessons from the Gospels and from the rest of the New Testament suggests that earthly power is transitory and corrupting, and that the followers of Jesus should be more attentive to matters spiritual than political.
As always with the Bible, however, there are passages that complicate the picture. The author of Hebrews says believers are "strangers and exiles on the earth" and that "For here we have no lasting city, but seek the city which is to come." In Romans the apostle Paul advises: "Do not be conformed to this world." The Second Vatican Council cited these words of Pius XII: the Catholic Church's "divine Founder, Jesus Christ, has not given it any mandate or fixed any end of the cultural order. The goal which Christ assigns to it is strictly religious … The Church can never lose sight of the strictly religious, supernatural goal."
As an archbishop of Canterbury once said, though, it is a mistake to think that God is chiefly or even largely concerned with religion. "I hate the sound of your solemn assemblies," the Lord says in Amos. Religion is not only about worshipping your God but about doing godly things, and a central message of the Gospels is the duty of the Christian to transform, as best one can, reality through works of love. "Being in the world and not of it remains our charge," says Mohler. "The church is an eternal presence in a fallen, temporal world—but we are to have influence. The Sermon on the Mount is about what we are to do—but it does not come with a political handbook."
How to balance concern for the garden of the church with the moral imperatives to make gentle the life of the world is one of the most perplexing questions facing the church. "We have important obligations to do whatever we can, including through the use of political means, to help our neighbors—promoting just laws, good order, peace, education and opportunity," wrote Noll, Hatch and Marsden. "Nonetheless we should recognize that as we work for the relatively better in 'the city of the world,' our successes will be just that—relative. In the last analysis the church declares that the solutions offered by the nations of the world are always transitory solutions, themselves in need of reform."
Back in Louisville, preparing for Easter, Al Mohler keeps vigil over the culture. Last week he posted a column titled "Does Your Pastor Believe in God?," one on abortion and assisted suicide and another on the coming wave of pastors. "Jesus Christ promised that the very gates of Hell would not prevail against his church," Mohler wrote. "This new generation of young pastors intends to push back against hell in bold and visionary ministry. Expect to see the sparks fly." On the telephone with me, he added: "What we are seeing now is the evidence of a pattern that began a very long time ago of intellectual and cultural and political changes in thought and mind. The conditions have changed. Hard to pinpoint where, but whatever came after the Enlightenment was going to be very different than what came before." And what comes next here, with the ranks of professing Christians in decline, is going to be different, too.
Read more about NEWSWEEK's poll on religion in America here .
With Eliza Gray
Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/192583
Jul 1, 2009
Jitters Over Religion Hard Sell in Singapore
Star, Malaysia
June 20, 2009
INSIGHT: BY SEAH CHIANG NEE
STEREOTYPED as a society that only worships money, Singapore is surprisingly seeing a surge of religiosity – or simply put, too much religion.
June 20, 2009
INSIGHT: BY SEAH CHIANG NEE
STEREOTYPED as a society that only worships money, Singapore is surprisingly seeing a surge of religiosity – or simply put, too much religion.
This exuberance is, however, confined to a small segment of fundamentalist Christians, and appears out of line with most materialistic Singaporeans.
The Christian community makes up 17% of the people, while Buddhists and Taoists form a majority 51%, and Muslims, 16%.
But in recent years there has been a surge of born-again Christianity. These include bible-quoting evangelists who gather in city squares and MRT stations, persistently striving to convert the public, including followers of other faiths.
Others work in schools, polytechnics and hospitals, even among patients.
A major concern, however, is their targeting of schools, a melting pot of different cultures, races and religions, trying to convert impressionable teenagers.
Young men in their 30s, usually working in pairs, would approach students outside the school compound to talk about God.
The kids would be asked for their cell-phone numbers, and those who comply may find themselves harassed by persistent SMS invitations to attend services.
Another worry is the belittling of other religions, which could spark off friction.
A university lecturer who accompanied her mother, a dementia victim, received more than a blood test at a hospital, when the evangelising nurse asked about her mother’s religion.
When she replied “Buddhist” she was told to go to church because “it’ll be good for you”.
In a recent high profile trial, a Christian couple were jailed eight weeks under the Sedition Act for distributing and possessing anti-Muslim and anti-Catholic tracts.
The two – SingTel technical officer Ong Kian Cheong, 50, and a Swiss bank associate director, Dorothy Chan Hien Leng, 46 – have appealed against conviction.
The intent was to convince Muslims to convert to Christianity by using inflammatory and misleading information, the court heard.
Bizarrely, they hit Catholics even harder, describing the Pope as Satan.
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has named religious divide as potentially one of the biggest threats to social order.
“Don’t mix religion with politics”, warned Home Affairs Minister Wong Kan Seng. He said that the Government would intervene if any activism threatens Singapore’s social fabric.
Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean has advised people to manage their differences, saying: “If you push your argument too hard, there’ll be others who push back.”
These comments came as emotions ran high over the failed takeover of AWARE, a social body, by members of a small fundamentalist church apparently in pursuit of their religious beliefs.
The vast majority of Christians work within the framework of this multi-religious society, conscious and tolerant of other ancient religions.
They attend church once a week and return home to their families without trying to convert followers of other faiths.
The increasing reports of insensitive evangelism have irked many Singaporeans and have worried the majority of non-activist Christians about a possible backlash.
Evangelism notwithstanding, Singapore remains a stable, tolerant society where any hint of extremism is deeply resented.
Some 85% of Singaporeans profess having a religion, probably including many nominal believers, while atheists make up the other 15%.
There is, however, an anomaly among the younger set.
Singapore is a tightly competitive society and a rat race for its citizens, from a very young age. The result is the emergence of youths who know very little about religion.
From comments in a survey, prominent educator Phyllis Chew said she was surprised to hear such comments about Islam – “their marriages take place in the void deck” – and Buddhism – “it’s about filial piety”.
It was conducted among 2800 students, aged 12-18. Chew said it showed that while 76% were tolerant of other religions, their idea of tolerance was “not talking about it”.
“A lack of knowledge of different faiths is a potentially unstable situation,” she said, calling for a revival of religious teaching in schools.
The recession, one of the worst in Singapore’s history, appears to be making Singaporeans a little bit more religious, too.
“I pray harder in these times, although my job is not affected this time,” said a 25-year-old Singaporean as unemployment rose to the highest in three years.
“I’m praying for my fiance, that his job is safe,” she said. They were planning to wed and feared retrenchment.
Attendance in churches, temples and mosques has generally risen as Singaporeans turn more to religion for comfort.
“People might experience depression and socio-psychological problems worrying about work, Alexius Pereira, sociologist at the National University of Singapore,” told Reuters.
“It is through such worries that they turn to religion.”
How effective is modern evangelism? When it comes to numbers, it is the born again Christians who are proportionately the biggest gainers.
The reason is less their aggressive evangelism than the lure of educated youths by their glitz and modern church operations. The gain has, however, been slow and gradual.
Occasionally followers do switch, and it has nothing to do with educational levels. Neither are changes one-sided.
Chinese have switched to become Muslims, and Hindus to Buddhists. Only the Malays stay largely with their faith.
There is another reason why many adult Singaporeans – especially those who are ageing – turn to religion.
After accumulating sufficient money for retirement, Singaporeans – however materialistic – often begin to turn their thoughts to the after-life.
A bit is kiasuism may be at work, too.
I once asked a housewife who likes to play the jackpot machine, why she had not embraced a religion. Her reply: “I’m waiting till I am older and closer to death.”
o Seah Chiang Nee is a veteran journalist and editor of the information website littlespeck.com
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