News & Notes

The Barna Group, based in Ventura County, is an organization which does reputable work on trends in religious life in the US. Their perspective tends to the conservative Christian, and their responses to identifiable movements in the religious scene in America don’t often line up with my own, but I find their studies useful in assessing what’s going on in American religion.

They have released their end-of-year summary, and identified four basic trends in the past year:

1. Increasingly, Americans are more interested in faith and spirituality than in Christianity.
2. Faith in the American context is now individual and customized. Americans are comfortable with an altered spiritual experience as long as they can participate in the shaping of that faith experience.
3. Biblical literacy is neither a current reality nor a goal in the U.S.
4. Effective and periodic measurement of spirituality – conducted personally or through a church – is not common at this time and it is not likely to become common in the near future.

I think these are not far off the mark, but don’t share Barna’s distress, expressed in comments like:

Americans typically draw from a broad treasury of moral, spiritual and ethical sources of thought to concoct a uniquely personal brand of faith. Feeling freed from the boundaries established by the Christian faith, and immersed in a postmodern society which revels in participation, personal expression, satisfying relationships, and authentic experiences, we become our own unchallenged spiritual authorities, defining truth and reality as we see fit.

Consequently, more and more people are engaged in hybrid faiths, mixing elements from different historical eras and divergent theological perspectives,” Barna stated. “In some ways, we are creating the ultimate ecumenical movement, where nothing is deemed right or wrong, and all ideas, beliefs and practices are assigned equal validity. Everyone is invited to join the dialogue, enjoy the ride, and feel connected to a far-reaching community of believers. Screening or critiquing what that community believes is deemed rude and inappropriate. Pragmatism and relativism, rather than any sort of absolutism, has gained momentum.”

I suspect that to some extent, the move from “Christianity” to “faith and spirituality” is a reflection of the increasing religious diversity of our culture, and the recognition that there are, indeed, many different expressions of the religious impulse. As people become aware of other traditions, they find much that is admirable in those traditions, and may, in fact, adopt attitudes, rituals, or perspectives that are different from those they have previously been familiar with.

Every encounter we have changes us. Most of the time we are not aware of it, because sometimes the change simply reinforces our existing perspective or attitudes. But the more opportunity we have to encounter truly different ways of thinking and being, the more we are challenged to understand our own traditions more deeply, or else to critique or even change them.

A “pure” form of religious tradition can only be something that has been frozen in place- a tradition that is no longer living and engaged in the real world around. Religions change, because our experiences change, we change. Something is lost, and many may mourn its passing. But something is gained, as well, and that can be cause for rejoicing.

• Year in Review Perspective (The Barna Group)

…When it’s a war memorial.

Stephen Colbert comments irreverently on the strange arguments that were given in the Supreme Court concerning a cross on public land:

In a recent broadcast of Speaking of Faith on National Public Radio, host Krista Tippett interviewed a couple of young women from Los Angeles who have been taking a slightly different tack on interfaith dialogue.

Aziza Hasan is the Jordanian-born daughter of a Palestinian Muslim father and an American Christian Mother. Malka Haya Fenyvesi is a first-generation Jewish American whose parents survived World War II and the Holocaust.

In Los Angeles, Malka now directs interfaith programming at the Progressive Jewish Alliance and Aziza is with the Muslim Public Affairs Council there. Together, they created a program called NewGround: A Muslim-Jewish Partnership for Change.

They bring together young Jews and Muslims from all across society to talk honestly and openly about issues that challenge and divide them, without feeling that they have to resolve everything. As Malka says,

I think there’s always a bridge. The bridge is about understanding. I don’t think the bridge is about resolution. Part of what it means to do authentic dialogue work is that it’s messy in so many ways.

Part of this “messy” work involves learning how to engage in conflict in a positive way, a skill that many people have yet to master. Aziza notes that,

One of the biggest struggles we actually faced in terms of inside the circle of the program is also getting people to be honest and not necessarily polite. First we have to get them to be willing to engage in conflict in a positive and healthy way and then we have to try to get them to actually like say what’s really on their mind because after, you know, they start building these relationships, they get really excited. “Hey, we’re getting along, I really like this person,” and then they don’t want to hurt each other. What they don’t understand is that, you know, sometimes you have to be direct in order to really have a solid relationship, and it’s our job really to push them to that corner.

Together, they work to cultivate “curiosity over assumptions,” to allow people to discover what each other is feeling and thinking about the issues that face them every day.

Genuine appreciation for one another cannot be built on a foundation of dishonesty, even a dishonesty that overlooks painful issues so as not to offend one another. These young women and the work they are doing may well point the way to a deeper and more long-lasting interfaith reality.

• Curiosity over Assumptions Speaking of Faith, National Public Radio
  (podcast, transcript, and notes)

A special half-hour documentary titled “Religion, Politics, and Advocacy” made by CBS in conjunction with the Interfaith Broadcasting System will be aired on Sunday, September 27. Check your local listings for time.

“Religion, Politics & Advocacy” looks at the day in the life of a religious advocate — who they are, who they represent and how they lobby Congress on behalf of those who may not have a voice.

We hear from Sister Simone Campbell, advocate for the Catholic Social Justice lobby NETWORK; Dr. Sayid Syeed, a founder of the Islamic Society of North America; Andrew Genszler, Director of the Washington office of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America; Brent Walker, Executive Director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty; and Rabbi David Saperstein, Director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.

The focus is not on legislation directly affecting the religious groups, but on how religious groups have organized and advocated on issues of broad community concern, such as regulating the tobacco industry and working to alleviate world hunger through Bread for the World.

It’s interesting to note that the groups featured in this program are all Abrahamic traditions. It might be that the producers chose to limit the spectrum of religious groups in order to fit it all into half an hour, or perhaps that these are the religious groups that have been around long enough to develop lobbying capabilities.

• Interfaith special on CBS features religion and advocacy
  National Council of Churches

I must say that I am amazed that the leaders of the Religious Right (and many other non-conservative religious leaders) and Christians generally clamor for prayer in the public schools.

So says Ronald B. Flowers, Emeritus Professor of Religion at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. Flowers has recently written a book (with Steven K. Green and Melissa Rogers) titled Religious Freedom and the Supreme Court (Bayor University Press, 2008). Flowers was interviewed in the June issue of Church and State, published by Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Flowers goes on to say,

For the public schools to have prayer in the way these people seem to want, it would mean that the government was doing one of the primary functions of the churches. Why cannot they see that the more the government does the work of the churches, the more the churches will be marginalized? The more the government does the work of the churches, in prayer in public places and in subsidizing faith-based charities, the less the churches will be the vibrant, important institutions in society that I assume all Christians want them to be.

The United States has done a delicate balancing act between encouraging religious life and commitment as an important and significant dimension of our communal life, but without establishing or promoting any one particular religion. As religious life in the US becomes increasingly diverse, it highlights the ways in which one tradition, Christianity, has at times been emphasized in public life.

What is the way forward with our balancing act? Some react to the new diversity by clamoring for more support for the “traditional Christian” framework. Others want their religions to enjoy the same governmental acknowledgment and support that Christianity has historically enjoyed. Neither of these approaches recognizes the dangers in governmentally-supported religion outlined by Professor Flowers.

The founders of this nation saw beyond the limits of their own situation to the challenge of including new religions alongside the familiar. Thomas Jefferson wrote in his Notes on Religion (1776),

He [Locke] says “neither Pagan nor Mahomedan nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion.” Shall we suffer a Pagan to deal with us and not suffer him to pray to his god?. . . It is the refusing toleration to those of different opinion which has produced all the bustles and wars on account of religion.
[quoted in McGraw, Rediscovering America's Sacred Ground: Public Religion and Pursuit of the Good in a Pluralistic America, p. 83].

The freedom and integrity of our various religious observances in this nation depends on maintaining that sacred balance- neither supporting nor repressing any given tradition, but allowing each the freedom to flourish in their own way.

• Religious Freedom and the Supreme Court (Interview with Ronald B. Flowers)
  Americans United for Separation of Church and State
• Religious Freedom and the Supreme Court
  by Ronald B. Flowers, Steven K. Green, and Melissa Rogers
  Baylor University Press
• Rediscovering America’s Sacred Ground: Public Religion and Pursuit of the Good in a Pluralistic America
  by Barbara McGraw

I’m a big fan of the website Killing the Buddha, which describes itself in this way:

Killing the Buddha is a religion magazine for people made anxious by churches, people embarrassed to be caught in the “spirituality” section of a bookstore, people both hostile and drawn to talk of God. It is for people who somehow want to be religious, who want to know what it means to know the divine, but for good reasons are not and do not. If the religious have come to own religious discourse it is because they alone have had places where religious language could be spoken and understood. Now there is a forum for the supposedly non-religious to think and talk about what religion is, is not and might be. Killing the Buddha is it.

In its articles I have found much to provoke me to think more deeply about my own faith, its flaws and its strengths, and to listen to widely different perspectives on how religion is lived out, perceived, and sometimes rejected.

I have just gotten a copy of Believer Beware: First Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith, which is the second collection of articles from Killing the Buddha. It contains first person stories of faith and non-faith, religion lost and found and lost again, and reflects the diversity of voices that co-author Jeff Sharlett calls “cacophony.”

Cacophony, after all, is the true sound of belief and unbelief in America, faith found and lost again, religion, ritual, and the rejection of all that, interwoven into our daily lives. Cacophony, not harmony; the sound of many people singing many songs, speaking in many tongues, telling as many different stories as there are souls.

For those of us who spend our time seeking harmony between people of different religious traditions, this is an important reminder. The fact is that religion, ultimately, is not about denominations, or theology, or congregations. It is about how each of us understand ourselves and live our lives in relation to whatever we most value. Given that we are often challenged to find harmony in our own lives, and even within our own religious traditions, how much then are we forced to acknowledge that we cannot find an over-arching global and spiritual harmony!

But if cacophony is the “true sound of belief and unbelief in America,” it is also the true sound of life. Walking through a city, or through a forest, we are confronted with a myriad of voices and sounds, all seeking to be heard, to be honored, to be appreciated.

“Keep the Diversity; Seek the Harmony” was the theme of the third community interfaith event at the Circle of Palms in San Jose in October of 2007, sponsored  by South Bay Interfaith. During that evening, we heard music and chanting from Jewish, Unitarian, Roman Catholic, Mormon, and Hindu traditions. If all had been singing at the same time, it would have been cacophony. But all took time to stop and listen to the other, and at one point the whole group joined in a song that was not part of any of their own traditions.

Sometimes those who seek the harmony do so by neglecting the diversity, by imposing an artificial sense of unity. But the interfaith challenge is to balance that harmony with a healthy respect for the real diversity among our traditions.

On the Killing the Buddha website, you can find a brief audio piece about “The Cacophony Choir,” including the voices of several individuals telling their stories. Take a listen!

• Cacophony Choir
  Killing the Buddha
• Killing the Buddha
• Believer Beware (Amazon)
• South Bay Interfaith

The San Jose Mercury on Sunday ran an interesting article by Sargunjot Kaur regarding the challenges that Sikhs face in maintaining their custom of wearing turbans and beards while seeking to serve with public agencies like the Army and Police.

“Every Sikh should be able to engage in every job. We all have equal rights, and we are not going to kill our faith to gain those rights,” said Mohinder Singh, 67, head priest at San Jose Sikh Temple. “Doesn’t America mean freedom? Then why are Sikhs being pushed to give up their religion?”

For Sikhs, uncut hair, symbolizing the perfection of creation,  is one of the five outward symbols of their faith. The turban and beard are the most visible signs of a (male) Sikh. In keeping with their religious vows to protect the innocent, Sikhs have served proudly in both military and police forces around the world. In the US, they are slowly gaining the right to serve without violating their religious convictions.

• Sikhs fight for right to wear turbans, beards in military, law enforcement
  (San Jose Mercury News)

Independence Day is a good time to celebrate what has made the United States what it is today- a place where people of all tribes, cultures, languages, religions (and no religion) come together in respect and appreciation for the richness of our diversity and the strength of our shared work.

I’m especially grateful to the Founders, who spelled out clearly that the US was not a “Christian” nation, not in the business of advocating for any particular religious perspective, and not allowed to prevent any citizen from exercising (or choosing not to exercise) their religious convictions.

Of course, not everyone feels the way I do. For example, the folks who produced The American Patriot’s Bible. Edited by a Southern Baptist pastor in Georgia, the American Patriot’s Bible is an unvarnished effort to link God and Country in the manner that serves neither well.

According to the publisher, the American Patriot’s Bible “intersects the teachings of the Bible with the history of the Unites States while applying it to today’s culture.” According to Steve Rabey of the Religion News Service, interspersed in the text of the New King James Bible are “some 300 articles about such topics as  `The Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ the right to keep and bear arms, the war in Iraq and religious broadcasting.”

And it’s not only liberal types like myself who are wary of the project. In a review at Christianity Today, Dr. Greg Boyd, author of The Myth of a Christian Nation, says:

Every special interest Bible imposes a certain agenda that to some degree colors the Word, but the Patriot’s Bible takes this “coloring” to a whole new level. There’s not a single commentary in this Bible that even attempts to shed light on what the biblical text actually means. To the contrary, the text of the Bible is used merely as an excuse to further the patriotic agenda of the commentators.

On the website for the Patriot’s Bible, it is possible to preview some of the pages of the book. The two sample pages with actual biblical text are from Exodus. One page uses the institution of the Passover Observance, “This day shall be a day of remembrance for you.”  (Ex 12:14) as the basis for a comment on the reason for Memorial Day observances. On Exodus 20 (one version of the Decalogue), it notes that Harry Truman had the Bible open to this passage when he was sworn it, and that in the Colony of New York in 1665, observance of the Sabbath was required by law. What, exactly, does Memorial Day have to do with Passover? What was Harry Truman thinking? And it was laws like those in New York that led to the First Amendment. As Boyd notes:

The Patriot’s Bible never tires of offering the reader quotes from various famous people in American history who believed all of this, but this simply begs the question. Why should we today regard the claims to divine favor found throughout our history as any different than similar claims made by political leaders of countries and tribes throughout history?

Religious life in America is arguably the most engaged, active, and lively in the world. And it is my firm conviction that the reason that is so is because we have found room for other perspectives, and have had to support and sustain our religious commitments without the interference or the support of the government.

Happy Independence Day!

• New Patriot’s Bible: God Bless America Indeed!
  Beliefnet
• Book Review: The Patriot’s Bible
  Christianity Today
• The American Patriot’s Bible
  Official Website
• www.americanpatriotsbible.com

Preparing for the December Parliament of Religions

Sunday, July 12, 2009
4:00-7:00 pm
Interfaith Chapel in the Presidio

• What do Chicago, Cape Town, and Barcelona have in common?
• How did a 19^th century Hindu teacher change world religion?
• What happens when 10,000 people from different spiritual traditions converge in one place?
• To whom did the Australian government offer a collective apology?
• And what are we taking to Melbourne?!?

These questions and more will be explored at Taking It to Melbourne, a pre-Parliament of the World’s Religions event. We’ll have videoclips and pictures on a big screen along with personal stories of people who have journeyed to past Parliaments. And a special feature: presentations from those in our area who will be offering workshops at the Parliament in December.

Californians (and visitors from afar) who have proposed workshops for the Parliament in Melbourne: We invite you to be part of the program, taking two or three minutes to explain your workshop proposal and why it is important to you. Contact Paul Chaffee at paul@interfaith-presidio.org if you are interested in presenting.

LIVE WEBCAST – If you can’t come to San Francisco, go to www.interfaith-presidio.org and click on the Video Center button to join the event, at 4:00 pm (PST) (No login required).

If you are coming in person, you’ll find a map and directions at the website.

• Interfaith Center at the Presidio
• Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions

A statement from the US Council of Bishops last week has stirred up some long-standing tensions between the Roman Catholic Church and the Jewish community. On June 18, 2009, the  Committee on Doctrine and Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued “A Note on Ambiguities Contained in Reflections on Covenant and Mission.”

The “Ambiguities” are part of a document issued in 2002 by a group of Catholic and Jewish scholars seeking common ground for dialogue and mutual understanding. The recent statement points out that “Reflections on Covenant and Mission” was never an official document of the Catholic Bishops, and clarifies several statements made in that document.

The core of the issue relates to the question of whether Christians (specifically Catholic Christians) should be seeking to convert Jews. This has been a sticky question from the earliest days of the Christian movement. What has happened to God’s original covenant with the Jews?

The present issue reinforces some of the historic affirmations of the Church- however grateful Christians may be to the Jews, they are to understand that the new revelation in Jesus Christ has fulfilled and completed the covenant. Christians are to evangelize, to “tell the good news.”

Some Jewish leaders are understandably upset by statements in this new document that seem to imply that Catholics should enter interfaith dialogue with an intent to convert Jews. The Anti Defamation League asked the Bishops to reaffirm a commitment to dialogue without proselyting.

It is a constant tension in interfaith relationships– how to hold firmly to your own convictions while appreciating the religious commitments of your dialogue partner. Rabbi Yehiel E. Poupko, Judaic Scholar at the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago notes, “No faith community should turn to another and tell them what to believe.” However, it does make a difference how another community acts. In light of the tragic history of Jewish/Christian relations over the past two thousand years, a little “humility and caution” would be appropriate on both sides.

• A Note on Ambiguities Contained in Reflections on Covenant and Mission
  US Conference of Catholic Bishops
• ADL Troubled By U.S. Bishops’ Statement
  Anti Defamation League
• New rows deepen old ruts in Catholic-Jewish relations
  National Catholic Reporter