May 16, 2012

“Most of the time I am alone with my ritual…”

Peter Berger

In the words of “Monty Python and the Flying Circus”—now for something completely different:

When I started writing this blog, I had no preconceived idea about the frequency or schedule of its postings. After a while it became clear to me that once a week was about the right frequency (since there are a few other things I do, such as trying to retain a sense of reality in the current political season). And somehow Wednesday became the day on which the week’s post goes out into the mysterious world of the blogosphere. I had not decided on this schedule; it just happened; then it became a repeated fact. As such, it has acquired what the legal philosopher Hans Kelsen called the “normative power of facticity”: If a fact stays around for a while, it produces a sense of obligation—specifically, the obligation to keep it going. This happened with my blogging Wednesday. I feel obliged to meet this deadline, I know pretty well when I must have a text ready for posting, and I get anxious if it looks as if I won’t have it on time. I am not sure whether this has become a ritual; it is certainly a habit; every habit has the potential to become a ritual. Since ritual is at the very heart of religion, and since I have assumed the obligation to blog about religion at least most of the time, the topic is not out of order here.

Forming habits is a basic requirement if human beings are going to live in a society (which in turn is a requirement for surviving as a species). Society is only possible because its members share mutually predictable programs of behavior. We are different from even our closest zoological relatives in that our biological makeup falls far short of supplying the required programs. The social philosopher Arnold Gehlen interpreted our species as being instinctually deprived, a “deficient being”. [He could also have called homo sapiens a biologically under-equipped chimpanzee, but philosophers, especially German ones, don’t use such colorful language.]  Since our instincts provide us with only a few programs of behavior, we must invent such programs ourselves. These ersatz instincts are what we call institutions (Gehlen has built a very interesting theory on this phenomenon). Let us assume that Adam and Eve, when they met for the first time, did have a built-in program driving them toward each other. Beyond this primal interaction, nature did not tell them what else they should do with each other. Consequently human beings constructed these immensely varied and complex institutions, which provide programs for tackling the problems of sexuality, procreation, child-rearing, nomenclature, the rights of property, and so on. If these institutions—we commonly call them kinship—did not exist, the rules of engagement would have to be renegotiated every time a man was attracted to a woman, down to the property rights of great-grandchildren. This process of endless renegotiation would take all available time: Nothing else would get done, including such urgent activities as agriculture and warfare. But I am digressing: Back to ritual

Ritual is, as it were, a solemnized habit. Suppose that I decided to declare myself a reincarnation of a minor Tibetan sage and started a cult in my condominium (because I finally went crazy, or because I wanted to stop paying real estate taxes). Wednesday would now become the day when, amid awe-inspiring ceremonies, I pronounced the latest bulletins from a higher realm. Habit would definitely have morphed into ritual. Also, a solitary performance would have morphed into a collective one. Much of the time rituals are solitary. The caption under one of William Steig’s best New Yorker cartoons reads “Most of the time I am alone with my ritual” (the cartoon shows a man standing by himself, juggling with a number of objects in the air). Collective rituals may occur at quite different occasions, but even when these are mundane (national celebrations, say, or academic ones), they have a religious flavor. Religion and ritual have a deep affinity. With this statement I get to the main points of this post: Ritual behavior typically occurs in the face of danger. Religion is dangerous business.

The danger may be real or imaginary. An individual getting ready for serious surgery or embarking on a dangerous journey may perform some private ritual (which others might call superstitious). Neurotics and psychotics live in illusionary worlds full of terrible perils, which are fended off ritually (for example, by avoiding stepping on certain objects, or by muttering incantations). Soldiers are prepared for the dangers of the battlefield long before they get there, by all the elaborate rituals of military life. There may well be biological roots of this behavior (for once, our simian heritage may show itself). Gorillas engage in ritual dances before attacking, as do elephants (most impressively). Konrad Lorenz, the famous observer of animal behavior, tells some wonderful stories about Martina, the goose with whom he undertook many experiments and who fell back into ritual actions whenever she became frightened.

The Latin word religio has often been linked to the verb religare—“to tie again”. Religion can then be understood as the ligature that binds a community together. Fair enough—that is indeed one of the social functions of religion. However, some Latinists have disputed this etymology, have proposed instead that religio comes from relegere—“to be careful”. In other words, religion is how one behaves in the face of very dangerous realities. Rudolf Otto, one of the great religion scholars of the twentieth century, has explicated this insight in his classical work of 1917, Das Heilige (misleadingly titled as The Idea of the Holy in the English translation—misleading because one of Otto’s key points is that the holy is not an idea but an experience). He took the Roman term for religious objects, numen, and coined the new word “numinous” in German or English. The word denotes a reality that is terrifying (mysterium tremendum), that is totally other (totaliter aliter) than ordinary life, that can destroy human beings that inadvertently touch it (like the ancient Israelites who, with no ill intent, stumbled over the Ark of the Covenant). The high point of Otto’s description of the numinous is his comparison of two of the most awesome encounters with the divine in religious scriptures—the throne vision in the Book of Isaiah and the vision of Krishna’s universal form in the Bhagavad Gita. This cross-cultural quality of religion is aptly illustrated by the first words frequently spoken by a divine being in addressing a human being—“do not be afraid”—because, of course, there is every reason to be afraid in such an encounter. In the Abrahamic traditions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—such comforting words are typically spoken by angels, the messengers of God.

If the full force of numinous experiences were permanently unleashed, ordinary life would become impossible. Social order would be destroyed. Throughout history defenses were erected to avoid such a catastrophe. The numinous must be assuaged (mostly by way of ritual); it must be limited to certain places (holy places) and times (holy days). Religious institutions are in charge of these defenses. They contain—domesticate, defang—the numinous, so that human beings can go on with the ordinary business of living. The same institutions transmit, in an attenuated form, the numinous experience to those who have not themselves encountered it in their own lives. This mediation can certainly be powerful, but nowhere near the power of an angel’s speech.

Rainer Maria Rilke, in the first poem of the Duino Elegies, wrote: “Every angel is terrible”.  There is an Islamic hadith (an authoritative tradition) about what the Prophet Muhammad did after the angel had for the first time spoken to him on Mount Hira. It tells that he ran down from the mountain, all the way to his house in the city of Mecca, and said to his wife Khadija—“Hide me, hide me, so that he will not find me again!” Khadija is called “the first Muslim”, because she believed Muhammad.

Posted in Culture, Inter-faith Dialogue, Islam | 2 Comments
May 9, 2012

If it’s December, I’m Presbyterian

Peter Berger

On April 13, 2012 Religion News Service carried a story about Andrew Bowen, a 29-year old resident of Lumberton, North Carolina. Throughout the year 2011 he practiced a different religion each month—Hindu in January, Baha’i in February, Zoroastrian in March, and so on. Bowen had what he called a teenage experience of “Christian fundamentalism”. Married with two children, he and his wife lost a third child—an event which plunged him into a crisis of faith. The story does not explain how he hit on the idea of this very original interfaith experiment. Each month he would spend the first two weeks reading up on the designated faith, then turning for the next two weeks to whatever rituals or other practices went with the faith. In each case he chose a “mentor” to initiate him into the scheduled religion. Since Lumberton had limited facilities for a hands-on curriculum in comparative religion, Bowen had to go far afield in his search for instructors (the one for Zoroastrianism lived in Chicago). Following the curriculum turned out to be a full-time job, since it involved intense changes in lifestyle in addition to all the reading. The story was illustrated by photos showing Bowen with a turban and what looks like a sword (the Sikh month?), sporting a Wiccan symbol, and sitting in a yoga position. He stopped working for the year and the family was supported by his wife Heather, who is a nurse (and a Baptist). At first she was not thrilled by her husband’s idiosyncratic experiment, but she says that she came to respect and even benefit from it. Heather’s least thrilling month was November, when Bowen lived as a Jain monk, meditating wrapped in his grandmother’s sheets and carrying a broom to whisk away tiny creatures that might be inadvertently swallowed (following the Jain version of a “culture of life”); worst of all, he did not bathe for the month.

Bowen did not actually convert to any of the faiths he serially tried out, although he continues with some of the practices (he meditates daily and occasionally attends Catholic services). What he claims to have achieved is a measure of peace and a renewed respect for human diversity.

Scholars of religion might want to look down on this do-it-yourself exercise in ecumenicity, calling it superficial or misleading. I think that such an attitude would be a mistake. Bowen’s experiment was a genuine quest for truth after a profound personal crisis. It merits respect. Of course one month of even intense immersion is not enough for an adequate grasp of major religious traditions, some of which embody many centuries of human experience and thought. But one should not underestimate the gain from even short-term theological tourism. I spent considerably less than a month on my one visit to Nepal, but I did acquire a sense of its distinctive synthesis of Hinduism and Buddhism. Beyond respecting Bowen, his story is emblematic of American religious pluralism and instructive for understanding the latter.

I have long ago come to the conclusion that the empirical evidence has falsified so-called secularization theory—the notion that modernity necessarily brings about a decline in religion. Secularization theory should be replaced by a theory of plurality—a situation in which many religions co-exist and interact with each other. Readers of this blog have not promised to become familiar with everything I have ever written about religion (which would fall under the constitutional prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment). All the same, I cannot here develop the proposed pluralization theory. Except to simply state its two principal components, one on the level of religious institutions, the other on the level of individual consciousness. On the level of institutions:  In the pluralistic situation every religious institution, which it likes this or not, becomes a voluntary association. Max Weber, one of the fathers of the sociology of religion, distinguished between two institutional forms of religion—the “church”, into which one is born, and the “sect”, which one joins as an adult. The historian Richard Niebuhr suggested that American history has created (presumably inadvertently) a third form of religious institution—the “denomination”, which in many ways looks like a “church”, but which one nevertheless freely joins and belongs to, and which is in competition with other religious bodies. On the level of consciousness, religion loses its taken-for-granted quality, instead becomes a matter of individual decision. The peculiarly American term “religious preference” nicely catches both levels. Put differently, the challenge of secularity, where it exists (it does in some places, notably in Europe), is that there is an absence of gods; the challenge of plurality is that there are too many gods.

When there is a combination of religious plurality with a political system which guarantees freedom of religion, what comes about is, precisely, Niebuhr’s denominationalism. For well-known historical reasons, America has been in the vanguard of such a development. Its emergence in many parts of the world today has usually little to do with American influences, but is the result of the above-mentioned combination of a social and a political fact. Andrew Bowen has, in exemplary fashion, re-enacted this historical drama.

In the pluralistic situation every religion becomes a denomination—even Judaism, which is both a religion and a people, into which, by definition, one is born. In America Judaism has been born again (I choose the phrase deliberately) in at least three denominations.

Last year I happened to come on a Hindu temple in central Texas. It is a large, unmistakably Indian building, plucked down in the heart of the Bible Belt. In India most temples are dedicated to one or two gods, depending on the location. This is not practical in America, where immigrants come from different parts of India. The Texas temple has a large space where everyone can join in common worship (on important holidays hundreds of people come from all over the Southwest). But then there are eight or nine small chapels, where people can connect with the god or goddess of their preference—denominationalism objectified in architecture. A colleague of mine has been teaching a college course titled “Introduction to Hinduism”. She thought that the students would be Americans of any background interested in Indian religion. To her surprise most of the students were of Indian ethnic background, mostly very ignorant of Hinduism. When asked why they had registered for the course, several of them said that they wanted to find out who they are. Logically, this sentence does not make sense: If one is something, one need not find out what the something is; if one has to engage in a project of finding out, then, almost by definition, one is not that something. But sociologically, the sentence is remarkably descriptive: These young Americans want to have information that will help them to decide whether and how they want to be Hindus.

Posted in Religion, Secularism, United States | 9 Comments
May 2, 2012

Capital Punishment and the Deficit

Peter Berger

Reading the New York Times at breakfast is more than a habit. It is a sort of addiction. One experiences withdrawal symptoms in places where the paper is not available (especially when the only alternative is USA Today). At least in this country, the Times has no serious rival for good international news coverage, by some of the best journalists around. The editorial page is another matter, a predictable assortment of politically correct opinions. [Relevant joke: What will be the very last headline of the New York Times? – “World Ends Tomorrow: Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals and Transgendered Persons Hit Hardest.”] I rarely agree with a Times editorial. I did on April 13, 2012. The editorial was headed “More Evidence Against the Death Penalty”. The conclusion, with which I strongly agree, was that “Capital punishment… should be abolished throughout the United States.” I do have some questions about the “overwhelming evidence” cited in support of the conclusion.

The editorial was triggered by the news item that Connecticut has just voted to abolish the death penalty, thus becoming the 17th state without the penalty and the 5th to abolish it in the last five years. There is now a growing movement in this direction. Repeal measures are being prepared in California, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky and Washington, and death penalty laws are under review in Ohio, Oregon and Pennsylvania. If this movement continues, there is some chance that the United States may cease to be the exception among Western democracies in its enthusiasm for capital punishment. According to Amnesty International, which keeps abreast of this matter, the US is among the 22% of member nations of the United Nations who retain the death penalty both in law and in practice (quite a few have it on the books, but fail to use it). In 2011 the US was the only country in the Americas to have carried out executions. In 2010 it occupied the fifth place in the number of executions carried out (46). Only four countries were ahead of the US—China (2,000 executions), Iran (250), North Korea (60), Yemen (53). A noble company, one might say. As is well known, no country can be a member of the European Union if it retains the death penalty, and the US difference has been an important contribution to anti-Americanism in both Europe and Latin America.

According to Gallup, there have been ups and downs in public opinion concerning capital punishment (possibly related to varying degrees of fear of crime). As of 2010, 64% of Americans were in favor, though there has been some movement toward favoring abolition. This is greatly increased if life imprisonment without parole is offered as an alternative. In any case, the legislative trend is clearly not a response to a big shift in public opinion, but rather a development within the political class. Since this blog has a religion focus, it should be mentioned that support for the death penalty correlates negatively with degree of religious involvement – 65% in favor among those who attend services weekly or more, 69% among those who attend monthly, 71% of those who attend rarely or never. There are interesting differences as between religious groups – 71% of Protestants are in favor of the death penalty, 65% of Catholics, 57% of those with no religious preference. There has been a notable decline in support among Catholics (possibly due to recent teachings about a “culture of life” by the Catholic Church). Across all denominations, Christian as well as Jewish, religious conservatives are more in favor of the death penalty than religious liberals. Not surprisingly, this difference is very visible within Protestantism—among clergy and lay people, and in official positions of church bodies. All mainline Protestant churches have made abolitionist statements, while Evangelical churches (notably the Southern Baptist Convention) have supported retention. Again not surprisingly, the (liberal) Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has come out for abolition, the (conservative) Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod for retention. The ancient affinity between priests and hangmen has not completely disappeared; this is not the place to repeat what I have written elsewhere on this unfortunate phenomenon.

But back to the development commented upon in the Times editorial: What are the arguments made in the current legislative debates? There is the argument that the death penalty is grossly unjust, being imposed disproportionally on the poor and on racial minorities. Thus 35% of executions since 1976 were suffered by African-Americans (currently 12.6% of the population). And there have been many reports of blunders made by court-appointed defense counsels for indigent defendants. There has been a disturbing number of cases where death row inmates were freed as a result of DNA evidence (leading to the reasonable supposition that they were the lucky ones, while others were executed in the absence of such evidence). Yet these facts have been acknowledged by those in favor of capital punishment, only used to call for more stringent procedures.

We live in an era of government deficit. Thus the major argument in favor of abolition has not been for the reasons just mentioned, and even less on grounds of the inhumanity of capital punishment, but quite prosaically because of its cost. According to one study, since 1978 (when a more extended application of the death penalty was enacted) the state of California spent about $4 billion in order to carry out 13 executions. I suppose this could be seen as a rather bizarre proof that the legal system is reluctant to execute, therefore giving a defendant ample time for appeal. Be this as it may, the cost is clearly huge. Donald Heller, who helped draft the ballot initiative which led to the 1978 law, now calls for another ballot to repeal the penalty: “The cost of our system of capital punishment is so enormous that any benefit that could be obtained from it… is so dollar wasteful that it serves no effective purpose.”  Suppose that the cost/benefit analysis came out differently: Would we then drop any opposition to capital punishment?  Or suppose that the routine use of torture by the police greatly reduced the crime rate and its great cost, would we then endorse the practice?

Whatever morally neutral arguments may be used in public debate, the basic motive for abolition is moral: It is the conviction that capital punishment is an intrinsically inhuman barbarity. [Full disclosure: I fully share this conviction.] Thus a moral conviction, and not any arguments about economics or unfairness, led to the abolition of the death penalty throughout a Europe still under the shadow of the monstrous inhumanity of Nazi power. Two passionate books by famous authors were influential in the debate about this—Arthur Koestler’s Reflections on Hanging (1956) in Britain and Albert Camus’ Reflections on the Guillotine (1957) in France. [It is significant that Koestler narrowly escaped execution by the Franco forces in Spain, and that Camus was active in the Resistance in Nazi-occupied France.]

Opponents of capital punishment might wish that similar moral arguments, rather than economic calculations, would lead to the end of capital punishment in the United States. However, it is results rather than purity of motive that finally matter in what Max Weber called the ”ethic of responsibility”.  Quite frequently in history morally desirable changes occurred for reasons that had nothing to do with morality: How important in the abolition of slavery was the insight that keeping slaves was more expensive than employing free labor? How many South African businessmen turned against apartheid because it was ruining the economy, rather than because they were impressed by sermons on racial equality? And must one deplore if some east European states are improving their treatment of minorities in accordance with European Union law, not because they are sorry about past atrocities, but because that is a condition of obtaining EU subsidies?  History is not an ongoing seminar in moral philosophy. This does not mean that moral considerations play no role; it does mean that, much of the time, it is more effective to appeal to interests rather than conscience.

Posted in Christianity, Culture, Europe, Politics, United States | 19 Comments
April 25, 2012

Cursing Is Legal (at least, for now, in Texas…)

Peter Berger

On April 6, 2012, Religion News Service carried a story originally reported in the Dallas Morning News. Judge Martin Hoffman, of the Dallas district court, dismissed a lawsuit brought by Mikey Weinstein against Gordon Klingenstein. Weinstein, a former Air Force lawyer, is an avowed atheist and founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which opposes what it claims to be unconstitutional religious activities in the armed forces. Klingenstein is a former Navy chaplain and an ordained minister of the Dallas-based Full Gospel Church, a very conservative Protestant congregation. What led to the lawsuit was the fact that Klingenstein had made public a so-called “imprecatory prayer” directed against Weinstein—that is, a prayer that asks God to harm somebody.

People of Klingenstein’s theological orientation like to claim Biblical warrants for any of their views. The New Testament is not without invocations of God’s wrath against those who reject the Gospel, but the Old Testament is a richer source. A favorite source is Psalm 109, in which God is asked to do any number of terrible things to an enemy of the psalmist: “May his days be few; may another seize his goods! May his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow! May his children wander about and beg; may they be driven out of the ruins they inhabit!”—and so on and on for many more verses. The Dallas story does not tell in detail just what misfortunes God was asked to inflict on Weinstein in the prayer at issue, but Klingenstein apparently quoted Psalm 109. The solemn pronouncement of curses against enemies could not have been an unusual occurrence in ancient Israel, for we are told in Deuteronomy 11 that two mountains (near today’s Nablus) were officially designated for two distinct religious ceremonies—Mount Gerizim for blessings, Mount Ebal for curses. It seems that some conservative Protestant preachers have uttered solemn curses against President Obama—also against the Internal Revenue Service (that one, I think, could acquire broad bipartisan support!).

It is not difficult to figure out why Weinstein might be considered a plausible candidate for a malediction from Mount Ebal. One just has to go to the website of his Foundation and read its motto: “When one proudly dons a U.S. Military uniform, there is only one religious symbol: the American flag. There is only one religious scripture: the American Constitution. Finally, there is only one religious faith: American patriotism.” If one wanted a definition of blasphemy from a traditional Christian (or Jewish, or Muslim) point of view, this text would do. Many people in America take blasphemy seriously, and some are not content to leave retribution to God. Quite a few unpleasant things have been happening to Weinstein and his family—death threats, vandalism, a dead animal left outside the house. The legal issue came down to the question whether Klingenstein’s curse caused these actions.

Judge Hoffman ruled that such causation could not be established. Klingenstein did not drag, or enjoined others to drag, the carcass to Weinstein’s house, or did not otherwise directly threaten or harm him. Therefore, the curse fell under the category of protected speech. Apparently an appeal is being planned. But for the time being, cursing people is legal in Texas.

There are a few things to be noted about this episode. As far as I can tell, Judge Hoffman’s ruling follows an established tradition in American law: Speech, no matter how offensive or hurtful, is protected under the first amendment—unless it directly threatens or harms the targeted individuals. A classical case for this legal doctrine was the 1977 incident in Skokie, Illinois, where the United States Supreme Court ruled that a group that called itself the National Socialist Party of America had the right to parade with full Nazi regalia through the streets of this largely Jewish suburb of Chicago—despite the fact that one in six inhabitants was a Holocaust survivor. The same doctrine was invoked when the Supreme Court ruled that a Protestant fundamentalist group had the right to demonstrate at military funerals with the message that God was punishing America for its sins—despite the fact that this action inflicted great hurt to the grieving families. I wonder whether this doctrine will come unglued, as the new concept of “hate speech” makes its way through the courts: Could not an atheist claim that a ceremonial curse constitutes “hate speech”? There is also the delicious irony in the fact that, if Weinstein had stipulated that a curse in the name of God could have real effects in the empirical world, he might not have won in a Texas court in 2012, but he would surely have won in a Salem, Massachusetts court in 1692—though thereby implicitly denying his atheist worldview. (Of course both defendant and plaintiff might have been hanged eventually, the former for witchcraft, the latter for atheism.) Needless to say, he would also have won for many centuries in any court in so-called Christendom. (Incidentally, the British law against witchcraft was only revoked in 1951.)

The Dallas case raises interesting questions of free speech and religious freedom. But for the moment I just want to make one different point: The court assumed that the curse itself was ineffective—not as a point in law, but as a matter of fact. I think that this points to an interesting phenomenon: America (as, for example, compared with Europe) is not a highly secularized society—certainly not in Texas. But, as a result of a number of historical developments, there has developed a secular public discourse—in the legal system, as well as in a number of other important institutions. The history of this has been traced in a much discussed book edited by Christian Smith, The Secular Revolution (2003). I tend to view this development as the quest for a “formula of peace” for the management of an increasingly pluralistic society. This secular discourse co-exists with any number of religious discourses. The co-existence has been generally successful, though with intermittent conflicts (in recent years accentuated by the “culture wars”). The secular discourse functions in everyday life as providing a sort of naturalist default explanation for anything that may have a supernatural flavor; even religious people have immediate recourse to explanations free of any supernatural implications,  even though they may also believe that God intervenes in the matter at issue. (For all I know, Judge Hoffman is a fervent Baptist believer—a belief he must bracket while he sits on the bench—or has a cup of coffee with an  agnostic neighbor.)

Most of us, however religious we may be, operate at first, especially in public life, within a discourse which the scholastics called “etsi Deus non daretur”—“as if God were not given”. Later on, best of all in the company of fellow believers, we may feel free to switch to a discourse in which God is very much “given”. In the matter of curses, I think, most of us today gravitate toward naturalist explanations: If an individual is under a curse, and knows it, he may indeed become sick—but the sickness is psychosomatic—or the sickness can be explained, curse or no curse, by contact with a source of infection—or, simplest of all explanations, there is such a thing as coincidence. Naturalist explanations can take us a long way. Sometimes, though, doubt creeps in.

An old anthropologist friend of mine, Richard Lieban, did research on witchcraft around Cebu in the central Philippines. (A book which describes some of this research is Cebuano Sorcery, 1967). He was returning from one of his field trips via Europe, and we happened to meet up in Paris. I remembered an evening we spent together. It was in the summer, and we sat in an outdoor café. Lieban told one story after another about his adventures with sorcerers. One point he made had to do with specialization—some sorcerers specialized in blessings, others in curses, with various sub-specialties in each category (rather like practitioners of modern medicine—don’t expect a cardiologist to suggest a treatment for your arthritis). Needless to say, the malevolent sorcerers (who did black magic) were more interesting than the benign ones (the specialists in white magic). It was getting late and quite dark as Lieban went on about the former group. He told about people who were cursed and fell very ill. Some of them died. I asked him the obvious (naturalist) question: Did they know that they had been cursed? He did not answer right away. He looked troubled. Then he replied: “Not always”.

Posted in Religion, Secularism | 7 Comments
April 18, 2012

The Long Reach of the Protestant Parsonage in Germany?

Peter Berger

The German presidency is a largely ceremonial office, though its incumbent is supposed to represent the political virtues of the Federal Republic. Thus the scandal forcing the recent resignation from the presidency of Christian Wulff on February 17, 2012, while closely followed (and perhaps caused) by the German media, was not much noticed abroad. Nor are the details of this political drama very interesting. (It is unclear at this point whether Wulff did anything illegal by an unbecoming lifestyle of luxury and close associations with wealthy friends, but he was widely perceived as not living up to the high moral expectations of his office.) What is more interesting beyond the domestic politics is the background of his chosen successor—Joachim Gauck, a former Lutheran pastor from East Germany. In 2010, when the office of president fell open, Gauck had been widely supported to occupy it. But he was opposed by Angela Merkel, the chancellor, who pushed through the candidacy of Wulff, a not very distinguished politician of the CDU (Merkel’s party). When Gauck’s candidacy resurfaced two years later and was supported by all the mainstream parties, including a strong group in the CDU, Merkel had to swallow the (presumably unpalatable) pill of joining the supporters. It is unlikely that this small defeat tarnished Merkel’s reputation as the most powerful woman in Europe, not much loved but feared throughout the continent (and loathed in Greece for her compulsory diet of fiscal sauerkraut).

However, there are two aspects of this development that are of interest to outside observers of Germany who do not follow the ups and downs of its domestic politics. With Gauck as president and Merkel continuing as chancellor, the two most prominent political figures in Germany will be individuals who grew up in East Germany under Communism. This may do something to assuage the inferiority feelings of Easterners (the so-called “Ossis”). But there is another aspect that interests me here: Both individuals are products of an institution with great cultural significance in German history—the Protestant parsonage.

Joachim Gauck, aged 72, is the son of a sea captain, who was arrested by the Soviet occupation authorities and deported to a labor camp in Siberia, from where he returned after many years in impaired health. The younger Gauck has described this event as indelibly shaping his political outlook, making him an unbending enemy of all forms of totalitarianism and a fierce advocate of democracy. He became a Lutheran pastor, not an easy occupation in East Germany at the time. He also became active as an advocate for human rights, and a founder of the New Forum, an opposition group that played a part in the collapse of the Communist regime. After the re-unification, from 1992 to 2000, Gauck became director of the Stasi Archive, which collected and opened to the public the papers of the East German security service (the Stasi). He has described himself as a “liberal conservative”, with views that have made him acceptable across the German political spectrum, with the exception of the far left, Die Linke, the only party in parliament which opposed his candidacy—and which contains an element given to nostalgia about the Communist past (Ostalgie). His personal life testifies to his conservative liberality—separated from his wife, he has been living with what in Germany is called a “life partner”, with a feminine suffix (Lebensgefaehrtin). Some of his political friends have reputedly urged him to marry her as he moves into the presidential palace. (Combining liberalism and conservatism in one’s political positioning is often difficult—and, God knows, not only in Germany.)

Angela Merkel, aged 57, is the daughter of a Lutheran pastor. She grew up in a rural parsonage north of Berlin. Children of clergy were discriminated against under the Communist regime, and generally barred from higher education. Young Merkel must have been very conscious of her politically suspect background, though her father belonged to the group in the church that eschewed opposition to the regime in favor of accommodation (the slogan at the time was “the church in a socialist society”/”Kirche im Sozialismus”—a phrase that could either mean ideological sympathy or just realistic strategy). This fact apparently allowed Merkel to attend university, where she obtained a degree in chemistry. She only became active politically after the re-unification—in the right-of-center CDU (which supposedly annoyed her left-leaning father). She became a protégé of Chancellor Kohl and rapidly rose in the party. She has been federal chancellor since 2005. I have seen no information about Merkel’s own religious beliefs or practices (though we know that she is very respectably married to a fellow-chemist, who does not meddle in politics).

Merkel and Gauck share a background of Protestant life in Communist East Germany. To what extent has this background shaped their worldview and their overall lifestyle? I don’t think that I know enough about these two individuals to answer the question—though it is hard to believe that the conditions under which one lived during one’s formative years leave no traces in one’s later life. In the event, one can take an individual out of a Lutheran parsonage—I doubt whether one can take the parsonage out of the individual. The powerful language of Luther’s German translation of the Bible and the powerful music of Lutheran hymnody must inevitably reverberate even in the consciousness of individuals whose ties with the Lutheran church have frayed. But we do know a lot about the story of that church in the so-called German Democratic Republic, and in East Germany since then. It is an interesting and somewhat puzzling story.

The ideology of the DDR was an aggressively atheist Marxism. Religious institutions were closely watched by the Stasi. Clergy and active lay people were harassed, frequently arrested, treated as second-class citizens. As a result religion existed in a barely tolerated subculture, tightly contained and periodically persecuted. Because of the exigencies of German religious history, the population of the DDR was mostly Protestant. By the very nature of its pariah status, the Protestant church inadvertently maintained (as it were, preserved in amber) not only a particular religious tradition, but the bourgeois culture with which it had been historically linked. Visitors to the DDR were regularly impressed by the old-fashioned appearance of its urban landscape—socialist neglect had kept away the frenetic modernization of West German cities and towns. But equally impressive was the preservation of bourgeois values and habits, equally old-fashioned by Western standards—not only in the Protestant quasi-ghetto, but especially there. Most Protestant congregations did not actively oppose the regime. Nevertheless, they constituted oases of an older, different culture in the desert of official Communist institutions. Since the Protestant church was the only institution with a degree of tolerated autonomy, it very naturally became the main locale of political opposition in the late 1980s. The regime change was inaugurated by the huge demonstrations that first emerged from the historic Thomaskirche in Leipzig (where Johann Sebastian Bach had been organist). When the regime finally collapsed in 1989, some people spoke of “a Protestant revolution”—prematurely, as things turned out. In the final years of the DDR and the first years after re-unification, a number of church-related individuals, including pastors, became politically prominent. Merkel and Gauck were not the only ones. But the role of the church diminished rapidly in the 1990s. Today the territory of the former DDR and the Czech Republic constitute the most thoroughly secularized region in Central Europe. (The Austrian sociologist Paul Zulehner has described them as two countries in which atheism is the established religion.) Why this is so is an intriguing question, but I cannot pursue it here.

A few years ago I heard a lecture by a historian about the role of the Protestant parsonage in German cultural history. The role was quite remarkable. A disproportionate number of writers, scholars and artists were the children of Protestant pastors. But the Protestant parsonage, the Pfarrhaus, was a focus of education and cultural activity beyond the family that inhabited it, especially in smaller towns and villages. The parsonage radiated the distinctive “Protestant ethic” to which Max Weber ascribed an important causal role in the genesis of modern capitalism—personal discipline, soberness, honesty, a penchant for orderliness. Did all good Protestants live that way? Of course they did not. (Deservedly or not, pastors’ daughters had a reputation for sexual laxity.) Did this ethic have negative aspects? Of course it did. It could be stuffy and stultifying, and its penchant for orderliness often led to a supine respect for authority, any authority. Yet many of the greatest cultural achievements in German history had Protestant, specifically Lutheran roots. In the aforementioned lecture this parsonage culture was described as a phenomenon that was past. Probably correctly, the lecturer ascribed this in large part to the changing role of women: Educated women married to pastors increasingly pursued professional careers of their own, and were unwilling to just be helpers of their husbands in keeping the Pfarrhaus going. I was impressed by the fact that in the discussion after the lecture (which took place in Berlin under the auspices of a Lutheran foundation) no one was interested in asking whether, in a society with a high degree of gender equality, an institution of comparable cultural influence could be invented.

With the incorporation of the former DDR into the Federal Republic, Germany has become a more Protestant country in demographic terms. But there has been no lasting “Protestant revolution”. West Germany is somewhat less secularized than the East, but it too partakes of the overall Eurosecularity. It seems likely that the parsonage still resonates, even if faintly, in the minds of Angela Merkel and Joachim Gauck. Does this mean a new cultural influence of the Protestant church? Probably not. More likely what we hear are the last echoes of a Bach chorale that has ended. All the same, it is useful to recall that history always has surprises.

Posted in Europe, Protestantism | 11 Comments
April 11, 2012

American Politics and the Structure of Betrayals

Peter Berger

When the nice people at The American Interest invited me to start a blog on religion, they said that, if so moved from time to time, I could write on other topics. Mostly I have not been so moved. I am now. As I watch, with more or less appalled fascination, the unfolding circus of our presidential election, two recent incidents have caught my attention. (I may add that my observations about this are rigorously non-partisan—I could make them regardless of whether I favor President Obama or any of his Republican opponents;  I do have a preference, but it is quite irrelevant here.) The two incidents do not directly involve religion. They do involve morality. Arguably morality and religion have something to do with each other.

The first incident, widely reported, occurred at a recent international conference as Obama was conversing with outgoing Russian President Medvedev. They were talking about the differences between the United States and Russia on missile defense. Obama did not notice that the mic was open as he made the following remarks: He asked Medvedev to deliver a message to incoming President Putin—the latter was to give Obama some “space”, since he would have greater “flexibility” in this matter after the November election. Apart from the fact that Obama apparently expects to win the election, there is an interesting implication here (which of course Republicans have pounced upon): In order to win the election, Obama must deal with opposition in Congress and with an American public which is somewhere in the middle on most issues. After winning the election and not being able to run again, he would indeed be more flexible. Of course some people have wondered what else he would then be more flexible about—specifically, on other issues that most people are more concerned about than missile defense. But there is a less complimentary way of describing his situation: Although Obama has relied very much on his “base” (the left wing of the Democratic party) in his actions as president (just think of the partisan way in which he pushed the health bill through Congress), he has also given the appearance of being at heart a pragmatist inclined toward the middle (much to the disappointment of some in the “base”). Once re-elected, though, there would be no need to seek compromises with the Republican opposition or to curry favor with middle-of-the-road voters. In other words, Obama is really a man of the left at heart, but after the election, he will be able to betray those who voted for him as a man of the middle.

The second incident, also widely reported, occurred when Eric Fehrnstrom, a key advisor to Mitt Romney, made an ill-advised reference to a children’s toy called “Etch-a-Sketch” in speaking about the notion that Romney has gone too far to the right in trying to appease his “base”, namely the right wing of the Republican party. (I have never seen this toy. I don’t know anyone who has. But I take it that you can write something on it and then erase it.)  Once nominated, he would be freed from this burden and able, indeed compelled, to move toward the middle. This is how Fehrnstrom described the post-nomination situation: “Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch-a-Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and we start all over again”. A more kindly interpretation of this less than grammatical utterance would be that Romney is a man of the middle at heart and, until nominated, must make all these conservative noises. But after the nomination and going into the general election, he will be able to betray those who voted for him as a man of the right.

My intention here is not to cast moral aspersions on either Obama or Romney. I don’t know what either man truly believes. But both Obama and Romney’s advisor were quite simply describing the reality of American politics. Betrayal is not (or not only) a reprehensible choice by a politician. There really is no politically realistic choice. Betrayal is built into the very structure of the political reality. In order to be nominated and elected, a candidate for office, sooner or later, must betray somebody. By definition, he or she can only betray his or her friends. By definition, one cannot betray those who are not friends. (I have written “he or she” and “his or her”, not to conform to feminist syntax, but to emphasize that gender makes no difference here.)

I am not sure whether this structure of betrayals exists in other democracies. The American primary system guarantees it. A candidate must rely on a “base” to be nominated. These are the people who write cheques, who come to rallies, who canvass and make phone calls. Oscar Wilde once remarked, “The trouble with socialism is that it takes away all your free evenings”; the same can be said about all political activists. Most people have other things to occupy their evenings—family, friends, hobbies, vices. Given the primary system, the activists must be kept happy until the nomination has been achieved; they are rather less important as the general election looms. Then all these other people, the ones who don’t normally fill their evenings with politics, must be appealed to. Like most Americans, they are “moderates”, in the middle on most issues. What is more, it is very difficult to govern without support from the middle. This is so despite the much lamented “polarization”. Most Americans are not particularly polarized, not even on the hot button issues of the so-called “culture war”. The activists are polarized. Inevitably, they drive the political process. I am not a historian of American politics; I don’t know to what extent the situation today is uniquely polarized. Even stipulating that it is, the structure described here antedates it.

Are there remedies? Barring a serious national crisis, there is the chance that a rising disgust with uncompromising partisanship will mobilize “moderates”, even including activists, to push both parties toward the middle. Pragmatic party leaders may reassert control over unruly elements (the good old smoke-filled back rooms might be happily resurrected, even without the now banned smoke). Open primaries might help. But it seems likely that the structure of betrayals will not change in the near future. We may have to live with it for quite some time. There are worse things. And, when all is said and done, American democracy is still one of the best political arrangements around.

Religion comes back here as one tries to assess this state of affairs morally. I am not saying anything original if I assert that the long shadow of Puritan morality is still with us. It has been largely left behind when it comes to sexual morality (though many of our sexual liberationists exhibit a lot of Puritan zeal in their propaganda). Puritanism is alive and well in politics. America is still supposed to be a morally pure ”city on the hill”. Every campaign, domestic or foreign, becomes a crusade. The lesson taught by Reinhold Niebuhr about the inherent impurity of political reality has still not been truly learned, though he is often quoted. Those of us who mostly watch politics from the sidelines should not expect too much of our politicians. Those who are active politicians (assuming that they have moral concerns at all) must, I think, decide which betrayals are an acceptable price to pay for whatever good purposes they want to achieve. They might also ponder the statement by Machiavelli that a ruler must be prepared to risk the salvation of his soul for the good of the city.

Posted in Morality, Politics | 14 Comments
April 4, 2012

Death of a Theologian

Peter Berger

William Hughes Hamilton died on February 28, 2012, aged 87. His passing was barely noted in the media, a fact both sad and instructive. Along with a small group of other individuals, he attained sudden celebrity status in the 1960s as one of the founders of the so-called “death of God theology”. The phrase had all the makings of a classic man-bites-dog story, so it is not surprising that in April 1966 it appeared on the cover of Time magazine with the caption “Is God dead?” At that time Hamilton was on the faculty of Colgate-Rochester Divinity School, in upstate New York. As public attention engulfed Hamilton, he confronted a wave of hostility, both by colleagues and in the Presbyterian church where he worshipped with his family. He found a more friendly haven elsewhere, first at the progressive New College in Sarasota, Florida, and later at Portland State University in Oregon (where he taught for many years until his retirement).

When the “death of God theology” burst onto the American religious scene, it was perceived by many people as the most cutting-edge Christian response to the spirit of modernity. The impact was very short-lived, which reminds one (perhaps uncharitably) of an observation by William Ralph Inge, the late Dean of St.Paul’s Cathedral, to the effect that “he who marries the spirit of the age soon finds himself a widower”. Be this as it may, Hamilton was one of the three central individuals in the founding group, along with Thomas Altizer and Paul van Buren; a Jewish associate of the group was Richard Rubenstein. They all agreed that the traditional God of the Biblical tradition was no longer credible. Hamilton believed that Christians should forget about the hope of heaven, instead concentrate on understanding this world and doing good in it, thus presumably following the moral teachings of Jesus. I think it is fair to say that Altizer was the intellectually most interesting member of the group. He understood the death of God as a cosmic process of God’s emptying himself into the world he created; an ancient Christian term for this has been the kenosis of God, his voluntary humiliation in order to redeem the fallen world. Altizer saw the culminating of the kenosis in the crucifixion of Jesus—at which point God merges with the natural world and no longer confronts it as a transcendent being. (Kenosis, by the way, has a certain resemblance with the idea of tsimtsum in Jewish mysticism—God contracts himself in order to make room for the world. It is in that sense that God died.)

This is pretty heavy stuff. It is not to denigrate them if one says that Hamilton and van Buren have a simpler understanding of the “death of God”. Hamilton insisted that he was not an atheist, that he considered himself a follower of Jesus, no matter whether one understood Jesus as divine. He never changed his mind about this. In a 2007 interview he said: “The ‘death of God’ is a metaphor. We needed to redefine Christianity as a possibility without the presence of God.” The “possibility” here is a moral, not a transcendent one. Van Buren became strongly engaged in Christian-Jewish dialogue, and became affiliated with an institution in Jerusalem interested in this dialogue. He did not like the phrase “death of God theology”, preferring to call his approach “secular theology”. He and Hamilton, more so than Altizer, were very much in the American tradition of liberal Protestantism. Rubenstein came to the “death of God” by way of the idea that one could not believe in the Biblical God in the wake of the Holocaust; logically enough this led him in the direction of heterodox mysticism. (It is not without interest that the idea of tsimtsum comes from the teaching of Isaac Luria, the 16th-century founder of the Safed school of kabbalah. Luria taught God’s exile from the world—that is, his absence—in the wake of an earlier catastrophe in history, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain.)

The phrase “death of God” is of course derived from Friedrich Nietzsche. It occurs in an early work of his, The Cheerful Science” (1882). (The German title, Die froehliche Wissenschaft” was originally rendered in English as The Gay Science”. For obvious reasons this would be rather misleading today.)  A character identified as The Madman proclaims the death of God from “the scaffolding of the universe”: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us?…. Must we not ourselves become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” In his later work, especially in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche sought to answer these terrible questions with his evocation of the “Overman” (Uebermensch).

Nietsche was a pivotal figure. Dying on the very cusp of the 20th century, he has had a multifaceted influence on Western thought ever since. As is only to be expected, the influence affected both profound and trivial successors. Paradoxically, the “death of God” theology had roots in the profound thought of the father of Protestant neo-orthodoxy, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth. (Van Buren studied in Basel with Barth, who would have been appalled if he had read what his student wrote later on.) Especially in his early work, which set the feisty tone of the neo-orthodox movement, Barth asserted that Christian faith is the very opposite of all religion: Religion is the human attempt to invent God; the Gospel is God’s unmediated address to humans, all of whose outreaching toward God is sinful illusion. (One must not forget that Barth came out of Calvinism, the most radically transcendent tradition in Christian history.) Thus Barth had no problem with even the fiercest critics of the Christian religion, of whom Nietzsche was certainly one. Another source of the “death of God theology” was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the great martyrs of 20th-century Protestantism—he was the Protestant theologian executed by the Nazi regime for his connection with the conspirators who tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944. Bonhoeffer did not like Barth’s theology (he called it “revelation positivism”), but he was affiliated with the Confessing Church, the anti-Nazi movement in German Protestantism, which was influenced by Barthian ideas. In his famous Letters from Prison, written in the months before his execution, Bonhoeffer spoke of “religionless Christianity”. Tragically he did not have an opportunity to develop this idea. Another German source was Rudolf Bultmann, who was prominent in the years after World War II with his program of “demythologizing” Christianity.

I cannot assess to what extent these highly sophisticated thinkers influenced the “death of God theologians” of the 1960s. But there are much more popular sources in the history of liberal Protestantism in America. Within that community, whose piety differs greatly from the beliefs and practices of Evangelicals, it may well be a majority for whom God may be “dead”—not of course in the sense of atheism, but because all the emphatically supernatural dimensions of the Gospel are translated into naturalist terms. Van Buren’s preferred term “secular theology” fits better here than Nietzsche’s “death of God”. The latter idea is dramatically metaphysical, the former soberly mundane. In most cases the naturalist/secular translation of the Christian message has a strongly moral content. The sociologist Nancy Ammerman has called this “Golden Rule Christianity”. It is based on the alleged “teachings of Jesus”. Needless to say, there are different views on just what these teachings are. Some are primarily personal—the virtues of decency and compassion. Others are more concerned with the public sphere. The most influential representative of this more political view of Jesus’ teachings was Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918), the prime advocate of the so-called Social Gospel. He wrote that the Kingdom of God, proclaimed by Jesus, is “not a matter of getting individuals to heaven, but of transforming the life of earth into the harmony of heaven”. One might say that Rauschenbusch was the father of the liberal ideology of the mainline Protestant churches in the 20th century and beyond, characterized by a politically moderate reformism (which, along with American liberalism in general, has shifted to the left since the 1960s). The “teachings of Jesus” have also been interpreted as those of a revolutionary, a pacifist, even as the “world’s greatest business executive” (that one in the words of the advertising executive Bruce Barton, who wrote the 1925 bestseller The Man Nobody Knows). Every religious tradition that survives over centuries is subject to endless, often bizarre, re-interpretations.

What is the trouble with all these attempts (whether sophisticated or not)? The first problem is sociological: When the supernatural dimensions of Christianity are stripped away what remains are various secular agendas that can be embraced without religious trappings. In other words, every social Gospel tends to be self-liquidating. The second problem is historical: Just what did Jesus actually teach? Admittedly, New Testament scholars are not unanimous, regardless of whether they are themselves Christian believers. (As to the latter group, they are a particularly troubled bunch: I once opined that it is as difficult for a New Testament scholar to be a Christian as for a gynecologist to have sexual intercourse.) It is noteworthy that the oldest portions of the New Testament, the letters of the Apostle Paul, show no interest whatever in what Jesus taught: Paul preached what Christ did—as the divine Lord, whose incarnation, death and resurrection brought about a tectonic shift in the reality of the cosmos.  As to the Sermon on the Mount (generally taken as the summation of Jesus’ teaching), it was almost certainly not delivered as a single sermon, but was composed as a collection of Jesus’ sayings: Since we don’t know the context of each one, it is difficult to know how it was intended. The British writer Ferdinand Mount described the Sermon of the Mount as perhaps the greatest sermon ever, but that it was written for bachelors—that is, for individuals with no responsibility for the future. Probably Jesus’ message about the Kingdom of God was apocalyptic—a message about a radical shift in the nature of reality (which means that Paul was not far off). We know that many of his followers, and perhaps Jesus himself, expected that the apocalyptic event would happen in their own lifetime. Thus, as some scholars have put it, the moral teachings of Jesus (and possibly Paul’s as well) were an “interim ethic”—how to live in the short time before the coming of the Kingdom. If you expect the world to end next week, you won’t bother to change the oil, though you still want the windshield wipers to work. In that interpretation, the Sermon on the Mount was meant to describe the world after the coming of the Kingdom (though some of Jesus’ followers may want to anticipate this blessed condition in their present lives). Be this as it may, it is very doubtful indeed that Jesus intended these teachings to be a behavioral code for the next two millennia. In any case, any society larger than an Amish village would not survive for very long if it tried to live by such a code.

If the “death of God” is understood as an affirmation that God does not exist, Christianity (and any other religion) is debunked as an illusion (I think that this was fully Nietzsche’s intention): Theologians, like typewriter repairmen, should retrain for other employment.  If on the other hand the phrase is understood as a metaphor for secularization, thought to be an inevitable accompaniment of modernity, the empirical evidence does not support it: Most of the modernizing world today is intensely religious. To say the least, the “death of God” has been very much relativized.

I have written all of the above as an objective observer, not as a Christian believer. I will only add one brief postscript in the latter capacity. As a believer, I resonate with a bumper sticker I saw, of all places, just off Harvard Square: “Dear Mr. Nietzsche. You are dead. Yours very truly, God.”

Posted in Christianity, Secularism | 23 Comments
March 28, 2012

Travel Week

Peter Berger

I am traveling this week, and will return to the regular posting schedule next week.

Posted in Morality | Leave a comment
March 21, 2012

The Religiously Unaffiliated in America

Peter Berger

Foreign Affairs, the banner publication of the Council of Foreign Relations, carries in its March-April 2012 issue, an interesting article on religion and politics in the United States. It is by two prominent political scientists, David Campbell (Notre Dame) and Robert Putnam (Harvard). Their title is “God and Caesar in America: Why Mixing Religion and Politics is Bad for Both”. I assume that the sexier title on the cover of the journal was composed by the editors rather than the authors: “How the Tea Party Undermines Religion in America”. The material in the article comes from the authors’ highly informative book American Grace (about to come out as a paperback).

At the core of the article is a phenomenon that has drawn considerable attention for a while—the sharp rise in the number of Americans who declare themselves in surveys as being without religious affiliation. People who study religious statistics, and who also have a sense of humor (the two qualities are not necessarily contradictory), call this demographic “the nones”. In the 1960s the “nones” comprised 5-7% of the population; by the mid-1990s they had grown to 12%; in 2011 the percentage was 19%. According to the invaluable data on religion ongoingly posted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the incidence of “nones” is highest in the age group 30-49. A possible explanation, of course, could be that younger people have always been less religious than their elders (the so-called “life cycle effect”). The authors reject this explanation: Today 33% of young people are religiously unaffiliated, as compared with 12% in the 1970s. In other words: Youth as such is not the only factor in making individuals flee the churches. What is more, this flight of the young is rapidly accelerating: In surveys conducted by the authors all “nones” grew by about 18% between 2006 and 2011, but young “nones” grew by about 90%–a truly remarkable difference.

Campbell and Putnam have a convincing political explanation of this development: The growth of the “nones”, and especially of their young constituent, is a reaction against the Religious Right. According to their data, between 2006 and 2011 Democrats and progressives were more likely to be religiously unaffiliated than Republicans and conservatives. These data are supported by those of the Pew Forum: “Nones” are 23% of those who say they are Republicans or leaning toward the Republican party, but 55% of Democrats and those leaning toward that party. There is an even higher discrepancy among younger “nones”. They associate Republicanism with intolerance and homophobia. And they don’t like this. We know from many other sources that the young are much more liberal on issues of gender and sexuality. On empirical grounds, one may conclude that, whatever else has happened in America in recent decades, the sexual revolution has achieved victory on most fronts. If one wants to use this hackneyed phrase, those who take a stand against this development find themselves on “the wrong side of history”. (Please note that this statement is descriptive, not necessarily approving:  Historical change is not always a good thing.)

An interjection here: Could an alternative explanation be in terms of class? Sociologists just love class as an explanation. In that case, the “nones” would represent the secularity of the elite, as against the religiosity of the lower classes. The Pew data do not support this explanation: The “nones” are most strongly represented among people with an income under $30,000, with high school graduation or less, who are married but (interestingly) without children. I am enough of a sociologist to think that class comes in somewhere in this matter, but it is unlikely to be a major factor.

I find most intriguing the Pew data on the religious beliefs and behavior of the “nones”. Let us stipulate that the “nones”, especially if they are young, are repelled by the neo-Puritanism of religious conservatives. But does this mean that they have decided (in the words of the authors) “to opt out of religion altogether”? I am strongly inclined to say no. Back to Pew data: 60% of “nones” say that they believe in God, as against 22% who say not. 41% say that religion is important in their lives, a minority as against the 57% who say that religion is not important—but a minority large enough to contradict the assertion that the “nones” have turned against religion altogether. What they have clearly turned away from is participation in institutional worship: 72% say that they seldom or never attend church services.

Let me, with all due respect for Campbell and Putnam, suggest a hypothesis of my own:  Most “nones” have not opted out of religion as such, but have opted out of affiliation with organized religion. Among Christians (the great majority of all survey respondents) there are different reasons for this disaffection. The two authors are very probably correct that, broadly speaking, those who are turned off by Evangelicals and conservative Catholics do so because they don’t like the repressive sexual morality of those churches (the sexual abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church has not helped). But the “nones” have also exited from mainline Protestantism, which has been much more accommodating to the liberationist ethic. Here, I think, there has been frustration with what my friend and colleague Thomas Luckmann long ago called “secularization from within”—the stripping away of the transcendent dimensions of the Gospel, and its reduction to conventional good deeds, popular psychotherapy and (mostly left-of-center) political agendas. Put differently: My hypothesis implies that some “nones” are put off by churches that preach a repressive morality, some others by churches whose message is mainly secular.

What then do these people believe? There is very likely a number (in America a relatively small one) of “nones” who are really without religion—agnostics or (even fewer) outright atheists. The latter have been encouraged by the advocates of the so-called “new atheism”—which is not new at all, but rather a reiteration of a tired 19th-century rationalism, pushed by a handful of writers who have been misrepresented as an important cultural movement. Presumably it is committed atheists who spark litigation over allegations that, for instance, a Christmas tree in a public park is a violation of the constitution. The bulk of the “nones” probably consist of a mix of two categories of unaffiliated believers—in the words of the British sociologist Grace Davie, people who “believe without belonging”. There are those who have put together an idiosyncratic personal creed, putting together bits and pieces of their own tradition with other components. Robert Wuthnow, the most productive and insightful sociologist of American religion, has called this “patchwork religion”. This includes the kind of people who will say “I am Catholic, but…”, followed by a list of items where they differ from the teachings of the church. The other category are the children—by now, grandchildren—of the counter-culture. They will most often say, “I am spiritual, not religious”. The “spirituality” is typically an expression of what Colin Campbell, another British sociologist, has called “Easternization”—an invasion of Western civilization by beliefs and practices from Asia. A few of these are organized, for instance by the various Buddhist schools. But most are diffused in an informal manner—such as belief in reincarnation or the spiritual continuity between humans and nature, and practices like yoga or martial arts.

The political dynamics ably described by Campbell and Putnam may yet change. Republicans might endorse same-sex marriage and Democrats might lose their enthusiasm for abortion. There will always be politicians with no convictions of their own, but with a finely tuned ability to detect cultural changes and the resultant possibility of new constituencies to represent. What is not likely to change in the foreseeable future is the reality of America as, relatively, the most religious society in the Western world. Even the anti-Puritans among us tend to pursue their agendas with Puritanical zeal.

Survey photo on homepage via Shutterstock.

Posted in Secularism, The West | 43 Comments
March 14, 2012

A Muslim Voice for European Christianity

Peter Berger

The Tablet is an international Catholic weekly published in Britain. It was founded in 1840, a time when British Catholics still suffered from various civil disabilities. Today it is a very useful source of information about events and ideas in the world of the Roman faith. In its issue of February 18, 2012, it published two separate but related stories that captured my attention.

The first story deals with Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, who is the first Muslim woman to be a cabinet minister (in the government of David Cameron); she is also a co-chairman of the Conservative Party, with Basil Feldman. (The name suggests that he is Jewish. Googling him did not divulge his religious identity. I cannot help hoping that he is Jewish: I love the idea that the old party of Colonel Blimp may now be headed by a Jew and a Muslim.) Warsi, who was elevated to the peerage as a true and trusted Tory, is the daughter of Pakistani immigrants. She was raised in Yorkshire (whose distinctive accents still echo in her speech).

The story reports on her heading a British ministerial delegation to the Vatican. During this visit she gave an address at a prestigious Catholic institution in Rome, during which she agreed with the view of Pope Benedict XVI about the important place of religion in public discourse. She also agreed with the Pope’s opposition to a militant secularism growing in Europe (as recently exhibited by a court decision prohibiting prayers to be said at meetings of a town council in Devon—possibly a case of American influence by way of ACLU-type Kemalism). Warsi elaborated in an interview with The Tablet (it took place in the House of Lords—where else would an honest-to-goodness baroness give an interview?): “Aggressive secularism is pushing faith out of any public place. Europe would not try to erase the church spires on our horizons; then why would you try to erase our religious history or the role of Christianity in the development of values in our nations? Europe needs to be more in tune with its Christian identity” (my italics).

Some time earlier Warsi had drawn attention by an address headed “This Government does God”. The title was an allusion to a statement by Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s press secretary, “We don’t do God here” (expressing a widespread secularism in the Labour Party, continuing despite Blair’s personal Christian piety). Warsi was signaling that a Conservative government did not have this prejudice. In the interview she mentioned that her daughter attends a Catholic convent school: “My daughter’s own Islamic faith is strengthened by the Christian influence in her school. She says the Lord’s Prayer, she knows all the hymns and Christmas carols.”

The other story deals with an address by Queen Elizabeth at a meeting with representatives of what was intriguingly called “the nine faiths of the United Kingdom”, hosted at Lambeth Palace by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Queen defended the role of the Church of England, “woven in the fabric of society”. She also defended the state establishment of the Church. The purpose of the established Church, she said, is “not to defend Anglicanism to the exclusion of all faiths in this country. Instead the Church has a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths in this country.”  If one knows something about the ecclesiastical history of England, there is some irony here. The Queen is still formally head of the Church of England, and one of her titles, solemnly pronounced at her coronation is “Defender of the Faith”. The title was bestowed by the Pope on Henry VIII, a reward for his having written a fierce theological attack against Martin Luther. Needless to say, this was before he broke with the Pope, who would not bless Henry’s divorce of his wife and marriage to his mistress, the unfortunate, soon-to-be-beheaded Anne Boleyn. These less than spiritual origins of the Church of England should not influence an appreciation of some of its later accomplishments. (A Christian, and indeed a Muslim, might say that God works in wondrous ways.) Be this as it may, Queen Elizabeth II has now implicitly (though not in so many words) re-titled herself as “Defender of the Faiths”. (It is fair to say that no party in the religious conflicts of the sixteenth century would have been happy with this re-interpretation.)

A suitable comment applicable to both stories was made, in response to the Queen’s address, by Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of Britain: “The Church of England has a resonance and a significance beyond the Church of England; it is the best of a gathering of religious diversity.”  By the way, Sacks, who also sits in the House of Lords, is staunchly Orthodox. He tells the following story to illustrate the ingrained pragmatism of British political culture: The parade accompanying the monarch to Parliament to give the Speech from the Throne (which of course is dictated by the Prime Minister) is led by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Ahead of him a cross is carried, behind him are representatives of all the other faiths. Sacks protested that, as an observant Jew, he could not march behind a cross. The order of the parade was accordingly changed: First the Chief Rabbi, then the cross, then the Archbishop.

There are two lessons to be drawn from these stories. As to the Church of England, apart from its participation in the quirkiness of English life, something that English people generally value (rightly so, I think) and that others often find puzzling, its official role has merits that should not be overlooked. Grace Davie, a sharply insightful British sociologist, has cited the merit of a weak establishment of religion, of which the Church of England today is a prime example (she has also discussed in similar vein the role of equally weak Lutheran churches in Scandinavia). A strong establishment, one that has real power in the state, is very likely to be oppressive. That was certainly so in past English history, as Puritans, Quakers and many other non-Anglicans would readily testify. Today the C. of E. is without any real power—is almost pathetically weak. Yet precisely for this reason, while it still has the faint aura of its official status, it can credibly function as a moral authority. It has exercised this authority especially in the protection of religious minorities, as when the Archbishop of Canterbury (in a statement that was widely misunderstood) said that British Muslims should be free, if they wanted, to use Islamic courts as mediators in civil disputes. This is particularly important for Americans, who should understand that the distinctive version of the separation of church and state in the United States, while it has been superbly successful in managing a pluralistic religious landscape in this country, is not the only way in which religious freedom and individual rights can be protected. Not so incidentally, such an understanding has implications for American policies toward states who define themselves as in some ways Islamic.

The story of Sayeeda Warsi embracing the Christian heritage of Europe has important implications for the much-discussed issue of the Muslim presence in Europe. She has been attacked as “un-Islamic” by some of her co-religionists (she shrugs off these attacks). But survey data from Britain and from other European countries indicate that far more Muslims would side with her, not with her critics. (A recent survey of Muslims in France spoke of “the republican majority”.) This is not to minimize the danger from the minority addicted to radical versions of Islam and in some instances ready to express the radicalism in acts of violence. To be sure, even a small minority with such ideas can cause a lot of trouble. But these people are a minority. Most Muslims in Europe want to become an integral part of their several societies. The notion of “Eurabia”, an Islamized continent, is at this point an improbable dystopia.

Posted in Christianity, Europe, Inter-faith Dialogue, Islam | 10 Comments