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Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Jun 27, 2010
Newsletter 54 | International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS)
Feb 23, 2010
Turkey: Archeological Dig Reshaping Human History
A temple complex in Turkey that predates even the pyramids is rewriting the story of human evolution.
Published Feb 19, 2010
From the magazine issue dated Mar 1, 2010
They call it potbelly hill, after the soft, round contour of this final lookout in southeastern Turkey. To the north are forested mountains. East of the hill lies the biblical plain of Harran, and to the south is the Syrian border, visible 20 miles away, pointing toward the ancient lands of Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, the region that gave rise to human civilization. And under our feet, according to archeologist Klaus Schmidt, are the stones that mark the spot—the exact spot—where humans began that ascent.
Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn't just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.
Göbekli Tepe—the name in Turkish for "potbelly hill"—lays art and religion squarely at the start of that journey. After a dozen years of patient work, Schmidt has uncovered what he thinks is definitive proof that a huge ceremonial site flourished here, a "Rome of the Ice Age," as he puts it, where hunter-gatherers met to build a complex religious community. Across the hill, he has found carved and polished circles of stone, with terrazzo flooring and double benches. All the circles feature massive T-shaped pillars that evoke the monoliths of Easter Island.
Though not as large as Stonehenge—the biggest circle is 30 yards across, the tallest pillars 17 feet high—the ruins are astonishing in number. Last year Schmidt found his third and fourth examples of the temples. Ground-penetrating radar indicates that another 15 to 20 such monumental ruins lie under the surface. Schmidt's German-Turkish team has also uncovered some 50 of the huge pillars, including two found in his most recent dig season that are not just the biggest yet, but, according to carbon dating, are the oldest monumental artworks in the world.
The new discoveries are finally beginning to reshape the slow-moving consensus of archeology. Göbekli Tepe is "unbelievably big and amazing, at a ridiculously early date," according to Ian Hodder, director of Stanford's archeology program. Enthusing over the "huge great stones and fantastic, highly refined art" at Göbekli, Hodder—who has spent decades on rival Neolithic sites—says: "Many people think that it changes everything…It overturns the whole apple cart. All our theories were wrong."
Schmidt's thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city.
This theory reverses a standard chronology of human origins, in which primitive man went through a "Neolithic revolution" 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. In the old model, shepherds and farmers appeared first, and then created pottery, villages, cities, specialized labor, kings, writing, art, and—somewhere on the way to the airplane—organized religion. As far back as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, thinkers have argued that the social compact of cities came first, and only then the "high" religions with their great temples, a paradigm still taught in American high schools.
Religion now appears so early in civilized life—earlier than civilized life, if Schmidt is correct—that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it, less a revelation than a genetic inheritance. The archeologist Jacques Cauvin once posited that "the beginning of the gods was the beginning of agriculture," and Göbekli may prove his case.
The builders of Göbekli Tepe could not write or leave other explanations of their work. Schmidt speculates that nomadic bands from hundreds of miles in every direction were already gathering here for rituals, feasting, and initiation rites before the first stones were cut. The religious purpose of the site is implicit in its size and location. "You don't move 10-ton stones for no reason," Schmidt observes. "Temples like to be on high sites," he adds, waving an arm over the stony, round hilltop. "Sanctuaries like to be away from the mundane world."
Unlike most discoveries from the ancient world, Göbekli Tepe was found intact, the stones upright, the order and artistry of the work plain even to the un-trained eye. Most startling is the elaborate carving found on about half of the 50 pillars Schmidt has unearthed. There are a few abstract symbols, but the site is almost covered in graceful, naturalistic sculptures and bas-reliefs of the animals that were central to the imagination of hunter-gatherers. Wild boar and cattle are depicted, along with totems of power and intelligence, like lions, foxes, and leopards. Many of the biggest pillars are carved with arms, including shoulders, elbows, and jointed fingers. The T shapes appear to be towering humanoids but have no faces, hinting at the worship of ancestors or humanlike deities. "In the Bible it talks about how God created man in his image," says Johns Hopkins archeologist Glenn Schwartz. Göbekli Tepe "is the first time you can see humans with that idea, that they resemble gods."
The temples thus offer unexpected proof that mankind emerged from the 140,000-year reign of hunter-gatherers with a ready vocabulary of spiritual imagery, and capable of huge logistical, economic, and political efforts. A Catholic born in Franconia, Germany, Schmidt wanders the site in a white turban, pointing out the evidence of that transition. "The people here invented agriculture. They were the inventors of cultivated plants, of domestic architecture," he says.
Göbekli sits at the Fertile Crescent's northernmost tip, a productive borderland on the shoulder of forests and within sight of plains. The hill was ideally situated for ancient hunters. Wild gazelles still migrate past twice a year as they did 11 millennia ago, and birds fly overhead in long skeins. Genetic mapping shows that the first domestication of wheat was in this immediate area—perhaps at a mountain visible in the distance—a few centuries after Göbekli's founding. Animal husbandry also began near here—the first domesticated pigs came from the surrounding area in about 8000 B.C., and cattle were domesticated in Turkey before 6500 B.C. Pottery followed. Those discoveries then flowed out to places like Çatalhöyük, the oldest-known Neolithic village, which is 300 miles to the west.
The artists of Göbekli Tepe depicted swarms of what Schmidt calls "scary, nasty" creatures: spiders, scorpions, snakes, triple-fanged monsters, and, most common of all, carrion birds. The single largest carving shows a vulture poised over a headless human. Schmidt theorizes that human corpses were ex-posed here on the hilltop for consumption by birds—what a Tibetan would call a sky burial. Sifting the tons of dirt removed from the site has produced very few human bones, however, perhaps because they were removed to distant homes for ancestor worship. Absence is the source of Schmidt's great theoretical claim. "There are no traces of daily life," he explains. "No fire pits. No trash heaps. There is no water here." Everything from food to flint had to be imported, so the site "was not a village," Schmidt says. Since the temples predate any known settlement anywhere, Schmidt concludes that man's first house was a house of worship: "First the temple, then the city," he insists.
Some archeologists, like Hodder, the Neolithic specialist, wonder if Schmidt has simply missed evidence of a village or if his dating of the site is too precise. But the real reason the ruins at Göbekli remain almost unknown, not yet incorporated in textbooks, is that the evidence is too strong, not too weak. "The problem with this discovery," as Schwartz of Johns Hopkins puts it, "is that it is unique." No other monumental sites from the era have been found. Before Göbekli, humans drew stick figures on cave walls, shaped clay into tiny dolls, and perhaps piled up small stones for shelter or worship. Even after Göbekli, there is little evidence of sophisticated building. Dating of ancient sites is highly contested, but Çatalhöyük is probably about 1,500 years younger than Göbekli, and features no carvings or grand constructions. The walls of Jericho, thought until now to be the oldest monumental construction by man, were probably started more than a thousand years after Göbekli. Huge temples did emerge again—but the next unambiguous example dates from 5,000 years later, in southern Iraq.
The site is such an outlier that an American archeologist who stumbled on it in the 1960s simply walked away, unable to interpret what he saw. On a hunch, Schmidt followed the American's notes to the hilltop 15 years ago, a day he still recalls with a huge grin. He saw carved flint everywhere, and recognized a Neolithic quarry on an adjacent hill, with unfinished slabs of limestone hinting at some monument buried nearby. "In one minute—in one second—it was clear," the bearded, sun-browned archeologist recalls. He too considered walking away, he says, knowing that if he stayed, he would have to spend the rest of his life digging on the hill.
Now 55 and a staff member at the German Archaeological Institute, Schmidt has joined a long line of his countrymen here, reaching back to Heinrich Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy. He has settled in, marrying a Turkish woman and making a home in a modest "dig house" in the narrow streets of old Urfa. Decades of work lie ahead.
Disputes are normal at the site—the workers, Schmidt laments, are divided into three separate clans who feud constantly. ("Three groups," the archeologist says, exasperated. "Not two. Three!") So far Schmidt has uncovered less than 5 percent of the site, and he plans to leave some temples untouched so that future researchers can examine them with more sophisticated tools.
Whatever mysterious rituals were conducted in the temples, they ended abruptly before 8000 B.C., when the entire site was buried, deliberately and all at once, Schmidt believes. The temples had been in decline for a thousand years—later circles are less than half the size of the early ones, indicating a lack of resources or motivation among the worshipers. This "clear digression" followed by a sudden burial marks "the end of a very strange culture," Schmidt says. But it was also the birth of a new, settled civilization, humanity having now exchanged the hilltops of hunters for the valleys of farmers and shepherds. New ways of life demand new religious practices, Schmidt suggests, and "when you have new gods, you have to get rid of the old ones."
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Jan 17, 2010
As lives and houses shattered in Haiti quake, so did some religious differences
By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post
Sunday, January 17, 2010; A01
PORT-AU-PRINCE -- At night, voices rise in the street. Sweet, joyful, musical voices in lyric Creole. A symphony of hope in a landscape of despair.
"It doesn't mean anything if Satan hates me, because God loves me," sing the women at Jeremy Square, their faces almost invisible in the darkness of this powerless, shattered downtown. "God has already paid my debt."
Haiti is known as a society of devout Christians -- Catholics, Protestants, Methodists, evangelicals -- and followers of voodoo. Faith has long played a powerful role in this impoverished nation, giving hope to the poor and fulfilling social functions that the government is incapable of handling.
But in the days since the earth pitched and rolled here, pulverizing shanties and mansions alike, the religious differences that sometimes separated Haitians have come crashing down.
The women singing together in Jeremy Square might never have worshiped side by side before the disaster, but now their voices harmonize and soar well past 2 in the morning. Lionelle Masse, a stringy woman with a deep, sad voice, lost a child in the quake. She sings next to Rosena Roche, a fiery-eyed Catholic whose husband is buried under tons of rubble.
"I still have faith in God," Roche says. "I want to give glory to God."
Regardless of their faith, countless Haitians have similar questions: Why was I spared? Are we being punished for our sins? Is this a test of faith? What happens in the afterlife?
'Not the will of the Lord'Seekers stream into the parking lot of the ruined Sacre Coeur Catholic church, a 105-year-old brick gem that was turned into a grim, hollowed-out shell, its stunning stained-glass windows tossed to the ground in shards. There, the Catholics and the Protestants and others seek solace from Father Hans Alexander, a Haitian priest who took his decidedly un-Haitian first name from his German father. He doesn't ask them about their religion; he asks them about their pain.
"Catholics and Protestants and other religions are praying together now," Alexander says, as two tearful women slump over his thick, broad shoulders. "We are saying, 'We love Jesus; we don't care about religions. We just care about the Lord.' " He has tried to teach his followers this lesson for years but did not always succeed in changing the minds of parishioners who thought their religion was better or truer than others. The quake, he says, has done much to convince those he could not.
As it often can be with faith, there are doubts to overcome. Some parishioners want to blame the devil, or take responsibility themselves because they have sinned. Some think God has abandoned them.
"This is not the will of the Lord," Alexander tells the two women, sisters who lost their mother and one of their children, a 1 1/2 -year-old, in the quake. "Don't put this blame on the back of anyone. Don't put it on yourself."
Like almost everyone here, the woe is personal for Alexander, who is wearing sandals, almost as if to defy the dangerous pieces of glass, jagged metal and concrete that litter the sidewalk outside his church and befoul his courtyard. Beneath the broken remnants of his rectory are the bodies of at least 20 church members he must mourn alongside their friends and relatives.
A woman whose relative is now entombed there quietly prays, with arms spread out toward a statue of the Virgin Mary. Some of the grieving have wrestled with guilt about having survived while their loved ones died, but Alexander assures them that "it is not because God loves one person more than another."
Alexander, 40, grew up in this church, first as a vicar and for the past seven months as its principal priest. He is himself pondering basic questions. He has spoken so many times of "original sin," but the quake has led him to what he calls "a discovery," reinforcing his belief that "God created us to be good." The neighbors he sees helping one another -- carting debris, digging for survivors, patching wounds both physical and psychological -- confirmed it for him.
That sense of fundamental goodness is what rankles the priests gathered at Sacre Coeur about comments such as those by American televangelist Pat Robertson, who suggested that the earthquake was a punishment for Haitians aligning themselves, at times, with the devil. When Catholic priest Arsene Jasmin heard that, he was enraged. Jasmin, a Haitian who is a priest at the Shrine of the Sacred Heart Church in the District, arrived in Port-au-Prince for a visit the day before the earthquake.
"I get mad when I hear that Haiti is somehow being punished," he says. "It's unacceptable and wrong."
Jasmin gathered Friday night in a nearby building with 100 worshipers for three hours of prayer and song. His friend, Alexander, has no church anymore -- the building that once received 3,000 worshipers for five Sunday services is a wreck. But Alexander says he will celebrate Mass outside a nearby house Sunday anyway, and he expects hundreds, if not thousands, to come.
Salvation under the skiesFor others, especially those stuck in place because they have no way to travel around the city, places such as Jeremy Square will be their makeshift churches, as they have been each night. Roche, the Catholic woman who fears her husband is dead, sleeps and worships in the square, squeezed into a row of 25 men, women and children -- one of at least 60 tightly packed rows along the slope pavement of the square.
Just a few steps from Roche's thin, white blanket, Primrose Toussaint, a fervent Pentecostal believer drenched in sweat, waves her arms in the air.
"Even if I die, I die with Jesus," she calls out to no one in particular. "God bless this country. God bless these people."
She has no home, and almost all her meager possessions are gone, but she says, "I don't feel like I am in trouble. Without Jesus, I would be in trouble."
The children sleep while Roche and Toussaint sing in voices fast growing hoarse from hours of hymns. A chorus builds behind them.
"If you believe in God, salvation is sure," the voices sing as one. "Oh God, open the way."
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Dec 25, 2009
Indian, Methodist churches form melting pot of the faithful
By William Wan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 25, 2009; A01
As the choir launched into the Christmas song, Betty Leach sat in her pew and stared at the words on the page, trying to make sense of them. "Puttenesudu nedu," the Indian parishioners all around her sang.
At 79, she has passed more than four decades' worth of Christmases at this Silver Spring church. She brought her children here and her children's children. But now as the congregation broke into song, Leach couldn't begin to pronounce the words or translate their meaning: Jesus is born today. Instead, the bespectacled grandmother resigned herself to humming along.
After years of holiday tradition -- the "O Holy Nights," the turkey and gravy galore -- Christmas has undergone a dramatic makeover for Leach and two dozen other longtime parishioners. Now they celebrate with plates of goat curry with rice, folk songs from halfway around the world, and a people and culture they are only starting to understand.
This is what happens when you take two congregations -- a predominantly white church in desperate need of new members and a booming Indian church desperate for space -- and blend them together. The result at the now merged Memorial First India United Methodist Church is a study in frustration, joy, struggle and, above all, grace. And Christmas has become a chance for everyone involved to live out the season's themes of unity and peace amid what has turned out to be an unusual and sometimes complicated relationship.
* * *
Although many churches share their space with other congregations, full church mergers remain rare. Some experts estimate that 1 percent of Protestant churches merge each year. Two congregations so ethnically distinct agreeing to merge was a first for the denomination in this region.
Since the two churches -- First India and Memorial United -- joined together three years ago, the combined Sunday services, conducted mostly in English, have become a balancing act between the two worlds. And the man doing most of the juggling is the Rev. Samuel Honnappa, the church's diplomatic, soft-spoken pastor.
"Every Sunday is a big challenge," said Honnappa, 60, who is careful to choose someone from the Indian congregation and the original church to do the scripture readings each week. He also makes sure representatives from both groups serve on all the planning committees.
Even the church's decor reflects the delicate position in which it now operates. On one side of the simply adorned altar is the American flag; on the other, the Indian flag.
Two choirs perform during services: a small English choir and a larger choir that sings strictly in Telugu, the language in Andhra Pradesh, from where most of the Indians come.
"We started printing the Telugu hymns out phonetically, so people can at least sing along on Sundays," Honnappa said. "A lot of them really do try to make the same sounds, but I know it's hard for them."
For Leach, adjusting to the food has been even more challenging. At the new church's first holiday dinner, Leach recalls getting a spoonful of an exotically fragrant green bean dish.
"Try this one," they told her, "it's not too spicy."
She took one bite and went running for a cup of water. "They told me later I was eating the little black pebbles they use to spice the food. 'Betty, you're not supposed to eat that!' they said. All I knew was it was hot!"
There have been adjustments on the Indian side as well.
"We have something called Indian time," Honnappa said. "If an Indian says 5 p.m., what they really mean is 6 p.m. I've had to remind some in the Indian congregation that to an American, 5 p.m. means 5 p.m."
An arranged marriageFor the aging Memorial congregation, the merger was a last-ditch effort to keep the building on Colesville Road where it had worshiped for more than half a century.
When the church was built in 1958, its modern architecture caused a stir with its sharp angles, bright colors and long windows of clear-paned glass. The spacious sanctuary was built with the future in mind, able to fit more than 400 people. But instead of growing, the congregation of more than 200 kept shrinking until only about 25 remained, depending on the week and the weather.
Some members moved or passed away. Others quietly left to join other churches -- a group that eventually included Leach's daughter and granddaughter.
The church tried canvassing for new members, baking raisin nut loaves for visitors, even direct-mail marketing. None of it made a dent.
"On some Sundays, you could fit the entire congregation into the first two rows," said John Roth, 68, a church trustee.
In 2006, the area's denominational leaders told Memorial United that it needed to find new blood or risk losing its church altogether.
That's when Roth and others were told about the Indian group renting a small chapel in Takoma Park. The congregation of more than 120 -- mostly young, professional families -- was practically bursting at the seams. Sunday school classes were being conducted in the hallway.
That first Sunday after the merger, the sanctuary was filled for the first time in years. The old Memorial congregation found itself sitting amid a sea of Indians in colorful saris and suits.
The Indians tried not to seem too excited, afraid of offending the longtime members. But their kids couldn't contain themselves, running through the halls, exploring every new nook and cranny.
Leach smiled at their enthusiasm. "It was odd, yes, but there was something electric in the air," she recalled. "It felt like the church was alive again."
Even with all the changes, Leach said, it still feels like her spiritual home. "This church has been my life. I'll stay here until the day I die."
It is a sentiment shared by Edith Mountjoy, 88, who was baptized in the church, married there, had her children baptized there and her father buried there. With her husband now deceased and her daughter in another state, the church is in many ways her family. "All my friends are there, and the Indian folk, we're all starting to get acquainted, too," she said.
This month, after one of her sons died of cancer, she arrived on Sunday morning and was greeted by the pastor's wife with a long, lingering hug. "Oh, my heart just feels for you," Rachel Samuel told her. Many of the Indian parishioners, people whose names Mountjoy couldn't always remember, told her that they were praying for her and embraced her. It has made this year's tough Christmas, she said, a little easier to bear. "I really needed all those hugs."
Grace and unityCelebrating Christmas has been a unifying force for Memorial First India.
This year, members of both choirs joined for the first time to present a special holiday recital. Even the food at this week's Christmas dinner has been worked out to the satisfaction of all, with one table for fried chicken and lasagna and several others for slow-cooked lamb dishes, flatbreads and curries.
"It actually has gotten to the point where we have to keep our children from eating up all their American food," said Sukumar Christopher, 69, a founding member of the Indian congregation. "They get tired of the curry at home. All they want is to eat from the American table."
And almost everyone plans to attend the Christmas play, which the snow postponed until this weekend.
Together, they will look on as the children of the church reenact the Nativity scene, with Mary and Joseph wandering from inn to inn looking for someone to welcome them. It is a story that especially resonates among the Indian parishioners, who also searched hard for a place of their own. Now, they say, they've finally found it, alongside their new friends at Memorial United.
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Dec 21, 2009
Radical Islam meets a buffer in West Africa
By Karin Brulliard
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, December 21, 2009; A01
TIMBUKTU, MALI -- The Saharan sands stretching north from this fabled outpost have long been a trade route and cultural crossroads, and this past year has brought worrying signs that the desert might also help bring a violent brand of Islam to moderate parts of West Africa.
"It does not find a lot of purchase among local people," a State Department official said of the extremist group, known as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM. But, the official said, "the problem has gotten a lot worse in the past three, last one year. . . . It's one that requires attention."
So far, the desert belt spanning black and Arab Africa has proved less a gateway for the southward spread of militant Islam than a bulwark against it, and some analysts call the threat overblown. In this secular nation, alcohol is served and gambling is common. Images of President Obama are ubiquitous, and anti-American sentiment is rare. Few women wear veils.
"We don't want an Islamic republic," said Mahmoud Dicko, head of the High Islamic Council, an umbrella group of religious organizations in Bamako, the capital. "We don't want sharia, or to cut people's hands off."
A socially conservative but tolerant Sufi strain of Islam dominates, but the ranks of foreign imams are rising, and the government has little handle on what is being preached in mosques, Western diplomats said. A weak army has done little to challenge the extremists, who easily cross invisible desert borders, while frequent U.S. military-led training sessions meant to build up the Malian forces -- part of a five-year, $500 million counterterrorism program in 10 countries of the region -- have been "not very effective," one diplomat in Bamako said.
The region's al-Qaeda-linked group, which grew out of an Algerian nationalist movement, spread into the area under Algerian military pressure and rebranded itself as an al-Qaeda wing in 2007. Security analysts and Western officials say that AQIM's ties to al-Qaeda are mostly rhetorical and that it has little ability to strike outside the region or undermine governments here, though a recent coup in neighboring Mauritania and a sham election in Niger have deepened regional instability.
But by some measures, the group is growing bolder and more ideological. AQIM executed the British tourist in May, for example, after its demand for the release of a Jordanian cleric imprisoned in Britain went unmet.
And after long staying clear of Malian cities -- in what Western officials said was a tacit non-aggression agreement with the government -- AQIM assassinated a military officer in Timbuktu and then killed more than two dozen Malian soldiers and paramilitary forces sent to avenge his death. Last month, the group kidnapped a Frenchman in the northern town of Menaka.
Timbuktu, a small city where nomadic herders mix with traders and blue-turbaned Tuaregs, prides itself on its history as an ancient hub of Islamic scholarship, and the mention of religious warfare draws baffled looks here. But some leaders worry that poverty and modernization are mixing in unpredictable ways and that extremists' money could hold sway even if their ideology does not.
GPS and satellite phones have made it easier for outsiders to navigate the terrain. The cigarettes long smuggled through the dunes are being displaced by cocaine. Drought has made herding harder. And AQIM rebels are marrying into nomad families, said Col. Mamadou Mangara, governor of the vast area from Timbuktu to the northern border with Algeria.
On Friday, U.S. prosecutors filed charges against three Malians, all men in their 30s who were accused of plotting to ferry cocaine through Islamist-controlled sections of the desert in connection with AQIM associates.
"Working with animals -- young people don't want to do this," said Assarid Ag Imbarcaoune, a vice president of Mali's National Assembly who is from the northern desert. "Young people want villas, AC and big cars."
Resistance to radicalsThe shifting social currents inevitably affect faith in the region, scholars say.
"All you have to do is walk . . . anywhere in Mali to see that there is in fact a great diversity of Islam," said Mike McGovern, a Yale University assistant professor and former director of the International Crisis Group's West Africa office. "It's something that's constantly in evolution. To say West African Islam is this -- no, it's not."
That is clear in sun-scorched Bamako. The city's bustle and mostly black African population make it seem a galaxy away from the northern desert. But its urban density, experts say, might make its youths more vulnerable to radicalism, as has been the pattern in Mauritania.
Men filing in to pray at the Grand Mosque pass vendors selling animal skulls and claws believed to have medicinal or magical powers, though Muslim leaders shun them as un-Islamic. Many of the Chinese motorbikes clogging the streets are driven by women wearing everything from tank tops to vibrant but more traditional dress.
"I've got respect for my religion, but I act according to my thoughts," Fily N'Faly Bagayoko, 17, one motorbike rider, said about her decision not to wear a veil.
But this summer, Islamic leaders rallied 50,000 people to demonstrate against a proposed family code that would have, among other things, scrapped a law requiring a woman to obey her husband -- a show of force that underscored the conservatism of Malian Islam and that rattled democracy activists.
Across town at one madrassa, or Islamic school, female teenagers and teachers wore burqas -- a rare sight in Bamako. The school's imam, Mohammed Toure, complained that Western pressure was leading Mali's government to try to suppress Islam. But he said he had no desire for Mali to emulate Saudi Arabia, a nation where he studied and whose government funded his school.
"People have breathing space here," Toure, 39, said in his sunny office. "In Saudi, people are really in prison."
On a recent afternoon in Bamako, Mahmadou Haidara, a pudgy imam in billowy robes, shook his head at the thought of Islamist radicalism taking hold. But as he sat on his breezy roof preparing for a sermon, he pointed into the distance and said he was sure some foreign preachers were teaching "wrong" ideas.
"Real religion would never tell anyone to burn anything or kill others," he said of Islamist extremists. "We condemn them. And we fear them."
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Oct 24, 2009
Beliefs - Changes in Religion All Over the Map, Report Shows - NYTimes.com
The world is growing more religious. Or maybe it’s not.
On Friday, the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago released what it described as “the most comprehensive analysis to date of global religious trends.” Anyone studying its 9,000-word analysis and perusing 330 additional pages of references and tables will be quickly disabused of the idea that the currents of religious belief and practice are flowing in one or two or even a half-dozen clear directions.
“Religious change around the world is a complex phenomenon,” the report begins, in an almost comic understatement. “No simple description such as secularization, religious revival, or believing without belonging captures the complexity of the process.”
The report mines dozens of surveys by American and European social science researchers that measure religious trends over the last four decades in the United States, Western and Eastern Europe and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the world.
The United States, as often noted, remains unusually religious among advanced industrial nations. Nearly 6 out of 10 Americans pray one or more times each day; high percentages report feeling close to God, experiencing God’s presence or guidance on most days. Faith in God, they say, is “very important” in their lives.
Nonetheless, belief in God has slipped a little, and more Americans, though still believing, acknowledge some uncertainty about God’s existence. A growing number of Americans no longer identify themselves with any particular religious group. Those who do belong are less likely to say they are strong members. Regular attendance at religious services has declined, and the numbers never worshiping have increased.
Yet more Americans believe in a life after death and pray daily than in the 1970s. And to complicate things, most of these trends have had their ups and downs, leaving open the possibility of future spurts or reversals.
“The tilt of religious change in the United States over the last half century has clearly been in the secular direction,” the report concludes, “but the pattern is complex and nuanced.”
Europe, already significantly secular in the 1970s, has undergone a further secular shift, but here the modest overall changes are far less striking than the dramatic differences from nation to nation.
One 1997 survey question found 1.9 percent of Greeks and 2.8 percent of Italians calling themselves atheists, compared with 24.3 percent of the French and 59.7 percent of East Germans. Those who said that they both believed in God and practiced their faith ranged from 5.5 percent in Denmark to 51.9 percent in Ireland.
One could surmise from this data a large historical drift continuing to push Europe away from religion, but much more important were all the swirls and countercurrents of local histories and circumstances distinguishing one nation from another.
The collapse of Communist rule in Eastern Europe 20 years ago opened a whole new landscape of religious change. After decades of repression, government constraints and ideological pressures on religion were lifted. Religion rebounded in some places; the drift away from it was merely slowed in others. Again, the report concludes, “there is no uniform post-Communist religious pattern.”
One 2005 survey found 90 percent of Romanians believing in a God understood as a “person,” compared with 16 percent of Estonians. A 2006 survey indicated that three out of four Poles prayed daily, compared to one out of eight Czechs. Poles are six times as likely to believe in an afterlife as East Germans.
The once-reigning assumption that religion necessarily declined with modernization has been dethroned, largely because of the American counterexample. But after looking at various measures of religiosity, on the one hand, and of per capita wealth, life expectancy and educational levels, on the other hand, the National Opinion Research Center report detects at least some life in this venerable “secularization thesis.”
“With more modernization in general and with more education in particular, religious beliefs and behaviors across countries do tend to decline,” the report states, and then promptly warns that these correlations are “moderate” and “many are not statistically significant.” Conclusion? “The relationship is neither overwhelming nor uniform across countries.”
Modernization is, of course, linked to scientific knowledge and progress.
The NORC report shows that compared with other college-educated workers, scientists, engineers and physicians are less likely to believe firmly in God, believe in an afterlife, pray daily and attend religious services weekly. But the report also points out that “the difference between them and those in nonscientific occupations is not especially large,” and in fact most of them remain religious, with large proportions believing in God, identifying with a religion, praying and attending services.
“In sum,” the report says, “the proposition that science leads people in general and scientists in particular away from religion is only weakly supported by the available evidence.”
Surveys of belief and practice are only one way of exploring religious change, but they have grown increasingly sophisticated. The NORC report comes on the heels of useful surveys examining in detail religious political activists on the right and the left; the growing number of Americans who do not identify with any religion; and congregations coping with declining church attendance and financial strains.
In the face of all this data, it is tempting to grasp for simplifying patterns: growth or decline, the religious United States or secular Europe, scientific modernity or traditional faith. The reports suggests that when it comes to tracking religious change, there is a strong case for suspending belief.![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vi2RHyP94JDI6L3MXI_4NobIJeFOEkxCOmqAHWIAiXf-yDUBKt8lmC9rx3ho_adZRqQNBqdZCYBREUXnaeIi9uO07ue5RACV4WldzgZqvf_kVhprAuICt28U25Fu0abC_Q3lBmb6fV8h0x8DE-mqRI=s0-d)
Sep 12, 2009
Muslims Widely Seen As Facing Discrimination - Pew Research Center
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1336/perceptions-of-islam-religious-similarities-differences
Plus --
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Here is the URL for the fuller summary of the Pew survey just below --
http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=437
Sept. 9, 2009
Overview
Views of Religious Similarities and Differences
Views of Islam and Muslims
About the Survey
PDF version (24 pgs.)
Topline questionnaire (9 pgs.)
Religious Similarities and Differences
When asked how much various religions resemble their own, the public cites Protestantism and Catholicism as the faiths most like theirs. Overall, more than four-in-ten non-Protestants in the survey (44%) say that the Protestant religion and their own faith are similar (including 12% saying they are very similar), slightly more than say Protestantism and their own faith are somewhat or very different (38%). Of non-Catholics, 43% see mostly similarities between Catholicism and their own faith, while roughly half (49%) see mostly differences. More than one-third of non-Jews say Judaism is somewhat or very similar to their own faith (35%), while 47% say it is somewhat or very different.
By comparison, the public is even more likely to see differences rather than similarities between their own religion and Mormonism, Islam, Buddhism or Hinduism. In fact, majorities say that each of these faiths is different from their own religion, with sizeable numbers saying that these religions are very different from their own (37% say this about Mormonism, 40% about Hinduism, 44% about Buddhism and 45% about Islam).
Protestants see Catholicism as the religion most like their own, followed by Judaism. Among Protestants in the survey, white evangelicals (49%) and white mainline Protestants (50%) are somewhat more likely than black Protestants (39%) to see their religion as similar to Catholicism. But all three groups have roughly the same impression of Judaism's similarity with their own faith (39% similar among white evangelicals, 34% among both white mainline Protestants and black Protestants). Fewer Protestants see Mormonism (22%), Islam (15%), Hinduism (9%) or Buddhism (7%) as similar to their own faith.
Catholics, especially white, non-Hispanic Catholics, name Protestantism as the faith that is most similar to Catholicism. Interestingly, Catholics see greater similarities between Catholicism and Protestantism than do Protestants. After Protestantism, Catholics see Judaism as most like their faith. Indeed, Catholics are slightly more likely than Protestants to say their faith is similar to Judaism. Less than a quarter of Catholics (22%) see Mormonism as similar to their religion, 19% see Islam as similar, 16% see Buddhism as similar, and 12% see Hinduism as similar.
Compared with other groups, fewer of the religiously unaffiliated see their own beliefs as similar to Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism. However, the religiously unaffiliated are more likely than any other group in the survey to see their own beliefs as similar to Buddhism (26%).
Analysis of the survey reveals that perceptions of similarity with religious groups are linked with more favorable views of these groups. For instance, non-Catholics who see mostly similarities between their own faith and Catholicism are much more likely than those who see mostly differences to view Catholicism favorably (76% vs. 54%). And two-thirds of those who see mostly similarities between their own faith and Islam have a favorable view of Muslims (65%), compared with fewer than half of those who see mostly differences with Islam (37%).
Discrimination and Religious Minorities
Americans are more likely to say there is a lot of discrimination against Muslims than against any other religious group asked about in the survey. Most people say there is not a lot of discrimination against Jews, atheists, Mormons and evangelical Christians in the U.S., while nearly six-in-ten (58%) say there is a lot of discrimination against Muslims.
The only group that Americans perceive as subject to more discrimination than Muslims is homosexuals; nearly two-thirds of adults (64%) say gays and lesbians face a lot of discrimination. About half say blacks (49%) and Hispanics (52%) suffer from a lot of discrimination, and more than a third (37%) say there is a lot of discrimination against women in the U.S. today.
Young people (ages 18-29) are especially likely to say there is a lot of discrimination against Muslims, with nearly three-quarters (73%) expressing this view. Among those older than age 65, by contrast, only 45% say that Muslims face a lot of discrimination.
Across the political spectrum, most people agree that there is a lot of discrimination against Muslims. But this perception is most common among liberal Democrats, with eight-in-ten saying there is a lot of discrimination against Muslims. This is significantly higher than among all other partisan and ideological groups.
There are only minor differences of opinion between members of the major religious traditions on this question. Black Protestants are most likely to say there is a lot of discrimination against Muslims (65%), but majorities of all religious groups say Muslims face a lot of discrimination.
Few Feel Like Part of a Religious Minority
When asked about their own religious status, one-in-five Americans (19%) say they think of themselves as belonging to a minority because of their religious beliefs while 78% do not, numbers that are unchanged since early 2001. Though white evangelicals constitute the single largest religious group in the country, roughly a quarter (24%) identify themselves as part of a religious minority, much more than the 11% of white mainline Protestants and 13% of Catholics who do so. In this regard, evangelicals resemble black Protestants, among whom 22% regard themselves as part of a religious minority. Among the religiously unaffiliated, 18% see themselves as part of a religious minority, a figure significantly higher than among mainline Protestants or white Catholics.
Frequent attendance at religious services is associated with a higher tendency to feel like part of a religious minority. Overall, one-quarter of those who attend religious services at least once a week say they are a minority because of their beliefs, compared with 16% of those who attend less often. And among white evangelicals, nearly three-in-ten regular churchgoers (29%) see themselves as part of a religious minority. Likewise, 23% of those who say religion is very important in their lives think of themselves as minorities, compared with 14% of those who say religion is less important in their lives.
Politically, those in the middle of the ideological spectrum are less likely to consider themselves part of a religious minority. Just 13% of moderates identify as religious minorities, compared with 22% of conservatives and 21% of liberals.
Overview
Views of Religious Similarities and Differences
Views of Islam and Muslims
About the Survey
PDF version (24 pgs.)
Topline questionnaire (9 pgs.)
More Resources
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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
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