Sarah Palin and the National Day of Prayer

Rev. Welton Gaddy, host of the nationally syndicated radio program State of Belief and president of the Interfaith Alliance, has written a very inspiring and instructive essay about Sarah Palin and the National Day of Prayer that he read on last weekend's show and which appears in Religion Dispatches e-magazine.

Rev. Gaddy essentially denounces Palin's empassioned comments concerning a federal judge's ruling on the National Day of Prayer and that the U.S. is a Christian nation that "needs to get back to its Christian roots." He critiques her recent statements as uninformed and a-historical, since the fact that America is not nor has it ever been an officially Christian nation is quite well documented through sources such as statements or treatises formed by presidents Washington and J. Adams, not to mention the 1st Amendment's no establishment clause. Palin's statements were flippant, ignorant of the history of American culture and law, and simply pandering to a significant conservative (and largely evangelical-fundamentalist Christian) audience.

Here's a brief excerpt from Rev. Gaddy's commentary:

"Palin has thrown what we used to call in West Tennessee “a conniption fit” over the federal judge’s decision that the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional. While many of us applauded a judge who seems to understand the First Amendment’s religion clauses, some political pontificators and bandwagon religionists rushed to microphones to decry the further moral ruination of the nation. . .

"Palin did get one thing right in her Louisville speech. She said the Founding Fathers were believers. That is a true statement. Many of them were deists, but few of them were Christians by Palin’s narrow evangelical definition. However, the larger truth is that these were people, regardless of their religious identity, who had witnessed the abuse and violence that emerge when institutions of religion and government became entangled. . .

"The American people do not need the President of the United States to tell them when to pray or what to pray for. By definition prayer is personal and volitional. But neither do the American people need Sarah Palin stirring a revolt to get rid of the very principles that have assured efforts to guarantee civil rights to everybody and made our nation great." (Religion Dispatches, 4/22/10)

Read Rev. Gaddy's entire essay here.

Listen to State of Belief where Rev. Gaddy read this on air.

New Pew Forum Poll on Religious Belief in America

Americans are widely known now for our rather mix-and-match tendencies in religious approach and identity. Many people attend services of other religions than our own and blend Christianity with other religious practices like Buddhist meditation and New Age techniques.

This is no doubt a prominent approach within my denomination, Unity. We have always drawn inspiration and influence from other religious traditions from the very start when Charles and Myrtle Fillmore were reading about Indian religion and taking metaphysical cues from Emerson and other Transcendentalists. While Unity is not New Age, it is New Thought, which is a tradition that feels free to draw on New Age methods and beliefs to forward people on their spiritual journey, while often retaining much language, scripture, and culture from Christianity.

So this new Pew Forum poll is relevant to all Americans, but Unity occupies a unique place in American religious practice since it stands within the predominant Christian tradition yet draws on and incorporates much from other religions that constitute the rich plurality of religion and culture within the U.S.

The Pew Forum poll generally states that although the U.S. is an overwhelmingly Christian country, significant minorities say they hold beliefs of the sort found at Buddhist temples or New Age gatherings. Twenty-four percent of those surveyed overall and 22 percent of Christians say they believe in reincarnation, the idea that people will be reborn in this world again and again. Also, another piece in the poll relates that 1/4 of Americans say they sometimes attend services of a faith different from their own. (I am part of this 25% since, though I'm a progressive Unity Christian, attend Eastern Orthodox and Catholic Christian services often and I participate in Buddhist temple ceremonies and meditation gatherings from time to time as well.)

Alan Cooperman, associate director for research at the Pew Forum, says, ''It is as much now the norm as it is the exception for Americans to blend multiple religious beliefs and practices." (Faith in Public Life)

This rather new but increasingly present phenomenon of multiple religious belonging is becoming a permanent and interesting feature of the American religious situation. Within Unity circles, multiple religious belonging is probably more common than in other denominations and is very much welcomed, which can be witnessed in public statements of the Association of Unity Churches and Unity Institute as well as local Unity congregational statements.
This is all a testament to the openness and inclusivity of the Unity movement (regardless of the internal disputes about Unity's "identity") and to the influence of the wonderful religious diversity of our current religious context in the U.S.

Read more about the Pew Forum Poll at Faith in Public Life.

Buddhism's Prominence in America

A friend turned me on to this article at the Buddhist Channel about Buddhism and its place in today's American society and culture. Andrew Lam briefly outlines the roots of Buddhism in the U.S., its development up to now, and its impact and presence in here in the States. All this from his own Buddhist perspective, of course.

It's a concise but intriguing article. Check it out here.

(Image from Buddhist Channel website.)

Buddhism in America -- Helen Tworkov article

Helen Tworkov, editor of Tricycle magazine, writes a piece for EnlightenNext (formerly What is Enlightenment?) concerning the character and future of Buddhism in America. Over the past few decades Buddhist traditions and practices have been becoming assimilated and grafted into modern Western culture. The question Tworkov brings up is, "how can we make sure its heart and soul aren't getting lost in the translation?"

Read the article at EnlightenNext.

Religious Americans Better Citizens?

Michael Gerson of the Washington Post writes an opinion piece based on a recent book by Robert Putnam and David Campbell called American Grace. Gerson argues essentially that Americans who consider themselves "religious" are more generous with their time and money (both in religious and secular causes), join more voluntary associations, attend more public meetings, three times as likely to be more socially engaged than the unaffiliated, and even more likely to let people cut in line in front of them more readily. As Gerson says, "Ned Flanders is a better neighbor."

This is interesting since some secularists have not only predicted the inevitable end of religion but have claimed how detrimental religion is to society. Granted, countless human atrocities have been committed in the name of religion, but this doesn't necessarily mean that there's something inherent in the religious systems, values, and practices themselves that is the cause. At a fundamental level, it's the clinging, clamoring, selfish human ego that has led people to make horrible, harmful and violent decisions, whether it be through the Crusades or Stalinist Soviet Union. Regardless, I don't foresee religion going away anytime soon, and it's intriguing to hear of research that is suggesting that religious people in the U.S. live their lives more likely to be involved in their communities and altruistic activities.

Read the article at Faith in Public Life.

The Decline and Fall of Christian America - Newsweek Cover

This past week's issue of Newsweek featured a cover-story entitled, "The Decline and Fall of Christian America," which was written by Newsweek editor, Jon Meacham. This particular piece focuses on religious identity in America, evincing that the percentage of people who identify as Christian has dropped 10 points in the past couple of decades, and addresses what this might mean for American Christianity.

Meacham has written a few other articles for Newsweek on the subject of religion and politics, published a book on American religion (American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation [Random House, 2006]), and made several appearances on talk and news shows over the past few years. So, he has some experience with religious matters in the public sphere, but is certainly not a scholar of religion or religious studies. His pieces are more in the vein of journalistic coverage of social phenomena; he tends to pull out certain polls or surveys and freely comment on the possible implications of these numbers with very little substantial recourse to academic religious studies scholarship. Granted, he invokes a few philosophers (Hermann Keyserling, Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, and Tom Altizer) and theologians (mainly Augustine and a pastor he interviewed, Albert Mohler, Jr.) to make his points, but they seem to me to be exercised in a rather cursory and superficial manner, not at the center of his article but rather at the periphery.

It's certainly true that writing a magazine article is a totally different animal than, say, a peer-reviewed academic journal (the difference in audience, editing process, etc.), but I feel that if Newsweek is going to publish a column specifically concerned with religion and religious issues these pieces should be tackled by specialists in religious studies who have a more in-depth and wide-ranging knowledge base with which to work. This would bring a greater amount of accuracy and nuance to the articles and more credulity to the column in general. This being said, I nonetheless think that, considering these conditions, Meacham's article wasn't bad; it made some interesting points.

The crux of Meacham's piece is that for the past decade or so less people in the U.S. identify as explicitly Christian, while more identify as "unaffiliated" with any religious organization. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, since 1990 the number of self-identified Christians in the U.S. has fallen from 86 to 76 percent. A recent Pew Forum poll reported that the percentage of people who claim to be "atheist" or "agnostic" has increased four-fold since 1990 (from 1 to 3.6 million). From these stats Meacham argues that, although the U.S. is still shaped by religious sentiments, its politics and culture are generally less influenced by Christian movements and arguments than before. It seems that he's speaking to the failure of the Christian conservative right's hopes of creating a Christian state of some kind, which, especially in light of the stats he reports, seems like a veritable pipedream. Since the Christian right has been the most politically vocal and forceful, Meacham's talk about a "less Christian America" really only applies to the desires and aims of this group of Christians. Many of us more mainstream, moderate, or progressive Christians recognize that the U.S. has never been a Christian nation in the strict sense because of the constitutional provisions set out to protect the freedom of practice for people of all religions and to prevent the establishment of an official state/imperial religion. Although Christianity has always been a majority, and thus a great influence in public life, America was never intended to be and never has been a "Christian nation." And a great number of us moderate and progressive Christian acknowledge this reality.

I would contest that American culture is still greatly affected in a plethora of ways by Christian beliefs, practices, language, etc. (I won't rehearse these here). Just because the number of Christians is shrinking and that of the unaffilated is growing doesn't necessitate a conclusion that we're living in a "post-Christian" America. Rather, coupled with the research done by the Pluralism Project at Harvard, this suggests to me that we're not living in a post-Christian America, but a pluralist America, where public life and culture are increasingly influenced by a great variety of diverse belief-systems and practices that constitute the great religio-cultural "fruit salad" (to borrow a term from Ven. Thich Nhat Hanh) that is the United States. So, I think of these changes that Meacham speaks of as not so much pointing to a post-Christian situation but an ever-increasing pluralist situation where Christianity is still greatly influential in terms of numbers and history, but is gradually giving way to a rich tapestry of diversity of collective religious identity. And this increasing religious plurality is an exciting thing to become more aware of and experience.