February 1, 2012

Evangelical Democrats?

Peter Berger

As the absurd theater of the Republican primaries continues its itinerary from state to state, it at least serves one useful purpose: It puts to rest the notion that religion no longer matters in American politics. Actually the GOP is now dominated by two varieties of fundamentalism—the religious one, focused single-mindedly on matters south of the navel—and the economic one, which affirms the dogma that all taxes are the work of the devil. The latter belief system does not concern me here. But the former also indicates that the American culture war between traditionalists and progressives is by no means over, and that it continues to define the public image of the two major parties. Religious conservatives, notably Evangelicals, continue to gravitate toward the Republican party. Secularists continue to feel more at home in the Democratic party. This division, of course, is not absolute, and there have been some efforts to poach on the other’s ideological territory. But the bifurcation persists. Is it irreversible? The question is important: If the answer is no, this would be a bit of good news if one hopes for an end to the paralyzing polarization that now characterizes the political scene.

As one ponders this question, one may turn to a useful article in Society magazine, “The Evangelical Left and the Future of Social Conservatism”, by David Swartz (a historian on the faculty of Asbury University).  Swartz does not argue that the affinity between Evangelicals and the Republican party is about to end, but he suggests that this situation is more complicated and more changeable than it seems. Specifically, there is a growing generational difference in the Evangelical community. Younger Evangelicals increasingly resemble their peers in the larger society. The larger picture is described by Swartz as follows: “On the one hand, younger Americans are more pro-life on abortion, one of the typical measures of social conservatism. On the other hand, younger Americans increasingly support gay marriage and seem to be elevating economics above traditional morality. The old categories… do not seem to hold.” Or at least they are being reshuffled. Younger Evangelicals are part of the reshuffling.

The present political frequency distribution of Godders and non-Godders is relatively new. There has been an Evangelical Left in the Democratic party at least as early as William Jennings Bryan, who combined progressive views as then understood with a fierce belief in Biblical inerrancy (which Clarence Darrow successfully ridiculed in the famous Dayton “monkey trial”). It is also worth recalling that the resurgent conservative movement burst onto the political scene with the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, who had little interest in traditional morality. It was only in the 1970s that religious conservatives moved into the Republican party in large numbers. This move included religiously conservative Catholics and Jews, but Evangelicals were an important segment of what became an important Republican demographic. A pivotal moment in this development was the 1980 White House Conference on the Family, then very significantly renamed White House Conference on Families. The renaming of course was a concession to feminists, who effectively took over the event.  Conservatives walked out of the conference. It is important that the idea of the conference was first proposed by Jimmy Carter during his presidential campaign and realized when he was still in the White House. Religious conservatives had invested high hopes in the election of this born-again Baptist. One of them, a good friend of mine, had said that “the election of Jimmy Carter marks the end of the secular Enlightenment”. Alas, it meant nothing of the sort. Carter’s capitulation at the White House conference was the culmination of a mounting disappointment in him on the part of Evangelicals who had thought of him as one of them. The disappointment extended to the Democratic party as a whole. What followed was the rise of the Christian Right, closely identified with the Republican party and marching under the banner of “family values”—which meant, and still means, values opposed to those of radical feminists and other sexual liberation movements.

The leadership of the Democratic party was understandably unhappy about this exodus of many who had been part of its core constituency in the past. While having to keep the adherence of secular progressives, Democratic leaders have also tried to woo the Godders, and especially Evangelicals. In the 2008 election both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton appointed very visible Evangelicals to their staffs. An interesting figure is Joshua DuBois—born as recently as 1982, an African-American Pentecostal minister, with an M.A. in public affairs from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School. After serving on Obama’s campaign staff, he is now head of the Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships in the White House. Obama has made much of his Christian faith, and this effort has survived his disastrous choice of a church affiliation in Chicago. I know of no comparable efforts by Republicans to woo secular progressives (though I suppose that so-called “Massachusetts moderates” have engaged, albeit mutedly, in such a project).

Swartz cites recent findings from surveys of the Pew Research Center: Since 2005 young white Evangelicals’ identification with the Republican party has dropped by 15%, but identification with the Democratic party has only risen by 5%. Presumably disenchanted Evangelicals have joined the large group of independents, whose number has jumped by 10%. Swartz believes that an important factor in the future will be the Democratic handling of pro-life Evangelicals (as well, of course, of pro-life Catholics).

The political profile of Evangelicals seems to be tripartite. There continues to be a strong segment of Evangelicals who will be an important Republican constituency. There is also a vocal but still relatively small Evangelical Left, visibly represented by Jim Wallis, founder and editor of Sojourners magazine, supposedly a “spiritual advisor” to President Obama (if so, certainly an improvement on Jeremiah Wright!). Wallis disavows the “Left” label, but he has been associated with progressive causes, most recently with the Occupy Wall Street movement. At the same time, he is staunchly traditional on abortion and same-sex marriage. The third component in this profile is the most interesting. Variously called “freestyle Evangelicals” or “cosmopolitan Evangelicals”, they strongly reject identification with either political party, affirming that the core of the Gospel is beyond politics. They adhere to traditional moral values, but seek to balance them with various social causes (such as combating hunger, or AIDS, or sex trafficking). In terms of politics, their stance is best described as one of mediation. This is most clearly the case with their most visible representative—Rick Warren, pastor of the huge Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, and author of the astronomically successful bestseller The Purpose Driven Life. In 2008 Warren staged the strictly nonpartisan Civil Forum on the Presidency, where he separately interviewed Barack Obama and John McCain on national television. Like Wallis, Warren holds traditional moral values, but he does not put them at the center of his public ministry. Unlike Wallis, he keeps a distance from the Democratic party, although he agreed to give the invocation at Obama’s inauguration. If I were Jimmy the Greek, I would bet that the “freestyle Evangelicals” are most likely to be prominent, and possibly dominant, in the future.

There is nothing intrinsically secular in the Democratic party, nor intrinsically religious in the GOP. The bifurcated situation is the result of a series of historical accidents, but once established, it is not easy to change. The hardliners are always crucially important suppliers of funders and activists. The primary system, that peculiar institution of American politics, guarantees that contenders for public office must first keep the hardliners happy while seeking nomination, and must then move away from them in order to be elected. As we have learned all too clearly, this fatal progression from hypocrisy to betrayal undermines the middle on which any healthy democracy depends.

For the health of American democracy one should hope for more Evangelical Democrats and more secular Republicans. If I were one of those billionaires being asked by President Obama to contribute their “fare share”, I would endow a foundation with the sole aim of supporting that vital middle. The foundation’s first grants would be to two new organizations, Democrats Against Same-Sex Marriage, and The Association of Republican Abortionists. (This would in no way imply ideological identification with these two causes.)

Posted in Culture, Politics, Religion, Secularism | 8 Comments
January 25, 2012

Stubborn Amish and Stubborn Atheists

Peter Berger

One of my earliest memories is of an incident in the kindergarten of my childhood in Vienna. I must have been at most five years old. I was supposed to speak a line in a play about which I have no memory. All I remember is that I was wearing a top hat and was sitting on some sort of cupboard—and that I did not want to speak my line. The teacher cajoled me several times, but I kept shaking my head. She was quite angry, but finally gave up. I came down from my perch, having successfully disobeyed an order from legitimate authority.

I am not sure that this episode indicates a profound character trait. But, although I am both temperamentally and philosophically inclined toward compromise in conflict situations, I have always resisted if authorities or peers wanted to make me do things against my will. Furthermore, I have always sympathized with people who stubbornly refuse to be swayed from deviant views or behaviors. Unless the views or behaviors are morally repugnant (I don’t sympathize, say, with deviant racists), my sympathy does not hinge on agreement with the stubborn refuseniks. In my own field of the sociology of religion, along with most colleagues I concluded long ago that secularization theory—the notion that modernity necessarily leads to a decline of religion—cannot be maintained in the face of the evidence. Yet there is a rather small group of social scientists who stubbornly continue to adhere to the theory. I rather admire them. Admittedly the sociology of religion generates less than profound disagreements. But I have a lingering admiration for people who refuse to accept evidence of a more fundamental kind—such as socialists or creationists—perhaps, at a stretch, even flat-earth theorists.

The Religious News Service provides daily briefings which are quite useful to obsessive religion-watchers like me. On January 12, 2012, the briefing contained two stories from different sources. Each dealt with stubborn people, the sort I instinctively sympathize with even though I totally disagree with them.

The first story, reported by the Associated Press, came from Kentucky. As other states, Kentucky has a law which requires slow-moving vehicles (such as tractors or trailers) to affix reflective signs to avoid faster vehicles to run into them from behind. The horse-drawn buggies favored by Amish of the strict observance clearly fit the description of slow-moving vehicles. There have indeed been some collisions with Amish buggies, including one in Kentucky when an SUV ran into such a buggy and killed a teenager. The mandated sign is a bright orange triangle. An especially strict group of Amish, going under the melodious name of Swartzentruber, refused to affix this triangle. They claimed that the object is garish and offends their commitment to “a simple, plain life”. They also said that they rely on God for protection on the road. They are willing to use (supposedly less garish) gray tape and hanging lanterns. Other states have accommodated the Amish position, on grounds of religious freedom. The Kentucky authorities did not. They pressed on. Amish buggies were ticketed. But the Amish refused to pay the fines and were accordingly jailed (for some days at a time). A more recent story in daily newspapers indicates that the conflict continues, with more Amish going to jail, though a bill is pending in the legislature to allow an exemption from the putatively garish triangle.

The second story comes from a blog of one Jonathan Turley under the highbrow title Res ipsa loquitur (“The Thing Speaks for Itself”). It is about Jessica Ahlquist, a Rhode Island high school girl. With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, Ahlquist went to federal court asking that her school be compelled to remove a large mural displaying a prayer asking God, among other things, to help students “to be good sports and smile when they lose”. Before resorting to federal court, Ahlquist had made her demand at various meetings of the local school committee. She said that “As an atheist, I have the right to go to school and not feel discriminated against by the people who are praying there.” She met with strong hostility from committee members and many fellow-students. She received insults and threats in school, on the way home from school, and online. She said that she felt alone and hated—and, most important, that her first-amendment rights were being violated. The US district court agreed with her. The school was ordered to remove the prayer. I don’t know if “the thing speaks for itself”, but it seems to speak for the readers of the blog—there were ninety-eight responses, most of them endorsing the sentiment expressed by the title of the post: “Brava, Jessica Ahlquist”.

My own sentiment is not as enthusiastic. But between Jessica and a clutch of hostile Godders, as between the Swartzentruber and the mighty state of Kentucky, I empathize with the stubborn orneriness of the former two. This despite the fact that, God knows, I strongly disagree with the two respective worldviews. (In the unlikely case that Jessica reads my blog, I hope that she concedes my first-amendment right to invoke the deity). The best I can say about the Mennonite faith of the Amish is that it derives from the less bloodthirsty version of the Dutch Reformation. I find the Amish lifestyle quaint but unappealing, and their pacifism morally irresponsible. As to the atheism in question, I consider it, precisely, a worldview appropriate in adolescence but not later in life. To be an agnostic is a very reasonable position to take in view of the depressing realities of the human condition and the absurd puzzles of the universe. The agnostic says “I don’t know what it ultimately means”; the atheist claims to know. Those of us who have not been visited by angels are, almost by definition, agnostic. Yes, we can have faith—I would say, faith alone (sola fide). But faith is not knowledge. That is another story. The ACLU featured in Jessica’s story has a view of the separation of church and state that can be described as Kemalist—the public space of the republic must be kept antiseptically clear of the religious virus. Kemalism has not been working very well in Turkey. It will work even less in the United States.

Posted in Freedom, Modernity, United States | 22 Comments
January 18, 2012

A New Direction for the Russian Orthodox Church?

Peter Berger

On January 7 The New York Times reported that Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, head of the Department of Church and Society of the Moscow Patriarchate and one of the highest officials in the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church, said in a radio interview that the ROC should serve as a mediator between the state and the people. Two days earlier Aleksei Navalny, an opposition leader, had called for just such a role by the Church: “I would very much like for the Russian Orthodox Church to take up such a role in society, so that all conflicting sides would seek and accept its mediation.” Although Chaplin did not mention Navalny, it is reasonable to assume that he was responding to the latter’s appeal—and indeed that he was, in this very broadcast, initiating precisely this sort of mediation. He did not endorse the recent demonstrations, but he said that Russia would never be the same after these demonstrations and that a government that did not respond to popular concerns would be “slowly eaten alive”. He called for a national dialogue including all “patriotically inclined” people, not just the urban middle class that was staging the demonstrations. He specifically said that the charges of fraud in the recent parliamentary elections must be addressed.

Fifteen minutes after Interfax, the Russian news agency, reported on the Chaplin interview, another Church spokesman announced that on the next day Patriarch Kiril I would give “a very important interview” on Rossiya 1, the main television channel. And so he did—on Saturday, January 7, which is the day when Orthodox Christmas is celebrated. The Times again reported on this on the following day. Reuters had a somewhat fuller report. (Interfax apparently carried the full text of Kiril’s address, but I could not access it in English.)

Kiril’s language was somewhat more moderate than Chaplin’s. After all, he spoke just a few hours after celebrating a solemn Christmas liturgy in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. But he essentially repeated Chaplin’s message, giving it the most possible official blessing. He did say that “If the authorities remain insensitive to the expression of protest, this is a very bad sign of the authorities’ inability to adjust.” He affirmed the right to protest, but warned against revolutions, which are easily manipulated in the interest of those seeking power. He cited the revolution of 1917 as a relevant warning: “Then we were unable to preserve balance and wisdom. We destroyed our country.” From the quotations available to me, it is not clear just to whom the “we” refers to. Given the context, though, I surmise that it includes the official Church, which had uncritically supported the anti-revolutionary authorities—“balance and wisdom” would have meant mediating between the government and its critics. And of course the Communist regime which emerged from the revolution inflicted enormous destruction on Russian society.

It is important to realize that neither of these two men is theologically or politically liberal. Kiril was born as Vladimir Gundyayev in Leningrad in 1946. Both his father and grandfather were Orthodox priests. He was ordained in 1969, elected as Patriarch in 2009. In 1971 he became the principal Orthodox representative at the World Council of Churches in Geneva, and he has participated in ecumenical events ever since (something that he has been criticized for by ultra-conservatives in the ROC). One must assume that he has acquired cosmopolitan skills by rubbing shoulders with all sorts of non-Orthodox people over the years, but one should be careful not to assume that these contacts greatly influenced his worldview. The World Council of Churches is dominated by Protestants and in the 1970s, when Kiril got there, was engaged in an orgy of theologically legitimated Leftism. In any case, from the beginning, the major activity of Orthodox participants at ecumenical gatherings was, over and over again, to say no! to WCC theological and political initiatives. Soon after becoming Patriarch, Kiril said that he was opposed to any doctrinal or liturgical reforms. Politically, he praised the Byzantine concept of sinfonia—the harmonious collaboration of Church and state in the maintenance of a Christian society.

Vsevolod Chaplin was born in 1968, the son of an agnostic professor. Thus, unlike Kiril, he did not come to Orthodoxy because of family background but as the result of a personal quest. He was ordained as a priest in 1992, as an archpriest in 1999 (the title seems to be similar to that of monsignor in the Catholic Church). Before assuming his present position as head of the Patriarchate’s Department of Church and Society, he headed its Department of External Relations. Like Kiril, he participated in activities of the World Council of Churches, and, also like Kiril, he apparently has been unaffected by these heretical contacts. He has publicly refused to pray with non-Orthodox Christians. He recently achieved a certain notoriety for criticizing Russian young women dressing “like prostitutes”, thus inviting rape. As a remedy, he advocated a “nationwide dress code”.

I have never met Kiril. I have met Chaplin, twice—in the course of a research project on the Russian Orthodox Church and Democracy, which our research center at Boston University conducted in collaboration with the Institute of Church-State Studies at Baylor University (the Baylor center was then directed by Christopher Marsh, a highly competent political scientist with expertise on religion in Communist Russia). The project was undertaken between 2002 and 2004. Early on Marsh and I had a meeting in Moscow, during which we interviewed Chaplin; toward the end of the project we held a conference in Washington, of all places at the Woodrow Wilson Center, on the general topic of Russian Orthodoxy and democracy. Chaplin performed memorably on both occasions. In Moscow he made a spirited defense of the 1997 law on religion, which stopped short of restoring the ROC as the official state religion, but gave it a privileged position denied all others. He was particularly hostile to Protestant missionaries who, with pockets full of American money, come to Russia to “steal Orthodox souls”. Marsh, who speaks fluent Russian, came ready to translate, but we were surprised to find that Chaplin speaks good English. In Washington he gave a lecture on the Patriarchate’s view of the place of religion in the state. He was very open on this:  The ideal would be rulers directly inspired by God, “like the Judges in the Old Testament”. This, unfortunately, is no longer possible. But close to ideal would be a monarchy with (his exact words) “a monolithic relationship between Church and state”. He added that “we have concluded that democracy is preferable to anarchy”. This ringing endorsement of democracy evoked some gasps in the Washington audience, a reaction presumably shared by Woodrow Wilson if his spirit still hovers over the center named after him. A young Russian woman in the audience, in a somewhat shaky voice, contradicted Chaplin: there are many Orthodox people in Russia who disagree with his view of religion and democracy. Chaplin, looming over her dressed all in a black cassock with a large pendant cross around his neck, clearly did not appreciate this sort of public criticism (especially, I guess, coming from a young woman—I was pleased that she stood her ground).

Do the recent statements by the Patriarch and one of his highest associates indicate a radically new direction in the ROC’s understanding of its role in society? Definitely not: It is obvious that neither man has been converted from his overall theological and political traditionalism. But does this mean that these Christmas utterances are unimportant? I think not. They represent a small but potentially significant change in the understanding by the ROC of its place in contemporary Russian society. Since the advent of the Putin government, the relation between Church and state has become increasingly intimate—not quite “monolithic”, in Chaplin’s inimitable phrasing, but approximating more and more the concept of sinfonia evoked by Kiril. The ROC has used the government to enhance its privileges and its power. The state has used the ROC as an instrument to advance both its domestic and foreign policies—and, most important, to support the nationalist ideology, which is now its principal if not its only source of legitimacy. If the Church is now to define its role as mediator, this suggests a loosening of the erstwhile “sinfonic” embrace.

Obviously it is much too early to say whether such a new role will measurably affect Russian politics. It is possible that the recent statements are simply tactical, motivated by the Church’s desire to distance itself from troubles that might engulf the Putin regime. However, if there is hope to arrest the authoritarian drift of the regime and to return to the democratic developments of the Yeltsin period, then a truly mediating role of the Church could be very helpful. There could also be positive implications for the global place of Orthodoxy. Russia contains by far the greatest number of Orthodox people in the world. A more independent and vibrant Russian Orthodox Church would inevitably have an influence on Orthodox churches outside Russia, which almost everywhere are damaged in their public witness by their close identification with nationalism and ethnicity. Orthodoxy represents a distinctive and immensely rich version of the Christian faith, which deserves a much better hearing than the one it gets in its present condition.

Posted in Orthodoxy, Politics | 3 Comments
January 11, 2012

Counting Christian Noses

Peter Berger

In December 2011 the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (Washington) issued A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Christian Population. Some of the data were developed in collaboration with the Center for the Study of Global Christianity (South Hamilton, Massachusetts). The two institutions are responsible for the bulk of reliable statistical information on religion worldwide. They are directed, respectively, by Luis Lugo and Todd Johnson. I happen to know these two gentlemen quite well. They are the religious nose counters par excellence. Ask them how many Lutherans there are in Mongolia, and how many Buddhists in Finland, they will within a few minutes come back with reasonably accurate numbers.

While the broad outline of the situation has been known for some time, reading the sheer mass of figures in the Pew report is startling. The ongoing comparison is between the years 1910 and 2010. Apart from marking the beginning of a century convenient for comparison, the earlier date is significant in itself. 1910 marked the date of the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh. It was attended by about 1,300 delegates (all Protestants—Catholics and Orthodox were not invited), most from Europe and North America. The conference (whose centennial in 2010 was celebrated by a series of events) is now seen as the culmination of the Protestant missionary movement of the nineteenth century, and as a prelude to the ecumenical movement of the twentieth. Its official theme was “The Evangelization of the World in This Generation”. The mood was triumphalist, the expectations grandiose. Yet I doubt whether any of the participants could have imagined either the size or the shape of Christianity a century hence.

The world population has, of course, expanded enormously between the two dates. Thus the proportion of Christians in the world population has remained stable at about 33%. But the absolute number of Christians has increased very greatly, from about 600 million to about 2.8 billion. Christianity is by far the largest religion in today’s world. Muslims come second, at about 25% of the world population. Among Christians, about 50% are Catholic, about 37% Protestant. [These last figures should be taken with a grain of salt: Catholics tend to include as adherents all who were baptized as Catholics—even if, particularly in Latin America, many may now be noisily enthusiastic (mainly Pentecostal) Protestants. In the other camp, many Protestants (again especially Pentecostal ones) belong to informal groups meeting in private homes, storefronts, garages—and are thus hard to count. Therefore, the above total of Protestants is probably an underestimate. General advice: When counting Christian noses, have a good supply of salt at hand.]

If the size of world Christianity today is amazing, the distribution is even more so. There has been a massive shift in the geography of the religion. In 1910 two thirds of Christians lived in Europe. In 2010 26% lived in Europe, 37% in the Americas, 24% in Africa, 13% in Asia and the Pacific region. But this still does not give the full picture. The figure for “the Americas” is ambiguous, since it includes both North and Latin America. According to the Atlas of Global Christianity (2009—it, by the way, was co-edited by Todd Johnson), in 2010 there were about 283 million Christians in North America (United States and Canada), about 549 million in Latin America. The basic fact: About 1.3 billion Christians, 61% of the total number, live in the Global South. [This is without figuring in the fact that a considerable number of Christians in North America, Catholics as well as Protestants, are Latinos.] The most dramatic shift has occurred in Africa: Christians were 9% of the population in 1910, 63% in 2010. [This figure lumps together mainly Muslim northern Africa and mainly Christian sub-Saharan Africa. The percentage of Christians in the latter would be much higher: Sub-Saharan Africa is basically Christian territory.] Example: Nigeria now has twice as many Protestants than Germany, the homeland of the Reformation. Example: Brazil has twice as many Catholics than Italy, where the Vatican sits as it tries to make sense of the religious landscape. [It is hardly surprising that Pope Benedict XVI regards the “evangelization of Europe” as a top priority. Some African priests might be helpful for this project.]

To understand the importance of this geographical shift, one must look at the respective religious characteristics of Christianity in the two sectors of the globe. In recent years a number of influential works have described this, such as Philip Jenkins’ The New Faces of Christianity (2006) and Mark Noll’s The New Shape of World Christianity (2009). The slow-burning schism in the Anglican communion, with dissident Episcopal congregations in the United States putting themselves under the care of African bishops, has made clear that Christianity in the Global South is both theologically and morally more conservative. Thus African Catholics are rarely troubled by the issues (from papal authority to traditional sexual morality) which agitate their liberal coreligionists in Europe and North America. Thus African Protestants, across denominations, are largely Evangelical in their beliefs and values. More than that: Christianity in the Global South is robustly supernaturalist, while Christians to the north of it tend to constrict the supernatural components of the faith within an essentially naturalist worldview. This is most glaring in the case of Pentecostal and charismatic Christians. The Pew report lumps these two categories together—very plausibly, as the dividing line between them is artificial; the report claims that about 584 million Christians, or about 26.7% of the world total, fall under this category. However, what I have called “supernaturalism” is not limited to the Pentecostal/charismatic grouping. The Catholic Church, dramatically in Latin America, has always succeded in adapting itself to the supernatural beliefs and practices (“superstitions”, if you will) of indigenous people it baptized. And (largely Evangelical) Protestantism in Africa has been strongly infiltrated by charismatic supernaturalism—some scholars have coined the term “Pentecostalization” for this process.

If this seems a bit complicated, let me simplify: A few months ago I was talking about this North/South split with a Methodist minister in Boston. I said that, it seemed to me, the North could be put on the defensive over this split. When he asked what I meant, I said: “I would like you to explain to an African Christian why you do not raise people from the dead in your church.” I said that the African interlocutor might go on: “Jesus did. The Apostles did. We do. Why don’t you?”.

Of course this is an oversimplification (albeit, I think, a useful one). There are pockets of supernaturalism in America, as there are Christians in Africa whose notion of “superstition” is no different from that of a liberal Protestant in America. And admittedly, the question about raising people from the dead is a little extreme: It is a relatively rare event even among Catholic curaderas in Guatemala or Protestant charismatics in Nigeria. But the broader category of miraculous healing is empirically more applicable. Virtually all Christians believe, at least in theory, that God can heal illnesses, and most will pray for such healing if the occasion arises. But in America most Christians (even conservative Catholics and Evangelical Protestants) will assume that God heals through naturalist means—the hands of a surgeon, the efficacy of a drug. African Christians are much more likely to believe that a charismatic healer, by putting his hands on a sick person, can directly cause a miraculous healing there and then.

Behind all the numbers collected so assiduously by Lugo, Johnson et al. looms a vast challenge to the taken-for-granted naturalism in Europe and North America: The majority of global Christians (and, needless to say, the majority of all religious people in the world) question this naturalism, and behave accordingly. Will this challenge diminish with greater affluence and higher education?  Possibly.  Thus far it doesn’t look like it. Thus it would seem that an important dialogue is still outstanding. In recent decades there has developed a veritable dialogue industry, much of it initiated by official church bodies. There have been dialogues between Christians and Jews, Muslims, Buddhists—dialogues between Catholics and Protestants as well as agnostics, Lutherans and Calvinists, and so on. As far as I know, there has been no sustained dialogue between Christians in the two global regions—other than what must be sporadic exchanges in informal settings. I am not at all sure what would be the result of the outstanding dialogue. I am sure that it would be important. [Full disclosure: Our research center at Boston University has such a dialogue on the drawing board.]

Posted in Christianity, Inter-faith Dialogue, Pentecostalism | 23 Comments
January 4, 2012

Islamic Philosophy and the Future of the Arab Spring

Peter Berger

There are few current questions about international developments as important as the ones concerning the future of what, rather optimistically, has been called the Arab Spring. Will this series of popular uprisings indeed lead to a new era of democracy and progress in the Middle East? Or will it rather lead to an era of  violence and totalitarianism inspired by a Jihadist version of Islam? Obviously either outcome will be affected by a variety of factors, many of them with little if any relation to religion. I would like to suggest that a controversy which preoccupied Islamic philosophers a thousand years ago may have a surprising relevance to this alternative.

The recently published 12th volume of Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, a helpful series put out by the Hudson Institute, revolves around the same alternative. The ongoing election in Egypt has brought the matter into urgent attention. While the election process is dragging on, and while the role of the military remains unclear, there has been the alarming success at the polls of the Muslim Brotherhood, which of late has been making liberal noises, and the various groupings of radical Salafist movements who have made very few such concessions. At this time of writing the two groupings appear to have gathered about 60% of the votes. The political party set up by the Brotherhood has deliberately defined itself in terms of the so-called “Turkish model”—supposedly a liberal democracy inspired by “Islamic values”, but definitely not based on shariah law. Recent domestic and international behavior by the Erdogan government in Turkey is beginning to put some question marks behind this definition of the “model”. Still, at least in aspiration this “model” has more liberal potential than anything the Salafists would like to put in place.

The same alternative between more moderate Islamic regimes and unabashedly fundamentalist ones prevails throughout the Muslim world. What, at least for the moment, seems to be off the table is the prospect of secular regimes with some liberal credentials. (It is ironic that the last secular regime still standing, albeit wobblingly, is the one in Syria—with zero liberal credentials). It is not that there are no liberal voices in the Muslim world, even in Iran and Saudi Arabia. But, with the exception of Indonesia and Turkey, they do not have a broadly popular following. As to the secularized intellectuals with whom Western interlocutors are most comfortable, they have no following at all. It is therefore plausible that, if one is to have hopes for liberal democracy in the Muslim world, one will have to pin these hopes on individuals and movements who define themselves within a decidedly Islamic discourse.

Muslims and others like to point out that the Bible contains enough bloodthirsty teachings to compete with any Salafist ideology. Judaism has moderated these teachings early on, and then profited (if that’s the word) from the fact that there was no sovereign Jewish state in all the centuries from the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans to the establishment of the modern state of Israel—no state which, even if it wanted to, would have been able, for example, to inflict the criminal penalties enjoined in the Book of Leviticus. The New Testament is less carnivorous than the Hebrew Bible, but the history of Christianity, from its establishment in the Roman state onward, shows that Christians have had little difficulty legitimating every kind of violence and bloodshed in theological terms. Yet, at least in modern times, there have been sophisticated efforts to separate the core messages of Biblical revelation from various passages, which are deemed to be morally offensive but which can be ascribed to the contingencies of their historical context. I think that the advent of modern historical scholarship has greatly helped this process of separating core and periphery in the scriptural texts. Liberal Protestants have been in the forefront of this development, followed (initially with some reluctance) by Catholics, and then by liberal Jews. Of course there continues resistance in all branches of the “Abrahamic tradition” by conservatives who insist on the “inerrancy” of the scriptural texts.

Such a development is much more difficult in the case of Islam. I think that a major reason for this is the Muslim understanding of the Quran. It is misleading to compare the Quran with the Bible. For most Muslims, the Quran is “inerrant” to a degree far beyond the understanding of this term by even very conservative Christians or Jews. It has been suggested that Christians, rather than comparing the Quran with the Bible, should compare the Quran with Christ—especially the Christ described in the prologue to the Gospel of John—the Christ who is the Word (Logos): “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.” Thus it is very instructive that the earliest controversies among Islamic scholars concerned the question of whether the Quran was eternal or created—a question which curiously resembles the Christological controversies of the first centuries of Christian history.

All Muslims agree that the Quran (the Arabic word means “recitation”) was revealed to Muhammad by the angel Jibril (Gabriel) between 610 and 632 CE—the period spans the time that Muhammad spent in Mecca, under constant threat of persecution by the local authorities troubled by his message, and the time in Medina, when he was head of state and military leader. The angel commanded Muhammad to recite (iqra) the words being revealed. It is unclear how many of these texts were originally transmitted orally and how many were quickly written down. All the texts were assembled in the book now known as the Quran after the death of Muhammad, under the authority of the Caliph (“commander of the faithful”) Abu Bakr. Other traditions about sayings and actions of the Prophet, so-called hadith, were collected separately. They have less than revelatory status, but are nevertheless authoritative. The chain of evidence, leading back to the time of the Prophet, is carefully guarded. The debates as to whether the Quran was eternal or created began at some time in the first century after Muhammad’s death. I think that the majority view ever since has favored the eternity of the Quran—it was with God from the beginning, as was the Johanine Logos. It is the minority view, ascribing created status to the Quran, which is particularly relevant in the present situation.

To a modern outsider these are quite obscure debates (as are the ones that agitated the early Christian councils, from Nicaea to Chalcedon). Why are these debates still important? I can claim no competence in Islamic scholarship, but it seems to me that the question can be answered: If the Quran is co-eternal with God, it has a higher degree of literal infallibility (“inerrancy”) than if it is a creation of God. There are different schools of Quranic interpretation (tafsir), including the highly symbolic interpretations engaged in by Sufis. But it seems to me that a greater range of interpretation is opened up if the Quran is understood as part of God’s creation rather than part of God’s essence. This is particularly important in interpreting the difference between the chapters coming, respectively, from the Mecca and the Medina period. The passages most often quoted by more liberal Muslims come from the former period—those most troubling to liberals come from the latter. Islamic scholars have always acknowledged the difference, but if every passage is equally infallible, it is difficult to give due acknowledgment to the different historical contexts. What is more, once such a broader interpretation is allowed, one is then enabled to differentiate between the core and the periphery of the faith. No non-Muslim is entitled to decide what is core and what periphery in the Islamic faith. Certainly God’s justice is central to Muhammad’s prophecy, including its full exercise on the Day of Judgment. But it is relevant that every chapter (sura) of the Quran begins with the formula “In the name of God the compassionate, who practices compassion” (bismillah al-rahman al-rahim – both adjectives are modifications of the Arabic root for compassion, rahm, distinguishing compassion as an inherent quality and as a form of action). I would think that an Islamic legitimation of liberal democracy, with its panoply of human rights, would put God’s compassion along with his justice at the core of the faith.

An early school of Islamic philosophy was the Mu’tazila, which was cultivated between the 8th and 10th centuries, centered in Basra and Baghdad. The Mutazilites, strongly influenced by Greek philosophy, emphasized the use of reason in interpreting the Quran. They distinguished the core content of the revelation and its historical deviations. And, significantly, they asserted that the Quran was created, not eternal. I find it equally significant that one of the foremost reformist Muslim thinkers today has described himself as a “neo-Mutazilite”. Abdolkarim Soroush, an Iranian scholar, was close to the Islamic Revolution in its early days, but became more and more critical of the regime that emerged from it. A victim of repression in his home country, he has been teaching at Harvard and other American universities. He is known as an interpreter of the great Sufi poet Jelaluddin Rumi, but he has written extensively on the relation of Islam to the modern world. He has distinguished between the “essential” and the “accidental” elements in a religious tradition. And he has advocated what he calls “religious democracy”—in the event a regime inspired by Islam but not based on shariah law, guaranteeing all the rights of liberal democracy, including full religious freedom—and very significantly including the right to change one’s religion.

History is not an ongoing philosophical seminar. The future of the Arab Spring and of the Middle East in general will be crucially affected by many factors far removed from concerns of religion or theoretical thought—such as the price of oil, the progress of nuclear proliferation, or the decline of American military and political power. But ideas do matter. It is important to understand that those who wish to combine their Muslim faith with aspirations toward liberal democracy have decidedly Islamic ideas to support their agenda.

Posted in Islam, Philosophy, Politics | 15 Comments
December 28, 2011

A Holiday Respite

Peter Berger

We are taking a brief break with posts this week. I’d like to wish all my readers all the best for this holiday season and in the new year. Regular posting will resume next week.

Posted in Symbolism | 4 Comments
December 21, 2011

Miracles and the Historians

Peter Berger

In its December 2011 issue Christianity Today carried an interview with Craig Keener, a New Testament historian teaching at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. He is the author of a recent book, Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts. Keener has a quarrel with most of his colleagues, who tend to dismiss these accounts as legends rather than actual facts. He recommends jettisoning the “naturalistic tradition” of modern historical scholarship and dealing with miracles as alleged facts to be investigated for their veracity just as all other facts that historians come across. He points out that the “naturalistic tradition” originated in Europe in the modern era, when none of these scholars had ever witnessed a miracle. The situation is different today. Keener spent time in Africa, where Christians claim to witness miracles in their everyday lives: “Extraordinary things are taking place around the world”.

I am not concerned at this moment with whether miracles are to be taken as empirically real, be it in New Testament times or in Africa today. Rather, I want to address the question of the “naturalistic” assumptions of modern historical scholarship. Keener is of course quite right about this: For the last three hundred years or so historians have come to think of their craft as a branch of science. This means an intellectual discipline with specific canons of procedure. Among these is the norm that every statement about the empirical world should be subject to falsification: The historian must allow others to examine and, if indicated, to reject the evidence on which he has based this or that statement. Obviously this presents a challenge to a historian who, as a believer, regards the text under examination to contain divine revelation. This challenge constitutes the great drama of modern Biblical scholarship.

Can the Bible (or for that matter any other text claimed to be revelatory) be studied in any other way? It definitely can. The theologian will extract from the text propositions that cannot be falsified. So will the preacher, who has to address an audience with no interest whatever in scholarship. There could also be an individual, perhaps an agnostic, who is interested in the text simply for its literary quality. The historian, who defines his approach as scientific will come to the text in a very distinctive way.

Modern science has achieved high credibility and prestige, not only for its intellectual plausibility, but because of its immense practical successes. Modern science, and the technology it has made possible, has fundamentally changed the circumstances of human life on this planet. One result of this has been the ideology of scientism, which asserts that science is the only valid avenue to truth. On the part of believers there has been the understandable impetus to present belief itself as being based on science. The prototypical figure in this has been Mary Baker Eddy, founder of a denomination aptly called Christian Science, with Jesus transformed into someone called Christ, Scientist. Not only does this do violence to the Jesus found in the New Testament, but equally so to science as an intellectual discipline. In the same line there have been attempts to establish a Christian economics, a Christian sociology, and so forth. Such constructions are as implausible as a Christian geology, or a Christian dermatology.

But there is something more fundamental involved in all of this: The refusal to accept the fact that there is more than one way to perceive reality.

The most eloquent expression of this fact is the opening paragraph of Robert Musil’s great novel The Man without Qualities (in my opinion one of the most important novels of the twentieth century, because it painstakingly seeks to describe the nature of modern man and the possibility of religion in the modern world). The paragraph begins with the sentence “A barometric low hung over the Atlantic”. It then goes on in the tones of a scientific weather report, to end with the sentence “It was a fine day in August 1913”. The point here is both simple and profound: There is no way of deducing the last sentence from the meteorology that precedes it.

Currently, at least in America, the drama of science and religion has played out in the controversy over evolution. Christians who believe that the account of creation in the Book of Genesis is literally true have sought to discredit the theory of evolution—and they have called this exercise “creation science”. This worldview is hard to maintain in the face of the empirical evidence, but whatever it is, it is not science. Things are a bit more complicated with a follow-up approach—that of “intelligent design”. This centers on the proposition that it is impossible to look at the exquisitely constructed physical universe without concluding that there must an intelligent creator at its foundation. Now, this is a proposition that any believing Jew, Christian or Muslim will agree with. Even an agnostic physicist might be swayed by it. But the proponents of ID have called their conclusion “scientific” and have gone to court insisting that it should be taught in public schools as an alternative to conventional evolution theory. I think a federal court was right in rejecting this claim, calling ID not science but a thinly disguised affirmation of religious faith.

Back to the historian: If he wants to claim the status of “science” for his discipline, he has no alternative to following in the “naturalistic tradition”. The acts of God (miraculous or otherwise) cannot be empirically investigated or falsified. How the historian then looks at the same phenomenon, such as a Biblical account of ancient events, will obviously depend on his theology. If he believes in Biblical inerrancy—every sentence is literally true—he will definitely have some serious problems.  But there are other, more flexible ways of looking for revelation “in, with and under” the Biblical text. In that case, even the most rigorous historical scholarship cannot undermine the approach of faith.

Posted in Philosophy, Religion, Secularism | 15 Comments
December 14, 2011

Do The Three Abrahamic Faiths Worship The Same God?

Peter Berger

It has become common now to speak of Judaism, Christianity and Islam as constituting three forms of “Abrahamic faith”. I have not been able to nail down just when this term was first used. (To use another term of current interfaith politeness, this may be due to the fact that my Internet skills should properly be dated BCE—“before the common era”.) I have the impression that it came to be widely used in America in the wake of 9/11, with the altogether admirable intention of countering anti-Islamic hatred. In that it is similar to the term “Judaeo-Christian”, which originated around the 1950s with the similarly admirable intention of countering anti-Semitism. In 1955 Will Herberg published an influential book, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, in which he argued, among other things, that these three faiths now constituted a common foundation of the American creed. Even then this left out a lot of people—for example, the millions of Americans belonging to Eastern Orthodox Christian churches. The notion that “Abrahamic faith” now undergirds the political ideology of the United States naturally annoys American Hindus and Buddhists, not to mention agnostics, atheists and adherents of more exotic religions (how about Wiccans?!). But there has also been opposition to the usage within the three alleged religious cousins.

There was both Christian and Jewish resistance to the earlier term. Scholars from both communities criticized the term as substituting a fuzzy commonality for the sharp differences between the two faiths. But this criticism was somewhat muted, not only because just about all these scholars approved of the purpose of interfaith amity, but also because the continuity between Judaism and Christianity is hard to deny. After all, the most conservative Catholic or Protestant cannot overlook the fact that the Hebrew Bible is part of the canonical Christian Scriptures. (Indeed, in terms of sheer bulk, the New Testament looks like an appendix to the Old.) And the most Orthodox Jew cannot ignore the fact that Jesus was himself a Jew and that the earliest Christians constituted a movement (however heretical) within first-century Judaism. The Muslim case is not the same. The way in which the Koran interprets Judaism and Christianity is hardly compatible with the self-understanding of these religions. Even the most liberal Christians, who might approve the recitation of Muslim prayers at some ecumenical events, are unlikely to advocate the inclusion of the Koran in the Biblical canon. But some Muslims have not been happy either. An interesting development occurred in Malaysia in 2010. An Islamic group asked the state to forbid Christians to use the name “Allah” both in Malay translations of the Bible and in church worship. The contention was that the name “Allah” properly refers to the God proclaimed by the Prophet Muhammad, and to no one else. The High Court rejected this request. There were anti-Christian riots to protest this decision and some people were killed during attacks on churches.

On November 29, 2011, The Christian Century carried a story about an event that occurred earlier in the month at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, a widely respected Evangelical center in the Boston area. Miroslav Volf gave a lecture there, evidently provoking a lively debate. Volf is a very learned and much published Protestant theologian of Croatian origin. I think he can fairly be described as an open-minded, moderate Evangelical. He used to teach for a while at Fuller Theological Seminary in California, one of the centers of the current revival of Evangelical theology; he is now a professor at the Yale Divinity School. His book Allah: A Christian Response was recently published. Its central thesis was reiterated in the lecture at Gordon-Conwell:  Yes, one can say that Christians and Muslims believe in the “same God”. There are enough common affirmations to justify this—most importantly, of course, the belief that there is only one God (what the late Richard Niebuhr, coincidentally another Yale Divinity professor, called “radical monotheism”)—but also the belief in a personal creator distinct from the creation, and the giver of a moral code. Volf said that his position was one of “political theology”, rather than a statement of what is required for salvation. I understand this to mean that Christians, without giving up their faith in the unique salvation provided through Jesus Christ, have enough in common with Muslims to collaborate in seeking justice and a better society. The audience at Volf’s lecture was divided. He was warmly received, and some agreed with him. The opposition was succinctly summarized by a seminary student: “At stake is the gospel. If you are saying to a Muslim, ‘See, there is common ground between us, and then there shall be peace’, essentially you have nullified the need for the gospel”.

How one comes out on this will obviously depend on one’s own theological position. Both Christian and Jewish conservatives are likely to be at least uncomfortable with the notion that theirs is an “Abrahamic faith”. [Full disclosure: As a theologically liberal Lutheran, I have no problem with the term.] But I think that one can temporarily bracket one’s understanding of one’s own faith, and look at the issue objectively—that is, truth claims set aside, trying to assess descriptively what the three religions do and what they do not have in common. If one does that, I further think that both those who say no to the idea of “Abrahamic faith” and those who say yes are right in a way.

Say no: Both Christianity and rabbinical Judaism developed side by side in the early years of the common era. (The Pharisees got bad press in the New Testament, but many historians think that both of the above two developments grew out of a Pharisee tradition, of which Rabbi Hillel was one of the founders.) But they divided sharply early on. The New Testament (in Acts 15) reports on a meeting of Jesus’ followers in Jerusalem, attended by both the Apostles Peter and Paul, who together convinced the assembly that Gentile converts need not be circumcised or follow the full Jewish law. Whatever may have been intended by the two Apostles, this decision marks the emergence of Christianity as a religion distinct from Judaism. The rabbis reciprocated. At the probably mythical Council of Yavne, the “Nazarenes” (still the term used for Christians in modern Hebrew) were formally cursed and expelled from the Jewish community. (There probably was no single “council”. Yavne was where the Sanhedrin relocated after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. Its rabbinical school made a number of important decisions over several years, including the fixation of the canon of the Hebrew Bible.) Rabbinical Judaism never rescinded the excommunication. The history of Jews under the rule of Christians hardly encouraged the notion that the two worshipped the same God! In recent times some Christian theologians have emphasized the Jewish roots of Christianity (for example, in the assertion that God’s covenant with Israel has not been “superseded” by the new covenant with Christ’s church). And some Jewish scholars have taken a more benign view of Jesus. But the problem of Christology, summed up in Jesus’ question to his first disciples “And who do you say that I am?”, cannot be wished away by either side.

If the notion of Christians and Jews sharing a common Abrahamic faith is problematic, that of Muslims joining in as number three is more so. The most solemn affirmation of Muslim faith, the shehada, says that “There is no God but God [Allah], and Muhammad is his prophet.” A very liberal Christian might even pronounce this formula, as long as he mentally puts an indefinite article before the word “prophet”—a prophet, rather than the prophet. But such an act of interfaith concession would violate a central Islamic doctrine—that while there were prophets before Muhammad—notably Abraham, Moses and Jesus—he is “the seal of prophecy”, its final culmination. For Islam, both Judaism and Christianity, as they developed, distorted the message of these earlier prophets. Needless to say, this compliment was returned by those who have interpreted Islam as a distortion of Christianity. (Incidentally, the aforementioned liberal Christian had better be careful. In at least one version of Islamic law, there is the provision  that anyone who, whatever his intention, pronounces the shehada before witnesses, thereby becomes a Muslim. If he later changes his mind, he will be guilty of apostasy, for which the penalty is death.)

So yes, there are very distinctive differences between the three traditions. But so there are within each. Do Catholics and Protestants share a common faith? Do Sunnis and Shiah? And what about Reform and Orthodox Jews? If one looks more closely at any collective category, its alleged essence can quite easily be deconstructed, and not only when it comes to religion. Are there such creatures as “musicians”? Or “Americans”? Or, for that matter, “human beings”?  Sometimes it is a good idea to step back and look at the imputed collectivity from afar. It may help to look at the three “Abrahamic” faiths from, say, Benares, one of the most holy cities of Hinduism and near which the Buddha preached his first sermon. Looked at from that far location, the family resemblance between the three versions suddenly appears quite clearly. Hindus and Buddhists sometimes speak of “West Asian religion”, in contrast with their own “South Asian” or “East Asian” religion. It then seems just about inevitable to say that Jews, Christians and Muslims, whatever their differences, do indeed worship the same God.

To be sure, there are similarities between Benares and Jerusalem as well. There are Hindu versions of theism, with intense devotions to personal deities (bhakti), but there is no real analogue to the monotheism that originated in the deserts of the Near East. In Vedanta, arguably the most sophisticated form of Hinduism, the ultimate reality is the brahman, the impersonal ocean of divinity in which all individual identities eventually dissolve. There are theistic elements in Mahayana Buddhism, with devotion directed toward godlike boddhisatvas—individuals who have attained Enlightenment, but who, out of compassion, delay their entry into the final bliss in order to help others to get there. But that bliss too ends in that impersonal ocean of divinity that seems for many centuries to have dominated the religious imagination of India, from where it migrated eastward. One can find almost anything in a religious history that is over three thousand years old. But, once one has encountered the high points of this history, some in ancient texts but some still very much alive today, one will find the notion of Abrahamic faiths very plausible indeed. From a sophisticated Buddhist points of view, these faiths are at best forms of upaya—a Sanskrit term usually translated as “expedient means”—that is, illusions useful as crutches on the path to Enlightenment for those not yet ready for the truth. Tolerant Christians (like the Jesuit missionaries who first came to China and Japan) have reversed the patronizing concept by looking on some aspects of Buddhism as errors that may yet serve as praeparatio Evangelii—if you will, upaya stood on its head.

I have long argued that the dialogue between Jerusalem and Benares is an important task for Christian theology. It seems to me, though, that between those who say no and those who say yes to the idea of Abrahamic faiths, the latter have the better case. But this is not to reject Volf’s view that there is enough common ground between these faiths to make possible political collaboration for morally desirable ends. But there is also common ground, I think, between morally decent people of all faiths or no faith. That common ground is humanity. Jews, Christians and Muslims, the children of Abraham, believe that this humanity is part of the creation by the one God whom they worship.

Posted in Christianity, Islam, Judaism | 28 Comments
December 7, 2011

Southern Baptists Go Swimming in Lake Geneva

Peter Berger

Some years ago a sizable number of American Evangelicals, perhaps in search of a more colorful version of Christianity, became Eastern Orthodox as a group. For some reason they chose to join the American branch of the Patriarchate of Antioch, one of the most ancient Christian bodies in the world. (Its liturgical language is traditionally Arabic. You can’t get much more colorful than that.) Apparently these refugees from Billy Graham embraced their new faith with a fervor that alarmed some who were born Orthodox. People converting to Orthodoxy have been described as having gone “swimming in the Bosphorus”. It seems that now an increasing number of Evangelicals, this time Southern Baptists, are preparing to swim in the Swiss lake on whose shores John Calvin presided over his somber (hardly colorful) Protestant commonwealth.

The Christian Century, in its issue of November 15, 2011, carried a brief story about a “New Calvinism” movement within the Southern Baptist Convention. The story caught my attention, as this particular denomination seems an unlikely locale for an eruption of Calvinism. I then turned to the Associated Baptist Press, which had fuller coverage of what is indeed an interesting development.

Calvinism, often also referred to as Reformed theology, is gaining influence in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). A 2007 poll reported that 10% of its pastors now call themselves Reformed, and that 29% of recent seminary graduates do so—an intriguing portent for the future. The development was not much noticed for a while, but is now generating a lively controversy. It should be noted that, from its inception in the sixteenth century, Calvinism has come in two versions—one closely following the teachings of the founding generation, the other having significantly softened the original harshness. Both versions came to America from the various Calvinist homelands in Europe—notably Switzerland, Germany, Scotland and (very importantly) the Netherlands. The softer version has been more prevalent. What is particularly interesting is that the harsher version seems to appeal to many Baptists turned neo-Calvinists.

The original, full-bodied version of Calvinism has been symbolized by the acronym TULIP (it is probably not accidental that this is also the national flower of the Netherlands).  The first letters of the acronym stand for: Total depravity: human nature has no good features whatever;  Unmerited election: we are saved by God’s grace, which we don’t deserve; Limited atonement: not all men are saved, only the elect; Irresistible grace: we cannot resist God’s action in saving us; Perseverance of the saints: once God has placed us among the elect, we can never lose that status. Put together, these propositions add up to the so-called doctrine of double predestination—the assertion that God, from all eternity, has decided who will be saved and who will be damned. Arguably, this is the most repulsive doctrine in the history of the Christian religion. Understandably, most adherents of the Reformed tradition found it unbearable, and sought ways of softening it. Calvin and the other founders believed that no one could know whether he was or was not among the elect. However repulsive in its conception of God, this doctrine has a certain grandeur: one should serve God, not in hope of heaven or in fear of hell, but out of unconditional devotion. At least some of the early Calvinists managed to believe this. Very soon two methods were devised so that an individual could attain certitude about election by an inner experience which conveyed such certitude (the “method” from which Methodism derived its name), by the empirical fact that God has bestowed his blessings upon the individual (this is where Max Weber saw one of the roots of the “Protestant ethic” and its striving for worldly success).

Both the harsh and the soft versions of Calvinism have found defenders among Southern Baptists. Roger Olson (who teaches theology at Baylor University) wrote, “I am against any Calvinism—and any theology—that impugns the goodness of God in favor of absolute sovereignty, leading to the conclusion that evil, sin and every horror of history are planned and rendered certain by God.” Such a God would be “a moral monster”. Olson calls this “radical Calvinism”, expressing admiration for less extreme versions. The full TULIP version was defended by Michael Horton (Westminster Seminary), though he doesn’t like the terminology of the acronym: “It is impossible to read the Bible without recognizing God’s freedom to choose some and not others.” One of the most influential SBC theologians, Albert Mohler (Southern Theological Seminary), has supported Horton’s position, calling the New Calvinism “a healthy return to Southern Baptists’ historic roots”. (By the way, Mohler has elsewhere said that the death penalty is pro-life: “[It] is not about retribution. It is first of all about underlining the importance of every single human life”.)

What happens in the Southern Baptist Convention is not a marginal event. It is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States (over 16 million in number) and the second-largest Christian body after the Roman Catholic Church. It was founded in 1845 over the issue of slavery (Baptists in the South defended it, Baptists in the North opposed it). The SBC has long left behind its racist views, and it is no longer restricted to the South (there have been several moves to change its region-specific name). What characterizes it today is a robustly conservative theology—the SBC is firm in its rejection of liberal interpretations of Christianity. That much makes for an affinity with Calvinism. But Southern Baptists, along with all other Evangelicals, emphasize the free decision of individuals to be converted, to “accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior”—an idea very much opposed to double predestination. This may be called the great Evangelical “whoever”, reverberating through the long history of American revivals, reiterated with every call for people to come to the altar and confess their faith—summarized in the most quoted sentence from the Gospels: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (Luke 3:16).

How then is one to understand the New Calvinism in this improbable setting? I will venture a sociological interpretation.

In 1994 the historian Mark Noll (now on the faculty of Notre Dame) published an influential book titled The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. In it he bemoaned an anti-intellectualism that had become established in the Evangelical community. He understood this as a defensive reaction against an elite culture which was increasingly secular and which looked down on Evangelicals as backward provincials. A big change has been occurring more recently. There is a new cohort of Evangelical intellectuals, well-educated and increasingly self-confident. Some are ensconced in a nation-wide network of Evangelical institutions, but others have moved into mainstream institutions. (Noll’s own move, from Wheaton College to Notre Dame, is prototypical.)  There is a certain instructive parallel here with the new class of Jewish intellectuals, who flooded into mainstream academia and media in the 1950s (though the Evangelical development has not yet reached that level). The underlying fact, however, is the same and very simple: upward social mobility and higher education, with a concomitant decline of prejudice against the rising group. Evangelicals, including the Southern Baptists among them, have developed a more sophisticated approach to the faith, and they have looked for intellectual resources to do this. Despite the aforementioned difference, Calvinism had to be appealing in this quest. It has a great intellectual tradition, with roots in European cultures. It shares with American Evangelicals a conservative theology, a high regard for the authority of the Bible (frequently moving over into the notion of Biblical inerrancy), and a gut dislike of all liberal directions in contemporary Protestantism.

The New Calvinists have shown a particular interest in a Dutch theologian whose work seems particularly relevant to the American situation. Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) also used the term New Calvinism to define his position. He combined orthodox Calvinist theology with a strong commitment to the separation of church and state (he split with the official Dutch Reformed Church over this issue). As far as I can make out, he accepted the doctrine of predestination, but without emphasizing its negative portion (the bit about predestination to hell). He taught the sovereignty of Christ over all realms of reality, but he believed that, if grounded in a strong Christian culture, Christians could participate in a pluralist society and a democratic state. He visited America and lectured at Princeton. Kuyper founded a political party, and he was prime minister of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905. One can understand how Kuyper would appeal to Baptists, who always held a strong belief in the separation of church and state.

The soft version of Calvinism has been associated with the name of Jacob Arminius (1560-1609). The Arminians had a number of differences with Calvinist orthodoxy, prominently including a rejection of the doctrine of double predestination. They split from the orthodox Dutch Reformed Church over a number of issues, spelled out in the so-called Remonstrance of 1610. A major issue was their assertion that election was conditioned by a free choice of the will—thus rejecting the doctrine of double predestination. In 1609 (the year of Arminius’ death) an English-speaking Baptist church was established in Amsterdam. Ever since Baptists have taught the idea of “soul competency”—that is, the freedom of individuals to embrace salvation. Arminianism has exerted an enormous influence on American Protestantism—not only among groups explicitly derived from the Reformed tradition (such as Presbyterians), but on Methodists and Baptists, and indeed on all Evangelicals. Thus Mohler was not altogether wrong when he said that Baptists turning to Calvinism are returning to their “historic roots”—it just isn’t his sort of Calvinism that dwells in these roots.

These considerations suggest a prediction:  If Calvinism is to make further inroads among Southern Baptists or among any other segments of American Evangelicals, it will be in its Arminian form.

Posted in Christianity, Evangelicalism, Protestantism | 45 Comments
November 30, 2011

Natural Polytheism in China

Peter Berger

Some years ago there was a cartoon in The New Yorker showing Zeus in conversation with two other Olympian divinities. The caption read: “They call it monotheism. I call it downsizing.” Also some years ago, a Japanese philosopher (whose name I forgot) wrote that Western civilization has been dominated by two fallacies: monotheism, the belief that there is only one god; and the principle of the excluded middle, asserting that anything must be either A or non-A. He added that every reasonable person knows that there must be many gods, and that most things are both A and non-A. East Asian cultures, including both Japan and China, suffer from neither alleged fallacy and have traditionally been averse to downsizing. This may be changing, as seen in the spread of Christianity, but there persists a stubborn (let me call it) natural polytheism.

On November 9, 2011, the Religious News Service carried an item from the Huffington Post. It was a story of two thousand Han Chinese attending an academy run by the LarungGar, a very large Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Sichuan province in an area inhabited by many Tibetans. The academy claims that it normally holds about 10,000 students, most of them Tibetans. Possibly Tibetan Buddhist statistics are as unreliable as American Christian ones. But the interesting thing about this story is that a large number of Han Chinese—that is, not Tibetans but ethnic Chinese—are studying at this institution. It would be as if large numbers of Irish Catholics went to Sweden to study Lutheran theology. The Larun Gar, like many other monasteries in Tibet proper and in other areas with many ethnic Tibetans, has had difficulties with the authorities because of suspected sympathies for the Dalai Lama and his campaign for Tibetan cultural autonomy (the Beijing regime has the term “splittism” for this, a translation from the Chinese original which one may regard as a less than needed contribution to the English language). In 2001 this monastery suffered a major assault by government forces.

But there is no reason to assume that these two thousand Han visitors came to express support for the Dalai Lama. They came because they were interested in the Tibetan school of Buddhism (which is very distinctive), and not in any Tibetan political aspirations.

Buddhism was introduced into China by Indian missionaries via the Silk Road, probably in the third century BCE. It has been thoroughly indigenized and (unlike Christianity) has not been regarded as a foreign religion for a long time. It has become an important part of the Chinese cultural scene, which has generally been highly pluralistic—or, if you will, polytheistic—when it comes to religion. For much of history Buddhism has co-existed peacefully with Confucianism, Taoism and folk religion, not only in the state but in the lives of individuals, who saw no problem in making use of some or all of these traditions as this or that need arose. Confucianism in its role as a state ideology was both tolerant and contemptuous with regard to all forms of supernaturalism. The educated Confucian gentleman considered such superstitions below his dignity, but quite permissible if not actually desirable for women and other uneducated people. The Confucian magistrate was mainly concerned with controlling religion, knowing well the danger to the state from movements of charismatic excitement. Two great monotheistic religions, Christianity and Islam, did disturb the polytheistic harmony by their exclusivist claims. Islam was pretty much contained in the northwest, though in recent years Uighur separatism has created problems that could be limited to the region. Christianity has been much more successful throughout the country, and the authorities have gone back and forth between repression and toleration.

Under Communism there existed hostility against all religions, culminating in the savage onslaughts of the Cultural Revolution. The situation changed with the demise of dogmatic Maoism, with the regime less concerned with spreading “scientific atheism” than with making sure that it is in full control of religious groups—one may say,very much in the Confucian tradition. As to Buddhism, it is, like Islam, mainly a localized problem. The campaign against the “evil cult” of Falun Gong was not triggered by the supposedly superstitious practices of this quasi-Buddhist movement, but by its capacity at one point to bring thousands of adherents to Beijing, without the authorities knowing about it—an ultimate nightmare for both Communist and Confucian government officials.

It is interesting to compare the fate of religion during and after full-fledged Marxist dominance in Russia and China (as was done very competently in a book by Christopher Marsh, Religion and the State in Russia and China, 2011). Both Communist regimes propagated an atheist ideology and persecuted all religious groups, at times with very great brutality. There were differences between the religion policies of the two Communist countries, but it is in the recent period (post-Communist de jure in Russia, de facto in China) that the differences have become very sharp indeed. Since the advent of the Putin administration the Russian Orthodox Church has come very close to being the state religion—as it was before the Bolshevik revolution. No such thing in China. Instead the regime presides, in a mixture of antagonism and toleration, over a robust pluralism, which it seeks to domesticate in the service of a “harmonious society”—a truly Confucian concept. Thus the fate of religion in the two countries is a great example of what economists call “path dependence”—the weight of history over the present. This is an important phenomenon beyond the borders of any one country.

Posted in Asia, Buddhism | 6 Comments