82 Sermon Illustrations on Religious Decline

Throughout history, people’s faith and their attachments to religious institutions have transformed, argues Sumit Paul-Choudhury. So what’s next?

________

Before Mohammed, before Jesus, before Buddha, there was Zoroaster. Some 3,500 years ago, in Bronze Age Iran, he had a vision of the one supreme God. A thousand years later, Zoroastrianism, the world’s first great monotheistic religion, was the official faith of the mighty Persian Empire, its fire temples attended by millions of adherents. A thousand years after that, the empire collapsed, and the followers of Zoroaster were persecuted and converted to the new faith of their conquerors, Islam.

Another 1,500 years later – today – Zoroastrianism is a dying faith, its sacred flames tended by ever fewer worshippers.

We take it for granted that religions are born, grow and die – but we are also oddly blind to that reality. When someone tries to start a new religion, it is often dismissed as a cult. When we recognise a faith, we treat its teachings and traditions as timeless and sacrosanct. And when a religion dies, it becomes a myth, and its claim to sacred truth expires. Tales of the Egyptian, Greek and Norse pantheons are now considered legends, not holy writ.

Even today’s dominant religions have continually evolved throughout history. Early Christianity, for example, was a truly broad church: ancient documents include yarns about Jesus’ family life and testaments to the nobility of Judas. It took three centuries for the Christian church to consolidate around a canon of scriptures – and then in 1054 it split into the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic churches. Since then, Christianity has continued both to grow and to splinter into ever more disparate groups, from silent Quakers to snake-handling Pentecostalists.

If you believe your faith has arrived at ultimate truth, you might reject the idea that it will change at all. But if history is any guide, no matter how deeply held our beliefs may be today, they are likely in time to be transformed or transferred as they pass to our descendants – or simply to fade away.

If religions have changed so dramatically in the past, how might they change in the future? Is there any substance to the claim that belief in gods and deities will die out altogether? And as our civilisation and its technologies become increasingly complex, could entirely new forms of worship emerge? (Could artificial intelligence develop a soul?)

To answer these questions, a good starting point is to ask: why do we have religion in the first place?

Reason to believe

One notorious answer comes from Voltaire, the 18th Century French polymath, who wrote: “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”Because Voltaire was a trenchant critic of organised religion, this quip is often quoted cynically. But in fact, he was being perfectly sincere. He was arguing that belief in God is necessary for society to function, even if he didn’t approve of the monopoly the church held over that belief.

Many modern students of religion agree. The broad idea that a shared faith serves the needs of a society is known as the functionalist view of religion. There are many functionalist hypotheses, from the idea that religion is the “opium of the masses“, used by the powerful to control the poor, to the proposal that faith supports the abstract intellectualism required for science and law. One recurring theme is social cohesion: religion brings together a community, who might then form a hunting party, raise a temple or support a political party.

Those faiths that endure are “the long-term products of extraordinarily complex cultural pressures, selection processes, and evolution”, writes Connor Wood of the Center for Mind and Culture in Boston, Massachusetts on the religious reference website Patheos, where he blogs about the scientific study of religion. New religious movements are born all the time, but most don’t survive long. They must compete with other faiths for followers and survive potentially hostile social and political environments.

Under this argument, any religion that does endure has to offer its adherents tangible benefits. Christianity, for example, was just one of many religious movements that came and mostly went during the course of the Roman Empire. According to Wood, it was set apart by its ethos of caring for the sick – meaning more Christians survived outbreaks of disease than pagan Romans. Islam, too, initially attracted followers by emphasising honour, humility and charity – qualities which were not endemic in turbulent 7th-Century Arabia. (Read about the “light triad” traits that can make you a good person.)

Given this, we might expect the form that religion takes to follow the function it plays in a particular society – or as Voltaire might have put it, that different societies will invent the particular gods they need. Conversely, we might expect similar societies to have similar religions, even if they have developed in isolation. And there is some evidence for that – although when it comes to religion, there are always exceptions to any rule.

Hunter-gatherers, for example, tend to believe that all objects – whether animal, vegetable or mineral – have supernatural aspects (animism) and that the world is imbued with supernatural forces (animatism). These must be understood and respected; human morality generally doesn’t figure significantly. This worldview makes sense for groups too small to need abstract codes of conduct, but who must know their environment intimately. (An exception: Shinto, an ancient animist religion, is still widely practised in hyper-modern Japan.)

At the other end of the spectrum, the teeming societies of the West are at least nominally faithful to religions in which a single watchful, all-powerful god lays down, and sometimes enforces, moral instructions: Yahweh, Christ and Allah. The psychologist Ara Norenzayan argues it was belief in these “Big Gods” that allowed the formation of societies made up of large numbers of strangers. Whether that belief constitutes cause or effect has recently been disputed, but the upshot is that sharing a faith allows people to co-exist (relatively) peacefully. The knowledge that Big God is watching makes sure we behave ourselves.

Or at least, it did. Today, many of our societies are huge and multicultural: adherents of many faiths co-exist with each other – and with a growing number of people who say they have no religion at all. We obey laws made and enforced by governments, not by God. Secularism is on the rise, with science providing tools to understand and shape the world.

Given all that, there’s a growing consensus that the future of religion is that it has no future.

Imagine there’s no heaven

Powerful intellectual and political currents have driven this proposition since the early 20th Century. Sociologists argued that the march of science was leading to the “disenchantment” of society: supernatural answers to the big questions were no longer felt to be needed. Communist states like Soviet Russia and China adopted atheism as state policy and frowned on even private religious expression. In 1968, the eminent sociologist Peter Berger told the New York Times that by “the 21st Century, religious believers are likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture”.

Now that we’re actually in the 21st Century, Berger’s view remains an article of faith for many secularists – although Berger himself recanted in the 1990s. His successors are emboldened by surveys showing that in many countries, increasing numbers of people are saying they have no religion. That’s most true in rich, stable countries like Sweden and Japan, but also, perhaps more surprisingly, in places like Latin America and the Arab world. Even in the US, long a conspicuous exception to the axiom that richer countries are more secular, the number of “nones” has been rising sharply. In the 2018 General Social Survey of US attitudes, “no religion” became the single largest group, edging out evangelical Christians.

Despite this, religion is not disappearing on a global scale – at least in terms of numbers. In 2015, the Pew Research Center modelled the future of the world’s great religions based on demographics, migration and conversion. Far from a precipitous decline in religiosity, it predicted a modest increase in believers, from 84% of the world’s population today to 87% in 2050. Muslims would grow in number to match Christians, while the number unaffiliated with any religion would decline slightly.

The pattern Pew predicted was of “the secularising West and the rapidly growing rest”. Religion will continue to grow in economically and socially insecure places like much of sub-Saharan Africa – and to decline where they are stable. That chimes with what we know about the deep-seated psychological and neurological drivers of belief. When life is tough or disaster strikes, religion seems to provide a bulwark of psychological (and sometimes practical) support. In a landmark study, people directly affected by the 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand became significantly more religious than other New Zealanders, who became marginally less religious.

We also need to be careful when interpreting what people mean by “no religion”. “Nones” may be disinterested in organised religion, but that doesn’t mean they are militantly atheist. In 1994, the sociologist Grace Davie classified people according to whether they belonged to a religious group and/or believed in a religious position. The traditionally religious both belonged and believed; hardcore atheists did neither. Then there are those who belong but don’t believe – parents attending church to get a place for their child at a faith school, perhaps. And, finally, there are those who believe in something, but don’t belong to any group.

The research suggests that the last two groups are significant. The Understanding Unbelief project at the University of Kent in the UK is conducting a three-year, six-nation survey of attitudes among those who say they don’t believe God exists (“atheists”) and those who don’t think it’s possible to know if God exists (“agnostics”). In interim results released in May 2019, the researchers found that few unbelievers actually identify themselves by these labels, with significant minorities opting for a religious identity.

What’s more, around three-quarters of atheists and nine out of 10 agnostics are open to the existence of supernatural phenomena, including everything from astrology to supernatural beings and life after death. Unbelievers “exhibit significant diversity both within, and between, different countries.

Accordingly, there are very many ways of being an unbeliever”, the report concluded – including, notably, the dating-website cliche “spiritual, but not religious”. Like many cliches, it’s rooted in truth. But what does it actually mean?

The old gods return

In 2005, Linda Woodhead wrote The Spiritual Revolution, in which she described an intensive study of belief in the British town of Kendal. Woodhead and her co-author found that people were rapidly turning away from organised religion, with its emphasis on fitting into an established order of things, towards practices designed to accentuate and foster individuals’ own sense of who they are. If the town’s Christian churches did not embrace this shift, they concluded, congregations would dwindle into irrelevance while self-guided practices would become the mainstream in a “spiritual revolution”.

Today, Woodhead says that revolution has taken place – and not just in Kendal. Organised religion is waning in the UK, with no real end in sight. “Religions do well, and always have done, when they are subjectively convincing – when you have the sense that God is working for you,” says Woodhead, now professor of sociology of religion at the University of Lancaster in the UK.

In poorer societies, you might pray for good fortune or a stable job. The “prosperity gospel” is central to several of America’s megachurches, whose congregations are often dominated by economically insecure congregations. But if your basic needs are well catered for, you are more likely to be seeking fulfilment and meaning. Traditional religion is failing to deliver on this, particularly where doctrine clashes with moral convictions that arise from secular society – on gender equality, say.

In response, people have started constructing faiths of their own.

What do these self-directed religions look like? One approach is syncretism, the “pick and mix” approach of combining traditions and practices that often results from the mixing of cultures. Many religions have syncretistic elements, although over time they are assimilated and become unremarkable. Festivals like Christmas and Easter, for example, have archaic pagan elements, while daily practice for many people in China involves a mixture of Mahayana Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. The joins are easier to see in relatively young religions, such as Vodoun or Rastafarianism.

An alternative is to streamline. New religious movements often seek to preserve the central tenets of an older religion while stripping it of trappings that may have become stifling or old-fashioned. In the West, one form this takes is for humanists to rework religious motifs: there have been attempts to rewrite the Bible without any supernatural elements, calls for the construction of “atheist temples” dedicated to contemplation. And the “Sunday Assembly“ aims to recreate the atmosphere of a lively church service without reference to God. But without the deep roots of traditional religions, these can struggle: the Sunday Assembly, after initial rapid expansion, is now reportedly struggling to keep up its momentum.

But Woodhead thinks the religions that might emerge from the current turmoil will have much deeper roots. The first generation of spiritual revolutionaries, coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s, were optimistic and universalist in outlook, happy to take inspiration from faiths around the world. Their grandchildren, however, are growing up in a world of geopolitical stresses and socioeconomic angst; they are more likely to hark back to supposedly simpler times. “There is a pull away from global universality to local identities,” says Woodhead.

“It’s really important that they’re your gods, they weren’t just made up.”

In the European context, this sets the stage for a resurgence of interest in paganism. Reinventing half-forgotten “native” traditions allows the expression of modern concerns while retaining the patina of age. Paganism also often features divinities that are more like diffuse forces than anthropomorphic gods; that allows people to focus on issues they feel sympathetic towards without having to make a leap of faith to supernatural deities.

In Iceland, for example, the small but fast-growing Ásatrú faith has no particular doctrine beyond somewhat arch celebrations of Old Norse customs and mythology, but has been active on social and ecological issues. Similar movements exist across Europe, such as Druidry in the UK. Not all are liberally inclined. Some are motivated by a desire to return to what they see as conservative “traditional” values – leading in some cases to clashes over the validity of opposing beliefs.

These are niche activities at the moment, and might sometimes be more about playing with symbolism than heartfelt spiritual practice. But over time, they canevolve into more heartfelt and coherent belief systems: Woodhead points to the robust adoption of Rodnovery – an often conservative and patriarchal pagan faith based around the reconstructed beliefs and traditions of the ancient Slavs – in the former Soviet Union as a potential exemplar of things to come.

So the nones mostly represent not atheists, nor even secularists, but a mixture of “apatheists” – people who simply don’t care about religion – and practitioners of what you might call “disorganised religion”. While the world religions are likely to persist and evolve for the foreseeable future, we might for the rest of this century see an efflorescence of relatively small religions jostling to break out among these groups. But if Big Gods and shared faiths are key to social cohesion, what happens without them?

One nation under Mammon

One answer, of course, is that we simply get on with our lives. Munificent economies, good government, solid education and effective rule of law can ensure that we rub along happily without any kind of religious framework. And indeed, some of the societies with the highest proportions of non-believers are among the most secure and harmonious on Earth.

What remains debatable, however, is whether they can afford to be irreligious because they have strong secular institutions – or whether being secular has helped them achieve social stability. Religionists say even secular institutions have religious roots: civil legal systems, for example, codify ideas about justice based on social norms established by religions. The likes of the New Atheists, on the other hand, argue that religion amounts to little more than superstition, and abandoning it will enable societies to improve their lot more effectively.

Connor Wood is not so sure. He contends that a strong, stable society like Sweden’s is both extremely complex and very expensive to run in terms of labour, money and energy – and that might not be sustainable even in the short term. “I think it’s pretty clear that we’re entering into a period of non-linear change in social systems,” he says. “The Western consensus on a combination of market capitalism and democracy can’t be taken for granted.”

That’s a problem, since that combination has radically transformed the social environment from the one in which the world religions evolved – and has to some extent supplanted them.

“I’d be careful about calling capitalism a religion, but a lot of its institutions have religious elements, as in all spheres of human institutional life,” says Wood. “The ‘invisible hand’ of the market almost seems like a supernatural entity.”

Financial exchanges, where people meet to conduct highly ritualised trading activity, seem quite like temples to Mammon, too. In fact, religions, even the defunct ones, can provide uncannily appropriate metaphors for many of the more intractable features of modern life.

The pseudo-religious social order might work well when times are good. But when the social contract becomes stressed – through identity politics, culture wars or economic instability – Wood suggests the consequence is what we see today: the rise of authoritarians in country after country. He cites research showing that people ignore authoritarian pitches until they sense a deterioration of social norms.

“This is the human animal looking around and saying we don’t agree how we should behave,” Wood says. “And we need authority to tell us.” It’s suggestive that political strongmen are often hand in glove with religious fundamentalists: Hindu nationalists in India, say, or Christian evangelicals in the US. That’s a potent combination for believers and an unsettling one for secularists: can anything bridge the gap between them?

Mind the gap

Perhaps one of the major religions might change its form enough to win back non-believers in significant numbers. There is precedent for this: in the 1700s, Christianity was ailing in the US, having become dull and formal even as the Age of Reason saw secular rationalism in the ascendant. A new guard of travelling fire-and-brimstone preachers successfully reinvigorated the faith, setting the tone for centuries to come – an event called the “Great Awakenings”.

The parallels with today are easy to draw, but Woodhead is sceptical that Christianity or other world religions can make up the ground they have lost, in the long term. Once the founders of libraries and universities, they are no longer the key sponsors of intellectual thought. Social change undermines religions which don’t accommodate it: earlier this year, Pope Francis warned that if the Catholic Church didn’t acknowledge its history of male domination and sexual abuse it risked becoming “a museum”. And their tendency to claim we sit at the pinnacle of creation is undermined by a growing sense that humans are not so very significant in the grand scheme of things.

Perhaps a new religion will emerge to fill the void? Again, Woodhead is sceptical. “Historically, what makes religions rise or fall is political support,” she says, “and all religions are transient unless they get imperial support.” Zoroastrianism benefited from its adoption by the successive Persian dynasties; the turning point for Christianity came when it was adopted by the Roman Empire. In the secular West, such support is unlikely to be forthcoming, with the possible exception of the US. In Russia, by contrast, the nationalistic overtones of both Rodnovery and the Orthodox church wins them tacit political backing.

But today, there’s another possible source of support: the internet.

Online movements gain followers at rates unimaginable in the past. The Silicon Valley mantra of “move fast and break things” has become a self-evident truth for many technologists and plutocrats. #MeToo started out as a hashtag expressing anger and solidarity but now stands for real changes to long-standing social norms. And Extinction Rebellion has striven, with considerable success, to trigger a radical shift in attitudes to the crises in climate change and biodiversity.

None of these are religions, of course, but they do share parallels with nascent belief systems – particularly that key functionalist objective of fostering a sense of community and shared purpose. Some have confessional and sacrificial elements, too. So, given time and motivation, could something more explicitly religious grow out of an online community? What new forms of religion might these online “congregations” come up with?

We already have some idea.

Deus ex machina

A few years ago, members of the self-declared “Rationalist” community website LessWrong began discussing a thought experiment about an omnipotent, super-intelligent machine – with many of the qualities of a deity and something of the Old Testament God’s vengeful nature.

It was called Roko’s Basilisk. The full proposition is a complicated logic puzzle, but crudely put, it goes that when a benevolent super-intelligence emerges, it will want to do as much good as possible – and the earlier it comes into existence, the more good it will be able to do. So to encourage everyone to do everything possible to help to bring into existence, it will perpetually and retroactively torture those who don’t – including anyone who so much as learns of its potential existence. (If this is the first you’ve heard of it: sorry!)

Outlandish though it might seem, Roko’s Basilisk caused quite a stir when it was first suggested on LessWrong – enough for discussion of it to be banned by the site’s creator. Predictably, that only made the idea explode across the internet – or at least the geekier parts of it – with references to the Basilisk popping up everywhere from news sites to Doctor Who, despite protestations from some Rationalists that no-one really took it seriously. Their case was not helped by the fact that many Rationalists are strongly committed to other startling ideas about artificial intelligence, ranging from AIs that destroy the world by accident to human-machine hybrids that would transcend all mortal limitations.

Such esoteric beliefs have arisen throughout history, but the ease with which we can now build a community around them is new. “We’ve always had new forms of religiosity, but we haven’t always had enabling spaces for them,” says Beth Singler, who studies the social, philosophical and religious implications of AI at the University of Cambridge. “Going out into a medieval town square and shouting out your unorthodox beliefs was going to get you labelled a heretic, not win converts to your cause.”

The mechanism may be new, but the message isn’t. The Basilisk argumentis in much the same spirit as Pascal’s Wager. The 17th-Century French mathematician suggested non-believers should nonetheless go through the motions of religious observance, just in case a vengeful God does turn out to exist. The idea of punishment as an imperative to cooperate is reminiscent of Norenzayan’s “Big Gods”. And arguments over ways to evade the Basilisk’s gaze are every bit as convoluted as the medieval Scholastics‘ attempts to square human freedom with divine oversight.

Even the technological trappings aren’t new. In 1954, Fredric Brown wrote a (very) short story called “Answer”, in which a galaxy-spanning supercomputer is turned on and asked: is there a God? Now there is, comes the reply.

And some people, like AI entrepreneur Anthony Levandowski, think their holy objective is to build a super-machine that will one day answer just as Brown’s fictional machine did. Levandowski, who made a fortune through self-driving cars, hit the headlines in 2017 when it became public knowledge that he had founded a church, Way of the Future, dedicated to bringing about a peaceful transition to a world mostly run by super-intelligent machines. While his vision sounds more benevolent than Roko’s Basilisk, the church’s creed still includes the ominous lines: “We believe it may be important for machines to see who is friendly to their cause and who is not. We plan on doing so by keeping track of who has done what (and for how long) to help the peaceful and respectful transition.”

“There are many ways people think of God, and thousands of flavours of Christianity, Judaism, Islam,” Levandowski told Wired. “But they’re always looking at something that’s not measurable or you can’t really see or control. This time it’s different. This time you will be able to talk to God, literally, and know that it’s listening.”

Reality bites

Levandowski is not alone. In his bestselling book Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari argues that the foundations of modern civilisation are eroding in the face of an emergent religion he calls “dataism”, which holds that by giving ourselves over to information flows, we can transcend our earthly concerns and ties. Other fledgling transhumanist religious movements focus on immortality – a new spin on the promise of eternal life. Still others ally themselves with older faiths, notably Mormonism.

Are these movements for real? Some groups are performing or “hacking” religion to win support for transhumanist ideas, says Singler. “Unreligions” seek to dispense with the supposedly unpopular strictures or irrational doctrines of conventional religion, and so might appeal to the irreligious. The Turing Church, founded in 2011, has a range of cosmic tenets – “We will go to the stars and find Gods, build Gods, become Gods, and resurrect the dead” – but no hierarchy, rituals or proscribed activities and only one ethical maxim: “Try to act with love and compassion toward other sentient beings.”

But as missionary religions know, what begins as a mere flirtation or idle curiosity – perhaps piqued by a resonant statement or appealing ceremony – can end in a sincere search for truth.

The 2001 UK census found that Jediism, the fictional faith observed by the good guys in Star Wars, was the fourth largest religion: nearly 400,000 people had been inspired to claim it, initially by a tongue-in-cheek online campaign. Ten years later, it had dropped to seventh place, leading many to dismiss it as a prank. But as Singler notes, that is still an awful lot of people – and a lot longer than most viral campaigns endure.

Some branches of Jediism remain jokey, but others take themselves more seriously: the Temple of the Jedi Order claims its members are “real people that live or lived their lives according to the principles of Jediism” – inspired by the fiction, but based on the real-life philosophies that informed it.

With those sorts of numbers, Jediism “should” have been recognised as a religion in the UK. But officials who apparently assumed it was not a genuine census answer did not record it as such. “A lot is measured against the Western Anglophone tradition of religion,” says Singler. Scientology was barred from recognition as a religion for many years in the UK because it did not have a Supreme Being – something that could also be said of Buddhism.

In fact, recognition is a complex issue worldwide, particularly since that there is no widely accepted definition of religion even in academic circles. Communist Vietnam, for example, is officially atheist and often cited as one of the world’s most irreligious countries – but sceptics say this is really because official surveys don’t capture the huge proportion of the population who practice folk religion. On the other hand, official recognition of Ásatrú, the Icelandic pagan faith, meant it was entitled to its share of a “faith tax”; as a result, it is building the country’s first pagan temple for nearly 1,000 years.

Scepticism about practitioners’ motives impedes many new movements from being recognised as genuine religions, whether by officialdom or by the public at large. But ultimately the question of sincerity is a red herring, Singler says: “Whenever someone tells you their worldview, you have to take them at face value”. The acid test, as true for neopagans as for transhumanists, is whether people make significant changes to their lives consistent with their stated faith.

And such changes are exactly what the founders of some new religious movements want. Official status is irrelevant if you can win thousands or even millions of followers to your cause.

Consider the “Witnesses of Climatology“, a fledgling “religion” invented to foster greater commitment to action on climate change. After a decade spent working on engineering solutions to climate change, its founder Olya Irzak came to the conclusion that the real problem lay not some much in finding technical solutions, but in winning social support for them. “What’s a multi-generational social construct that organises people around shared morals?” she asks. “The stickiest is religion.”

So three years ago, Irzak and some friends set about building one. They didn’t see any need to bring God into it – Irzak was brought up an atheist – but did start running regular “services”, including introductions, a sermon eulogising the awesomeness of nature and education on aspects of environmentalism. Periodically they include rituals, particularly at traditional holidays. At Reverse Christmas, the Witnesses plant a tree rather than cutting one down; on Glacier Memorial Day, they watch blocks of ice melt in the California sun.

As these examples suggest, Witnesses of Climatology has a parodic feel to it – light-heartedness helps novices get over any initial awkwardness – but Irzak’s underlying intent is quite serious.

“We hope people get real value from this and are encouraged to work on climate change,” she says, rather than despairing about the state of the world. The congregation numbers a few hundred, but Irzak, as a good engineer, is committed to testing out ways to grow that number. Among other things, she is considering a Sunday School to teach children ways of thinking about how complex systems work.

Recently, the Witnesses have been looking further afield, including to a ceremony conducted across the Middle East and central Asia just before the spring equinox: purification by throwing something unwanted into a fire – a written wish, or an actual object – and then jumping over it. Recast as an effort to rid the world of environmental ills, it proved a popular addition to the liturgy. This might have been expected, because it’s been practised for thousands of years as part of Nowruz, the Iranian New Year – whose origins lie in part with the Zoroastrians.

Transhumanism, Jediism, the Witnesses of Climatology and the myriad of other new religious movements may never amount to much. But perhaps the same could have been said for the small groups of believers who gathered around a sacred flame in ancient Iran, three millennia ago, and whose fledgling belief grew into one of the largest, most powerful and enduring religions the world has ever seen – and which is still inspiring people today.

Perhaps religions never do really die. Perhaps the religions that span the world today are less durable than we think. And perhaps the next great faith is just getting started.

A recent survey conducted by The Wall Street Journal and The University of Chicago found that Americans are, in huge numbers, pulling back from the values that once defined them. Over the last 25 years, the percentage of Americans who described “Patriotism” as either “important” or “very important” fell from 70% to 38%. Those who valued “Religion” fell from 62% to 39%, “Having Children” from 59% to 30%, and “Community Involvement” from 47% to 27%. Even the percentage of Americans valuing “Tolerance for Others” dropped from 80% to just 58%. Only one value out of ten listed increased: “Money,” from 31% to 43%.

Bill McInturff is an expert involved with previous iterations of this survey. He told The Wall Street Journal, “Perhaps the toll of our political division, COVID and the lowest economic confidence in decades is having a startling effect on our core values.” While economic affairs affect what people consider to be important, this is reversing the proverbial cart and horse. Corrupt societies can be prosperous, but only for a time. Eventually, low trust, rampant injustice, and civic division have consequences. Throughout history, economic crisis has not created a moral vacuum: It reveals it.

If there is no moral design to reality, or for humanity in particular, what people value is inconsequential. In such a world, there is nothing to be pursued outside of individual expression, which is assumed to lead to happiness and human flourishing. Who cares if people do not value communities, countries, or tolerance? It is the inherent determination of individuals, the pursuit of what they want the most, that will inevitably guide them. We can only follow our own impulses and desires.

History tells a different story, however. For example, a central genius of the American system is the built-in idea that people can and will go wrong if given the chance. Even the well-intentioned can be hypocrites, including America’s founders, who nevertheless understood the pitfalls of both concentrated power and a virtue-less mob. In the prophetic words of John Adams,

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net.

Or, to borrow words often attributed to Patrick Henry, “Bad men cannot make good citizens.”

Though various forms of godless philosophy reject the idea, our most fundamental beliefs about life and the world shape our behavior. We do the things that are important to us, and we consider what is important based on what we think is true about life and the world. Put differently, our values shape our actions, and what we value is shaped by what we believe. Or, to fall back on a well-worn phrase, ideas have consequences.

America’s changing values reflect a deeper change in how we think about reality itself, especially what we believe about meaning, purpose, and identity. What is life all about? Who am I? Why am I here? America’s changing values will be reflected in how we live, both as individuals and how we order our lives together as a society.

Any solution, if it will help and not further harm, must first accurately diagnose the crisis. To diagnose a crisis of values as primarily economic is to confuse cause and effect. Conservatives who tout the free market alone without addressing the fundamental beliefs and values required to sustain life together, miss the point. A fabulously wealthy society is not, in and of itself, a better one. America needs a revival, one that will rekindle belief in what is true and good, and ultimately in that which is bigger than ourselves.

Christians, connected to the true Vine, can show the better way, loving our neighbors (even when we are hated) and loving truth. In a world starving for the right values, God gives our lives true value. The world is valuable because God created it and Christ died to save it. May God grant us the courage to live like this is true.

________

Copyright (c) 2023 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

The U.S. religious marketplace is extremely volatile, with nearly half of American adults leaving the faith tradition of their upbringing to either switch allegiances or abandon religious affiliation altogether, a new survey finds.

The study released by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life is unusual for it sheer scope, relying on interviews with more than 35,000 adults to document a diverse and dynamic U.S. religious population.

While much of the study confirms earlier findings -- mainline Protestant churches are in decline, non-denominational churches are gaining and the ranks of the unaffiliated are growing -- it also provides a deeper look behind those trends, and of smaller religious groups.

“The American religious economy is like a marketplace - very dynamic, very competitive,” said Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum. “Everyone is losing, everyone is gaining. There are net winners and losers, but no one can stand still. Those groups that are losing significant numbers have to recoup them to stay vibrant.”

The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey estimates the United States is 78 percent Christian and about to lose its status as a majority Protestant nation, at 51 percent and slipping.

More than one-quarter of American adults have left the faith of their childhood for another religion or no religion at all, the survey found. Factoring in moves from one stream or denomination of Protestantism to another, the number rises to 44 percent.

One in four adults ages 18 to 29 claim no affiliation with a religious institution.

“In the past, certain religions had a real holding power, where people from one generation to the next would stay,” said Penn State University sociologist Roger Finke, who consulted in the survey planning. “Right now, there is a dropping confidence in organized religion, especially in the traditional religious forms.”

Lugo said the 44 percent figure is “a very conservative estimate,” and more research is planned to determine the causes.

“It does seem in keeping with the high tolerance among Americans for change,” Lugo said. “People move a lot, people change jobs a lot. It’s a very fluid society.”

The religious demographic benefiting the most from this religious churn is those who claim no religious affiliation. People moving into that category outnumber those moving out of it by a three-to-one margin.

The majority of the unaffiliated -- 12 percent of the overall population -- describe their religion as “nothing in particular,” and about half of those say faith is at least somewhat important to them. Atheists or agnostics account for 4 percent of the total population.

The Roman Catholic Church has lost more members than any faith tradition because of affiliation swapping, the survey found. While nearly one in three Americans were raised Catholic, fewer than one in four say they’re Catholic today. That means roughly 10 percent of all Americans are ex-Catholics.

The share of the population that identifies as Catholic, however, has remained fairly stable in recent decades thanks to an influx of immigrant Catholics, mostly from Latin America. Nearly half of all Catholics under 30 are Hispanic, the survey found.

On the Protestant side, changes in affiliation are swelling the ranks of nondenominational churches, while Baptist and Methodist traditions are showing net losses.

Many Americans have vague denominational ties at best. People who call themselves “just a Protestant,” in fact, account for nearly 10 percent of all Protestants.

Although evangelical churches strive to win new Christian believers from the “unchurched,” the survey found most converts to evangelical churches were raised Protestant.

Hindus claimed the highest retention of childhood members, at 84 percent. The group with the worst retention is one of the fastest growing -- Jehovah’s Witnesses. Only 37 percent of those raised in the sect known for door-to-door proselytizing said they remain members.

Among other findings involving smaller religious groups, more than half of American Buddhists surveyed were white, and most Buddhists were converts.

More people in the survey pool identified themselves as Buddhist than Muslim, although both populations were small -- less than 1 percent of the total population. By contrast, Jews accounted for 1.7 percent of the overall population.

The self-identified Buddhists -- 0.7 percent of those surveyed -- illustrate a core challenge to estimating religious affiliation: What does affiliation mean?

It’s unclear whether people who called themselves Buddhists did so because they practice yoga or meditation, for instance, or claim affiliation with a Buddhist institution.

The report does not project membership figures for religious groups, in part because the survey is not as authoritative as a census and didn’t count children, Lugo said. The U.S. Census does not ask questions on religion.

________

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.

Fewer Americans say they believe in God or pray regularly — yet more people believe in an afterlife nonetheless, a new study finds.

It’s a generational thing, with millennials the least likely generation to say they’re religious or to take the Bible literally, the team at San Diego State University, Florida Atlantic University and Case Western Reserve University found.

“In recent years, fewer Americans prayed, believed in God, took the Bible literally, attended religious services, identified as religious, affiliated with a religion, or had confidence in religious institutions,” the team wrote in the journal Sage Open.

“The large declines in religious practice among young adults are also further evidence that millennials are the least religious generation in memory, and possibly in American history,” said psychologist Jean Twenge of San Diego State University, who led the study.

The team looked at the General Social Survey, in which up to 58,000 people are interviewed annually about a variety of factors, including religion.

They answered questions such as: “What is your religious preference? Is it Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, some other religion, or no religion” and “Do you believe there is a life after death?”

They found big changes since the 1970s and 1980s.

“In the late 1980s, only 13 percent of U.S. adults expressed serious doubts about the existence of God (choosing one of the less certain response choices such as ‘I don’t believe in God,’ ‘I don’t know whether there is a God and I don’t believe there is any way to find out,’ or ‘I don’t believe in a personal God, but do believe in a Higher Power of some kind,’” the team wrote.

“Among 18- to 29-year-olds, 30 percent had serious doubts by 2014, more than twice as many as in the late 1980s (12 percent).”

Fewer also believe the Bible is the actual word of God.

“In 1984, 14 percent of Americans believed the Bible ‘is an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by men’ rather than the word of God; by 2014, 22 percent of Americans believed this, a 57 percent increase,” they wrote.

In 1998, 49 percent of 18 to 29-year-olds said they were moderately or very religious in 1998. By 2014 this had dropped to 38 percent.

And while 15 percent of adults said they were “not religious at all” in 1998, 20 percent did in 2014.

Yet 80 percent of Americans said they believe in an afterlife in 2014, up from 73 percent in 1972-74.

“It was interesting that fewer people participated in religion or prayed but more believed in an afterlife,” Twenge said. “It might be part of a growing entitlement mentality - thinking you can get something for nothing.”

A news report from the Netherlands points to a form of theological insanity that is spreading far beyond the Dutch. ECUMENICAL NEWS INTERNATIONAL reports that church authorities in the Netherlands have decided not to take action against a Dutch pastor who openly declares himself to be an atheist.

The pastor, Klaas Hendrikse, serves a congregation of the Protestant Church in the Netherlands. In 2007 he published a book described as a “manifesto of an atheist pastor.” In the book Hendrikse argues for the non-existence of God, but he insists that he does believe in God as a concept.

As ECUMENICAL NEWS INTERNATIONAL reports:

In his book, Hendrikse recounts how his conviction that God does not exist has become stronger over the years.

“The non-existence of God is for me not an obstacle but a precondition to believing in God. I am an atheist believer,” Hendrikse writes in the book. “God is for me not a being but a word for what can happen between people. Someone says to you, for example, ‘I will not abandon you’, and then makes those words come true. It would be perfectly alright to call that [relationship] God.”

While this kind of theological language may be shocking, it is not all that uncommon. For years, many theologians have been moving away from realist conceptions of theology to various forms of non-realism. In classical terms, anti-realist theologians can actually be atheists, for they do not believe that God actually or necessarily exists. They do, however, find “God” to be a useful concept.

Janet Martin Soskice defines theological realists as “those who, while aware of the inability of any theological formulation to catch the divine realities, none the less accept that there are divine realities that theologians, however ham-fistedly, are trying to catch.”

That definition is incredible helpful, for it serves to remind us that there are, on the other hand, some theologians who believe that there is no divine reality at all. Evidently, there are some pastors who also believe that there is no God, but there is a concept of God that we can use.

Most Christians would be shocked and scandalized to know that a pastor would be an atheist -- and intend to remain as pastor. But in the doctrinally disarmed world of many denominations, the service of an atheist as pastor is not only conceivable but actual. In one sense, Klass Hendrikse is merely more open about his atheism than many others. Indeed, many liberal Protestants believe that God is, in the end, an intellectual concept that may add meaning to life -- not a living self-existent deity who rules over all.

In Klass Hendrikse’s case, his congregation belongs to two denominational groups. Neither denominational body was willing to bring Pastor Hendrikse to a church trial or disciplinary process.

In announcing the decision not to discipline Hendrikse, the church told the congregation by letter that a disciplinary process would amount to “a protracted discussion about the meanings of words that in the end will produce little clarity.”

Such is the world of liberal Protestantism. The service of a preacher who does not even believe in God is preferable to “a protracted discussion about the meanings of words that in the end will produce little clarity.” Of course, the lack of clarity is the church’s own fault. It is not as if the issues are not sufficiently clear. A denomination that will not require its pastors to believe that God exists is a denomination that has reached the very bottom of the well in terms of theological insanity. According to the news report, the Protestant Church in the Netherlands claims that its own laws prevent the denomination from taking any action against a serving pastor.

The theological self-destruction of the church never starts with a pastor who doesn’t even believe in the existence of God. It begins with denials of one doctrine here, another there. Before long, the unwillingness of the church to call its churches and ministers to account leads to further theological concessions. The cowardice of church bureaucrats opens the door to any and all theological aberrations. The next thing you know, there is an atheist in the pulpit.

A church afraid of “a protracted discussion about the meanings of words that in the end will produce little clarity” is itself the guilty party in that lack of clarity. The church bears the responsibility to make the issues clear and to defend the faith -- otherwise it isn’t a church at all.

The Dutch have become famous worldwide for their liberal approach to assisted suicide and euthanasia. In this case we see something new -- the suicide of a church.

*

[The original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #5228]

Fewer Americans say they believe in God or pray regularly — yet more people believe in an afterlife nonetheless, a new study finds.

It’s a generational thing, with millennials the least likely generation to say they’re religious or to take the Bible literally, the team at San Diego State University, Florida Atlantic University and Case Western Reserve University found.

“In recent years, fewer Americans prayed, believed in God, took the Bible literally, attended religious services, identified as religious, affiliated with a religion, or had confidence in religious institutions,” the team wrote in the journal Sage Open.

“The large declines in religious practice among young adults are also further evidence that millennials are the least religious generation in memory, and possibly in American history,” said psychologist Jean Twenge of San Diego State University, who led the study.

The team looked at the General Social Survey, in which up to 58,000 people are interviewed annually about a variety of factors, including religion.

They answered questions such as: “What is your religious preference? Is it Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, some other religion, or no religion” and “Do you believe there is a life after death?”

They found big changes since the 1970s and 1980s.

“In the late 1980s, only 13 percent of U.S. adults expressed serious doubts about the existence of God (choosing one of the less certain response choices such as ‘I don’t believe in God,’ ‘I don’t know whether there is a God and I don’t believe there is any way to find out,’ or ‘I don’t believe in a personal God, but do believe in a Higher Power of some kind,’” the team wrote.

“Among 18- to 29-year-olds, 30 percent had serious doubts by 2014, more than twice as many as in the late 1980s (12 percent).”

Fewer also believe the Bible is the actual word of God.

“In 1984, 14 percent of Americans believed the Bible ‘is an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by men’ rather than the word of God; by 2014, 22 percent of Americans believed this, a 57 percent increase,” they wrote.

In 1998, 49 percent of 18 to 29-year-olds said they were moderately or very religious in 1998. By 2014 this had dropped to 38 percent.

And while 15 percent of adults said they were “not religious at all” in 1998, 20 percent did in 2014.

Yet 80 percent of Americans said they believe in an afterlife in 2014, up from 73 percent in 1972-74.

“It was interesting that fewer people participated in religion or prayed but more believed in an afterlife,” Twenge said. “It might be part of a growing entitlement mentality - thinking you can get something for nothing.”

Throughout history, people’s faith and their attachments to religious institutions have transformed, argues Sumit Paul-Choudhury. So what’s next?

________

Before Mohammed, before Jesus, before Buddha, there was Zoroaster. Some 3,500 years ago, in Bronze Age Iran, he had a vision of the one supreme God. A thousand years later, Zoroastrianism, the world’s first great monotheistic religion, was the official faith of the mighty Persian Empire, its fire temples attended by millions of adherents. A thousand years after that, the empire collapsed, and the followers of Zoroaster were persecuted and converted to the new faith of their conquerors, Islam.

Another 1,500 years later – today – Zoroastrianism is a dying faith, its sacred flames tended by ever fewer worshippers.

We take it for granted that religions are born, grow and die – but we are also oddly blind to that reality. When someone tries to start a new religion, it is often dismissed as a cult. When we recognise a faith, we treat its teachings and traditions as timeless and sacrosanct. And when a religion dies, it becomes a myth, and its claim to sacred truth expires. Tales of the Egyptian, Greek and Norse pantheons are now considered legends, not holy writ.

Even today’s dominant religions have continually evolved throughout history. Early Christianity, for example, was a truly broad church: ancient documents include yarns about Jesus’ family life and testaments to the nobility of Judas. It took three centuries for the Christian church to consolidate around a canon of scriptures – and then in 1054 it split into the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic churches. Since then, Christianity has continued both to grow and to splinter into ever more disparate groups, from silent Quakers to snake-handling Pentecostalists.

If you believe your faith has arrived at ultimate truth, you might reject the idea that it will change at all. But if history is any guide, no matter how deeply held our beliefs may be today, they are likely in time to be transformed or transferred as they pass to our descendants – or simply to fade away.

If religions have changed so dramatically in the past, how might they change in the future? Is there any substance to the claim that belief in gods and deities will die out altogether? And as our civilisation and its technologies become increasingly complex, could entirely new forms of worship emerge? (Could artificial intelligence develop a soul?)

To answer these questions, a good starting point is to ask: why do we have religion in the first place?

Reason to believe

One notorious answer comes from Voltaire, the 18th Century French polymath, who wrote: “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”Because Voltaire was a trenchant critic of organised religion, this quip is often quoted cynically. But in fact, he was being perfectly sincere. He was arguing that belief in God is necessary for society to function, even if he didn’t approve of the monopoly the church held over that belief.

Many modern students of religion agree. The broad idea that a shared faith serves the needs of a society is known as the functionalist view of religion. There are many functionalist hypotheses, from the idea that religion is the “opium of the masses“, used by the powerful to control the poor, to the proposal that faith supports the abstract intellectualism required for science and law. One recurring theme is social cohesion: religion brings together a community, who might then form a hunting party, raise a temple or support a political party.

Those faiths that endure are “the long-term products of extraordinarily complex cultural pressures, selection processes, and evolution”, writes Connor Wood of the Center for Mind and Culture in Boston, Massachusetts on the religious reference website Patheos, where he blogs about the scientific study of religion. New religious movements are born all the time, but most don’t survive long. They must compete with other faiths for followers and survive potentially hostile social and political environments.

Under this argument, any religion that does endure has to offer its adherents tangible benefits. Christianity, for example, was just one of many religious movements that came and mostly went during the course of the Roman Empire. According to Wood, it was set apart by its ethos of caring for the sick – meaning more Christians survived outbreaks of disease than pagan Romans. Islam, too, initially attracted followers by emphasising honour, humility and charity – qualities which were not endemic in turbulent 7th-Century Arabia. (Read about the “light triad” traits that can make you a good person.)

Given this, we might expect the form that religion takes to follow the function it plays in a particular society – or as Voltaire might have put it, that different societies will invent the particular gods they need. Conversely, we might expect similar societies to have similar religions, even if they have developed in isolation. And there is some evidence for that – although when it comes to religion, there are always exceptions to any rule.

Hunter-gatherers, for example, tend to believe that all objects – whether animal, vegetable or mineral – have supernatural aspects (animism) and that the world is imbued with supernatural forces (animatism). These must be understood and respected; human morality generally doesn’t figure significantly. This worldview makes sense for groups too small to need abstract codes of conduct, but who must know their environment intimately. (An exception: Shinto, an ancient animist religion, is still widely practised in hyper-modern Japan.)

At the other end of the spectrum, the teeming societies of the West are at least nominally faithful to religions in which a single watchful, all-powerful god lays down, and sometimes enforces, moral instructions: Yahweh, Christ and Allah. The psychologist Ara Norenzayan argues it was belief in these “Big Gods” that allowed the formation of societies made up of large numbers of strangers. Whether that belief constitutes cause or effect has recently been disputed, but the upshot is that sharing a faith allows people to co-exist (relatively) peacefully. The knowledge that Big God is watching makes sure we behave ourselves.

Or at least, it did. Today, many of our societies are huge and multicultural: adherents of many faiths co-exist with each other – and with a growing number of people who say they have no religion at all. We obey laws made and enforced by governments, not by God. Secularism is on the rise, with science providing tools to understand and shape the world.

Given all that, there’s a growing consensus that the future of religion is that it has no future.

Imagine there’s no heaven

Powerful intellectual and political currents have driven this proposition since the early 20th Century. Sociologists argued that the march of science was leading to the “disenchantment” of society: supernatural answers to the big questions were no longer felt to be needed. Communist states like Soviet Russia and China adopted atheism as state policy and frowned on even private religious expression. In 1968, the eminent sociologist Peter Berger told the New York Times that by “the 21st Century, religious believers are likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture”.

Now that we’re actually in the 21st Century, Berger’s view remains an article of faith for many secularists – although Berger himself recanted in the 1990s. His successors are emboldened by surveys showing that in many countries, increasing numbers of people are saying they have no religion. That’s most true in rich, stable countries like Sweden and Japan, but also, perhaps more surprisingly, in places like Latin America and the Arab world. Even in the US, long a conspicuous exception to the axiom that richer countries are more secular, the number of “nones” has been rising sharply. In the 2018 General Social Survey of US attitudes, “no religion” became the single largest group, edging out evangelical Christians.

Despite this, religion is not disappearing on a global scale – at least in terms of numbers. In 2015, the Pew Research Center modelled the future of the world’s great religions based on demographics, migration and conversion. Far from a precipitous decline in religiosity, it predicted a modest increase in believers, from 84% of the world’s population today to 87% in 2050. Muslims would grow in number to match Christians, while the number unaffiliated with any religion would decline slightly.

The pattern Pew predicted was of “the secularising West and the rapidly growing rest”. Religion will continue to grow in economically and socially insecure places like much of sub-Saharan Africa – and to decline where they are stable. That chimes with what we know about the deep-seated psychological and neurological drivers of belief. When life is tough or disaster strikes, religion seems to provide a bulwark of psychological (and sometimes practical) support. In a landmark study, people directly affected by the 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand became significantly more religious than other New Zealanders, who became marginally less religious.

We also need to be careful when interpreting what people mean by “no religion”. “Nones” may be disinterested in organised religion, but that doesn’t mean they are militantly atheist. In 1994, the sociologist Grace Davie classified people according to whether they belonged to a religious group and/or believed in a religious position. The traditionally religious both belonged and believed; hardcore atheists did neither. Then there are those who belong but don’t believe – parents attending church to get a place for their child at a faith school, perhaps. And, finally, there are those who believe in something, but don’t belong to any group.

The research suggests that the last two groups are significant. The Understanding Unbelief project at the University of Kent in the UK is conducting a three-year, six-nation survey of attitudes among those who say they don’t believe God exists (“atheists”) and those who don’t think it’s possible to know if God exists (“agnostics”). In interim results released in May 2019, the researchers found that few unbelievers actually identify themselves by these labels, with significant minorities opting for a religious identity.

What’s more, around three-quarters of atheists and nine out of 10 agnostics are open to the existence of supernatural phenomena, including everything from astrology to supernatural beings and life after death. Unbelievers “exhibit significant diversity both within, and between, different countries.

Accordingly, there are very many ways of being an unbeliever”, the report concluded – including, notably, the dating-website cliche “spiritual, but not religious”. Like many cliches, it’s rooted in truth. But what does it actually mean?

The old gods return

In 2005, Linda Woodhead wrote The Spiritual Revolution, in which she described an intensive study of belief in the British town of Kendal. Woodhead and her co-author found that people were rapidly turning away from organised religion, with its emphasis on fitting into an established order of things, towards practices designed to accentuate and foster individuals’ own sense of who they are. If the town’s Christian churches did not embrace this shift, they concluded, congregations would dwindle into irrelevance while self-guided practices would become the mainstream in a “spiritual revolution”.

Today, Woodhead says that revolution has taken place – and not just in Kendal. Organised religion is waning in the UK, with no real end in sight. “Religions do well, and always have done, when they are subjectively convincing – when you have the sense that God is working for you,” says Woodhead, now professor of sociology of religion at the University of Lancaster in the UK.

In poorer societies, you might pray for good fortune or a stable job. The “prosperity gospel” is central to several of America’s megachurches, whose congregations are often dominated by economically insecure congregations. But if your basic needs are well catered for, you are more likely to be seeking fulfilment and meaning. Traditional religion is failing to deliver on this, particularly where doctrine clashes with moral convictions that arise from secular society – on gender equality, say.

In response, people have started constructing faiths of their own.

What do these self-directed religions look like? One approach is syncretism, the “pick and mix” approach of combining traditions and practices that often results from the mixing of cultures. Many religions have syncretistic elements, although over time they are assimilated and become unremarkable. Festivals like Christmas and Easter, for example, have archaic pagan elements, while daily practice for many people in China involves a mixture of Mahayana Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. The joins are easier to see in relatively young religions, such as Vodoun or Rastafarianism.

An alternative is to streamline. New religious movements often seek to preserve the central tenets of an older religion while stripping it of trappings that may have become stifling or old-fashioned. In the West, one form this takes is for humanists to rework religious motifs: there have been attempts to rewrite the Bible without any supernatural elements, calls for the construction of “atheist temples” dedicated to contemplation. And the “Sunday Assembly“ aims to recreate the atmosphere of a lively church service without reference to God. But without the deep roots of traditional religions, these can struggle: the Sunday Assembly, after initial rapid expansion, is now reportedly struggling to keep up its momentum.

But Woodhead thinks the religions that might emerge from the current turmoil will have much deeper roots. The first generation of spiritual revolutionaries, coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s, were optimistic and universalist in outlook, happy to take inspiration from faiths around the world. Their grandchildren, however, are growing up in a world of geopolitical stresses and socioeconomic angst; they are more likely to hark back to supposedly simpler times. “There is a pull away from global universality to local identities,” says Woodhead.

“It’s really important that they’re your gods, they weren’t just made up.”

In the European context, this sets the stage for a resurgence of interest in paganism. Reinventing half-forgotten “native” traditions allows the expression of modern concerns while retaining the patina of age. Paganism also often features divinities that are more like diffuse forces than anthropomorphic gods; that allows people to focus on issues they feel sympathetic towards without having to make a leap of faith to supernatural deities.

In Iceland, for example, the small but fast-growing Ásatrú faith has no particular doctrine beyond somewhat arch celebrations of Old Norse customs and mythology, but has been active on social and ecological issues. Similar movements exist across Europe, such as Druidry in the UK. Not all are liberally inclined. Some are motivated by a desire to return to what they see as conservative “traditional” values – leading in some cases to clashes over the validity of opposing beliefs.

These are niche activities at the moment, and might sometimes be more about playing with symbolism than heartfelt spiritual practice. But over time, they canevolve into more heartfelt and coherent belief systems: Woodhead points to the robust adoption of Rodnovery – an often conservative and patriarchal pagan faith based around the reconstructed beliefs and traditions of the ancient Slavs – in the former Soviet Union as a potential exemplar of things to come.

So the nones mostly represent not atheists, nor even secularists, but a mixture of “apatheists” – people who simply don’t care about religion – and practitioners of what you might call “disorganised religion”. While the world religions are likely to persist and evolve for the foreseeable future, we might for the rest of this century see an efflorescence of relatively small religions jostling to break out among these groups. But if Big Gods and shared faiths are key to social cohesion, what happens without them?

One nation under Mammon

One answer, of course, is that we simply get on with our lives. Munificent economies, good government, solid education and effective rule of law can ensure that we rub along happily without any kind of religious framework. And indeed, some of the societies with the highest proportions of non-believers are among the most secure and harmonious on Earth.

What remains debatable, however, is whether they can afford to be irreligious because they have strong secular institutions – or whether being secular has helped them achieve social stability. Religionists say even secular institutions have religious roots: civil legal systems, for example, codify ideas about justice based on social norms established by religions. The likes of the New Atheists, on the other hand, argue that religion amounts to little more than superstition, and abandoning it will enable societies to improve their lot more effectively.

Connor Wood is not so sure. He contends that a strong, stable society like Sweden’s is both extremely complex and very expensive to run in terms of labour, money and energy – and that might not be sustainable even in the short term. “I think it’s pretty clear that we’re entering into a period of non-linear change in social systems,” he says. “The Western consensus on a combination of market capitalism and democracy can’t be taken for granted.”

That’s a problem, since that combination has radically transformed the social environment from the one in which the world religions evolved – and has to some extent supplanted them.

“I’d be careful about calling capitalism a religion, but a lot of its institutions have religious elements, as in all spheres of human institutional life,” says Wood. “The ‘invisible hand’ of the market almost seems like a supernatural entity.”

Financial exchanges, where people meet to conduct highly ritualised trading activity, seem quite like temples to Mammon, too. In fact, religions, even the defunct ones, can provide uncannily appropriate metaphors for many of the more intractable features of modern life.

The pseudo-religious social order might work well when times are good. But when the social contract becomes stressed – through identity politics, culture wars or economic instability – Wood suggests the consequence is what we see today: the rise of authoritarians in country after country. He cites research showing that people ignore authoritarian pitches until they sense a deterioration of social norms.

“This is the human animal looking around and saying we don’t agree how we should behave,” Wood says. “And we need authority to tell us.” It’s suggestive that political strongmen are often hand in glove with religious fundamentalists: Hindu nationalists in India, say, or Christian evangelicals in the US. That’s a potent combination for believers and an unsettling one for secularists: can anything bridge the gap between them?

Mind the gap

Perhaps one of the major religions might change its form enough to win back non-believers in significant numbers. There is precedent for this: in the 1700s, Christianity was ailing in the US, having become dull and formal even as the Age of Reason saw secular rationalism in the ascendant. A new guard of travelling fire-and-brimstone preachers successfully reinvigorated the faith, setting the tone for centuries to come – an event called the “Great Awakenings”.

The parallels with today are easy to draw, but Woodhead is sceptical that Christianity or other world religions can make up the ground they have lost, in the long term. Once the founders of libraries and universities, they are no longer the key sponsors of intellectual thought. Social change undermines religions which don’t accommodate it: earlier this year, Pope Francis warned that if the Catholic Church didn’t acknowledge its history of male domination and sexual abuse it risked becoming “a museum”. And their tendency to claim we sit at the pinnacle of creation is undermined by a growing sense that humans are not so very significant in the grand scheme of things.

Perhaps a new religion will emerge to fill the void? Again, Woodhead is sceptical. “Historically, what makes religions rise or fall is political support,” she says, “and all religions are transient unless they get imperial support.” Zoroastrianism benefited from its adoption by the successive Persian dynasties; the turning point for Christianity came when it was adopted by the Roman Empire. In the secular West, such support is unlikely to be forthcoming, with the possible exception of the US. In Russia, by contrast, the nationalistic overtones of both Rodnovery and the Orthodox church wins them tacit political backing.

But today, there’s another possible source of support: the internet.

Online movements gain followers at rates unimaginable in the past. The Silicon Valley mantra of “move fast and break things” has become a self-evident truth for many technologists and plutocrats. #MeToo started out as a hashtag expressing anger and solidarity but now stands for real changes to long-standing social norms. And Extinction Rebellion has striven, with considerable success, to trigger a radical shift in attitudes to the crises in climate change and biodiversity.

None of these are religions, of course, but they do share parallels with nascent belief systems – particularly that key functionalist objective of fostering a sense of community and shared purpose. Some have confessional and sacrificial elements, too. So, given time and motivation, could something more explicitly religious grow out of an online community? What new forms of religion might these online “congregations” come up with?

We already have some idea.

Deus ex machina

A few years ago, members of the self-declared “Rationalist” community website LessWrong began discussing a thought experiment about an omnipotent, super-intelligent machine – with many of the qualities of a deity and something of the Old Testament God’s vengeful nature.

It was called Roko’s Basilisk. The full proposition is a complicated logic puzzle, but crudely put, it goes that when a benevolent super-intelligence emerges, it will want to do as much good as possible – and the earlier it comes into existence, the more good it will be able to do. So to encourage everyone to do everything possible to help to bring into existence, it will perpetually and retroactively torture those who don’t – including anyone who so much as learns of its potential existence. (If this is the first you’ve heard of it: sorry!)

Outlandish though it might seem, Roko’s Basilisk caused quite a stir when it was first suggested on LessWrong – enough for discussion of it to be banned by the site’s creator. Predictably, that only made the idea explode across the internet – or at least the geekier parts of it – with references to the Basilisk popping up everywhere from news sites to Doctor Who, despite protestations from some Rationalists that no-one really took it seriously. Their case was not helped by the fact that many Rationalists are strongly committed to other startling ideas about artificial intelligence, ranging from AIs that destroy the world by accident to human-machine hybrids that would transcend all mortal limitations.

Such esoteric beliefs have arisen throughout history, but the ease with which we can now build a community around them is new. “We’ve always had new forms of religiosity, but we haven’t always had enabling spaces for them,” says Beth Singler, who studies the social, philosophical and religious implications of AI at the University of Cambridge. “Going out into a medieval town square and shouting out your unorthodox beliefs was going to get you labelled a heretic, not win converts to your cause.”

The mechanism may be new, but the message isn’t. The Basilisk argumentis in much the same spirit as Pascal’s Wager. The 17th-Century French mathematician suggested non-believers should nonetheless go through the motions of religious observance, just in case a vengeful God does turn out to exist. The idea of punishment as an imperative to cooperate is reminiscent of Norenzayan’s “Big Gods”. And arguments over ways to evade the Basilisk’s gaze are every bit as convoluted as the medieval Scholastics‘ attempts to square human freedom with divine oversight.

Even the technological trappings aren’t new. In 1954, Fredric Brown wrote a (very) short story called “Answer”, in which a galaxy-spanning supercomputer is turned on and asked: is there a God? Now there is, comes the reply.

And some people, like AI entrepreneur Anthony Levandowski, think their holy objective is to build a super-machine that will one day answer just as Brown’s fictional machine did. Levandowski, who made a fortune through self-driving cars, hit the headlines in 2017 when it became public knowledge that he had founded a church, Way of the Future, dedicated to bringing about a peaceful transition to a world mostly run by super-intelligent machines. While his vision sounds more benevolent than Roko’s Basilisk, the church’s creed still includes the ominous lines: “We believe it may be important for machines to see who is friendly to their cause and who is not. We plan on doing so by keeping track of who has done what (and for how long) to help the peaceful and respectful transition.”

“There are many ways people think of God, and thousands of flavours of Christianity, Judaism, Islam,” Levandowski told Wired. “But they’re always looking at something that’s not measurable or you can’t really see or control. This time it’s different. This time you will be able to talk to God, literally, and know that it’s listening.”

Reality bites

Levandowski is not alone. In his bestselling book Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari argues that the foundations of modern civilisation are eroding in the face of an emergent religion he calls “dataism”, which holds that by giving ourselves over to information flows, we can transcend our earthly concerns and ties. Other fledgling transhumanist religious movements focus on immortality – a new spin on the promise of eternal life. Still others ally themselves with older faiths, notably Mormonism.

Are these movements for real? Some groups are performing or “hacking” religion to win support for transhumanist ideas, says Singler. “Unreligions” seek to dispense with the supposedly unpopular strictures or irrational doctrines of conventional religion, and so might appeal to the irreligious. The Turing Church, founded in 2011, has a range of cosmic tenets – “We will go to the stars and find Gods, build Gods, become Gods, and resurrect the dead” – but no hierarchy, rituals or proscribed activities and only one ethical maxim: “Try to act with love and compassion toward other sentient beings.”

But as missionary religions know, what begins as a mere flirtation or idle curiosity – perhaps piqued by a resonant statement or appealing ceremony – can end in a sincere search for truth.

The 2001 UK census found that Jediism, the fictional faith observed by the good guys in Star Wars, was the fourth largest religion: nearly 400,000 people had been inspired to claim it, initially by a tongue-in-cheek online campaign. Ten years later, it had dropped to seventh place, leading many to dismiss it as a prank. But as Singler notes, that is still an awful lot of people – and a lot longer than most viral campaigns endure.

Some branches of Jediism remain jokey, but others take themselves more seriously: the Temple of the Jedi Order claims its members are “real people that live or lived their lives according to the principles of Jediism” – inspired by the fiction, but based on the real-life philosophies that informed it.

With those sorts of numbers, Jediism “should” have been recognised as a religion in the UK. But officials who apparently assumed it was not a genuine census answer did not record it as such. “A lot is measured against the Western Anglophone tradition of religion,” says Singler. Scientology was barred from recognition as a religion for many years in the UK because it did not have a Supreme Being – something that could also be said of Buddhism.

In fact, recognition is a complex issue worldwide, particularly since that there is no widely accepted definition of religion even in academic circles. Communist Vietnam, for example, is officially atheist and often cited as one of the world’s most irreligious countries – but sceptics say this is really because official surveys don’t capture the huge proportion of the population who practice folk religion. On the other hand, official recognition of Ásatrú, the Icelandic pagan faith, meant it was entitled to its share of a “faith tax”; as a result, it is building the country’s first pagan temple for nearly 1,000 years.

Scepticism about practitioners’ motives impedes many new movements from being recognised as genuine religions, whether by officialdom or by the public at large. But ultimately the question of sincerity is a red herring, Singler says: “Whenever someone tells you their worldview, you have to take them at face value”. The acid test, as true for neopagans as for transhumanists, is whether people make significant changes to their lives consistent with their stated faith.

And such changes are exactly what the founders of some new religious movements want. Official status is irrelevant if you can win thousands or even millions of followers to your cause.

Consider the “Witnesses of Climatology“, a fledgling “religion” invented to foster greater commitment to action on climate change. After a decade spent working on engineering solutions to climate change, its founder Olya Irzak came to the conclusion that the real problem lay not some much in finding technical solutions, but in winning social support for them. “What’s a multi-generational social construct that organises people around shared morals?” she asks. “The stickiest is religion.”

So three years ago, Irzak and some friends set about building one. They didn’t see any need to bring God into it – Irzak was brought up an atheist – but did start running regular “services”, including introductions, a sermon eulogising the awesomeness of nature and education on aspects of environmentalism. Periodically they include rituals, particularly at traditional holidays. At Reverse Christmas, the Witnesses plant a tree rather than cutting one down; on Glacier Memorial Day, they watch blocks of ice melt in the California sun.

As these examples suggest, Witnesses of Climatology has a parodic feel to it – light-heartedness helps novices get over any initial awkwardness – but Irzak’s underlying intent is quite serious.

“We hope people get real value from this and are encouraged to work on climate change,” she says, rather than despairing about the state of the world. The congregation numbers a few hundred, but Irzak, as a good engineer, is committed to testing out ways to grow that number. Among other things, she is considering a Sunday School to teach children ways of thinking about how complex systems work.

Recently, the Witnesses have been looking further afield, including to a ceremony conducted across the Middle East and central Asia just before the spring equinox: purification by throwing something unwanted into a fire – a written wish, or an actual object – and then jumping over it. Recast as an effort to rid the world of environmental ills, it proved a popular addition to the liturgy. This might have been expected, because it’s been practised for thousands of years as part of Nowruz, the Iranian New Year – whose origins lie in part with the Zoroastrians.

Transhumanism, Jediism, the Witnesses of Climatology and the myriad of other new religious movements may never amount to much. But perhaps the same could have been said for the small groups of believers who gathered around a sacred flame in ancient Iran, three millennia ago, and whose fledgling belief grew into one of the largest, most powerful and enduring religions the world has ever seen – and which is still inspiring people today.

Perhaps religions never do really die. Perhaps the religions that span the world today are less durable than we think. And perhaps the next great faith is just getting started.

The learned are going to destroy the Christian religion. Already, according to their boastings, it has pretty nearly come to an end. The pulpit is effete, it cannot command public attention. We stand up and preach to empty benches! As you see — or do not see. Nothing remains for us but to die decently, so they insinuate. And what then? When our Lord was dead, when the clay-cold corpse lay watched by the Roman soldiery, and with a seal upon the enclosing stone, was not the cause in mortal jeopardy? But how fared it? Did it die out? Every disciple that Jesus had made forsook Him, and fled, was not Christianity then destroyed? Nay, that very day our Lord won a victory which shook the gates of hell, and caused the universe to stand astonished. Matters are not worse with Him at this hour! His affairs are not in a sadder condition today than then. Nay, see Him today and judge. On His head are many crowns, and at His feet the hosts of angels bow! Jesus is the master of legions today, while the Caesars have passed away! Here are His people — needy, obscure, despised, I grant you, still, but assuredly somewhat more numerous than they were when they laid Him in the tomb. His cause is not to be crushed, it is forever rising.

— Charles Spurgeon, "The Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus" [2 Timothy 2:8]

— http://www.txdirect.net/~tgarner/chspur28.htm

Where Is the money? The money is in the pockets of God’s people. The most recent research by empty tomb, inc. reveals the following:

• Less than 3 percent all Christians tithe, meaning give at least 10 percent of their income to their church

• The median annual gift to a church is $200.

• In 1968, Americans gave 3.1 percent of their disposable income; now Americans give 2.2 percent, which is less than they gave during the Great Depression.

• At the current rate of decline, by the year 2050, Americans will give only 1 percent of their disposable income to the church; if this occurs, a vast number of churches and missions will be forced to close.

The least religious nations are also the most healthy and successful

________

The world seems more religious than ever these days.

Across the Middle East, fervent forms of Islam are growing more popular and more politically active. Muslim nations that were somewhat secularized 40 years ago — like Lebanon and Iran — are now teeming with fundamentalism. In Turkey and Egypt, increasing numbers of women are turning to the veil as an overt manifestation of reinvigorated religious commitment. But it isn’t just in the Muslim world that religion is thriving. From Brazil to El Salvador, Protestant evangelicalism is spreading with great success, instilling a spirited, holy zeal throughout Latin America. Pentecostalism is proliferating, too — vigorously — and not only throughout Latin America, but in Africa and even, to a lesser extent, China. And many nations of the former Soviet Union, which had atheism imposed upon them for decades, have emerged from the communist era with their faith not only intact, but strong and vibrant. Here in the United States, religion is definitely alive and well. In terms of church attendance and belief in God, Jesus, and the Bible, religion in the United States is stronger and more robust than in most other developed democracies.

In sum, from Nebraska to Nepal, from Georgia to Guatemala, and from Utah to Uganda, humans all over the globe are vigorously praising various deities; regularly attending services at churches, temples, and mosques; persistently studying sacred texts; dutifully performing holy rites; energetically carrying out spiritual rituals; soberly defending the world from sin; piously fasting; and enthusiastically praying and then praying some more, singing, praising, and loving this or that savior, prophet, or God.

But that is not occurring everywhere. I am referring to two nations in particular, Denmark and Sweden, which are probably the least religious countries in the world, and possibly in the history of the world. Amidst all this vibrant global piety — atop the vast swelling sea of sacredness — Denmark and Sweden float along like small, content, durable dinghies of secular life, where most people are nonreligious and don’t worship Jesus or Vishnu, don’t revere sacred texts, don’t pray, and don’t give much credence to the essential dogmas of the world’s great faiths.

In clean and green Scandinavia, few people speak of God, few people spend much time thinking about theological matters, and although their media in recent years has done an unusually large amount of reporting on religion, even that is offered as an attempt to grapple with and make sense of a strange foreign phenomenon out there in the wider world that refuses to disappear, a phenomenon that takes on such dire significance for everyone — except, well, for Danes and Swedes.

What are societies like when faith in God is minimal, church attendance is drastically low, and religion is a distinctly muted and marginal aspect of everyday life?

Many people assume that religion is what keeps people moral, that a society without God would be hell on earth: rampant with immorality, full of evil, and teeming with depravity. But that doesn’t seem to be the case for Scandinavians in those two countries. Although they may have relatively high rates of petty crime and burglary, and although these crime rates have been on the rise in recent decades, their overall rates of violent crime — including murder, aggravated assault, and rape — are among the lowest on earth. Yet the majority of Danes and Swedes do not believe that God is “up there,” keeping diligent tabs on their behavior, slating the good for heaven and the wicked for hell. Most Danes and Swedes don’t believe that sin permeates the world, and that only Jesus, the Son of God, who died for their sins, can serve as a remedy. In fact, most Danes and Swedes don’t even believe in the notion of “sin.”

So the typical Dane or Swede doesn’t believe all that much in God. And simultaneously, they don’t commit much murder. But aren’t they a dour, depressed lot, all the same? Not according to Ruut Veenhoven, professor emeritus of social conditions for human happiness at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Veenhoven is a leading authority on worldwide levels of happiness from country to country. He recently ranked 91 nations on an international happiness scale, basing his research on cumulative scores from numerous worldwide surveys. According to his calculations, the country that leads the globe — ranking No. 1 in terms of its residents’ overall level of happiness — is little, peaceful, and relatively godless Denmark.

The connection between religion — or the lack thereof — and societal health is admittedly complex. It is difficult to definitively establish that secularism is always good for society and religion always bad. However, the often posited opposite claim is equally difficult to substantiate: that secularism is always bad for a society and religion always good. To be sure, in some instances, religion can be a strong and positive ingredient in establishing societal health, prosperity, and well-being. And when considering what factors contribute to the making of a good society, religion can be a positive force.

Here in the United States, for example, religious ideals often serve as a beneficial counterbalance against the cutthroat brand of individualism that can be so rampant and dominating. Religious congregations in America serve as community centers, counseling providers, and day-care sites. And a significant amount of research has shown that moderately religious Americans report greater subjective well-being and life satisfaction, greater marital satisfaction, better family cohesion, and fewer symptoms of depression than the nonreligious. Historically, a proliferation of religious devotion, faith in God, and reliance on the Bible has sometimes been a determining factor in establishing schools for children, creating universities, building hospitals for the sick and homes for the homeless, taking care of orphans and the elderly, resisting oppression, establishing law and order, and developing democracy.

In other instances, however, religion may not have such positive societal effects. It can often be one of the main sources of tension, violence, poverty, oppression, inequality, and disorder in a given society. A quick perusal of the state of the world will reveal that widespread faith in God or strong religious sentiment in a given country does not necessarily ensure societal health. After all, many of the most religious and faithful nations on earth are simultaneously among the most dangerous and destitute. Conversely, a widespread lack of faith in God or very low levels of religiosity in a given country does not necessarily spell societal ruin. The fact is, the majority of the most irreligious democracies are among the most prosperous and successful nations on earth.

Just to be perfectly clear here: I am not arguing that the admirably high level of societal health in Scandinavia is directly caused by the low levels of religiosity. Although one could certainly make such a case — arguing that a minimal focus on God and the afterlife, and a stronger focus on solving problems of daily life in a rational, secular manner have led to positive, successful societal outcomes in Scandinavia — that is not the argument I wish to develop here. Rather, I simply wish to soberly counter the widely touted assertion that without religion, society is doomed.

If you can smell my ax starting to grind here, your nostrils are in good working order. The claim that without religion, society is doomed deserves to be challenged because, aside from being poor social science, it is a highly political claim that is regularly promulgated by some of America’s most popular and most influential Christian conservatives. Those individuals do not represent or speak for the majority of believers in America, but together they do constitute a formidable and uniquely zealous chorus that reaches the hearts and minds of millions of people on a regular basis.

I am referring, for instance, to Pat Robertson, the successful televangelist and founder of the Christian Coalition, who regularly condemns secularism. And Ann Coulter, the Christian conservative media pundit, who has written in one of her best-selling books that societies that fail to grasp God’s significance are headed toward slavery, genocide, and bestiality, and that when Darwinian/evolutionary theory is widely accepted in a given society, all morality is abandoned. Conservative pundit William J. Bennett has argued that “the only reliable answer” for combating societal ills is widespread religious faith, and that without religion, a society is without “the best and most reliable means to reinforce the good” in social life and human relations.

Conservative Christian Americans aren’t the only ones who broadcast this perspective. Keith Ward, a professor of theology at the University of Oxford, has recently argued that societies that lack strong religious beliefs are essentially immoral, unfree, and irrational. He claims that any nonreligious society without a strong belief in God is a society “beyond morality ... and freedom” and ultimately predicated upon “the denial of human dignity.” John D. Caputo, a professor of religion and humanities at Syracuse University, has declared that people who are without religion and who do not love God are nothing more than selfish louts, thereby implying that a society with a preponderance of irreligious people would be a fairly loveless, miserable place.

Belief in God may certainly give emotional and psychological comfort to the individual believer — especially in times of pain, sadness, or uncertainty — and history has clearly shown that religious involvement and faith in God can often motivate individuals or cultures to promote justice and healthy societal development. But the fact still remains that it is not the most religious nations in our world today, but rather the most secular, that have been able to create the most civil, just, safe, equitable, humane, and prosperous societies. Denmark and Sweden stand out as shining examples. The German think tank the Hans-Böckler Stiftung recently ranked nations in terms of their success at establishing social justice within their societies; Denmark and Sweden, two of the least-religious nations in the world, tied for first.

It is a great socioreligious irony — for lack of a better term — that when we consider the fundamental values and moral imperatives contained within the world’s great religions, such as caring for the sick, the infirm, the elderly, the poor, the orphaned, the vulnerable; practicing mercy, charity, and goodwill toward one’s fellow human beings; and fostering generosity, humility, honesty, and communal concern over individual egotism — those traditionally religious values are most successfully established, institutionalized, and put into practice at the societal level in the most irreligious nations in the world today.

________

Phil Zuckerman is an associate professor of sociology at Pitzer College. This essay is adapted from his book SOCIETY WITHOUT GOD (New York University Press, 2008).

http://chronicle.com

Section: The Chronicle Review

Volume 55, Issue 21, Page B4

In our time, we are witnessing an extraordinary phenomenon: the virtual wiping out of the church in a place it has existed for nearly 2,000 years. The plight of Iraq’s Christian community reminds us that church expansion is not a constantly upward slope.

In his 2002 book THE NEXT CHRISTENDOM: THE COMING OF GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY, historian Philip Jenkins told the world where Christianity was heading. In his latest — THE LOST HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY: THE THOUSAND-YEAR GOLDEN AGE OF THE CHURCH IN THE MIDDLE EAST, AFRICA, AND ASIA — AND HOW IT DIED (HarperOne, 2008) — Jenkins looks at where it has come from. The Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Humanities at Penn State University, Jenkins first notes that the faith is not rooted in any one culture. “The more you look at history, the more you realize Christianity is not solely a European religion,” he says. “It’s European, but it’s also Asian and African, and it has a long history of developing in very different societies.”

Second, Jenkins shows how and why churches in entire regions have died. CHRISTIANITY TODAY’s managing editor for special projects, Stan Guthrie, spoke with Jenkins.

WHAT CAUSES CHURCH DEATH?

In no case that I can see does a church simply fade away through indifference. What kills a church is persecution. What kills a church is armed force, usually in the interest of another religion or an antireligious ideology, and sometimes that may mean the destruction or removal of a particular ethnic community that practices Christianity. So churches die by force. They are killed.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE OLD SAYING, “THE BLOOD OF THE MARTYRS IS THE SEED OF THE CHURCH”?

That was said by Tertullian, who came from the church in North Africa, where the church vanished. If you were to look at the healthiest part of Christianity right around the year 400 or 500, you might well look at North Africa, roughly what we call Tunisia and Algeria. It was the land of Augustine. Then the Arabs, the Muslims, arrive. They conquer Carthage in AD 698, and 100 years later — I don’t say there were no Christians there, but there certainly was only a tiny, tiny number. That church dies.

WHY DOES PERSECUTION SOMETIMES STRENGTHEN A CHURCH AND OTHER TIMES WIPE IT OUT?

The difference is how far the church establishes itself among the mass of people and doesn’t just become the church of a particular segment, a class or ethnic group. In North Africa, it’s basically the church of Romans and Latin-speakers, as opposed to the church of peasants, with whom the Romans don’t have much connection. When the Romans go, Christianity goes with them.

But Christianity establishes itself very early as a religion of the ordinary, everyday people in Egypt as things get translated into Coptic. As a result, after almost 1,400 years under Muslim rule, there is still a thriving Coptic church that represents [perhaps] 10 percent of the Egyptian people — which I would personally put forward as the greatest example of Christian survival in history.

HOW DO LESSONS LIKE THAT APPLY TO IRAQ, WHERE CHRISTIANS ARE UNDER PRESSURE FROM MUSLIMS?

Iraq is a classic example of a church that is killed over time. The church will probably cease to exist within my lifetime. It has probably gone from a figure of about 5 percent to what it is now, 0.5 percent, in the last 50 years or so. You can’t continue losses like that forever. At some point, you are down to the last one or two people.

Do I think that literally there will be no Christians in Iraq? No. But I believe the communities will be all but eliminated as entities. There are odd communities, including on the Nineveh plains, but they are quite small, and are mainly waiting for visas to allow them to leave the country.

So as to why the church is dying in Iraq, I would point again to persecution, to the rise of radical Islamist ideologies that make life intolerable for minority communities. Just as important is the state’s role, or the lack thereof. If you remove the state, with its ability to hold mobs and vigilantes in check, you open the door to the uprooting and expulsion of those minorities.

YOU WRITE ABOUT THE RATCHET EFFECT. WHAT DO YOU MEAN?

It is one of the most worrying things. Persecution doesn’t have to exist absolutely constantly over 500 or 1,000 years. Minorities get on perfectly well for 50 years and then there’s persecution and the population is reduced. The ratchet turns another notch, and it will go one way but it won’t turn back. That sort of sporadic persecution through the centuries is what can really destroy a faith.

WHAT ARE THE WAYS CHURCHES CAN RESPOND TO PERSECUTION AND GROW THEIR COMMUNITIES AND THEIR FAITH?

It very much depends on what the challenge is. If you are dealing with a major armed persecution, then you really have to go into survival mode. As I was writing this book, I became very conscious of one question, which is how you measure the success of a church. I am tempted to measure it in terms of numbers, whether it’s 5 percent of the population, 40 percent, or whatever. But I suppose an argument would be made by somebody from a Mennonite or Anabaptist tradition that that’s not the question — that the question is not numerical success but quality of witness, that the New Testament does not guarantee worldly success or growth or megachurches. It actually does include persecution as a fundamental part of the package. So maybe that fact is one we have to come to terms with.

YOU ARGUE THAT WE ARE LACKING A THEOLOGY OF CHURCH EXTINCTION. WHY DO WE NEED ONE?

I sometimes ask audiences how many people have ever read a book on the growth or establishment of a church, and many people raise their hands. Then I ask how many people have ever read a book on the death or extinction of a church, and virtually nobody does. But in history, church death is a very common phenomenon. Christianity moves from one area to another, but it also dies in areas where it has been strong. That fact violates a lot of what we expect about Christian growth. We have a theology of mission, not a theology of retreat. So do we explain these episodes as the churches doing something horribly wrong? Do we regard them as a natural part of historical development? Do we think that if Muslims replaced Christians in a country like Iraq, the expansion of Islam must be within God’s plan? How Christians actually deal with things like the destruction of the church in Iraq is by not talking about it. We pay no attention to it because we don’t know about it.

SO OUR IGNORANCE IS BOTH A PRODUCT OF OUR OWN HISTORICAL SITUATION AND MAYBE A WILLFUL TURNING OF OUR EYES FROM THE CARNAGE?

It’s something of that. But I don’t want to criticize Americans who, for example, are very conscious of the suffering church. And they try to alleviate that suffering and intervene politically. But suppose churches do vanish. Across much of the Middle East, the last century since 1915 has been catastrophic in terms of the destruction or annihilation of churches. I really don’t know people who are writing about that or trying to address that theologically.

HOW DO YOU RELATE THAT NEED TO THE OBVIOUS SPREAD OF CHRISTIANITY AROUND THE WORLD?

I suppose coincidence is not a word that should be used by anyone who has any sense of Providence, but 1915 marks the beginning of the end of Christians in the Middle East, and the beginning of mass Christianity in Africa. It’s almost as if one door closes and another one opens elsewhere. I would not say God closed one eye and opened another, but when Christianity is at its weakest in one area, amazing new opportunities open elsewhere. My concern is that when we write Christian history, so often it’s a matter of, “Let’s look at this expansion, and let’s look at this growth and new opportunity.” We’re not really seeing the doors that are closing — which would have been a great title for the book.

________

Philip Jenkins is the author of THE LOST HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY: THE THOUSAND-YEAR GOLDEN AGE OF THE CHURCH IN THE MIDDLE EAST, AFRICA, AND ASIA — AND HOW IT DIED (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008).

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today.

The doctrine of hell, claims an article in National Geographic, “isn’t as popular as it used to be.”

But evangelist David Stockwell apparently hasn’t received the memo. He has preached on hell at every single one of his evangelistic meetings through 45 years of full-time evangelism and told Baptist Press he sees people respond “with conviction and a great desire to get right with God.”

Stockwell, president of the Conference of Southern Baptist Evangelists, is among evangelicals who defend the traditional doctrine of hell and dispute the notion that individuals who have not received Jesus as their Lord and Savior simply cease to exist when they die -- a belief known as annihilationism and defended by some scholars quoted in the National Geographic article.

Other proponents of the traditional view -- like California pastor Ben Skaug and Boyce College professor Denny Burk -- dispute National Geographic’s suggestions that annihilationism may soon become the dominant perspective and that belief in eternal conscious torment for the unrighteous has not always been the consensus view of Christians.

‘Compelled to preach the truth’

The National Geographic article, published May 13, reports that 58 percent of Americans believe in hell, down from 71 percent two decades ago. The article quotes seven contemporary and historical Christian figures who have defended annihilationism and four who support the traditional teaching on hell.

In tandem with the article, the National Geographic Channel aired a documentary titled “Map of Hell,” which explored the history of belief in the afterlife.

In the article, writer Mark Strauss claims “it is difficult to know” where “most evangelicals stand on the issue of hell.” He references “a conundrum that continues to tug at the conscience of some Christians, who find it difficult to reconcile the existence of a just, loving God with a doctrine that dooms billions of people to eternal punishment.”

For Stockwell, the greater “conundrum” is how a holy God can accept sinful humans as His children.

“Eternal judgment in pain, agony and flames of hell are what we all truly deserve,” Stockwell said. “But God ... who is rich in love and mercy, because of His great love for us, so loved the world that He gave His only Begotten Son” to pay “the penalty for our sin.” Only those who do not receive this gift must suffer judgment in hell.

The mandate to preach hell as a place of eternal conscious torment, Stockwell said, stems from Scripture passages like Jude 1:22-23 and the fact that “Jesus talked about hell twice as much as He talked about heaven.” During Stockwell’s ministry, messages that included discussion of hell have led people to Christ who went on to become International Mission Board missionaries and leaders at prominent churches among other paths.

“If we really believe God and what He has said in His Word,” Stockwell said in written comments, “then we would be compelled to preach the truth of what God has said: that those who die without Christ in their hearts will spend eternity in hell, forever and ever! We would realize that our friends and neighbors, members of our own families, people all around us are dying in sin, without Christ, and on their way to hell.”

Consensus on hell?

Skaug, who is writing a doctoral dissertation on the doctrine of hell at Gateway Seminary of the Southern Baptist Convention, noted that judgment of the wicked is commonly referenced in Scripture as an expression of God’s justice.

The Old Testament Minor Prophets spoke of “the day in which God would bring judgment to the wicked.” In the New Testament, every book “speaks to or references God’s judgment of the wicked,” said Skaug, executive pastor of Los Angeles-area Immanuel Baptist Church in Highland, Calif., and a former vice president at Gateway Seminary.

“Since all judgment has been given over from the Father to the Son, hell is the place where Jesus Christ will sentence the wicked (John 5),” Skaug said. “It will be a place where they will face eternal fire (Matthew 18:6-9). This place is the very same place that has been prepared beforehand for Satan and his fallen angels (Matthew 25:31-46), where the worm does not die and the fire is not extinguished.”

Hell, he said, “is described as eternal destruction in 2 Thessalonians 1:5-10[*]. In other words, it is the place where the omnipresent God is actively pouring out His perfect wrath on the wicked who have rejected Jesus Christ.”

Skaug questioned National Geographic’s claim that “in its earliest years, Christianity didn’t have a consensus on the nature of hell.”

The early church “did not have a unanimous understanding of the doctrine of hell,” Skaug said, noting that the third-century theologian Origen believed postmortem punishment was only temporary. “However, to say the early church did not have a consensus on the doctrine of hell is another matter.”

Theologians like Tertullian in the second and third centuries and John Chrysostom in the fourth century believed in eternal conscious torment, and Augustine popularized that view in the fourth and fifth centuries, Skaug said.

“From Augustine through the medieval period, the traditional doctrine of hell was considered standard orthodoxy,” Skaug said, and it continued to prevail in the Reformation era. The Enlightenment of the 1700s saw some churches begin to depart from orthodoxy, yet “the conservative church maintain[ed] its hold on the traditional doctrine of hell.”

A matter of authority

In the end, Skaug said, beliefs about hell are determined by an individual’s view of Scripture.

“Our job is not to judge the Scriptures to determine if they fit inside of our Westernized perspectives, but rather allow the Word of God to mold and shape our thinking so that our thoughts are closer to God’s thoughts,” he said. “If the Bible declares that hell is a real place, then evangelicals should not be embarrassed to proclaim the traditional doctrine of hell as truth.”

Burk, who contributed to the 2016 book “Four Views on Hell,” made a similar observation, suggesting many theologians who reject the traditional doctrine of hell “tend to be drifting in other crucial areas of doctrine as well.”

“I do not claim this is true in every individual case,” Burk, professor of biblical studies at Boyce, wrote in a blog post, “but it is true in many cases. What we believe about Hell is fundamentally a reflection of what we believe about God, His character, and His justice. Revisions in the doctrine of Hell, therefore, are often accompanied by other revisions that undermine orthodox evangelical faith.”

The National Geographic article, Burk wrote, uses a tactic common among annihilationists when it notes that Anglican author and pastor John Stott, who died in 2011, was an annihilationist.

While expressing profound respect for Stott, Burk argued “he had a patently unbiblical view of Hell” which, because of Stott’s “otherwise impeccable credentials,” has “provided cover for others who have drifted away from the traditional view.”

Burk questioned a prediction attributed to theologian Preston Sprinkle by National Geographic that “even within conservative evangelical circles, the annihilation view of Hell will be the dominant view in 10 or 15 years.”

Burk responded, “It may very well be that belief in annihilationism is on the rise. But still, is it the ‘dominant’ view? Dominant among whom? Bible-believing Christians? Bible-believing Christians around the world? I don’t think so.

“In the entire 2,000-year history of the Christian church,” he wrote, “the near consensus view has been the Eternal Conscious Torment view. The recent decline of that view in the West may simply be a sign of Christianity’s decline in the West. I’m not convinced it’s a sign the Christian church is undergoing some historic shift in its doctrine of Hell.”

Among Southern Baptists, seminary professors and other entity leaders must affirm the Baptist Faith and Message, which states in Article X on “last things,” “The unrighteous will be consigned to Hell, the place of everlasting punishment. The righteous in their resurrected and glorified bodies will receive their reward and will dwell forever in Heaven with the Lord.”

________

* The original article incorrectly had 1 Thessalonians 1:5-10.

The accelerating fragmentation of the strife-torn Episcopal Church USA, in which several parishes and even a few dioceses are opting out of the church, isn’t simply about gay bishops, the blessing of same-sex unions or the election of a woman as presiding bishop. It also is about the meltdown of liberal Christianity.

Embraced by the leadership of all the mainline Protestant denominations, as well as large segments of American Catholicism, liberal Christianity has been hailed by its boosters for 40 years as the future of the Christian church.

Instead, as all but a few die-hards now admit, all the mainline churches and movements within churches that have blurred doctrine and softened moral precepts are demographically declining and, in the case of the Episcopal Church, disintegrating.

It is not entirely coincidental that at about the same time that Episcopalians, at their general convention in Columbus, Ohio, were thumbing their noses at a directive from the worldwide Anglican Communion that they “repent” of confirming the openly gay Bishop V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire three years ago, the Presbyterian Church USA, at its general assembly in Birmingham, Ala., was turning itself into the laughingstock of the blogosphere by tacitly approving alternative designations for the supposedly sexist Christian Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Among the suggested names were “Mother, Child and Womb” and “Rock, Redeemer and Friend.” Moved by the spirit of the Presbyterian revisionists, Beliefnet blogger Rod Dreher held a “Name That Trinity” contest. Entries included “Rock, Scissors and Paper” and “Larry, Curly and Moe.”

Following the Episcopalian lead, the Presbyterians also voted to give local congregations the freedom to ordain openly cohabiting gay and lesbian ministers and endorsed the legalization of medical marijuana. (The latter may be a good idea, but it is hard to see how it falls under the theological purview of a Christian denomination.)

The Presbyterian Church USA is famous for its 1993 conference, cosponsored with the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and other mainline churches, in which participants “reimagined” God as “Our Maker Sophia” and held a feminist-inspired “milk and honey” ritual designed to replace traditional bread-and-wine Communion.

As if to one-up the Presbyterians in jettisoning age-old elements of Christian belief, the Episcopalians at Columbus overwhelmingly refused even to consider a resolution affirming that Jesus Christ is Lord. When a Christian church cannot bring itself to endorse a bedrock Christian theological statement repeatedly found in the New Testament, it is not a serious Christian church. It’s a Church of What’s Happening Now, conferring a feel-good imprimatur on whatever the liberal elements of secular society deem permissible or politically correct.

You want to have gay sex? Be a female bishop? Change God’s name to Sophia? Go ahead. The just-elected Episcopal presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, is a one-woman combination of all these things, having voted for Robinson, blessed same-sex couples in her Nevada diocese, prayed to a female Jesus at the Columbus convention and invited former Newark, N.J., bishop John Shelby Spong, famous for denying Christ’s divinity, to address her priests.

When a church doesn’t take itself seriously, neither do its members. It is hard to believe that as recently as 1960, members of mainline churches -- Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans and the like -- accounted for 40% of all American Protestants. Today, it’s more like 12% (17 million out of 135 million). Some of the precipitous decline is due to lower birthrates among the generally blue-state mainliners, but it also is clear that millions of mainline adherents (and especially their children) have simply walked out of the pews never to return. According to the Hartford Institute for Religious Research, in 1965, there were 3.4 million Episcopalians; now, there are 2.3 million. The number of Presbyterians fell from 4.3 million in 1965 to 2.5 million today. Compare that with 16 million members reported by the Southern Baptists.

When your religion says “whatever” on doctrinal matters, regards Jesus as just another wise teacher, refuses on principle to evangelize and lets you do pretty much what you want, it’s a short step to deciding that one of the things you don’t want to do is get up on Sunday morning and go to church.

It doesn’t help matters that the mainline churches were pioneers in ordaining women to the clergy, to the point that 25% of all Episcopal priests these days are female, as are 29% of all Presbyterian pastors, according to the two churches. A causal connection between a critical mass of female clergy and a mass exodus from the churches, especially among men, would be difficult to establish, but is it entirely a coincidence? Sociologist Rodney Stark (“The Rise of Christianity”) and historian Philip Jenkins (“The Next Christendom”) contend that the more demands, ethical and doctrinal, that a faith places upon its adherents, the deeper the adherents’ commitment to that faith. Evangelical and Pentecostal churches, which preach biblical morality, have no trouble saying that Jesus is Lord, and they generally eschew women’s ordination. The churches are growing robustly, both in the United States and around the world.

Despite the fact that median Sunday attendance at Episcopal churches is 80 worshipers, the Episcopal Church, as a whole, is financially equipped to carry on for some time, thanks to its inventory of vintage real estate and huge endowments left over from the days (no more!) when it was the Republican Party at prayer. Furthermore, it has offset some of its demographic losses by attracting disaffected liberal Catholics and gays and lesbians. The less endowed Presbyterian Church USA is in deeper trouble. Just before its general assembly in Birmingham, it announced that it would eliminate 75 jobs to meet a $9.15-million budget cut at its headquarters, the third such round of job cuts in four years.

The Episcopalians have smells, bells, needlework cushions and colorfully garbed, Catholic-looking bishops as draws, but who, under the present circumstances, wants to become a Presbyterian?

Still, it must be galling to Episcopal liberals that many of the parishes and dioceses (including that of San Joaquin, Calif.) that want to pull out of the Episcopal Church USA are growing instead of shrinking, have live people in the pews who pay for the upkeep of their churches and don’t have to rely on dead rich people. The 21-year-old Christ Church Episcopal in Plano, Texas, for example, is one of the largest Episcopal churches in the country. Its 2,200 worshipers on any given Sunday are about equal to the number of active Episcopalians in Jefferts Schori’s entire Nevada diocese.

It’s no surprise that Christ Church, like the other dissident parishes, preaches a very conservative theology. Its break from the national church came after Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Anglican Communion, proposed a two-tier membership in which the Episcopal Church USA and other churches that decline to adhere to traditional biblical standards would have “associate” status in the communion. The dissidents hope to retain full communication with Canterbury by establishing oversight by non-U.S. Anglican bishops.

As for the rest of the Episcopalians, the phrase “deck chairs on the Titanic” comes to mind. A number of liberal Episcopal websites are devoted these days to dissing Peter Akinola, outspoken primate of the Anglican diocese of Nigeria, who, like the vast majority of the world’s 77 million Anglicans reported by the Anglican Communion, believes that “homosexual practice” is “incompatible with Scripture” (those words are from the communion’s 1998 resolution at the Lambeth conference of bishops). Akinola might have the numbers on his side, but he is now the Voldemort -- no, make that the Karl Rove -- of the U.S. Episcopal world. Other liberals fume over a feeble last-minute resolution in Columbus calling for “restraint” in consecrating bishops whose lifestyle might offend “the wider church” -- a resolution immediately ignored when a second openly cohabitating gay man was nominated for bishop of Newark.

So this is the liberal Christianity that was supposed to be the Christianity of the future: disarray, schism, rapidly falling numbers of adherents, a collapse of Christology and national meetings that rival those of the Modern Language Association for their potential for cheap laughs. And they keep telling the Catholic Church that it had better get with the liberal program -- ordain women, bless gay unions and so forth -- or die. Sure.

________

Charlotte Allen is Catholicism editor for Beliefnet and the author of “The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus.”

[Article from 2001 on an experimental Episcopalian seeker-sensitive church, which apparently no longer exists]

Harry Brunett and Chuck Donofrio remember when they felt that church was worthless. Brunett left the Episcopal Church as a young minister in 1965 because it seemed irrelevant to the civil rights struggle. Donofrio grew up singing in an Episcopal boys’ choir in downtown Baltimore, but he never considered himself a Christian and dropped out of church.

After spending years in community organization, Brunett returned to ministry in 1992 as pastor of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, a growing parish in western Howard County.

Donofrio also came back to the fold. But the two men retained a profound sense of their earlier alienation, which they are now using to shape an unorthodox ministry in Howard.

To reach people who never enter a sanctuary, Brunett and Donofrio have used market research and focus groups, and have designed weekly services that, among other things, deliberately de-emphasize Jesus Christ.

“The sad fact is the name of Jesus Christ has become for many people exclusionary,” said Donofrio, president and CEO of a Baltimore marketing and public relations firm. “Many people experience using Jesus almost as a bludgeon to beat them into submission.”

This effort to arouse the alienated has the backing and financial support of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland and the keen interest of its bishop, the Rev. Robert Wilkes Ihloff.

Typical Christian evangelism, Ihloff said, “has been a turnoff for people. This is really kind of experimental. What you have, in effect, is a dialogue with unchurched people.”

Brunett and Donofrio teamed up in 1998, when Donofrio was giving talks to Maryland Episcopal clergy about marketing the church. After two years of research and planning, and a year of experimental services, weekly gatherings began last month at Clemens Crossing Elementary School in Columbia.

So far, the services have drawn a small crowd of about two dozen. The effort includes a newly launched Web site, www.journeyscommunity.org. [link is dead as of 2011]

Despite the small turnout so far, ministry members think there is a wide audience for their message. According to recent research, only 20 percent of Americans regularly attend church, not the 40 percent that pollsters have reported for decades.

The main Protestant denominations have declined from a high of 30 million in 1965 to 22 million in 1995, according to the Hartford Institute for Religious Research. Episcopalians have mirrored that decline, from 3.4 million to 2.5 million during the same period.

In blunt business terms, mainline churches are losing market share even as their potential audience grows larger.

“It took at least a decade before churches acknowledged, ‘This is a real trend, and we’ve got to do something about this,’ “ said Scott L. Thumma, a Hartford Institute researcher.

Some have succeeded by shedding hymnals and pews for contemporary “seeker services” -- so named for people who wanted a spiritual dimension but were not attracted to a traditional church.

First developed 26 years ago by a suburban Chicago church, these services, which feature popular music and multimedia presentations, are offered at dozens of Washington-area churches.

In the Maryland Episcopal diocese, which covers most of the state beyond suburban Washington, the bishop is supporting such outreach even in a denomination that venerates tradition.

Three years ago, Ihloff defended the provocative -- some said sacrilegious -- television and newspaper advertising by a Frederick County Episcopal church.

More recently, he helped direct $40,000 from the diocese to Brunett’s effort. The ministry attracted an additional $55,000 from private and Episcopal church foundations.

“To really reach unchurched people, we’re going to have to develop a new style of being churched,” Ihloff said. “That’s not historically different from how Christianity operated in the early days.”

Donofrio’s research has revealed that many people are exposed to formal religion as children, reject it and then become spiritually curious as adults. At that point, say outreach ministry members, people want to ask questions, not listen to answers.

“We’re enabling people to discover God themselves, maybe through Jesus, maybe through Buddha, maybe through any number of ways,” Brunett said. “It’s not a back-door way to catch people and bring them to the Episcopal Church.”

In fact, St. Andrew’s officials aren’t counting on new faces in their pews.

“We don’t see it necessarily as a direct benefit to us,” said Peter Radue, the senior warden of St. Andrew’s vestry, its governing board. “Ministry shouldn’t be.”

During the services, the writings of Saint Benedict and Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh have equal exposure, along with country singer Willie Nelson’s tune “On The Road Again.”

There are meditation and movie clips, elements of Judaism and even 12-step programs for substance abusers. The services are designed by a ministry team that includes not only Brunett and Donofrio, but also a psychologist and a Baltimore fiction writer.

“I can relate to a movie clip more readily than I relate to the Bible,” said writer Jennifer Grow, a member of the ministry team. “If things [in the service] are only Christian, I would have a hard time with this.”

But officials with the Episcopal Church’s national offices in New York City weren’t sure how the ministry fits with the denomination’s mission.

“It is so radically different, some would see it as a repudiation of the basic tenets of the Episcopal Church, which is a community gathered around for the story, Jesus’s story,” said James Solheim, director of the Episcopal Church’s office of news and information. “I haven’t heard of anything like this since the ‘60s.”

The Rev. Melford “Bud” Holland, national coordinator for the Episcopal Church’s ministry development, said seeker ministries shouldn’t be preachy, but at some point they need to make their pitch for Christianity. “That’s who we are,” he said.

Some who have visited these small gatherings in Columbia prefer the potpourri of spiritual exercises.

“I like the intent of people coming together to seek something -- not having the answers is a nice part of it,” said Sheila Campbell, who grew up in a Southern Baptist family and now is a member of a Unitarian Universalist Church in Washington. “You can give yourself over to the moment.”

Michele Consentini traveled from Carroll County last spring to try the experimental services. She enjoyed the small group discussions and Brunett’s informal talk about namaste, a Sanskrit word meaning, “I bow to the divine in you.” Hindus greet each other with the expression, which urges people to recognize God in others.

It was an idea, Consentini said, that reverberated days later when a casual acquaintance unexpectedly helped her cope with her disabled son.

“For me, it’s the message and what you are going to take away and incorporate into your daily life,” she said.

Now, this woman who grew up in a nonreligious family, who felt out of place in a traditional church, stands before the microphone each Sunday and sings for the gathering. She is a new member of the ministry team.

________

c 2001 The Washington Post Company

What’s the most embarrassing thing you can talk about in your city? Discussions that include God, said a Scandinavian pastor.

The pastor in Denmark told this to sociologist Phil Zuckerman, who spent 14 months interviewing nearly 150 Scandinavians, according to The New York Times.

This can pose a dilemma for Christian workers trying to evangelize and plant churches in countries like Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland. The key, however, is not leaving God out of spiritual discussions, but knowing how to have an appropriate spiritual conversation with Scandinavians, said International Mission Board strategy leader David Moench.

Moench said sharing one’s faith in a postmodern culture must be done in ways that are genuine, not prepackaged. Rational approaches just don’t work. Stories are the key.

“You ask a lot of questions and you listen, then you look for bridges,” Moench said. “What are bridges from their story to my story? My story, because I’m a believer, involves my faith in Christ, my community that I live in, the church that we’re part of planting. Then I can begin to share God’s story, and that’s where it might be alright.”

Talking about God throughout Scandinavia can be tough because people are not interested. It could easily be believed that religion is a personal issue, thus not discussed. Zuckerman’s research states, however, that it is actually a non-issue.

“Interviewees just didn’t care about it,” he says in his book “Society Without God,” cited in The New York Times article in 2009. He uses phrases like “benign indifference” and “utter obliviousness” to describe most Scandinavians’ ideas about religion. For them, religion and Jesus are both “nice.”

Sweden is the least religious nation in the Western world, according to a WIN/Gallup International poll, conducted at the end of 2014. Eight out of 10 Swedes are either “not religious” or “convinced atheists,” the poll shows.

“It’s a little bit surprising because we have a lot of [church] members,” said Gunnar Sjöberg, head of communication for the Swedish Church. The poll shows that 63 percent of Sweden’s population is comprised of members of the once official state church.

“The presence of religion and the church in many Swedes’ lives is most visible when traditional rituals or ceremonies are performed,” Sweden Sverige, the official website of the Swedish government, reports. “Chief among these are christenings, marriages and funerals.” The site points out that “secular” ceremonies are now becoming more and more common, however.

The Church of Sweden has often accompanied liberal social change rather than obstructing it, the site notes.

“Christianity and the church may have maintained ritual and cultural importance in Sweden, but this has not prevented the country from becoming one of the world’s most liberal societies,” the site says.

“In some areas where religious and social conservatism often prevail, such as the right to abortion, no serious debate exists in Sweden. Living together and having children without being married is also socially acceptable, and recent statistics suggest more than 40 percent of first-time parents in Sweden have children before getting married.”

The Church of Sweden has performed legal same-sex marriages since 2009.

Moench said postmodernism is not a culture one is born into or that one acquires. “It’s actually a filter on how [to] look at everything,” he said. “So postmodernity exists within the church. Therefore, it’s not something to be challenged, to be confronted; it’s actually a way that we should communicate the Gospel cross-culturally.”

He warns that what is happening in Scandinavia now is a good indication of what is to come in the United States. “...You’re not fighting against necessarily a cultural view of Christianity. You’re actually fighting the ignorance of the fact that they’ve never met anybody who genuinely believed and acted upon the words of Jesus, lived in community, and carried out those truths.”

With numerous dilapidated buildings and only 323 residents according to the 2010 U.S. census, Organ, New Mexico, appears on at least one website listing American ghost towns. But Pastor Mitch Newton prefers to think of it as a Holy Ghost town because of the surprising work God has done through the town’s Baptist church.

Over the past three years, Faith Christian Fellowship has grown from five worship attendees to more than 25, or 400% growth. The congregation has baptized six people over that span, with three more baptisms scheduled for the coming weeks.

On one occasion, a man jumped in the baptistery while his 80-year-old parents were being baptized, professed that he also wanted to be saved and was baptized with them.

“God is so faithful,” Newton, 71, told Baptist Press. “ ... He is doing the whole work. I don’t do anything. I just open my mouth” after a week of study and preparation, “and we let the Lord take it from there.”

Mining of various minerals drew some 1,500 people to the southern New Mexico community by the mid-1880s, but the mines all closed by the Great Depression. A town renewal occurred when the first nuclear bomb was tested in 1945 at nearby White Sands Missile Range. Yet eventually the community dwindled again to its present size.

Faith Christian Fellowship likewise had a history of dwindling.

When a church of another denomination split in Las Cruces, N.M. -- some 15 miles away -- one of the factions ended up in Organ as Faith Christian Fellowship with about 65 members, meeting in a building owned by the Rio Grande Baptist Association. Faith assumed ownership of the building in 2003 and began cooperating with the association some five years ago -- though with a greatly diminished membership.

Things began to turn around in 2014 when Newton and his wife Ginger accepted a call to Faith, having retired from decades of pastoral ministry in Oregon.

The Newtons launched their ministry with a Fourth of July block party that reached a couple of new families, said James Underwood, director of missions for the Rio Grande Association. In the months that followed, the congregation increased in number and ethnic diversity, reaching Anglos, Hispanics and an African American.

One of the five members remaining at Newton’s arrival confessed he didn’t have certainty of salvation, placed his faith in Christ and was baptized. Amid teaching of basic Christian doctrines and a steady stream of outreach, the largely senior adult church has even begun to see families and children attending.

“Since Mitch Newton has come as pastor, things have really picked up,” Underwood told BP. “We saw the little church begin to blossom and grow and reach people they had never reached before ... [Organ] is an unexpected place for this type of growth.”

Underwood added, “It’s not like [Faith] invented something new. They have just taken the Gospel and sown the seeds, and it has borne much fruit.”

Baptist New Mexican editor Kevin Parker wrote that Faith demonstrates why churches should never say, “‘It’s over,’ even when a congregation shrinks and members age.”

“Yes, some communities die and their churches die along with them,” Parker wrote. “But, a more important question arises, ‘What does God want?’ Church locations may be viable for a new church plant, or for other purposes. God may even want to revitalize a congregation, like in Organ’s case.”

As for the future, Newton said he “look[s] for continued growth” as he continues “preaching and teaching and loving” the people.

In the near term, that growth looks to include the baptism of a man who was walking by the church one Sunday morning in early March and accepted an invitation to attend worship from Ginger Newton.

“That morning he came down the aisle and asked the Lord into his heart,” Mitch Newton said, “and he’s been bringing people to visit ever since,” including his two sons who also are scheduled for baptism.