Religion
An Adversary and A Spirit Within
By Cornell Cox: Written in love for my fellowman and church – Aug. 4, 2022
Recently a friend, member of our Sunday school class, brought unto the class a paper referencing the increasing number of secular citizens in the U. S. as opposed to those who are religious: (Atheist author stars on ‘secular values voter’ billboard, July 4 ads in Raleigh). For those of us – lifelong church attendees – within our varied faith beliefs, who continue to find value in the Christian message, this is a disturbing trend. But it’s no surprise to anyone who has been tracking, staying attuned to Christianity’s direction in America during the past several decades. In this referenced article, Gorham, a previous minister who now identifies as “atheist,” notes: “The ‘Nones’ (those of us unaffiliated with religion) are now 29 percent of the U.S. population. We are the largest ‘denomination’ by religious identification!” This article further states: Among Americans under 30, 36 percent identify as religiously unaffiliated.
[Pew Study] . . . more than a third (39%) of Americans are sure that those who do not believe in God can go to heaven. Combined with the 27% who said they don’t believe in heaven, that leaves only 32% of Americans saying that those who do not believe in God cannot go to heaven. (Another 2% didn’t answer the question.)
This growing trend of the secular, atheist, agnostic, the religious-unaffiliated is not inexplicable. There is a reason that my church’s five or more Sunday school rooms – built above Wesley Hall in the late 1960s (when religiosity’s peak had started to decline) and more classrooms in the building program of late 1980s – are no longer used as Sunday School classes. There is a cause many church-people no longer meet for Sunday school, that Sunday services have sparsely filled pews, or some churches have completely shut down, while others have opened in a new format. The reasons are various; however, a few things top the list: namely political intrusions by Christian Nationalism and Christian fundamentalist; theological differences, fundamentalist Vs. progressives; Add to those challenges the church’s once great ‘social attraction‘ Vs. current-day ‘competing activities’ (a cause of lower attendance, recently acerbated with COVID challenges).
[White-]Christian nationalists insist that the United States was established as an explicitly Christian nation, and they believe that this close relationship between Christianity and the state needs to be protected—and in many respects restored—in order for the U.S. to fulfill its God-given destiny. Recent scholarship underscores the extent to which these efforts to secure a privileged position for Christianity in the public square often coincide with efforts to preserve the historical status quo on issues of race, gender, and sexuality. And the practical ramifications of such views involve everything from support for laws that codify specific interpretations of Christian morality, to the defense of religious displays on public property, to nativist reactions to non-white, non-Christian immigrants. (For example read: An 'imposter Christianity' is threatening American democracy)
Most all ‘faith-oriented families’ have members who have joined the ‘None’ ranks. They, no doubt, rightly understand the growing danger to our democratic form of government, a society free from theocratical bearings, free to worship without impingement or influences from one specific denomination or sect of religious fundamentalism. (The unaffiliated are not saying, “Don’t bring to the public square virtues your religion may have taught you, i.e. morals and ethics, comprehensively ‘The Golden Rule’ of all traditional religious faiths.)
Some people, earnestly defensive of their religion, may ask, “Why are you so anti-religious?” Our constitutional founders, who were Christian deist, ostensibly provided for separation of church and state. So, if we are so protective of our individual faith belief, the question should be, “How can we insure fundamentalist religious views will not inhibit government’s role so as to protect religious freedoms for all people – to ‘keep religion out of government,’ and ‘government out of religion,’ so as to insure each’s autonomy, yet bring to the fore ‘Golden Rule’ values?”
(Pew study) “Evangelicals are by far the most likely (50%) to say their religion “is the one true faith leading to eternal life in heaven.” That is more than double the percentage of mainline Protestants and triple the percentage of Catholics who say the same.”
A growing number of the ‘religious unaffiliated’ recognize the increasing danger that intrusion of religion poses to democracy and/or, possibly, haven’t bought into theology – as presented to them. They understand, as well as many of us who remain anchored in the church, how some people may be ‘God possessed’ not in a healthy way, that religious ideology wrapped around ‘draconian extremism’ is harmful to both religion and state, and how the so-called ‘word of God’ can be (is) politically motivated.
After all, “God is an abstract idea.” Even though we have the Bible (Muslims, the Quran; Jews, the Tanakh) to orient us in monotheism, most every person see God somewhat differently. Therefore, essential, we must comprehend “what the ‘Bible is’ and what it ‘is not.’” The Bible is not the word of one deity; it is the ‘word of God’ by narratives told of Abraham and his descendants, writings by many characters and prophets; law, history, allegory, and the ‘words of Jesus’ as recorded by the Gospel writers – whereby ‘scribes errored in copying first manuscripts’[1]; through centuries of hundreds of translations whereby some ‘words’ didn’t convert to original meaning; reinterpreted in modern-day ministry – from which comes many different religious opinions. So speaking for God comes with a caveat and grave responsibility. However, the Bible, when at its best, provides countless life-principles, including the moral precepts of Jesus, the incomparable teacher.
The Abrahamic religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, all monotheist, are about half the world population or 3.7 billion.
Even though the Bible has been held on the celestial pedestal – as ‘God’s infallible word’ – mainly during the last two centuries, the Bible and religion has not been without skepticism and controversy since the Bible’s polemical canonizing and beginning of Christianity. Beginning with Martin Luther’s founding of Protestantism in 1517 A.D. – the era when for first time the Bible was translated to English by William Tyndall – Christianity over the last 500 years has opened to thousands of different denominations and sects. Thousands of churches have split on theology. Noteworthy, 100-years ago, June 10, 1922, The Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick gave a sermon at New York’s First Presbyterian Church: Shall The Fundamentalist Win (“Liberal” Protestants sought to reconcile faith and science and to slow what they saw as the reactionary tendencies of fundamentalism.) Fosdick was fired for his ‘earnest progressive theology’; however, he would continue his sermons in The Riverside Church, New York City, when it opened in 1930, built for him by John D. Rockefeller.
[Pew study] Not surprisingly, evangelicals (71%) lead the pack in insistence that those who do not believe in God cannot go to heaven. Yet that leaves one-fifth (21%) of evangelicals saying those who don’t believe in God can indeed get to heaven — a belief in direct opposition to a central tenet of evangelical doctrine.) [I don’t recall polls previously asking ‘if one could go to heaven, if they didn’t believe in God.’ So this is a surprise to me, because I always just took it – as I would think most people would – that if you didn’t believe in God you didn’t believe in heaven.]
To make certain, by definition, a ‘fundamentalist’ is a person who believes in the strict, literal interpretation of scripture in a religion. Probably, the most well-known, current-day, fundamentalist minister is Franklin Graham. His political-tie-to-Christianity leans unabashedly theocratically autocratic. The contrast between Franklin and his father, Billy Graham – of an earlier era – highlights the Christian Right’s alarming breach in separation of church and state. While Billy had ‘warm associations’ with the presidents during his ministry – occasionally getting caught in a political snafu – he didn’t publicly commit/campaign for a presidential candidate. And while his ministry certainly began on fundamentalist tones – working with non-fundamentalist Protestants in crusades – he was not a ‘strict fundamentalist’ evangelical. He stringently became a non-fundamentalist in his later years. At 87-years age, in his interview with Jon Meacham, he said:
"I'm not a literalist in the sense that every single jot and tittle is from the Lord. Sincere Christians can disagree about the details of Scripture and theology-absolutely." Though his own son has called Muslims "wicked" and "evil," Graham disagrees. "I would not say Islam is wicked and evil. I have a lot of friends who are Islamic. I have a great love for them." Graham's fiery certainty has given way to humility; when asked if he believes heaven is closed to non-Christians, he demurs. "Those are decisions only the Lord will make. I believe the love of God is absolute. He said he gave his son for the whole world, and I think he loves everybody regardless of what label they have."
More granularly, 30% of Protestants say that the Bible is literally true, compared with 15% of Catholics.Almost two-thirds of Catholics choose the alternative that the Bible is the inspired word of God, but every word should not be taken literally.”
Until the twentieth Century, it was only Protestants who actively embraced Scripture study. That changed after 1943 when Pope Pius XII issued the encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu. This not only allowed Catholics to study Scripture, it encouraged them to do so. And with Catholics studying Scripture and teaching other Catholics about what they were studying, familiarity with Scripture grew.
Perhaps Billy Graham, over more than 50-years of evangelizing, became more science conscious and open to biblical-research scholars, such as Bart Ehrman. He may have read books such as Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God. He may have observed the instruction of the Reverend Michael Brown. These men tell of a ‘word’ in Latin and Greek Bibles that translated to ‘salvation’ in the English Bible. Two main languages of the Roman empire were Latin and Greek:
Robert Wright: The word Romans used for “intact” was salvus [Latin]. Something that was salvuswas whole, in good working order. The expression salvus sis meant “May you be in good health.” Salvus is the word from which “salvation” comes. God, in moving from Israel into the wider world—the Roman Empire—continued to pursue the goal he had pursued in ancient Israel: provide salvation—keep the social system safe from forces of destruction and disintegration.[2]
Rev. Michael Brown: . . . the Greek word for “salvation,” which is soteria . . . does not refer to doctrinal rigidity or even to one's destination in the afterlife, but simply means “to become whole.”[3]
Church people, in growing number, no longer look to religion as a heavenly-afterlife panacea. There is a saying, “We’re so heavenly bound that we are no earthly good.” (Although, I would not deny comfort anyone derives from a ‘celestial belief’ in times death.) The ‘earthly good’ may be found within Salvus or Soteria. ‘Being made whole,’ we may grow in Christian principles that the incomparable, great-moral teacher taught.
Rabbi Marc Gellman, in his column, How to explain differences in beliefs with respect and love, wrote, “The mountain we must climb is John 14:6: Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” I do believe, there is a conscious effort, in some places of Christianity, thoughtfully, not to use this divisive scripture (John 14:6). Maybe there is, at the least, as religiosity moves forward, a discerning – for the sake of Christianity and other faiths – that it’s best to be completely honest and straightforward about these persistent issues.
[Gallop poll] “The poll found that 29 percent of adults in the U.S. – the most ever – say they believe the Bible is an "ancient book of fables, legends, history and moral precepts recorded by man," while 20 percent of adults – the lowest ever – say they believe it is the "actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word." [This is a 10 percent decrease – 30% to 20% – from 2011 to 2021.] In 2017, the last time the poll was conducted, 26 percent said it was a collection of fables, and 24 percent said it was the actual word of God.”
Karen Armstrong wrote in her book, The Bible: A Biography: “It is . . . crucial to note that an exclusively literal interpretation of the Bible is a recent development. Until the nineteenth century, very few people imagined that the first chapter of Genesis was a factual account of the origins of life. For centuries, Jews and Christians relished highly allegorical and inventive exegesis, insisting that a wholly literal reading of the Bible was neither possible nor desirable.”
“A single text could be interpreted to serve diametrically opposed interests,” wrote Armstrong. These discrepancies in scripture, different interpretations, combined with religion’s intrusion in government, and the church’s LGBTQ issue, may be some of the reasons many citizens say, “I am not a ‘religious’ person, but I am a ‘spiritual’ person.” While many of these people remain in church, many of these individuals have moved to the ‘growing religious unaffiliated.’
Considering the forgoing religious brief-history, how religion has changed in the last two centuries, and the ongoing decline in numbers, what do all these polls mean for America’s Christian future? Will Sunday school rooms be utilized again, for learning about Jesus? Will church pews be filled again on a regular basis? Is there a chance some of the ‘Nones’ will return to church? What is the future for ‘our belief’ and devotion to Christianity?
Actually, religion is growing by some accounts, or maybe, I should say faith (spirituality) is growing throughout the world. Some suggest that China will have the world’s largest Christian population by 2030.
[From 2018 report] If you think religion belongs to the past and we live in a new age of reason, you need to check out the facts: 84% of the world’s population identifies with a religious group. Members of this demographic are generally younger and produce more children than those who have no religious affiliation, so the world is getting more religious, not less – although there are significant geographical variations.
So what’s going on with religion in the United States, North America, and Western Europe where religion is in decline?[4] To what extent do the abovementioned religious issues – wherein there is a growing uneasiness – have a bearing on the ongoing waning religious affiliation in the USA?
A comprehensive religious forecast for 2050 by the Pew Research Center predicts that the global Muslim population will grow at a faster rate than the Christian population – primarily due to the average younger age and higher fertility rate of Muslims.[4][5][6]It is projected that birth rates – rather than conversion – will prove the main factor in the growth of any given religion.
In thinking about all this, I decided to look back at a book I read more than 10-years ago, titled: The Future of Faith, (Copyright 2009) by Harvey Cox (no kin).
First, Cox acknowledges an “unanticipated resurgence of religion in both public and private life around the globe.” Secondly, he states “. . . that fundamentalism, the bane of the twentieth century, is dying.” Thirdly he notes: “. . . most important, though often unnoticed, is the profound change in the elemental nature of religiousness.” “. . . what it means to be ‘religious’ is shifting significantly from what it meant as little as a half century ago.”
He observes the advance of science increasing the sense of awe we feel at the immense scale of the universe, and – I would add – our ‘incomprehension of creation’s beginning,’ a curiosity intensified via the James Webb Space Telescope. He says, people are turning to religion more in support to live in the world, and make it better, and less to prepare for the next, while he states, “The pragmatic and experiential element of faith as a way of life are displacing the previous emphasis on institutions and belief.”
Many people look at “faith” and “belief” as two words for the same thing, Cox says. They’re not the same, and in order to grasp the magnitude of religious upheaval we must know the difference: “Faith is a deep-seated confidence in people we trust and values we treasure.” Belief is more like opinion in our everyday speech to express a degree of uncertainty. He asserts, to know the tectonic shift in Christianity today, we must understand the distinction between the two.
“Creeds are clusters of beliefs. But the history of Christianity is not a history of creeds. It is the story of a people of faith who sometimes cobbled together creeds out of beliefs.”
Cox says, “The nearly two thousand years of Christian history can be divided into three uneven periods.”
“The first might be called the ‘Age of Faith’. It began with Jesus and his immediate disciples when a buoyant faith propelled the movement he initiated. During this first period of both explosive growth and brutal persecution, their sharing in the living Spirit of Christ united Christians with each other, and ‘faith’ meant hope and assurance in the dawning of a new era of freedom, healing, and compassion that Jesus had demonstrated. To be a Christian meant to live in his Spirit, embrace his hope, and to follow him in the work that he had begun.”
Second period: Age of Belief: Beginning in the third and fourth centuries (Thank Roman emperors Constantine and Theodosius) and lasting roughly 1500 years. “Emphasis on belief began to grow when . . . [orientation programs] thickened into catechisms, replacing faith in Jesus with tenets about him. Thus, even during that early Age of Faith the tension between faith and belief was already foreshadowed.”
“The year 385 CE marked a particularly grim turning point. A synod of bishops condemned a man named Priscillian of Avila for heresy, and by order of the emperor Maximus he and six of his followers were beheaded in Treves. Christian fundamentalism had claimed its first victim. Today Priscillian’s alleged theological errors hardly seem to warrant the death penalty.” . . . [Amongst other things,] “He believed that various writings that had been excluded from the biblical canon, although not “inspired,” could nevertheless serve as useful guides to life.” . . . “He was the first Christian to be executed by his fellow Christians for his religious views. But he was by no means the last. One historian estimates that in the two and a half centuries after Constantine, Christian imperial authorities put twenty-five thousand to death for their lack of creedal correctness.”
Third period: “Age of the Spirit,” Cox suggest, “We are now witnessing the beginning of a ‘post-Constantinian era.’ Christians on five continents are shaking off the residues of the second phase (the Age of Belief) and negotiating a bumpy transition into a fresh era for which a name has not yet been coined.”
Cox’s Christian journey, he admits, has gone through these 3-religious stages. First being raised Baptist, in a church without creeds. Second in the “age of belief,” when in college was asked directly if he was a Christian: “. . . I told him yes, that I tried to follow Jesus. But he fixed me with a direct stare and asked, ‘But do you believe in the substitutionary atonement?’ I was not sure what that was, and for awhile I passed through a difficult period, worried that my faith might be fatally deficient. I began to think that maybe a ‘real Christian’ had to believe a certain set of ideas about God, Jesus, and the Bible.” He says, “This was my quasi-fundamentalist stage” which only lasted about 2 years, when, “In history classes I began reading about the endless debates over creeds and confessions that had roiled Christianity for so long, and I took a course in world religions, which made me see my own faith as one among many.”
In this third stage of Christianity, a period of the last two centuries, an ongoing tectonic shift, Cox observes ‘a disconnecting of fundamentalism moving to a faith of ‘the spirit,’ a new awakening, whereby Christians’ identity is defined more by how one lives – than what a person believes. It is more of being a ‘practicing Christian,’ “but not necessarily a believing one who acknowledges the variable admixture of certainties and uncertainties that mark the life of any religious person.” This approach to Christianity was alive when “. . . the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–45) wrote wistfully from a Gestapo cell of what he called a future ‘religionless Christianity,’ liberated from its dogmatic tethers.” Which were “. . . forerunners of today’s dawning Age of the Spirit.”
Cox acknowledges the roll the megachurches, such as Saddleback and Willow Creek, in this newer emergence of the spirit. Recorded at his writing (2009), there were more than four hundred megachurches, with congregations of more than four thousand. As of 2020, “There are approximately 1,750 megachurches, Protestant churches with regular pre-pandemic attendance of 2,000 or more, in the United States, according to the Hartford Institute for Religion Research’s 2020 megachurch report.” The leadership of the megachurches are seeking to be more ethnically diverse, reporting to having 20% or more minority presence in their congregation.
“As Christianity moves awkwardly but irreversibly into a new phase in its history, those who are pushing into this frontier often look to the earliest period, the Age of Faith, rather than the intervening one, the Age of Belief, for inspiration and guidance. This should not be surprising. There are striking similarities between the first and the emerging third age. Creeds did not exist then; they are fading in importance now. Hierarchies had not yet appeared then; they are wobbling today. Faith as a way of life or a guiding compass has once again begun, as it did then, to identify what it means to be Christian. The experience of the divine is displacing theories about it. No wonder the atmosphere in the burgeoning Christian congregations of Asia and Africa feels more like that of first-century Corinth or Ephesus than it does like that of the Rome or Paris of a thousand years later.”
Cox considers the fundamentalist movements in America, “are in the true sense of the word ‘reactionary’ efforts.” “They are attempting to stem an inexorable movement of the human spirit whose hour has come.” In closing he says, “I have described how that primal impetus [spiritual] was nearly suffocated by creeds, hierarchies, and the disastrous merger of the church with the empire. But I have also highlighted how a newly global Christianity, enlivened by a multiplicity of cultures and yearning for the realization of God’s reign of shalom, is finding its soul again. All the signs suggest we are poised to enter a new Age of the Spirit and that the future will be a future of faith.”
In pursuit of God: churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques – from which all claim a ‘truth’ – will continue to rise and fall. Meanwhile: About the nature of God to act in certain ways, man can only guess or prophesize as he has been doing for many millenniums – because the “Master Builder” is beyond man’s feeble mind to comprehend or define the who, what, or how “the God of the cosmos” might be in control. The “god” created by ordinary humans can’t speak with unmitigated authority on divinity for the “One” or “Thing” we do not know or understand. We humans are only as a “fragment” off an “invisible atom” on this “speck of earth” within an “interstellar, infinite universe.”[5] However, irresistibly, the mystery of Creation, Planet Earth, the Infinite Universe, and its Supreme Ruler – live on.
Know that, “In the bulb there is a flower, in the seed an apple tree, in cocoons a hidden promise, butterflies will soon be free.”[6] That the ‘Almighty’ gave humans ‘the wherewithal in no small measure (brains)’ to save this planet earth – if we accept responsibility.
Someday there will be a telescope more powerful than the ‘James Webb’ – looking further into the infinite universe – to find there is no wall behind which God can be found. Although – as long as civilization survives – a boundless search for God grows in imagination and inspiration. Know, “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”(John 3:8)
[1] Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why – Bart D. Ehrman
[2] The Evolution of God – Robert Wright
[3] Bottom Line Beliefs: Twelve Doctrines All Christians Hold In Common (Sort of) – Michael B. Brown
[4] theguardian.com, Religion: Why faith is becoming more and more popular
[5] Promise of Better Days: A Farm Boy’s Odyssey Through North Carolina’s “Tobacco Way of Life” – by Cornell Cox
[6] The Hymn of Promise – Natalie Sleeth
