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The Church in the Centrifuge

The mainline churches are facing a new kind of Christ-and-culture problem. Since the accommodating Christ-of-culture formulation no longer serves us very well, we have been forced to rethink a Christian response to an increasingly pluralistic and religiously demonopolized environment. Not just religion but the culture generally is in the grips of change. Francis Fitzgerald describes American society in the late 20th century not as a melting pot but as a "centrifuge." A centrifuge is an apparatus that rotates at high speed and sorts out substances at differing densities. With centrifugal force, centers collapse and elements regroup in a different, more fragmented constellation.

Fitzgerald’s image suggests that talk about a religious mainline is increasingly problematic and that those of us who think of ourselves as mainliners ought to find more realistic images of who we are. Yet adopting narrow, sectarian notions of the church and ourselves would be alien to our theological heritage and our commitment to be a public church. Historically our churches have been "bridging institutions" concerned with bringing all of life into some meaningful whole. For us, speaking about God is quite properly public business.

But in a postestablishment era, we must go about our task differently. Let me venture a few suggestions about how to respond to the centrifuge.

New meaning born out of the post-1960s world present new challenges to the church. For example, the baby-boom generation, raised in the ‘60s and ‘70s, possesses experiences, values and approaches to belief and belonging that are very different from those of older church members. In fact, the demography of oldline Protestantism now creates two distinct populations: an aging constituency and the baby-boomers. While the churches have hardly explored fully what it means to minister to the former, the establishment mentalities found in the churches are certainly alien to the latter.

The baby-boomers are themselves far more diverse than the caricatures of Yuppies (young, urban professionals), Grumpies (grim, ruthless, upwardly mobile professionals) and Dinks (dual-income, no-kids couples) would suggest. Douglas Walrath’s distinction is helpful: The older baby-boomers are "challengers," quick to question why things are or must be as they are, and the younger ones are "calculators," for whom setting priorities is a way of life. The worlds of both groups are far removed from many oldline churches. For one thing, babyboomers see the world more in terms of options and choices, and approach matters of faith in a more pragmatic manner. Belonging to a congregation is itself a choice and not simply a matter of social conformity or family connections.

They dropped out of the churches in record numbers in the ‘60s and ‘70s but perhaps one-third or more—mainly the older baby-boomers—are returning. They are looking for a religious grounding for their children and for answers to their own questions about life and its meaning. Many claim to be "spiritual" even when they are unsure about what it means to be "religious." Great numbers of them are faith explorers who check out the alternatives. Some are prepared to make commitments. There is much church-hopping; denomination is less important than congregation.

It would be a mistake, however, to think these people will just return to church. This generation will pick and choose with great care. The congregations that attract them must provide programs that have integrity and speak to their particular life experiences. Many of the existing age- and gender-based structures in the churches will not meet their needs. Many baby-boomers have been caught up in consumerism and self-congratulatory economics, but are not fully convinced that these hold sufficient meaning for their lives. Some find the highly individualistic, utilitarian culture of modern America unsatisfying, and are looking for a warm, open and accepting environment. There are burned-out evangelicals, disillusioned fundamentalists and alienated ex-Catholics—all looking for greater congregational openness than they have known before. We are a refuge for the religiously abused.

If the church opens up "experiential space" and adjusts to this new generation’s world, it will change significantly in style and program. If it doesn’t, it will face an even more dismal future of membership decline.

A second suggestion has to do with religious language. How people talk about their religious and spiritual lives: is integrally related to the survival of faith itself. We liberals ought to move beyond our embarrassment over Christian talk about religious experiences. Paul Holmer distinguishes between "language about" and "language of " faith, and says we shouldn’t think the prevalence of the former substitutes for the poverty of the latter—especially at a time when many Americans are searching for ways of expressing who they are and what is most important to them.

Part of the problem is that liberals, because they are always looking for ways to recast the faith in new concepts and categories, easily fall prey to the latest jargons of science, philosophy, psychology and sociology. Liberalism has been so busy transforming the Christian tradition, says Joseph C. Hough, Jr., that it has forgotten to transmit it. This is not to disparage the formidable intellectual tasks of modern reformulation, or to minimize its importance for the life of the church, but to suggest that the ways in which we go about this often shortchange everyday languages of faith. We do this at our peril. Inevitably the vitality of the Christian church arises out of grass-roots affirmations of faith and commitment, out of the tales and stories told by those sitting in the pews.

I am persuaded by George Lindbeck, Hans Frei, Barbara Brown Zikmund and others that we must discover religious meaning in language and metaphor. Religion is a language: it involves learning how to talk about one’s life, interpreting events and experiences, and drawing upon a legacy of beliefs, symbols and stories that give life meaning and coherence. Individuals can tell deeply personal stories, but there is also a communal story—a narrative shaped by a shared outlook and common interpretation of experience. There is growing recognition today of how language shapes a particular community of faith. "Narrative theology" and ethicists are giving attention to the ways in which tradition informs our understanding of what we believe to be good. Language is at the heart of the theological enterprise, and we should appreciate now what this means for the renewal of spirit and faith.

Just as the biblical narrative carries its own force and cannot be reduced to a single teaching or moral, faith as expressed in story and metaphor is coherent on its own terms. For believers, the biblical and personal narratives fuse, forming a unity which is at once both universal and personal. When this happens, language, even the old dry vocabularies that seem spiritless, can come to life. Dan Wakefield’s recently published spiritual biography Returning is one example. Wakefield tells of his secular adventures: of accomplishment and disappointment, of having explored most of modern America’s seductive alternatives of spirit and flesh and, finally, of rediscovering himself in a worship service in Boston. He just happened to drop in on a congregation one Christmas Eve and, in a liminal moment, "started to see the deeper connections and more expansive framework offered by the sense of our small daily drama in relation to the higher meaning that many people call God."

We liberals must come to terms with the personal religious vocabulary and quit discrediting people’s spiritual quests or somehow looking upon them as less important than social and political matters. The appeal of New Age and human-potential therapies is that they give expression to the personal and mystical and do so—as Catherine Albanese points out—by "reprimitivizing" religion. They bring religion back to the most fundamental of human concerns: health and well-being and being in touch with self and with one’s environment. Some of us find this strange talk, yet it really isn’t all that strange. There was a time when liberal Protestants talked this way. They even talked of personal growth and transformation. Harry Emerson Fosdick’s On Being a Real Person comes to mind. It was not until the 1950s that liberal intellectuals decided that the laity’s preoccupation with personal faith encouraged self-absorption at the expense of theological and social issues. Perhaps it is time for a more balanced perspective.

Second, metaphor and language have something to do with community. It’s hardly news that we in the liberal churches have a belonging problem. Large proportions of our members have only marginal ties to congregations. Martin Marty says we look more like alumni or alumnae associations than faith communities. We treasure our individual freedom and autonomy, but for many of us the end result is "Sheilaism"—the radically individualized type of believer described in Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart who professes a faith in God but feels no need for sharing it or for communal involvement. Religious privatism saps the liberal churches of their strength perhaps more than anything else in modern society. What can we do about this? Belonging, or community, isn’t programmed; it doesn’t occur, in any lasting way, by mobilizing around an issue. Instead, it arises out of shared imagery and vocabulary. We have to break out of privatized modes of belief by cultivating imagery for the faith community. Then, and only then, will we solve the belonging problem.

Like most liberals, I respect that which transcends time and place. However, our preoccupation with universals often blinds us to sources of strength found in the particular. Picking up on the centrifuge theme, we have to respect the new densities of the post-1960s. If I read the signs correctly, I think there has been a mood shift. Students are searching religious traditions for basic values and beliefs. There is renewed interest in religious and spiritual figures—men and women whose lives stand out because of their character and commitment—and in moral and ethical issues. The most popular course at Harvard these days is Harvey Cox’s "Jesus and the Moral Life." At the University of California at Santa Barbara a course on "Vietnam and the American Soul" draws hundreds of students. Attention is on the particular—on the way specific religious and moral leaders have dealt with the nitty-gritty of faith and life.

The great world religious figures of this century—Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa—were all deeply rooted in a particular tradition, yet each has a broad appeal. Integrity, passion, conviction, vision—indispensable elements of a religious story—all arise out of a context, yet transcend context. Universality arises out of the particular, not the other way around. Good religion is like good literature in that the particular may bear within it the universal.

We in the liberal churches must rediscover our own particular traditions and celebrate them as authentic expressions of Christian faith. But we must not be so captive to our middle-class values that we lose sight of the bigger picture. Perhaps this is what our various constituency theologies are trying to make clear to us. But the point needs to be made in a better way. We need to concern ourselves less with theological in-fighting and liberal versus conservative posturing, and instead hold up particular embodiments of the universal. Emphasizing these common life experiences and epiphanies—what Robert Calhoun once spoke of as "intimations of the presence of God"—can help us locate that which unifies us.

What is finally important in renewing the churches is not the health or even survival of any particular institutional form. The church is not an end in itself; it is an earthen vessel from which sacrifice and service and proclamation must constantly be poured out. That it is taking new shape in our time is not to be feared but celebrated. We must be open to whatever new church emerges and not be overcome with guilt over the Protestant disestablishment of the past quarter-century. Disestablishments are liberating; they open up new challenges and opportunities. We must not fear that the treasure poured out will not be replenished. We must go about being faithful—with eyes open to what is happening around us, and hearts and minds fully engaged in the traditions we have inherited and the demands of the present age. And then we must leave the rest to God.

Cakes for the Queen of Heaven: 2,500 Years of Religious Ecstasy

"As for you, do not pray for this people, . . for I do not hear you. Do you not see what they are doing in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood, the fathers kindle fire, and the women knead dough, to make cakes for the queen of heaven; and they pour out drink offerings to other gods, to provoke me to anger. Is it I whom they provoke? says the Lord. Is it not themselves, to their own confusion? . . . Behold, my anger and my wrath will be poured out on this place, upon man and beast, upon the trees of the field and the fruit of the ground; it will burn and not be quenched" [Jer. 7: 1-20].

Whatever the precise date of this passage from Jeremiah’s prophecies -- and, as is usually the case, biblical scholars disagree -- the general historical context is clear: More than a century earlier the northern kingdom of Israel had been almost entirely annihilated by the Assyrians. Since this terrible event the little southern kingdom of Judah had been leading a precarious existence between the great powers in Mesopotamia and Egypt. From the beginning of his public activity, Jeremiah had been warning his compatriots against a great danger, a strong and terrible enemy, that was to come from the north -- the same direction from which the Assyrians had come.

Breaching the Covenant-Contract

It was this enemy that was to be the instrument of divine punishment of the sinful people of Israel. Over a hundred years before, the prophets of the north -- especially Hosea -- had spoken in just these terms about the Assyrians: Yahweh, the God of Israel, worked mysteriously through the forces of history, even through nations that had never heard of him, nations violently hostile to him. Even the Assyrians, a ferocious and merciless nation, could serve as the rod with which Yahweh would strike the people that had become unfaithful to the covenant. Unlike other gods, Yahweh was bound neither to a place nor to a people. His temple could just as well be in one place as in another. His relation to Israel was a contractual one rather than one of kinship. Yahweh had chosen Israel. He had bound himself to Israel in the covenant, but if Israel broke the terms of that contract, he was then free to repudiate the relationship. Now, once more, Jeremiah proclaimed these old truths about Yahweh, and the proclamation was given added weight by the frightful example of what had happened in the north.

Curiously, the sins denounced in the passage from Jeremiah (sins, that is, that constitute a breach of contract on the part of the people of Israel) are a mixture of social and religious offenses. There are easily recognized violations of social justice -- failures to abide by the law, oppression of the weaker elements in society, the shedding of innocent blood. But these sociological sins are closely linked with the religious ones -- the "going after other gods." This linkage is startling to modern ears. We are; to be sure, accustomed to the moral denunciation of social injustice, be it in religious or secular terms. A New York Times editorial writer would readily find himself at home in Jeremiah’s catalogue of social evils. But we are not at all accustomed to seeing such evils linked with the failure to worship properly (in large part, of course, because we have only the haziest notion about worship, proper or improper). The linkage between social ethics and worship was also startling in the context of the ancient Near East -- but not for the reason it startles us today. There was nothing hazy about worship in the ancient Near East: the individual was constantly surrounded by cult and ritual. Nor were the gods a remote or implausible hypothesis; on the contrary, they were tangibly close and real. It was not at all surprising for an Israelite prophet to assume that worship was of great importance. Rather, the unexpected thing was the assertion that the worship of Yahweh was directly and inevitably linked to the treatment of the lower classes of society. Not that this assertion was original to Jeremiah; he was merely reiterating an understanding of the covenant that harked back to very early times in the religious history of Israel.

‘Cheap Grace’ in the Temple of Astarte

What, then, was the improper worship that Jeremiah was talking about? Our passage indicates that a rather ecumenical array of gods was involved. The reference to kindling fires (for sacrifice) and pouring libations could, and probably did, refer to any number of divinities. But I think that the most interesting of the lot was that queen of heaven, for whom the women of Jerusalem made cakes (which, by the way, bore her image and were offered to her in a sacrificial cult). Who was she?

She was a very old divinity indeed, even then, and she had borne many names. In Mesopotamia she was known as Ishtar, in Syria-Palestine as Ashtoret. She reached Egypt as Ashtartu and in southern Arabia she appeared as a male god named Athtar. All these names, by the way, have their root in a Semitic verb that denotes irrigation; everywhere she is associated with the waters that give fertility to the land. There are indications of similar goddesses from other parts of the Mediterranean world and from India. The Greeks called her Astarte and identified her with their own Aphrodite.

Astarte (for convenience’ sake, I’ll use the Hellenized version of her name) was a key figure in the cult of sacred sexuality that was central to the religious life of the ancient Semites. Its basic assumptions were quite simple and, it seems, enormously attractive: humanity was part and parcel of a divine cosmos. The rhythms of nature, particularly the sequences of the seasons and the movements of the stars, were suffused with divine forces. Using later religious terminology, we might say that the rhythms of nature were means of grace or sacraments. These same divine forces were also to be found within human beings, notably in their sexual and agricultural activity (the two were closely linked: the same creative powers gave fertility to the human womb and to the land). The cult of sacred sexuality put one in touch with the divine forces in the cosmos and within oneself. That cult, logically enough, tended everywhere toward the orgiastic. The temples of Astarte had attached to them priestesses or sacred prostitutes (the Hebrew Bible calls them kedeshot, "holy women"; the Greeks called them "hierodules," or "servants of the holy"), who offered sexual relations not for pleasure (though that might have been an occasional fringe benefit) but as a sacrament. (To defend the cult against the charge of sexism, I might add that some of its establishments also had male priests with similar functions.) In addition to its institution of sacred prostitution, the cult had a number of special occasions (harvest festivals and the like) on which normal sexual prohibitions were suspended and, according to the accounts we have, a good time was had by all.

It would be a mistake to attribute the great attraction of the cult of sacred sexuality only to the occasions of sexual release it provided, though this probably played a part. One might observe in this connection that, as human cultures go, that of the ancient Semites was not particularly "repressive" of the sexual impulse; there were plenty of nonsacred prostitutes around, and the temples of Astarte did not have a monopoly in the brothel business. I think, rather, that we can grasp the attraction only if we pay attention to what I have called the sacramental character of sacred sexuality. The human being’s fundamental religious quest is to establish contact with divine forces and beings that transcend him. The cult of sacred sexuality provided this contact in a way that was both easy and pleasurable. The gods were as close as one’s own genitalia; to establish contact with them, when all was said mythologically and all was done ritually, one only had to do what, after all, one wanted to do anyway. It is hard to think of a more perfect example of what, many centuries later, Christians would call "cheap grace." At the same time, the cult provided ecstasy. In the throes of the orgiastic sacrament, the individual stepped outside his normal self and the humdrum restraints of ordinary life. He became one with the cosmos, with the gods, and ipso facto with his own true nature. He ate the apple and he became divine; what, in the biblical perspective, was the original seduction was also the most archaic experience of "consciousness-expansion."

All divinities have a terrible aspect. But Astarte commonly appeared in a most comfortable form. According to an old Babylonian hymn used in her worship,

. . . Ishtar is clothed with pleasure and love.

She is laden with vitality, charm, and voluptuousness.

In lips she is sweet; life is in her mouth.

At her appearance rejoicing becomes full. . . .

The same hymn announces that Astarte "is sought after among the gods." No wonder! The Israelites, men and women both, succumbed to her psychedelic charm again and again. Nothing seemed to diminish her fascination. Toward the end of Jeremiah’s ministry, when he lived in Egypt among the refugees from devastated Judah, once more we find him complaining about the women making cakes for the queen of heaven -- despite the fact that, as God says through the mouth of the prophet, they "have seen all the evil that I brought upon Jerusalem and upon all the cities of Judah" (Jer. 44:2). And, more than half a millennium later, when Paul came to Corinth to preach the gospel, the city was famous for its great temple of Aphrodite, with its battalions of "hierodules" who, we might say, stood in a valid "apostolic succession" to the kedeshot of Jeremiah’s time. The temptation of "cheap grace" spans the centuries; we may surmise that the Corinthian Christians were tempted for very much the old reasons.

Voluptuous Ecstasy or Stern Demands

But let me go back once more to ancient Israel:From the earliest layers of the biblical traditions to the most recent ones, the spokesmen of the God of the covenant violently repudiated the cult of sacred sexuality in all its forms. Why? First of all, it was not because these traditions were sexually "repressive," or "uptight," or averse to the satisfaction of "libidinal needs." On the contrary, ancient Israel was fairly relaxed about sexual matters, and until very late in its development it had no ideals of asceticism. The prophets were anything but "Puritans." They were denouncing not sex, but sacred sex. It is as if they said: "Go ahead, have your sexual pleasure -- but don’t make a religion out of it." Also, in denouncing Astarte and the other gods of this kind of cult, they did not do so because they doubted the existence of these deities (though perhaps some of them did so doubt). The prophets were anything but adherents of a "modern scientific world view." Even Paul, writing at a much later time when Judaism had indeed become a fully "monotheistic" religion, could say in a quite open way: "For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth -- as indeed there are many ‘gods’ and many ‘lords’ -- yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ" (I Cor. 8:5-6).

The sacred sexuality complex was repudiated by those who spoke for Yahweh because it violated their central understanding of both God and humanity. The basic presupposition of sacred sexuality was the unity of the cosmos with the divine. It was precisely this unity that Yahwism violently rejected. Yahweh was the God who had created the heavens and the earth. As creator, he stood over and against the cosmos. He was not one with it; therefore, there was no. way by which contact with him could be established by fusing the self with the inner processes of the cosmos. Put differently, ancient Israel polarized God and world in a hitherto unheard-of manner. By the same token, ancient Israel enormously radicalized the experience of transcendence. All gods are transcendent, in the sense of having their being beyond the borders of ordinary human life. Indeed, in this sense transcendence may be taken as a constitutive characteristic of all human religions. The God of Israel, however, was utterly transcendent. His power, to be sure, extended to every corner of the cosmos, but it confronted the cosmos rather than being immanent within it. Above all, Israel encountered its God as a God of history, through the mighty acts that were the foundation of the covenant.

This understanding of God was not an abstract, philosophical one. It came Out of the very core of Israel’s religious experience, and it had far-reaching moral implications. The covenant imposed cultic obligations on Israel, and the prophets were by no means anti-cultic (to think so is a very modern, indeed very Protestant misunderstanding). But these cultic obligations were inextricably linked with moral imperatives. Unlike the cult of sacred sexuality, the cult of Yahweh did not lead to otherworldly ecstasy; rather, it directed people back into the world, where their task was to do God’s will in human affairs. Worship here was inevitably linked with the whole gamut of moral concerns in society -- with social justice, with the right relations between nations and classes, with the protection of the weak. Unlike Astarte’s, Yahweh’s lips were anything but sweet; more often than not, his lips pronounced judgment. Unlike Astarte, Yahweh was not clothed with pleasure and voluptuousness; rather, his garb was righteousness. If Astarte’s "grace" was cheap and comfortable, Yahweh’s "grace" had to be dearly bought with moral effort and discipline.

Thus the opposition between the two religious possibilities was sharp and irreconcilable. It was either the voluptuous ecstasy of the one, or the stern demands of the other. Yahweh was a jealous God. Most important, the cultic betrayal of the covenant was inevitably linked with its moral betrayal: those who offer cakes to the queen of heaven are the same ones who oppress the weak and who shed the blood of the innocent. Despite the vast gulfs of experience that lie between ourselves and Jeremiah’s contemporaries, it should not be too difficult to see why: a religion of pleasure is not likely to be conducive to the often far-from-pleasurable efforts required by social concern; there is not much voluptuousness in taking care of widows and orphans.

Transcendence: Contraband Goods?

Inevitably there comes the question, What does all this have to do with us today? What should we care, after all, about who worshiped what in the Near East 2,500 years ago? Surely we have more urgent matters to worry about. Well, maybe. It seems to me, however, that these old stories speak to us in a surprisingly timely way, once we penetrate to their inner content through the enveloping layers of culturally alien materials.

To be sure, our spiritual situation today is very different from Jeremiah’s. It is not only that we have behind us over two millennia of Jewish and Christian history, during which not one but several radical transformations of religious experience and consciousness took place. Our own situation is deeply marked by the phenomenon we know as secularization. Put simply, this means that transcendence of any sort has become progressively less real to many people. The gods, which surrounded archaic man on all sides, have receded. The cosmos, once permeated with divine beings and forces, has become empty, cold, a mathematical design. This, of course, is what is meant by the "modern scientific world view." Transcendence has been, shall we say, declared "inoperative" by the major agencies that "officially" define reality -- the universities, the school system, the medical system, the communications media, and to some extent even the courts. Those who may be described as the "official reality-definers" -- loosely speaking, the intellectuals and would-be intellectuals -- are, throughout the Western world at least, overwhelmingly attached to that "modern scientific world view" which proscribes transcendence. In our society, as in others, these agencies together constitute what I like to call a "reality police." The "reality policemen" -- teachers, psychiatrists, commentators and the like -- watch over the cognitive boundaries of the culture. In their perspective, transcendence in any of its historical forms is viewed as contraband goods. A contemporary who hears the voice of Yahweh, I daresay, would be just as suspect in that perspective as one who experiences the voluptuous ecstasies of Astarte. Such aberrations are promptly excommunicated intellectually (the psychiatrists have at hand a full-blown "syllabus of errors" for this purpose, as do language analysts and other assorted ideologists of the cognitive status quo), and the individual who refuses to recant may have to face "repressive" treatments of various degrees of severity (from losing his job to electroshock).

I strongly suspect that there is something close to an instinct for transcendence in human beings. We can learn something from Freud here: "repressed" drives have a way of coming back, often in grossly distorted and bizarre forms. This is precisely what has been happening as a result of secularization and its agencies of "censorship." Very likely it has been happening all along, though some of the manifestations have been stronger or at least more visible in recent years. The gods are very old and very powerful; they are not easily "repressed." What is more, the "modern scientific world view" that was supposed to replace them has turned out to be a rather boring business for many people. The cosmos as a mathematical design may be inspiring to some physicists; the vision gives metaphysical cold feet to many others. Secularization has both demystified and trivialized reality.

It was G. K. Chesterton, as I recall, who observed that modernity has given ultimate authority to the world view of a slightly sleepy businessman right after lunch. Such a world view is not only unexciting; it also fails to do justice to some of the root experiences of human life -- notably the experiences of mystery and of pain. If one looks at the matter in this way, it is hardly surprising that transcendence has refused to go away quietly and definitively. It continues a vigorous "underground" existence in many places; the gods, as it were, come in plain brown envelopes. In other places it continues to defend itself in institutions that, from the viewpoint of the "official" world view, are obsolete remnants of an earlier age. Sometimes, to the surprise of the ideological establishment, transcendence erupts in unexpected and cataclysmic ways. This is a useful approach to an understanding of what has been happening on the religious scene in the past few years.

Let me bring up Freud once more: "repressed" material will erupt most violently where the "censorship" has been strongest. For this reason, the more colorful eruptions of transcendence have occurred not in the bosom of "reactionary" religious institutions but rather in those places where secularization has been most "repressively" established. In America, this means very largely the college-educated upper-middle class. The new Pentecostalism is spreading among progressive Roman Catholics and Episcopalians -- not among Southern Baptists or Adventists. Black masses are celebrated in affluent suburbs -- not in the areas of the working class. And it is the children of the most orthodox secularists, the offspring of thoroughly enlightened modern homes, who parade through the streets chanting Sanskrit hymns.

The Resurgence of Sacred Sexuality

One aspect of this recent religious upsurge is of immediate relevance: there has also been a resurgence of sacred sexuality. Perhaps nothing in human history ever vanishes completely -- a disturbing or consoling notion, depending on the degree of one’s faith in progress, but there it is: Astarte is alive and well, and if she lives anywhere, I suppose, it is in California.

The new sacred sexuality takes many forms. It appears in heavily secularized garb in various therapeutic cults, most of them offshoots of movements within the psychoanalytic camp -- from Wilhelm Reich to the more sedate branches of the "new sensitivity." In the counterculture it revealed its religious thrust almost everywhere, linked as it was to psychedelic experimentation and an intense interest in the occult. Norman O. Brown has perhaps been the most influential spokesman of this overtly religious celebration of sexuality. Finally, sacred sexuality is directly embodied in subcultural religious movements and sects, most of them of oriental inspiration. But this is only to look at the original "locations" of the phenomenon. By now it has been diffused widely through upper-middle-class culture in this country, most strongly on the west coast but elsewhere as well. To an extent, it has become the ideology of the "sexual revolution."

In view of this variety of forms, it is useful to pay attention to the common core of these phenomena. Perhaps the most illuminating proposition in all of this is the injunction "to get in touch with one’s body" (incidentally, a moral injunction, often put forth with considerable sternness). What does this imply? First of all, it implies some superficial beliefs about the place of sexuality in human experience (we might regard these as being in the antechamber of the temple of sacred sexuality proper): the belief that sexuality is a key, perhaps even the key, component of the quality of being human (in this, of course, lies the pervasive heritage of Freud); the belief that modern Western culture, and especially American culture, has unduly suppressed sexuality (this is the anti-Puritan aspect of the proposition), and, that, as a result, not only are we sexually frustrated (and that frustration carries all sorts of physical and psychological pathologies in its wake), but our entire relation to our own bodies as well as the bodies of others has become distorted. We are afraid of the body, we are afraid to let go physically, to ouch one another, to enjoy physical pleasure fully (and not just sexual pleasure in the narrower sense). "To get in touch with one’s body" is an imperative of regained health, beyond that of deepened humanity. Sexual liberation is thus linked to liberation in a more basic way; it becomes a method of achieving a freer humanity, individually and perhaps even politically.

This much we could call "secularized Astartism." It is not the end of the story. The core proposition is expanded today by many into a fully religious view of the world -- if you will, into Astartism desecularized. Once more, "to get in touch with one’s body" is to establish contact with the fundamental rhythms of the cosmos. The "new sensitivity" toward the body is linked with "expanded consciousness" -- expanding, that is, toward the divine. The status quo is defined as an alienation between ourselves and the life-giving forces of nature; the projected salvation consists in overcoming that alienation and returning to the divine forces that are immanent in nature.

Some of the writings of the ecology movement have expressed this viewpoint eloquently, but it can also be found elsewhere (and, needless to say, it can be found in the writings of "with-it" Christian theologians). It is interesting, by the way, that the blame for this alleged alienation is very commonly put on biblical religion and on the Judeo-Christian tradition as a whole -- an insight with which it is impossible to disagree. In this form of the proposition, we are once again in the realm of authentic sacred sexuality. The liberation of the body is once more linked to the ecstasies in which the divine womb of the cosmos is re-entered. The wheel has come full circle.

If you think that I’m now working up toward a prophetic denunciation of the new sacred sexuality, I must disappoint you. I’m no Jeremiah, the last thing in the world I want to be is a prophet, and there are worse things in our time than Astarte Rediviva. Also, let me say emphatically that I hold no brief for Puritanism or for sexual "repression." I’m quite tolerant of even the excesses of the "sexual revolution" (my main objection to it is that it is antierotic, but that is another topic), and I suspect that on balance it has done more good than harm. There is one thing, however, that I have in common with the Israelite prophetic tradition in this area: it is not sexuality, but sacred sexuality, which bothers me in religious terms. In an age in which we are so much at the mercy of the "repressive triviality" of the secularists, I incline toward an irenic attitude with regard to all, or nearly all, reaffirmations of transcendence: I would much prefer to live in a temple of Astarte than in a global Skinner Box, and I’ll take the poetry of William Blake over the dreary platitudes of positivist philosophers any day.

The Vital Link Between Worship and Morality

Nevertheless, I cannot finally leave it at that -- and no one can who has any stake in that vision of the human condition that comes down to us from ancient Israel. For both religious and ethical reasons, I cannot leave it there, and, in quite traditional fashion, I see once again the linkage between cult and ethics. Religiously, I believe that Jeremiah was right in his faith in the utterly transcendent God who created heaven and earth, who moves history, and who bids us do his work in the world. We may cherish all the wonders of creation -- as our passage has it, "man and beast . . . the trees of the field and the fruit of the ground." All these are good, indeed they are sweet (as the lips of love are sweet), but they are not God, who stands over them in infinite majesty and who at times, as in our passage, stands over them in judgment. To say this is not to indulge in narrow intolerance. But one must be true to one’s own experience: that means saying No as well as Yes. Now as then, it is not possible to worship both the God who created the world and a world itself perceived as divine.

But for ethical reasons also I cannot leave it with an attitude of total tolerance. There is still a vital connection between what we worship and what our morality is. Now as then, the world is full of injustice and misery. The God of the covenant demands of us that we work in this world, that we strive to combat injustice and to alleviate misery. A religion of pleasure, no matter what the intentions of its advocates, can only inhibit the efforts that are required by this moral demand. And, if I’m to be honest, at this point of my reflections my tolerance wears very thin indeed: in a world of mass murder and mass starvation, of unprecedented terror, odious tyrannies, and the threat of nuclear holocausts -- in such a world there is something obscene about an order of priorities that starts off with bigger and better orgasms.

Let me conclude with what I regard as the root insight of Jeremiah’s perspective: the transcendence of God and the worldly mission of humanity are not in contradiction. On the contrary, the worship of the God who is utterly beyond the world is deeply, inextricably linked with the most passionate engagement in the moral struggles of this world. Nor is the refusal to worship the creation instead of the Creator a denial of the good things of life. On the contrary, it is precisely in the celebration of the world as creation, and not in its worship as something divine, that we taste its hauntingly vulnerable sweetness.

The Class Struggle in American Religion

The fanatical mullahs have been let loose in the land, this land. They travel all across America in the flesh; even more alarmingly, they fill the air with the electronic projections of their presence. They are not a monolithic group, to be sure, and some seem more threatening than others. What they have in common is that unity of religious and political certitude which, despite all the ideological differences, is uncomfortably reminiscent of the fanaticism unleashed by Muslim fundamentalists.

Leave aside for the moment such endearing theological opinions as the one that God refuses to accept the prayers of those outside one particular congregation of certitude -- an expression not so much of anti-Semitism, one would guess, as of a peculiarly electronic conception of the divinity: "Sorry, sir, this number is unlisted." More relevant to the present considerations is the mind-blowing specificity of the messages received from the great switchboard in the sky by these people: God is against Salt II but for the MX missile. God is for prayer in the public schools but against ERA. And so on.

Flag-Wavers and Flag-Burners

One does not have to believe that the country is about to be taken over by enragé Southern Baptists to be alarmed by the recent upsurge of the Christian right. Theologically, the terrible simplicities of this neo-fundamentalism must be disturbing to anyone with more complicated notions of God’s interventions in the human condition. Politically, what is most troubling is the effortless linkage between reactionary religion and reactionary politics, especially in terms of an aggressive and at least potentially bellicose nationalism. Flag-waving preachers are always disturbing; they become truly frightening in an age of nuclear weapons. The alarm provoked by the Christian New Right, then, is not unreasonable.

Inevitably, however, the religio-political extravaganza on the right has reminded fair-minded observers of the comparable extravaganza on the left -- a phenomenon which, far from having been laid to rest with the late 1960s, is still going full blast and has even been institutionalized in important agencies of mainline religion in this country. Inevitably, one must ask by what criteria one deems good the pronouncements of left-of-center geese while condemning the preachments of right-of-center ganders. This question is, of course, at least in part a constitutional one. If it was wrong for the Internal Revenue Service to make threatening noises against church groups opposing the Vietnam war, then it would be wrong for the Federal Communications Commission to start harassing broadcasters for airing the political views of another set of church groups. But the issue is much deeper than the proper relations of church and state in the American democracy, important though these are. The issue touches on fundamental questions about Christians acting in the world, and ultimately it touches on the central question as to the nature of the Kingdom of God announced in the gospel.

If it is wrong to sanctify Americanism in Christian terms, how about the virulent anti-Americanism that permeates Christian church agencies and seminaries? Why is flag-waving objectionable, while flag-burning was an admirable expression of the prophetic ministry of the church? After all, what is prophecy to one is a reprehensible misuse of Christian symbols to another. And the specificity with which the political implications of Christian faith are spelled out on the right can be matched, pronunciamento by pronunciamento, on the left. An individual with even a modicum of detachment from the contemporary American scene may wonder how Christians can be so sure that God is either for or against all these specific political and social positions, or how Christians make it plausible to themselves that Jesus was either a capitalist ("The Man Nobody Knows") or a socialist ("The Man Only Good Guerrillas Know").

Obviously, the degree of alarm with which one perceives these two sets of militant American mullahs will depend on one’s own political convictions. It will also depend on just where one happens to live. A resident of, say, Texas will understandably be more alarmed by the mullahs on the right. If, on the other hand, one resides in, say, Boston, the left-of-center mullahs are much more real and consequently more likely to get on one’s nerves.

Let it be assumed, though, that Christians can aspire to some freedom from these ideological and geographical determinations (if they cannot, there must be something wrong with their understanding of the gospel that sets us free). In that case it is possible -- should be possible -- to draw some lessons from what is currently going on in American religion. It might even be possible, then, that the advent of the Christian New Right may turn out to be a blessing in disguise, and not only for those with right-of-center political opinions.

The Presence of the Kingdom

Specifically, there is a theological and a sociological lesson to be learned. The theological lesson is an old one, but since it is periodically forgotten, it may now be in need of repetition: It is not the purpose of the Christian church to sanctify political institutions or programs. Further: This applies to programs that would preserve the status quo as well as to those intending to replace it.

The church is the presence of the Kingdom in this world (or, if one prefers, in this eon -- for the present purpose, either formulation will do). Yet the Kingdom is not of this world; it is yet to come, in God’s own time. As the Kingdom embodies a promise of justice, the church must be concerned with justice in this world, and it is inevitable that this concern will embroil Christians in the political realm. And as Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom first of all to the poor and the despised, Christians must have a particular concern for the victims of every sort of oppression.

Probably most Christians, of whatever political persuasion, would assent to these basic propositions. And insofar as the concern for the oppressed means acts of compassion, there is hardly any controversy (one may think here, for example, about the work of the churches on behalf of refugees or in the alleviation of famine). The problems begin, of course, when the political involvement of Christians goes beyond this kind of diakonia to engagement in political action in the service of what some perceive as a quest for justice. And, needless to say, what to some Christians appears as such a quest for justice will appear to other Christians as an exercise in futility or even moral delusion.

It is not possible to say that the church must never legitimate any human endeavors whatever. For one thing, to say this would be to demand what is empirically unfeasible. Religion, for reasons that cannot be developed here, always gets into the business of legitimation in human society and history -- that is part of its nature -- and the Christian religion is no exception. The church itself, in its worldly shape, is an institution among others, subject like any other to social and political forces.

Also, however, it would be theologically inappropriate to say that the church must never legitimate anything, because that would imply a denial of the sacramental view of the world disclosed by Christian faith. Thus, for example, the Bible legitimates human parenthood by speaking of God in parental terms: the point here is not primarily that human symbolizations are employed to make God understandable (although that, of course, is the case), but that specific human acts or gestures come to be seen as adumbrations of a divine, metahuman reality. But it is the parent who shields a child from harm who adumbrates the sheltering love of God, not the parent who thrusts a child into danger or loneliness. By the same token, Christian faith legitimates loving parenthood -- and, in so doing, cannot fail to legitimate institutions that embody the acts of loving parenthood, notably the family.

What is not included in this legitimation, however, is any specific sociological configuration -- say, the bourgeois family as it developed in the modern West, or any modification thereof that someone may propose. In other words, the theologically appropriate legitimation must remain on a level of considerable generality, even abstraction, and will therefore be hard to apply to specific institutional concretizations.

Where to Draw the Line

It will be objected here that such abstraction makes Christian faith a ready tool for anyone who wishes to employ it. Historically, no doubt, this has frequently been the case. Therein lies the vulnerability of the church in the world. It is all the more important that Christians know how to make distinctions -- especially in the political realm, where ideological legitimations are always in demand. Christians must be engaged in the quest for justice. The church must affirm not only the quest as such but those human gestures that embody justice, such as the gesture of one who has power and shields the powerless.

To that extent, the church must even legitimate the state, which, at its best, institutionalizes the gestures of justice. That legitimation, however, is a long way from legitimating specific forms of government. Both a benevolent despot and a modern democracy may exercise power to shield the powerless, and the church can affirm the legitimacy of these uses of power. But the church was wrong when it drew out of this a doctrine of the divine right of kings, as the church would be wrong today in sanctifying the American form of government as the only one mandated by God. The same considerations pertain to all political institutions or programs.

Admittedly, it is often difficult to draw a line here. Perhaps different lines have to be drawn at different moments in history. In the late 1960s a very radical notion of how to draw the line was suggested by a man who is still one of the most interesting ecclesiastical figures in Latin America, Sergio Méndez Arcéo, the bishop of Cuernavaca. Méndez then took the position that, in the political realm, the church must never bless, only condemn. He since then changed his mind, at least for a while when he became convinced that the church must endorse socialism as the only way out of the human miseries of Latin America. The earlier position was not only more radical but also more persuasive. Thus, in 1968, after the Mexican army had fired on a student demonstration and killed a large number of people in the so-called Tlatelolco massacre, Méndez read a statement from the pulpit of his cathedral condemning the government for this act. He did this in his capacity as a bishop, speaking ex cathedra for the entire church.

In retrospect, there is no reason to question what he did. The facts were readily available, and their moral import was clear. No particular expertise was required to say that soldiers firing with machine guns on unarmed students were violating fundamental moral principles. Méndez, at that time, did not follow up his condemnation of the government with an endorsement of any specific program designed to reform the political system of Mexico. Wisely, he understood that this was not within his competence as a bishop. Unwisely, he assumed such competence when he endorsed socialism -- a program for alleviating misery on which every conceivable category of experts has failed to reach agreement and concerning which the training of a bishop hardly bestows expertise. Again, mutatis mutandis. these observations pertain to political issues across the board, in the United States as much as in Latin America.

The church has every competence to condemn terror, or starvation, or exploitation -- more specifically, to condemn the specific political arrangements that allow these oppressions to take place in an institutionalized form. But the church does not have the competence to bless any particular political modality either practiced or proposed as an alternative. And it is precisely in failing to make this distinction that American churches have gone astray, on both sides of the political spectrum.

Thus it was right when, in the 1950s, many in the churches condemned communism for its violations of human rights and dignity; it was wrong to deduce from this an unquestioning legitimation of the foreign policy of the United States in that period. Similarly, in the 1960s, it was right to condemn atrocities committed by the United States and its allies in Indochina; it was wrong to go on from this stand to an endorsement of the political goals of the North Vietnamese regime.

As in the case of the bishop of Cuernavaca, the reasons for this distinction are not only theological but also eminently empirical. Those who speak for the church have, very commonly, a fine sense of what is morally unacceptable in particular human situations. It may even be said that such a sense of injustice or inhumanity is one of the fruits of the Spirit. But these same people have no more expertise than others (and usually less) in designing practicable programs for political action. Put simply, one has good reason to be respectful of a bishop who condemns a military atrocity; one usually has very little reason to be respectful of that bishop’s opinions on the political dynamics of southeast Asia -- especially when the bishop is an American who has never been there.

Inflationary Prophecy

Quite apart from the preceding theological considerations (and even if one should disagree with these), the representatives of the church deceive the public if they lay claim to an expertise (political, economic or what-have-you) which in fact they do not possess. The idea that moral sensitivity somehow bestows the competence to make policy recommendations on every subject under the sun is delusional. It is also an idea that seems to have deep roots in American church history (let the experts on the latter decide whether the Puritans are to be blamed for this, along with so much else they have been blamed for, or whether the causes should be sought elsewhere).

The consequence, repeatedly, has been what one might call inflationary prophecy. The prophet who solemnly tells people what they ought to do may get away with this once or twice, especially if the recommendations do not lead to immediate and highly visible disaster. The prophet who keeps on doing this soon loses credibility. It simply is not credible that God’s will can be ongoingly specified in terms of the details of political life.

What is more, human beings seem to have a limited capacity for being inspired. The average person can psychologically cope with a couple of crusades in one lifetime. When every other day this or that political agenda is prophetically elevated to the status of a crusade, people get tired, bored, incredulous, or all of these. When prophecy (self-styled) is institutionalized in modern organizations, the end result is that the only people who are eagerly awaiting the next solemnly launched position of a particular church organization are the bureaucrats in the other organization down the block. This is what appears to have happened to mainline Protestant organizations already; there is every likelihood that, eventually, the same will happen to the evangelicals who are drawing all the attention now. After all, how many specific weapons systems can God be expected to endorse?

In all of this a distinction ought to be made between the church as the gathered community of the faith and individual Christians (including such individuals banded together for a particular political purpose). If the Christian concern for the world is to have any reality to it, it must, of course, express itself in concrete activity on behalf of specific purposes. Individuals and groups can do this, even in the name of their Christian faith, without identifying their activity with the church as such, and without insisting that the church endorse this activity with some modern variant of the formula "Thus saith the Lord." It is important to understand that, as soon as this distinction fails to be made, one of the most basic characteristics of the church is put in jeopardy -- namely, its catholicity.

If one says of a particular political position that it and no other is the will of God, one is implicitly excommunicating those who disagree. Contemporary American Christians, presumably without acknowledging that this is what they are doing, have been widely engaged in this sort of mutual excommunication. If one believes that it is indeed God who wills the building of the MX missile, or the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, or any other specific political purpose, then one cannot remain in communion with those who reject this view and thereby posit themselves in open rebellion against God. The formula "Thus saith the Lord" always implies the correlate "Anathema be the one who denies this."

Another way of saying this, in a lower key, is that the incorporation of specific political agendas into the public worship of the church makes it impossible for those who disagree to join in that worship. This may not be understood as excommunication by those who do it, but the empirical consequence is the same. The theological error is that political partisanship is now counted among the notae ecclesiae. The sociological effect is that the church ceases to be catholic and is broken up into ideological conventicles, each claiming the authority of the gospel for its respective program.

A Struggle Between Two Elites

This last point leads up to the sociological lesson that may be drawn from the current excitement about the new American fanatics: It is not the purpose of the church in contemporary America to take sides in the current class struggle.

This class struggle, let it quickly be said, is not the one that Marxists still fantasy about, proletariat pitted against bourgeoisie, the wretched of the earth rising against their oppressors. Rather, it is a struggle between two elites. On the one side is the old elite of business enterprise, on the other side a new elite composed of those whose livelihood derives from the manipulation of symbols -- intellectuals, educators, media people, members of the "helping professions," and a miscellany of planners and bureaucrats. This latter grouping has of late been called the "new class" in America -- a not wholly felicitous term that is likely to stick for a while.

It is not possible here to discuss what some people, a little generously, have called the theory of the new class. But the main features of the theory are not difficult to grasp. In modern technological societies a diminishing proportion of the labor force is occupied in the production and distribution of material goods -- that activity which was the economic base of the old capitalist class or bourgeoisie. Instead, an increasing number of people are occupied in the production and distribution of symbolic knowledge; these are the people enumerated above, and, if a class is defined by a particular relation to the means of production (as Marx, for one, proposed); then indeed there is here a new class. Like other classes, it is stratified within itself. And like other classes, it develops its own subculture.

The current class struggle is between the new knowledge class and the old business class. As in all class struggles, this one is over power and privilege. The new class is a rising class, with its own very specific (and identifiable) vested interests. But, in the public rhetoric of democracy, vested interests are typically couched in terms of the general welfare. In this, the new class is no different from its current adversary. Just as the business class sincerely believed (presumably still believes) that what is good for business is good for America, the new class believes that its own interests are identical with the "public interest." It so happens that many of the vested interests of the new class depend on miscellaneous state interventions; indeed, a large portion of the new class is economically dependent an public-sector employment or subsidization.

Once this is seen, it comes as no surprise that the new class, if compared with the business class, is more "statist" in political orientation -- or, in other words, is more on the "left." Many if not most of the great liberal programs since the New Deal have served to enhance the power and privilege (not to mention the prestige) of the new class; not surprisingly, its members are devoted to these programs.

Symbols of Class Culture

It should be emphasized that to say this is not thereby to invalidate any particular claims made on behalf of the liberal agenda for the society -- just as one does not invalidate a political program simply by pointing Out that it may benefit the business community. The point is simply to be aware that political purposes, in contemporary America as elsewhere, are not concocted in some Platonic heaven of ideas divorced from class interests. What is essential is the perception that many if not most current political issues have a class component. Some of these issues are directly related to class interests. This, for example, is eminently the case with the issues raised by the environmentalist movement -- a virtually pristine new-class affair, which has created a plethora of organizations devoted to the alleged protection of the environment, providing numerous jobs for members of the new class.

Other current political issues are not so directly linked to class interests. They have a wore symbolic character, but the symbolism too has a class component. An example is the abortion issue. Attitudes on abortion divide sharply along class lines, with the new class in the vanguard of the pro-abortion movement. It is not altogether clear why this should be in the class interest of this particular stratum: but, for whatever historical reasons, the issue has attained a symbolic nexus with this stratum, so that members of the new class do indeed strongly tend to be in favor of abortion, while their class adversaries tend to be against it.

Other examples could readily be enumerated. The symbols of class culture are important. They allow people to "sniff out" who belongs and who does not; they provide easily applied criteria of "soundness." Thus a young instructor applying for a job in an elite university is well advised to hide "unsound" views such as political allegiance to the right wing of the Republican party (perhaps even to the left wing), opposition to abortion or to other causes of the feminist movement, or a strong commitment to the virtues of the corporation. Conversely, a young business school graduate seeking a career with one of Fortune magazine’s "500" had better not advertise his or her career in the new politics, or views associated with the environmentalist, antinuclear or consumer movements.

A Class Component to Moral Beliefs

What does all this have to do with the church? And, more specifically, what does it have to do with the current effervescence of the Christian right? The answer is: almost everything!

Precisely the issues on which Christians divide today are those that are part of the current class struggle and of the Kulturkampf that symbolizes it. One of the easiest empirical procedures to determine very quickly what the agenda of the new class is at any given moment is to look up the latest pronouncements of the National Council of Churches and, to a somewhat lesser extent, of the denominational organizations of mainline Protestantism.

Conversely, virtually point by point, the Christian New Right represents the agenda of the business class (and of other strata interested in material production) with which the new class is locked in battle. What is more, while undoubtedly there are religious reasons for the upsurge of right-leaning evangelicalism, much of it can in all likelihood be explained as a reaction against the power grab of the new class. In that, of course, evangelicals are part of a much wider reaction, the political crystallization of which (temporary or not -- that remains to be seen) was the major event of the 1980 national elections. As to the reasons for this alignment of different religious bodies, they could not be simpler: the main reason, of course, is the class character of the respective constituencies of these bodies.

To repeat: the sociological disclosure of a class component to political or moral beliefs does not (and methodologically cannot) settle the question as to the justice of these beliefs. For example, historians have argued that antislavery sentiment was strong in the northern business class because this sentiment was in accord with the interests of that class. Maybe so. But, having duly noted this linkage, one may still affirm that the antislavery cause was morally just. More contemporaneously, it can be shown that the new class, probably more than any other group in the American population, has freed itself from the poisonous beliefs of racism. It can also be argued that there are class interests involved in this: the new class staffs the welfare-state and civil-rights institutions, the major putative beneficiaries of which are the racial minorities of America. This argument, if granted, still need not detract from one’s moral approval of a group relatively free of racist superstitions. The same holds for every one of the issues about which Americans divide along class lines today.

Striving for a Measure of Distance

That, however, is just the point that must be made here: no class has a monopoly on moral insights. From a Christian point of view, no class can claim, in its vested interests and symbols in the aggregate, to be. closer to the Kingdom of God. Christian ethics, without a doubt, will have to disaggregate. Thus, one might conclude on grounds of Christian ethics that the new class is "more Christian" in its resolute antagonism to racism, but "less Christian" in its uncritical allegiance to the cause of abortion.

But for such reflective disaggregation to take place at all, the churches must cease from responding with Pavlovian automatism to their respective class cultures. They must instead, in the freedom of the gospel, strive for a measure of distance from the immediate pressures of class location and class struggle. This is certainly not going to be easy and, sociologically speaking, it can probably never be achieved fully. Unless it is tried, however, the class divisions between American denominations will become near-absolute. Prophecy, so-called, will be nothing but propaganda on behalf of the one or the other class. Each congregation will be the one or the other class gathered for prayer. And that, every Christian should be able to affirm unhesitantly, is not the will of God.

From Secularity to World Religions

To be asked to tell how one’s mind has changed over a decade is an invitation to narcissism. To accept the invitation would seem to imply a quite solemn view of one’s own importance. My incurably Lutheran sensibility tells me that such a view is sinful, and my even more incurable sense of the comic says that it is ridiculous. Still, after an initial hesitation, I accepted. I did so precisely because I believe that my mind is not so unusual for its peregrinations not to have some common utility. My experiences over the past ten years are, by and large, commonly accessible, and it seems to me that most of my conclusions could be arrived at by anybody.

Third World Influences

The time period suggested by The Christian Century’s series suits me very conveniently, at least as far as my thinking about religious matters is concerned. In 1969 my book A Rumor of Angels was published, and in 1979 my book The Heretical Imperative. In between; most of my work as a sociologist was directly concerned not with religion but with modernization and Third World development, as well as with the problem (which first preoccupied me in the Third World) of how sociological insights can be translated into compassionate political strategies.

Yet these sociological excursions, as it turned out, had an indirect effect on my thinking about religion. If I were asked for the most important experience leading from the one book to the other, I would have to say the Third World. In the 1960s I was preoccupied with the problems of secularity, and A Rumor of Angels was an attempt to overcome secularity from within. The Third World taught me how ethnocentric that preoccupation was: secularization is today a worldwide phenomenon, it is true, but one far more entrenched in North America and Europe than anywhere else, so that a more global perspective inevitably provides a more balanced view of the phenomenon. Conversely, the Third World impresses one with the enormous social force of religion. It is this very powerful impression that eventually led me to the conclusion, stated in The Heretical Imperative, that a new contestation with the other world religions should be a very high priority on the agenda of Christian theology.

As I understand my own thinking, it has not moved in a radical way during this period. The problems that have preoccupied me have shifted considerably, but my underlying religious and political positions have remained more or less the same. To the extent that I have moved, though, I have moved further to the "left" theologically and further to the "right" politically. This development has confused and also distressed some of my friends (though, needless to say, some have been cheered by what others found distressing).

Again, the Third World has been crucial for both movements of thought. It has given me empirical access to the immense variety and richness of human religion, and thus has made it impossible for me (once and for all, I believe) to remain ethnocentrically fixated on the Judeo-Christian tradition alone. I moved more radically in the 1950s and early 1960s in my thinking about religion (mainly, it seems in retrospect, under the impact of experiencing America after what John Murray Cuddihy has aptly called "the fanaticisms of Europe"), outgrowing the neo-orthodox positions of my youth and finally concluding that my thinking fitted best within the tradition of Protestant liberalism. But the personal as well as intellectual encounter with the Third World gave that liberalism a scope that I could not foresee earlier.

I can say with confidence that the human misery of Third World poverty and oppression has shocked me as deeply as it can anyone coming from the comfortable West, and I have been and continue to be fully convinced of the urgency of seeking alleviation for it. But my efforts to understand the causes of this misery and to conceive plausible strategies for overcoming it have impressed me with the utter fatuity of the alleged solutions advocated by the political "left." To be sure, this insight has not in itself been theologically productive, but it has prevented me from taking the currently fashionable route of doing theology by baptizing the empty slogans of this or that version of Marxism with Christian terminology.

Modified Views of Secularization

It so happens that, for me, the decade staked out by The Christian Century coincided with visits to Rome both at the beginning and the end. In 1969 I organized and chaired a conference there on behalf of the Vatican’s Secretariat for Nonbelievers. It was a fascinating event, especially in the contacts it provided between members of the Roman ecclesiastical establishment and a somewhat wild assortment of scholars who had worked on the problem of secularization. The proceedings of the conference were subsequently published in a book aptly titled The Culture of Unbelief.

One incident from the conference that has stuck in my memory took place at a party. A leading Demochristian politician, very puzzled, asked a monsignor from the secretariat what this conference was all about. "La secolarizzazione," replied the monsignor. "Secolarizzazione," repeated the politician, then asked: "What is this?" The monsignor valiantly rose to the challenge and gave a rather adequate ten-minute summary. The crusty old gentleman of the Democrazia Christiana listened very carefully, then raised his hand and said in a firm voice: "We will not permit it!"

At the time, the remark impressed me as very funny. A few weeks later I went to Mexico, at the invitation of Ivan Illich -- a trip that turned out to be decisive in concentrating my attention on the Third World. I remember telling Illich the story. He laughed, but he did not think it as funny as I did. Illich is often right (often, not always). In this instance, his finding the idea of prohibiting secularization less outrageous than I found it was wise.

In 1979 I was in Rome just as the Iranian revolution was breaking out. I watched the events in Iran on Italian television with a good deal of nervousness, as I was supposed to fly to India via Tehran. There were the vast masses of Khomeini followers, with their posters and banners, seemingly stretching to the horizon. And they kept chanting: "Allahu akbar!" -- "God is great!" I had to think of that remark about secularization of a decade ago, and it did not seem funny at all. Indeed, a dramatic prohibition of secularization is exactly what Khomeini had in mind, and, whatever the eventual outcome of the Iranian revolution, it must be conceded that he has been rather successful in this undertaking thus far.

Certainly in the Islamic world, from the Atlantic Ocean to the China Sea, it is religion that offers a militant challenge to every form of secularity (including the Marxist one), and not the other way around. In the event, the turmoil in Iran forced me to change my travel plans and fly directly to India -- my first visit there, one that immersed me more completely than ever before in a non-Western religious culture. And while Hinduism, for many reasons, does not exhibit the dynamism of contemporary Islam, it too most assuredly is not behaving as the idea of secularization I held in the 1960s would have predicted.

The Third World is not the only reason why I have modified my earlier view of secularization. There has been impressive evidence of religious resurgence in North America. There has also been a significant religious revival in at least certain sectors of Soviet society, all the more significant because of a half-century of determined and sophisticated repression. This does not mean, as some have suggested, that secularization theory has been simply a mistake. But one can now say, I think, that both the extent and the inexorability of secularization have been exaggerated, even in Europe and North America, and much more so in other parts of the world. In itself, this is no more than a revision of a sociological thesis under the pressure of empirical evidence. As such, it is theologically neutral. Yet, inevitably (it seems to me, at any rate), it suggests that the problem of secularity is not quite as interesting for the Christian mind as many of us used to think. After all, it is one thing to engage in intellectual contestation with a phenomenon deemed to be the wave of the future, quite another to do so with one of many cultural currents in play in the contemporary world.

The Crisis of Modernity

Sociologically speaking, the phenomenon of secularization is part and parcel of a much broader process -- that of modernization. In the context of Christian theology, of course, the dialogue with secularity (which, I suppose, one can simply describe as the mind-set resulting from secularization) has been pretty much the same as the dialogue with modernity -- or with that well-known figure "modern man, whom Rudolf Bultmann and others conceived to be incapable of believing the world view of the New Testament.

Speaking sociologically again, there are good reasons for thinking that modernity, and modern secularity with it, is in a certain crisis today. It became clear to me in the Third World that modernization is not a unilinear or an inexorable process. Rather, from the beginning, it is a process in ongoing interaction with countervailing forces which may be subsumed under the heading of countermodernization. It is useful, I think, to look at secularization in the same way -- as standing in ongoing interaction with countersecularizing forces. The details of this relationship cannot be spelled out here. Suffice it to say that countermodernization and countersecularization can be observed not only in the Third World but also in the so-called advanced industrial societies, those of both the capitalist and the socialist varieties.

All of this strongly suggests a shift in theological attention, away from the much-vaunted engagement with modern consciousness and its theoretical products. It should be stressed that this is not to say that some of the latter products do not continue to offer theological challenges. I suspect that this is particularly true of developments in the physical sciences, those prime products of modernity, but this is an area in which I’m woefully ignorant and into which I’m therefore most reluctant to venture. Also, it is clear that, theories and world views apart, the modern situation continues to pose ethical problems of great gravity -- but that is not quite the same as what the dialogue with "modern man" was to be about.

I would also like it to be clear that, in saying that modern consciousness is not as interesting theologically as many have thought (or not as interesting as it once was -- for example, in the 19th century, when Christian theology had to deal with the challenge of modern historical thought), I’m not in the least implying some sort of antimodern stance. There is much of this around today (for instance, in the radical wing of the ecology movement), and some of it is quite appealing, but it will not stand up under rigorous scrutiny. It is not so much that we cannot go back (there is no law that says that the clock cannot be turned back -- it can be, it has been), but that the human costs of demodernizing would be horrendously large. Take just one item: One of the most dramatic consequences of modernity has been the marked decline in infant mortality. I don’t see how any conceivably viable assessment of modernity could conclude that this has been a bad thing.

The Compulsion to Choose

Already in the early 1960s, when I was working with Thomas Luckmann on new ways of formulating the sociology of knowledge, it had become clear to us that secularization and pluralism were closely related phenomena. The root insight here is that subjective certainty (in religion as in other matters) depends upon cohesive social support for whatever it is that the individual wants to be certain about. Conversely, the absence or weakness of social support undermines subjective certainty -- and that is precisely what happens when the individual is confronted with a plurality of competing world views, norms or definitions of reality. I continue to think that this insight is valid. Increasingly, however, it has seemed to me that, of the two phenomena, pluralism is more important than secularization. Put differently: The modern situation would present a formidable challenge to religion even if it were, or would come to be, much less secularized than it now is.

Competition means having to choose. That is true in a market of material commodities -- this brand as against that, this consumer option as against that. Whether one likes it or not, the same compulsion to choose is the result of a market of world views -- this faith or this "life style" against that. I have called this crucial consequence of pluralism "the heretical imperative," and I have tried in my recent book of that title to analyze different theological responses to this rather uncomfortable situation. Again, I do not perceive my thinking as having changed dramatically on these matters. But at least two accents have changed. First, it is much clearer to me now why the theological method (not necessarily any of the contents) of classical Protestant liberalism, with its stress on experience and reasonable choice, is the most viable one today. And second, because of my previously mentioned encounter with the Third World, I now have a much broader notion of the range of relevant choices in religion.

As a result of this perspective on the religious situation and its theological possibilities, I have for quite a while found myself in a sort of two-front position. Fronting the theological "right," I’m convinced that any attempts to reconstruct old certainties, as if "the heretical imperative" could be ignored, are futile. This conviction makes it impossible for me to seek alignment with any form of orthodoxy or neo-orthodoxy. On the other hand, I see no more promise in the "left" strategies of trying to make Christianity plausible by secularizing its contents, no matter whether this "secularization from within" (one of Luckmann’s helpful terms) is done by means of philosophy, psychology or political ideology. All these strategies are finally (and, indeed, rather soon) self-liquidating, as they rob the religious enterprise of whatever plausibility it still has within the consciousness of individuals.

Incidentally, this does not mean that I have no empathy with either the "right" or the secularizing-"left" positions. The former was the position of my youth, in the form of a sort of muscular Lutheranism, and (if nothing else) the nostalgias of middle age assure a lingering empathy. As to the latter position, it is not just a matter of "some of my best friends" and all that. More important, anyone who lives and works in a modern secular milieu undergoes every day the same cognitive tensions that move people toward this position, and a high degree of empathy is thereby given almost automatically.

In this connection, a word should be said about an event with which I was associated, the so-called Hartford Appeal of 1975 -- a statement that forcefully repudiated various secularizing trends in contemporary theological thought. It was widely regarded as a neo-orthodox manifesto. Whatever may have been the understanding of others connected with the event, this was not the way I understood it. For me, Hartford delineated what separated me from those to the "left" of the liberal position I espoused. Such delineation continues to be necessary, I believe (though, in retrospect, it is debatable whether the style of the Hartford Appeal was the most suitable). For me, however, delineation with regard to the theological "right" is equally important, and I hope that The Heretical Imperative has now fulfilled this purpose.

The worst thing about being in the middle is not that one is shot at from both sides. In this instance that is not so bad, as there are a lot of people in the same location. More disturbing is the thought that a via media, especially in religion, is always beset with tepidness. And that has indeed been one of the recurring qualities of Protestant liberalism. True enough, but I don’t think that this is a necessary quality. Every nuanced, reflected-upon position is in danger of appearing tepid in comparison with the self-confident postures of those who claim certainty. It is important to understand the illusionary character of the self-confident postures, at which point mellowness acquires its own certainty, more quiet perhaps than that of the Barthians, say, or of the Christian revolutionaries, but also more enduring.

The Act of Preaching

Speaking of Barthians, there is one question that concerned them from the beginning, indeed that first motivated Karl Barth himself in his early theological thinking: "How does one preach that?" The question is a crucial one, not only for those who are vocationally charged with preaching, but also for those (including myself) who are committed to the public reaffirmation of the Christian tradition. It is many years now since, after one (very happy) year at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, I drew back from the ministry as my own vocational goal. All biographical decisions are murky, but this one was essentially simple: I felt that I could not be a Lutheran minister unless I could fully assent to the definition of the faith as stated in the Lutheran confessions, and I drew back from this role because I doubted whether I could give such unqualified assent. In other words, I felt that I, for one, could not preach "that." I do not regret this long-ago decision, but it is relevant to these observations that today I would arrive at a different conclusion. If "that" is now understood as being the liberal position alluded to above, then I’m deeply convinced that it can indeed be preached -- and, given the call to do that, I’m convinced that I could.

The reason for this conclusion is also essentially simple: I believe that at the core of the Christian tradition is truth, and this truth will reassert itself in every conceivable contestation -- be it with the multiform manifestations of modern secularity, or with the powerful traditions of Asian religion awaiting theological engagement. To be sure, no one who honestly enters into such a contestation emerges the way one entered; if one did, the contestation was probably less than honest. In the act of reflection, every honest individual must be totally open, and this also means open-ended.

The act of preaching is different. Here the individual does not stand before the tradition in the attitude of reflection but deliberately enters into it and reaffirms the truth that he has discovered through it, without thereby forgetting or falsifying the fruits of reflection.

There is no way of predicting the movements of the spirit. I have often thought that even a person equipped with all the tools of modern social science would have been hard put to predict the Reformation, say, at the onset of the 16th century. I will not make a prediction here, but I will make a guarded statement: It is possible that out of the contestations of our time will emerge preaching voices of great and renewed power. There is a kind of stillness now, and has been for quite some time. It is possible that the stillness will be followed by thunder. We do not know this. We are not supposed to know. But the possibility is worth a Cautious hope, and perhaps even a gamble of faith.

Reflections of an Ecclesiastical Expatriate

Every ten years, it seems, the editors of the CHRISTIAN CENTURY ask me to write a piece on how my mind has changed. At first I'm pleased: Those people in Chicago still remember me; what is more, they apparently think their readers would still be interested in my ideas. Then, after this first flush of. self-indulgent gratification, the request takes on a slightly threatening quality. One disturbing thought obtrudes: Have I really developed my intellectual position in an interesting way during the past decade? For as long as I can remember, the CHRISTIAN CENTURY has been the principal forum for mainline Protestantism; yet that is a world completely foreign to me at this point, a world that, despite its continuing importance in my own society, barely attracts my attention and is nearly irrelevant to my ongoing concerns. This is a disturbing and puzzling observation. It stopped me short and forced me to reflect.

I encountered this world of the mainline almost immediately upon coming to America not long after World War II. I was young, very poor, European and Lutheran, and wartime desperations had shaped my social and religious sensibilities. America constituted an immense liberation from all this, a deeply satisfying experience of normality. The Protestant world I met fully represented the same normality. It was thoroughly identified with American culture, sensible, tolerant, far removed from the Kierkegaardian extremism that had up to then defined Christianity for me. It is hardly surprising that I had difficulties coming to terms with it.

While I could not accept the religio-cultural amalgam of the mainline churches, I found an ecclesiastical home right away in what was then the United Lutheran Church in America. It met both my religious and social needs. To be sure, the ULCA at that time was very much an American institution, and as such it partook of American normality (which, much later, as a sociologist, I would call the "OK world" of middle-class America). It was not a locale for desperate leaps of faith. However, it was sufficiently and clearly enough Lutheran to remain distinct from the pervasive Kulturprotestantismus of the other mainline churches. As one participated in its services enough "otherness" was present to assure one that what was being worshiped was not simply the goodness of the American way of life. While I was prepared to affirm the goodness of America, .I was not prepared to worship it or to equate its morality with Christian faith. After all these years, it seems to me I was quite correct in making this distinction.

The ULCA has disappeared, as has most if not all that was distinct in its successor denominations. Recently a cult of denigration has replaced the celebration of America, and various fashionable fanaticisms (all of them political rather than religious) have reduced the easygoing tolerance of that earlier period. But, curiously, what has not changed at all is the underlying principle of every variety of culture-religion: that the churches should reflect the moral concerns of their social milieu; even more, that the faithfulness of this reflexivity is the criterion by which the legitimacy of the churches' role must be judged. This principle can survive, and in this case has survived, even radical changes in the culture. I continue to believe, as I did those many years ago, that this principle is false and that it violates the very core of Christian faith.

It is always easier to perceive differences than continuities. Indeed, at first glance the differences between mainline Protestantism in the 1950s and the 1980s appear dramatic. The appearance is not deceptive. John Murray Cuddihy has written eloquently on the "Protestant smile," the certain sourire} of ingenuous niceness that he rightly saw as a sacrament of American civility. This smile still exists in many places, both inside and outside the mainline churches, but is much less evident on the public face of American Protestantism. That face now has a set and sour mien, an expression of permanent outrage. A Protestant scowl has replaced the Protestant smile. Feminism more than anything else has set this tone in recent years. This grimly humorless ideology has established itself as an unquestioned orthodoxy throughout the mainline churches. A newcomer to American Protestantism today would hardly be struck by an atmosphere of easygoing tolerance.

One of my first jobs after coming to this country was as an office boy in the headquarters of the Methodist Church, which was then on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. I vividly recall walking down long corridors and looking through open doors into the offices: almost every office was occupied by a formidable looking woman (I have been puzzled by the charge that American Protestantism was a patriarchate; what impressed me then was how very feminized it was). Almost every one of these women was smiling..

I didn't quite trust the Protestant smile, though I found it agreeable enough. I tried to understand it. Though my reasons for taking up sociology of religion in particular were somewhat more complicated, decoding the Protestant smile was one of my early preoccupations. The result of this intellectual effort was my first publication, The Noise of Solemn Assemblies. The book came out in 1961 and attracted a certain amount of attention at the time; I still think it was a fairly adequate piece of analysis.

What has happened since those days of smiling Protestantism has been an essentially simple process, one that holds no sociological mysteries. It has been the working-out of two sociologically well-known forces, those of class and of bureaucracy. I have written elsewhere at great length about this development, but a brief restatement is in order.

Mainline Protestantism has always been in a symbiotic relationship with the middle-class culture, which is to a large extent its own historical product (after all, it is this type of Protestantism that has been a crucially important factor in the formation of American bourgeois civilization) and that continues to be its social context. In the 1950s mainline Protestant churches reflected the middle-class culture and constituted a sort of social establishment within it. Put sociologically, the principal function of these churches was to legitimate the middle-class culture of America, to certify that the latter was indeed "OK." The omnipresence of the national flag in churches (which at first shocked me) was a fitting symbol of this legitimating function. Once again it should be stressed that nothing is intrinsically pejorative about this understanding of the American church-society relationship. To the extent that one approves of the traditional middle-class values (by and large, I did), one will not necessarily be offended by their being religiously legitimated.

The offense, if any, is theological rather than moral. One will be offended theologically if one believes that the Christian faith must never be identified with any culture, not even with a culture that one finds morally acceptable or even admirable. America, despite its many faults, has been a remarkable moral experiment in human history; but America is not and never can be the kingdom of God. In other words, the key issue here is the transcendence of Christian faith: the kingdom of God is not of this world, and any attempt to make it so undermines the very foundation of the gospel.

What has changed is not the symbiotic church-society relationship of mainline Protestantism; rather, what has changed is the character of the society, more specifically of the middle-class society and culture that is the natural habitat of the Protestant churches. This change is, more or less accurately, formulated by the so-called New Class hypothesis. In America (and, incidentally, in all other advanced capitalist societies) the middle class has split. Whereas previously there was one (though internally stratified) middle class, there now are two middle classes (also internally stratified). There is the old middle class, the traditional bourgeoisie, centered in the business community and the old professions. But there is also a new middle class, based on the production and distribution of symbolic knowledge, whose members are the increasingly large number of people occupied with education, the media of mass communication; therapy in all its forms, the advocacy and administration of well-being, social justice and personal lifestyles. Many of these people are on the public payroll, employed in all the bureaucracies of the modern welfare, redistributive and regulatory state; many others, while working in private-sector institutions, are heavily dependent on state subsidies. This new middle class, inevitably, has strong, vested interests; equally inevitably, it has developed its own subculture. In. other words, as is the case with every rising class (Marx has taught this well), what is at work here is a combination of class interest and class culture.

The class interest, within the political spectrum of Western democracies, is on the left; in America this means "liberal," in current terminology. The reason for this is extraordinarily simple. This class has a vital interest in the maintenance and expansion of those state expenditures on which its social existence depends. Put differently, its class interest is in government rather than in the market, in redistribution rather than production of societal wealth. The old middle class, for equally simple reasons, has opposing interests. Therefore. it tends toward the political right; in America, this constitutes a "conservative" tendency. These interests, of course, are rarely, stated as such in public political rhetorics. Class interests are presented as general interests. Business people continue to believe, mutatis mutandis, that "what is good for General Motors is good for America"; the new middle-class professionals, no doubt with equal sincerity, believe that the "reordering of national priorities" that guarantees their privileges benefits the poor, the underclass or whatever other morally acceptable beneficiary can be plausibly cited. Whether or not these respective class interests represent these more general social goods is an empirical question that has little to do with public legitimation.

Class interest and class culture are never related in a perfectly functional manner. There were good functional reasons why the rising bourgeoisie emphasized the virtues of frugality and literacy; it would be hard to detect a comparable functionality in the particular manners and canons of aesthetic taste that came to be associated with bourgeois culture. However, while there is a degree of randomness in the manner by which a class acquires its cultural accoutrements, once acquired the latter. do fulfill an important function. Members of a class can now recognize each other -- sniff each other out -- by means of the institutionalized cultural signals. Clothes, table manners, speech and expressed opinions serve to identify individuals for purposes of inclusion and exclusion. Once more, this is particularly important for a rising class, which has not yet firmly established its societal footing. This goes for the corporate dining room as it does for the faculty .club; in each case, the cultural signals are known and quite easily recognized. As the new middle class took on a visible shape in the '60s its cultural signals too became known and recognizable. This new middle class identified itself, logically enough, as not being the old middle-class culture. "Bourgeois" became a negative word. Logically again, the new middle-class culture understood itself as "emancipatory" or "liberating" as against the traditional bourgeois virtues. Strictly speaking, it was just that. The break was most visible in the areas of sexual .and gender behavior, but it was by no means limited to 'these.

There was, however, one big difference between this and earlier rising classes. Much of the new middle class is actually in the business of culture, is in control of many of the institutions that produce and disseminate cultural symbols, notably in the educational system and the communication media. In consequence the new middle class has cultural clout enormously larger than one might expect from its relatively modest numbers and financial resources (the latter are considerable, but still modest when compared to the economic might of the business community). This evaluation explains many of the political successes of the new middle class, whose values and views continue to represent

a minority of the population. What is more, because of this control over the cultural apparatus, the new middle class has successfully infiltrated its "class enemy" with many of its own ideas, agendas and lifestyles. The business community, by contrast, is culturally passive and inept as it has always been The "thinkers" are elsewhere. As to the working class, it has always been the weakest party in the drama of bourgeois cultural imperialism. It resists where it can by using its sheer numbers in the democratic process and by a sort of sullen sabotage of the agendas of its "betters," but it lacks the cultural know-how by which an effective resistance could be mounted. Thus there has been an inequality in the cultural battles of recent decades; the new middle class has generally been on the offensive. Of course, this does not mean that it always wins. Its agenda has been restrained by the democracy, by the inertia and slow pace of the law, and by the dynamics of capitalism. Nevertheless, with good reason the values and views of this class have been perceived as the wave of the future, which others may resist or slow down, but which they must somehow adjust to.

Organized religion is a cultural institution par excellence; it would have been surprising indeed. if it had not been drawn into the Kulturkampf. The mainline Protestant churches were sucked into it from the beginning. Inevitably, they reflected the cultural break lines, and with a vengeance. In not a single denomination, of course, are members of the new middle class a majority. But the clergy and the officials of the mainline churches belong to the new middle class by virtue of their education, their associations and their "reference group." It is here that the dynamics of bureaucracy took over from the dynamics of class. The former reflects what Roberto Michels called the "iron law of oligarchy" -- the ability of a bureaucracy to maintain itself even against the will of a majority of constituents and their elected representatives. In denomination after denomination, people who represented the new culture took over the bureaucratic machinery and thus the public face of the community. Bishops and other traditional authorities were unable to understand let alone to stop this process. As to the laity, contrary to what some observers expected, it did not put up a fight either. Few people in mainline churches want to invest time and energy in ecclesiastical infighting; this is not why they go to church. Instead, laypeople voted with their pocketbooks and their feet: they reduced their contributions and, in large numbers, they left. As a result, all the mainline churches have been suffering from both a fiscal and a demographic hemorrhage. Both conditions are still critical, though one may expect them to stabilize at some point. Likely, a residue of denominational loyalty by some plus an adherence to the new values by others will ensure that none of these churches will disappear completely. What is more, because these churches so conform to the prevailing elite culture, the general public will continue to perceive them as the mainline.

To a considerable extent the evangelical resurgence since the mid-1970s developed as a "resistance movement" against the new culture. Its clientele has been mainly lower-middle-and working-class, relatively uneducated, heavily provincial. Through its size, evangelicalism has been able to achieve a number of political and ecclesiastical successes (such as in the role of the new Christian right in some recent elections or in the takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention). All the same, here too the cultural battle is unequal. These communities, even more than business, lack the institutions and the know-how to mount an effective cultural resistance. Their very social and political successes are their undoing. as they are sucked into the ambience of the national culture. As James Davison Hunter has. shown, the values of the other side are growing within evangelical Protestantism in exact measure as its members become better educated and upwardly mobile. And as recent survey data suggest, the growth of evangelicalism has. been the result of demography, not conversion: Southern Baptists have more children than Episcopalians, and disgruntled Episcopalians are more likely to become unchurched than to become evangelicals. The net gain of the emigration of mainline Protestants from their churches is, therefore, likely to accrue to secularization rather than to evangelicalism. As to the Roman Catholic community, it has been buffeted by the same social and cultural forces, especially since Vatican II (probably inevitably) greatly weakened the institutional defenses against the overall culture. Here too the "iron law of oligarchy" has been brilliantly in evidence, much to the bewilderment of the bishops. There are, of course, two important differences as against Protestantism. The Roman Catholic Church is an international and an authoritarian organization. Both its internationalism and its authoritarianism have. also been weakened by the post-Vatican II reforms, but, they are still enough of a reality to make it unlikely that American Roman Catholicism will lose its distinctiveness in the way that, for example, American Lutheranism did in the wake of the recent merger.

To return to mainline Protestantism, the sociological picture is quite clear. Its churches are dwindling in numbers, but their allegiance to the ascendant middle-class culture will probably guarantee their continued public role. This culture is highly secularized. The mainline churches will thus contribute in a double way to the secularization of America--by legitimating a set of highly secularized values and by contributing to the unchurched population through its emigrants. The public face of these churches will continue to be shaped by an officialdom that faithfully reflects the interests and the culture of the new middle class. The former are likely to be fairly stable -- interests are more perduring than cultural fashions -- and thus the political orientation of these churches will continue to be liberal. The ideological expressions of these interests, though, are likely to vary even while, broadly speaking, they remain left-leaning. It is likely that the worldwide collapse of socialism will moderate some of the more extreme leftist sentiments in these quarters (though there is always some unlikely Third World country that these people will look to as, at long last, embodying "true socialism").

At the moment, as previously mentioned, feminism is now the prevailing orthodoxy. , which is why "inclusive language" (which serves to stigmatize and exclude those who dissent from the orthodoxy) is pushed with such vehemence. Environmentalism and other forms of Green ideology may catch up. And other, though as yet invisible, doctrines and movements may come to command center stage. What is most unlikely to change is the underlying structure of these cultural interactions: the ideologies and agendas of the churches all originate outside them; the churches play a basically passive role in the cultural drama, as receptors and disseminators rather than as initiators; they "read the signs of the times." It does not seem to occur to them that they might write them. In all of this, the church-society and church-culture relationships of mainline Protestantism have not changed at all from the situation I described in The Noise of Solemn Assemblies. Now, as then, these are middle-class institutions, legitimating middle-class interests and values. It just happens that the American middle class has changed. The "assemblies" are the same, if you will (and more ."solemn" than ever); the "noise," to be sure, has changed.

Sociological understanding is a far cry from. moral and theological assessment. Morally, the new middle-class culture is a mixed bag, as was the old middle-class culture and indeed every human culture this side of the kingdom. There is a strong continuity between the two cultures in their self-righteousness and their propensity to engage in potentially fanatical crusades; these are morally unattractive features indeed. The new middle class, I would argue, has a number of morally positive features, especially in its attitudes toward race and toward ethnic or other cultural differences; it is a racially and ethnically tolerant culture, and this is good. I would also agree, up to a point, with its self-assessment as a liberating force against the overly repressive features of an earlier bourgeois culture.. I agree that a certain measure of hedonism was a good thing to inject into American middle-class Puritanism, and the latter's sexual mores were, indeed a bit oppressive (though not at all as oppressive as the would-be liberators pretended). In this context one should make special, mention of the earlier attitudes toward homosexuals. One need not subscribe to all the rewriting of history by the gay movement to agree that the treatment of homosexuality in Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture was barbaric; the change has on, the whole been for the better. On the negative side of the ledger one must., charge the new middle-class culture with. a formidable list of moral aberrations, such as the mindless endorsement of far-way tyrannies or. terrorist movements as long as these could be thought of as being "on the right side, of history,". the equally mindless endorsement of all types of domestic radical isms from the Black Panthers to Greenpeace, the insouciant acceptance of millions of abortions as simply an expression of the right to choose, not to mention the other (less tangible) damage done to many lives by the brashs social engineering of new middle-class professionals (for instance. in education.) The old bourgeoisie was by no means the wonderful world that conservatives nostalgically make it out to be; the new bourgeoisie, in my opinion, is even less wonderful. In terms of what the churches have been legitimating, there has been a considerable degree of moral slip- page.

Theologically, if one momentarily brackets the moral question, I see no difference between the old situation and the new. In both cases there has been an all-too-easy identification of Christian faith with sets of secular values and secular agendas. This was a distortion of the gospel then, as it is a distortion now. Needless to say, the distortion becomes even more disturbing if one removes the moral brackets: Making the American flag into a quasi-sacramental object is offensive; doing the same with the banner of this or that movement of murderous totalitarianism is loathsome. Yet one must always be cognizant that at no moment in its two millennia of history has the Christian church been free of such aberrations and distortions. It would be extraordinarily ahistorical to ascribe some special propensity toward apostasy to present-day churches. The gravity with which one views the present situation will also depend on one's ecclesiology. The question is how seriously one takes the public face of the churches. I'm unsure about this.

I'm well aware that in many hundreds of local congregations the gospel is being effectively preached, the sacraments are being reverently administered, people are praying and getting answers to their prayers, and the sick, the. sorrowful and the dying are being consoled -- and all this without any regard for the busy activities and pronouncements emanating from national headquarters.. I find this reflection, comforting, especially as I know a few such congregations. My comfort is disturbed, however, when I reflect further that the same could have been said about many local parishes at the time of the Borgias and this could have suggested that the Reformation was a .totally unnecessary exercise. The public face of the churches does matter because the Christian church, by its very mission, must be a public institution. Christianity, as we frequently hear, is not just a personal, private affair. It constitutes a community, which has a historical and a social location. National headquarters matter, and they .must be taken seriously -- perhaps more seriously than they take themselves, for it is the face of Christ that is being publicly distorted.

The church will survive until the Lord returns. In its ,worship today -- even where that worship is weak or warped -- the church participates in the eternal liturgy of all creation. Nothing can change this. The historical course of any particular Christian community, such as that of mainline Protestantism, is of only limited significance in that perspective. For a Christian this is a reassuring thought: it puts all mundane concerns in proportion; it encourages one to follow one's own vocation and leave all outcomes to the Lord of history

My own vocation is in the world; I try to exercise it responsibly. The developments in mainline Protestantism discussed here, and more especially the developments within the Lutheran community, have made me ecclesiastically homeless. I don't relish this condition; I can live with it. This need be of no particular interest to others, except for one observation: Despite various unique ' aspects of my own biography, my problems in this matter are not unique. I consider myself theologically liberal, at least in the sense that I would find it quite impossible to move into any branch of evangelicalism and almost as impossible to move toward Rome. At the same time, for carefully weighed reasons (almost all of them based on my understanding of the world as a social scientist), I cannot give assent to the left-liberal-liberationist politics that has become monopolistically established in non- evangelical Protestantism. In the latter milieu, in most places, someone like me can only be, at best, tolerated and marginalized. People like me are many. They find themselves stranded between two equally unacceptable fundamentalisms, the one theological, the other moral and political. This is obviously uncomfortable for them, but it also offers little comfort for anyone with responsibility for the future of American Protestantism.

I have not exactly fulfilled my. assignment; I have not reported on how my mind has changed in the past decade. In my business I must come up with hypotheses all the time, many of which are subsequently falsified by the empirical evidence. Changing one's mind as a social scientist is both an occupational hazard and a point of professional honor. Perhaps I can rise to the assignment by one final observation. Ten years ago or so I believed the re was a good chance that a group of committed individuals might yet reverse the Babylonian captivity to the Zeitgeist of contemporary Protestant Christendom. I see no evidence of such a turn. At least speaking sociologically., then, I have changed my mind about that. Speaking theologically, of course, such an assessment provides no alibi for giving up. Sociology cannot predict the movements of the Holy Spirit. All we can do is to follow our callings.

Epistemological Modesty: An Interview with Peter Berger

What does it mean to study "economic culture"?

Our institute's agenda is relatively simple. We study the relationship between social-economic change and culture. By culture we mean beliefs, values and lifestyles. We cover a broad range of issues, and we work very internationally. I'm fanatical about very few things, but one of them is the usefulness and importance of cross-national studies. Even if one is interested only in one's own society, which is one's prerogative, one can understand that society much better by comparing it with others.

Clearly one of the most interesting questions in such an investigation is the relationship between capitalism and democracy. In some of the center's literature one can find these claims: "Capitalist development is a necessary prerequisite of democracy," and "The marketplace is a stalking horse of democracy." Could you explain the argument behind those claims?

It has been true in Western societies and it seems to be true elsewhere that you do not find democratic systems apart from capitalism, or apart from a market economy, if you prefer that term. The relationship doesn't work symmetrically: there are capitalist societies that are not democratic. But we don't have an example of a democratic society existing in a socialist economy--which is the only real alternative to capitalism in the modern world. So I think one can say on empirical grounds--not because of some philosophical principle--that you can't have democracy unless you have a market economy.

Now the more interesting question is, Why? I don't think there's a tremendous mystery here. The modern state, even the modern democratic state, is enormously powerful. If to all the enormous power that the state has anyway you add the power to run the economy, which is what socialism empirically means, the tendency toward creating some sort of totalitarianism becomes extremely strong. And then the individual has no escape from the reach of the state.

In a market economy, however, the individual has some possibility of escaping from the power of the state. Let's say you're a politically suspect figure and have just been fired from a government job. With a market economy there's always the possibility that you can be hired in your uncle's factory out in the provinces. It's along those lines one has to think of the relationship between the economic system and democracy.

The market appears to be a necessary but not sufficient condition of democracy. Do you also see the capitalist marketplace generating forces that propel a society toward democracy?

This question is, of course, acutely raised these days by the case of China. I don't think we know the answer. Let me say again that the relationship is asymmetrical: there's no democracy without a market economy, but you can have a market economy without democracy.

If you say simply that pressures toward democracy are created by the market, I would say yes. Even in a society as tightly controlled as Singapore's, the market creates certain forces which perhaps in the long run may lead to democracy. The market creates a middle class, for example, which sooner or later becomes politically uppity. The middle class doesn't like to be regulated, so it creates institutions which have a certain independence. And businesses need security of contract and some notion of property rights, so they generate a judiciary which is at least somewhat separate from the government. Private associations and a stock exchange emerge, and there is a need for public accountants. So I think you can argue, along these lines, that capitalism introduces certain institutional forces which put counterpressure on a really all-embracing dictatorial state.

But whether those forces inexorably lead to democracy is another question. On that point I would be cautious. Some people think that as the Chinese economy becomes more and more capitalistic it will inevitably become more democratic. Hence the Wall Street Journal takes the position that the best way to open up China politically is to have as many capitalist dealings with it as possible. I think this is far from certain. It may turn out to be true, it may not.

It appears that with the much-touted globalization of the economy and the global movement of capital, Americans are moving into a new kind of economic culture of their own. Is that true?

There's no question that we have an increasingly integrated world economy, and that this has very serious implications, socially and politically. We also have a cultural phenomenon: the emergence of a global culture, or of cultural globalization.

We recently studied a concrete example of this in the U.S. when we examined the role of business in the racial integration of Atlanta. Businesses, led by Coca-Cola, played a very positive role in moving Atlanta from being a rigidly segregated city, dominated by a small white elite, to being a city with a significant group of black political leaders. The fact that the business community wanted Atlanta to be a player in the global economy was very helpful in this move. Business leaders wanted Atlanta to be thought of as a new global city, not a magnolia-scented Old South city. This was reflected in their slogan, "Atlanta, the city too busy to hate."

Well, it didn't exactly work out that way. The city still has serious racial and social problems. But the effort was relatively successful. It certainly helped create a big and flourishing black middle class. There was a rather dramatic change in economic culture which most of us would probably regard in a positive light.

The negative side to globalization is that it wipes out entire economic systems and in doing so wipes out the accompanying culture. When certain branches of the economy become obsolete, as in the case of the steel industry, not only do jobs disappear, which is obviously a terrible social hardship, but certain cultures also disappear.

The increased mobility of jobs and capital would seem to exacerbate another trend that worries observers of American life: the weakening of civil society. People seem less inclined these days to commit themselves to local forms of community--voluntary associations, church groups--that tradititionally have formed the fabric of our culture. Do you share those concerns?

I would share those concerns if I shared the empirical assumptions behind them. But I'm a little skeptical. The best-known argument of this sort is made by Robert Putnam in his article "Bowling Alone." I'm sure Putnam is right that there's been a decline in certain kinds of organizations like bowling leagues. But people participate in communities in other ways. Two studies have come out of our institute that are relevant to this question. One is Nancy Ammerman's book Congregations and Community, which concludes that at least as far as organized religion is concerned, Putnam's thesis doesn't seem very plausible. People are very active participants in congregations.

The other study of ours is by Robert Wuthnow, who talks about "porous institutions." It's true that people don't participate in organizations the way they used to--they participate in less organized ways and move from one to another. But that doesn't mean they don't participate or that there's been a decline in social capital.

Certainly there are some factors that Putnam looks at which are realistic. Many civic organizations were once run by middle-class women--married women who didn't work and had time to do volunteer work. With more and more women in the labor force, the population of volunteers has shrunk. But again I would say that it's the mode of participation that has changed, not the fact of participation.

In some ways you started the discussion about the health of civil society two decades ago when you and Richard John Neuhaus wrote To Empower People, which highlighted the importance of "mediating structures"--by which you meant institutions like schools, labor unions and churches.

Yes, the concept of mediating structures or intermediating institutions covers more or less the same ground as civil society. I would say with regard both to civil society and to mediating structures that one should not romanticize these. Perhaps when Richard Neuhaus and I wrote that little book over 20 years ago we were romanticizing a little bit. Some intermediate structures are good for social order and for meaningful lives and some are bad.

Take the Ku Klux Klan, for example. Strictly speaking, it's a mediating structure. But you wouldn't want to say it's a good thing. The same could be said about civil society. Some kinds of civil society can be dreadful. You have to ask about the values that animate the institutions of civil society.

The analogy that occurred to me fairly recently is to cholesterol. Doctors used to think that cholesterol was bad for you--period. Then they began to distinguish between good and bad cholesterol. I think we have to distinguish between good and bad mediating structures. That means examining the values these institutions foster. If they foster racial hatred, then they're like bad cholesterol. If they foster dialogue between different groups, cohesion, value transmission, then they're good cholesterol.

Related to the concern about civil society is a concern about a rampant individualism in the U.S., the prevalence of an "autonomous" self. Some commentators fear that Americans have lost the ability to commit themselves to causes or institutions that take people beyond the ideal of individual preference. This concern has given rise to the communitarian movement in political thought. What is your view of the situation?

One has to consider what is correct about this analysis and what is doubtful. What is correct is that modern Western societies are more individualistic than either premodern Western societies or societies in other parts of the world. It's correct that you can have an excess of individualism, whereby people have no social ties whatsoever except perhaps to their immediate family and have no sense of the common good or obligations to the larger community. And it's certainly true that if there are too many of such people, the result is bad for society.

But the assumption made by Robert Bellah and to some extent most of the people who call themselves communitarians is that community in America has been falling apart. Which takes us back to Putnam's thesis, which I think is empirically questionable. It's amazing to what extent Americans do in fact participate in every kind of community you can imagine--and give money and time and so on. The people Bellah interviewed in his own book, Habits of the Heart, seem to indicate this, though Bellah interprets their remarks in terms of anomie and desperate aloneness. In fact, many of them are engaged in communal activities of one sort or another.

I don't think Americans are all that individualistic. Tocqueville understood that Americans are fundamentally associational--that this is the genius of American life. He also saw that the negative side of associational life is conformism. Americans are much more conformist than, for example, the French or the Italians. Which is hardly a sign that we are hyperindividualistic.

I wrote a commentary about two years on "furtive smokers" and what they tell us about American conformism. Though about one-fourth of American adults smoke, they've offered virtually no resistance to the antismoking campaign. Like obedient subjects of the emperor, smokers now stand shivering in the cold to smoke their cigarettes. That's not the sign of an individualistic culture. Its the behavior of a highly conformist and authority-prone culture. (The authority in this case is not that of the state but the peer group, or public opinion.

One of the issues that you've written about over the years is secularization. Scholarly opinion has gone through some changes on this topic. What is your sense of whether and how secularization is taking place?

I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization. It wasn't a crazy theory. There was some evidence for it. But I think it's basically wrong. Most of the world today is certainly not secular. It's very religious. So is the U.S. The one exception to this is Western Europe. One of the most interesting questions in the sociology of religion today is not, How do you explain fundamentalism in Iran? but, Why is Western Europe different?

The other exception to the falsification of the secularization thesis is the existence around the world of a thin layer of humanistically educated people--a cultural elite. I was recently a consultant on a study of 11 countries that examined what we called "normative conflicts"--basic conflicts about philosophical and moral issues. We found in most countries a fundamental conflict between the elite culture and the rest of the population. Many of the populist movements around the world are born out of a resentment against that elite. Because that elite is so secular, the protests take religious forms. This is true throughout the Islamic world, it's true in India, it's true in Israel, and I think it's true in the U.S.

One can't understand the Christian Right and similar movements unless one sees them as reactive--they're reacting to what they call secular humanism. Whether "secular humanism" is the right term or not, these people are reacting to an elite culture. Here again, the U.S. is very similar to much of the world.

Do you see any signs that the U.S. is moving toward the Western European style of secularization?

If the cultural elite has its way, the U.S. will be much more like Europe. On church-state matters, the federal courts, since the decision on prayer in the public schools, have been moving in what broadly speaking is the French direction--moving toward a government that is antiseptically free of religious symbols rather than simply a government that doesn't favor any particular religious group. Insofar as that view has sedimented itself in public education, the media and therapeutic centers, then I would say there are Europeanizing pressures. But in the U.S., unlike any Western European country, there is enormous popular resistance to this trend, especially from evangelical Christians, who after all comprise about 40 million or so, which is a lot of people. Whether that resistance will eventually weaken or not, I can't predict.

In your own writings you've made it clear that you are a member of that elite at least in the sense that certain theological certitudes are not open to you. You have placed yourself in the tradition of liberal theology that looks for "signals of transcendence," to use the term you employed in A Rumor of Angels. How do your read those signals today?

I haven't changed my theological position, really, since I wrote A Rumor of Angels. In my early youth I was sort of a neo-orthodox fanatic of a Lutheran variety. I don't think I was a fanatic in a personally disagreeable way, but intellectually I was. And then I got out of that. Since Rumor of Angels the only reasonable way I can describe myself theologically is as part of a liberal Protestant tradition.

My most recent book--Redeeming Laughter, about the comic in human life--takes up directly from where I ended in A Rumor of Angels, referring to humor as one of the signals of transcendence. I think it's a very important signal. To talk of signals of transcendence betrays a liberal position, for it excludes almost by definition any kind of orthodox certainty. If you are certain in terms of the object of your religious belief, you don't need any signals--you've already got the whole shebang. This is the only position I've found it possible to hold with intellectual honesty, and I doubt that is going to change.

How does the comic send a signal of transcendence?

The comic is a kind of island experience. For example, if I now told you a joke or you told me a joke, we would immediately signal to one another that this is not to be taken seriously. We'll say, "This is a joke --have you heard the latest?" Or we may even signal it with our body language. And then we laugh, and for the moment the serious world is suspended. And then we say, "But now, seriously..." and we go back to our so-called serious business.

The clown shows this island experience very well. Nothing can happen to the clown. He always gets up again. He is hit over the head, it doesn't hurt him. He has a pratfall, he jumps up again. He's magically invulnerable. We know that that's not the real world. The clown comedy appears as an island of safety and well-being in a world that we know very well is neither safe nor conducive in the end to our well-being. Now that experience has a strange similarity to religion. Religious experience is also an enclave.

A purely secular interpretation of reality would say, as many people have said, that this island experience of the comic is psychologically healthy (it's good for people to laugh), but that ultimately it's not serious. It's an escape. In Freudian terms, it's based on illusion (something Freud also said about religion).

In the perspective of religious faith there is what I call in the book an epistemological reversal. The invulnerability of the clown is a symbol of a promised future in which, indeed, there will be no pain--which is the fundamental promise of any religious concept of redemption. In the perspective of faith, the comic is a symbol of a redeemed state of human being. It is, therefore, of great theological significance.

Can you move from this island experience of the comic toward some constructive notion of belief?

Well, I'm not suggesting one should build a theological system on the clown, though it's a tempting idea. I don't know if one can go much further than what I have said.

How do you, as a theological liberal, view the "postliberal" movement among mainline or liberal Protestants--the movement to recover their theological identity and reimmerse themselves in the tradition and in the particular language and narrative of scripture?

The problem with liberal Protestantism in America is not that it has not been orthodox enough, but that it has lost a lot of religious substance. It has lost this in two different ways: one is through the psychologizing of religion, whereby the church becomes basically a therapeutic agency, and the other through the politicizing of religion, whereby the church becomes an agent of change, a political institution. Whatever the merits or demerits of either therapeutic or political activity, for religion these moves constitute digging your own grave, because there are other ways to get therapy and there are other ways to engage in politics.

I don't think it follows that what is needed is a return to orthodoxy. Some people seem to gravitate from one fundamentalism to another, from some kind of secular fundamentalism into a religious fundamentalism or the other way around, which is not very helpful. The history of Protestantism has shown that real faith, which has to do with God and Christ and redemption and resurrection and sin and forgiveness, is not just a psychological or a political activity, and also that you can have real faith without being in some sort of narrow orthodox mold. That is the challenge to liberal Protestantism.

Schleiermacher has always been a theological model not so much in the content of his thought as in his basic approach to faith, which is a very rational, historically oriented approach within a tradition, with the understanding that one cannot simply swallow the tradition but has to enter into a reasonable dialogue with it. In one of my books I call this the "heretical imperative"--you have to choose. No tradition can be taken for granted any more. To pretend that it can is, in most cases, a self-delusion.

Schleiermacher was lucky in that he still had a church with a strong religious substance with which he could enter into dialogue. In liberal Protestantism in America we are not so lucky. There is nothing much there to enter into dialogue with.

Another way of putting it is to say that the modern challenge is how to live with uncertainty. The basic fault lines today are not between people with different beliefs but between people who hold these beliefs with an element of uncertainty and people who hold these beliefs with a pretense of certitude. There is a middle ground between fanaticism and relativism. I can convey values to my children without pretending a fanatical certitude about them. And you can build a community with people who are neither fanatics nor relativists.

My colleague Adam Seligman uses the term "epistemological modesty." Epistemological modesty means that you believe certain things, but you're modest about these claims. You can be a believer and yet say, I'm not really sure. I think that is a fundamental fault line. I'm inclined to define theological liberalism in terms of being on one side of this fault line rather than in terms of any specific beliefs.

Protestantism and the Quest for Certainty

In the course of my career as a sociologist of religion I made one big mistake and had one big insight (arguably not such a bad record). The big mistake, which I shared with almost everyone who worked in this area in the 1950s and ‘60s, was to believe that modernity necessarily leads to a decline in religion. The big insight was that pluralism undermines the taken-for-grantedness of beliefs and values. It took me some time to relate the insight to the mistake. And it has only been very recently that I understood the implications for the position of Protestantism in the contemporary world.

Modernity, as has become increasingly clear, is not necessarily linked to secularization. It is so in a few areas of the world, notably in Western Europe, and in some internationally visible groups, notably the humanistically educated intelligentsia. Most of the world today is as religious as it ever was and, in a good many locales, more religious than ever. The reasons for the above-mentioned exceptions are intriguing, but cannot concern us here.

Pluralism, for our purposes, can simply be defined as the coexistence and social interaction of people with very different beliefs, values and lifestyles. This state of affairs is indeed generally associated with modernity, but it does not necessarily lead to secularization, as is most clearly shown by America, a "lead society" (to use Talcott Parsons’s term) both for modernity and for pluralism. Rather, the effects of pluralism are more subtle, but nonetheless of great importance: pluralism influences not so much what people believe as how they believe.

Throughout most of history human beings have lived in situations in which there was general consensus on the nature of reality and on the norms by which one should lead one’s life. This consensus was almost everywhere grounded in religion and it was taken for granted. The pluralistic situation necessarily changes this, for reasons that are not at all mysterious. They have to do with the basic fact that we are social beings and that our view of reality is shaped by socialization, first in childhood and later in the relationships of adult life. Where socialization processes are uniform, this view of reality is held with a high degree of taken-for-granted certainty. Pluralism ensures that socialization processes are not uniform and, consequently, that the view of reality is much less firmly held.

Put differently, certainty is now much harder to come by. People may still hold the same beliefs and values that were held by their predecessors in more uniform situations, but they will hold them in a different manner: what before was given through the accident of birth now becomes a matter of choice. Pluralism brings on an era of many choices and, by the same token, an era of uncertainty.

Historically, of course, Protestantism was itself an important factor in bringing about this situation, and not only in America. It was the Protestant Reformation that undermined once and for all the unity of Western Christendom. Its principle of individual conscience carried within it from the beginning the potential for an ever-expanding variety of Christian groupings. This development was not at all intended by the Reformers, but history is always the arena of unintended consequences.

As to America, the combination of its immigrant population and its regime of religious liberty necessarily made it into the most pluralistic society in the modern world. Eventually every religious tradition, however reluctantly, was profoundly affected by the simple fact that it no longer controlled a captive population of adherents, that the latter now had the choice of staying on or going somewhere else. Protestantism, especially American Protestantism, had to come to terms with this situation first. It is still faced with its very great challenge.

There are individuals who thrive on a situation in which nothing can be taken for granted, in which they are faced with a multitude of choices. Perhaps they could be called the virtuosi of pluralism. But for most people the situation makes for a great deal of unease. This response may derive from profound aspects of human nature. There is what John Dewey has called "the quest for certainty"—certainty at least when it comes to the most important questions of life. The clash between the built-in uncertainty of the pluralistic situation and the urge for at least a measure of certainty helps explain a rather curious phenomenon in contemporary culture—the alternation of relativism and absolutist claims to truth.

To say that nothing can be taken for granted any longer means that all claims to truth are relativized. In the extreme case this leads to a kind of nihilism which asserts that not only can one not be certain of anything but that the very idea of truth is illusory. A number of so-called postmodernist theories have legitimated this idea, but it can also be found among people who have never heard of currently fashionable French philosophers. In this view, everyone has the right to his own opinion and the only remaining virtue is an all-embracing tolerance. At first such relativism is experienced as a great liberation, especially for individuals coming out of some narrow provincial milieu.

After a while, though, the liberation itself is experienced as a burden, precisely because of the aforementioned yearning for certainty. At that point the allegedly liberated individuals become susceptible to any offer of renewed certainty. This susceptibility leads to a potential for conversion to any doctrine that comes along with an absolute claim to truth. The convert now embraces a pose of unshakable certainty. Not to put too fine a point to it, he becomes a fanatic.

This movement has often been observed among converts to this or that "fundamentalist" sect, whose doctrine may be religious but could just as well be secular. The recipe on offer by all such groups is always the same: Come and join us, and we will give you the certainty for which you yearn. Then the nihilist becomes a fanatic. However, the tightly knit community into which the convert has been initiated may once more be felt to be constraining, as much or more so than the old provincial or traditional milieu. Then a new alleged liberation may occur, and so one moves back again into the relativizing dynamic of the pluralistic situation.

The dialectic between relativism and the competing claims to absolute truth is ongoing. In every nihilist there is a fanatic screaming to get out, and conversely every fanatic is a potential nihilist. Most people, of course, are neither fanatics nor nihilists; for them, the dialectic plays itself out in less extreme forms. But they too are caught in the dilemma of reconciling their nostalgia for certainty with a social reality in which such certainty is very hard to come by.

I will allow myself a more personal observation here. Some time ago I made a discovery that somewhat surprised me: I found that I could communicate much better with people who disagreed with me but who were uncertain about their position than with people who agreed with me but who held our shared views in a posture of certainty. This was so in matters of political or other secular relevance, but also, emphatically, in matters of religious belief. This led me to a fantasy of a sort of ecumene of troubled souls (I like to call them "the uncertainty-wallahs"). But it also led me to look again at the impact of pluralism on contemporary religion.

If one rejects the stark alternative of an open-ended relativism or some variant of absolutist retrenchment, one is faced with a simple but far-reaching question: How is one to live with uncertainty? More specifically, how is one to have religious beliefs and to lead a religious life in a state of uncertainty? The answer that suggests itself is prototypically Protestant: one can, indeed must, do so by faith. The answer can be put in even more explicitly Protestant language: By faith alone—"sola fide."

Conventional Christian language maintains that there is a contradiction between faith and lack of faith, belief and unbelief. The implication is that unbelief is sinful. This has never been very persuasive to me. God has not exactly made it easy for us to believe in him, and, it seems to me, a just God will not hold it against us if we don’t manage the exercise. Be that as it may, it seems more plausible to me to propose a contradiction not between belief and unbelief but between belief and knowledge. If we know something, there is no reason to believe; conversely, if we say that we believe something, we are implying that we don’t know. A world that is taken for granted is one in which people know (more accurately, think they know) what is true; they don’t have to believe. Putting the contradiction in this way, one must then ask: Just what do we know when it comes to religion?

Clearly, there are some affirmations about which we can claim knowledge. The detailed delineation of this cognitive area can be left to the philosophers, but it certainly includes what is conveyed to me by direct sense experience (I know that I have hayfever, or that I have difficulties with my new computer); it also includes certain abstract logical or mathematical propositions; I think that it includes some moral perceptions (but that is another story). It emphatically does not include any scientific affirmations, which are always probabilistic in nature. But what about religion?

There are people, of course, who claim to have certain knowledge when it comes to their religious affirmations. If one assumes that God exists, one must inevitably concede the possibility that he has disclosed himself to some human beings more directly than to others. The scriptures of the great religious traditions contain in large part the testimony of such people. For them, terms like "belief" or "faith" make little sense, at least not in the sense these terms have for the rest of us; they know what they are saying. Most of us (and, needless to say, I include myself in this large, religiously undistinguished company) find ourselves in a very different situation. Whether we like it or not, if we are honest, religion for us cannot be based on knowledge, only on belief. The question is how we cope with this situation. Can we live with it?

I’m persuaded that the answer is yes. And although I think that there is a distinctively Protestant form this answer can take, the option of this type of religious existence is not by any means limited to Protestants. A colleague of mine, Adam Seligman, a sociologist and an observant Jew, has coined the attractive term "epistemological modesty" to describe this religious posture. It is a mellow synthesis of skepticism and faith that, in principle, can he found in any religious tradition. A few months ago Seligman convened a conference to discuss the resources for this type of religion in the three great monotheistic traditions (it was, indeed, an ecumenical gathering of "uncertainty-wallahs"!).

One of the participants from Israel recounted a story from Talmudic literature. It went something like this: A group of rabbis were arguing over the right interpretation of a biblical text. Rabbi Eleazar, who had interpreted the text one way, was one of the authorities cited, as was Rabbi Yochanan, who had interpreted it differently. The rabbis could not agree. In the group there was also a mystic, an adept of the Kabbalah. He said that it was possible for him to enter into an ecstasy that would take him directly before the throne of the Almighty; he offered to do so and to ask God himself to give the correct interpretation. The group agreed, whereupon the mystic took off in his ecstasy, stood before the throne and addressed God: "King of the Universe, we cannot agree on this text. Can you give us the correct interpretation?"

God, who of course was himself occupied in the study of Torah, shuffled his papers, shook his head, and finally replied: "Well, Rabbi Eleazar says so-and-so, but Rabbi Yochanan says so-and-so, and then there is Rabbi Amitai who says so-and-so..."

I’m not altogether comfortable with this story. I’m inclined to think that, both from a Jewish and a Christian point of view, we should assume that God could indeed have given the right answer. In other words, I don’t think that rabbinical Judaism held a "postmodernist" theory of truth! But the spirit of this story is appealing. And I think that one can translate it into Protestant terms.

If one acknowledges that one’s religious existence is based on faith and not on knowledge, one must find a way of articulating this fact. Protestantism provides a very powerful articulation. Its principle of sola fide not only accepts the fact of uncertainty, but affirms that it is good. It provides the posture in which one can live with uncertainty without succumbing to a corrosive relativism. The same posture, however, implies that one refuses the various offers of certainty with which our situation abounds.

Many of these offers are not Christian or even religious. The proponents of various non-Christian religions frequently approach us in a stance of alleged certainty that can easily compete with the most hard-bitten Christian "fundamentalists." There are also offers of certainty by any number of political and other secular ideologies whose stance is equally "fundamentalist."

Within the Christian orbit a number of offers are on hand. Essentially they have been around for a long time, but they always take new doctrinal or organizational forms.

Around the turn of the century the Russian writer Vladimir Soloviev published his famous story about the Antichrist. In it he describes how the Antichrist, a great charismatic leader, seduced the great majority of Christians. He seduced the Catholics with a project for the final completion of canon law, the Protestants with a wonderfully endowed institute of biblical scholarship, the Orthodox with a commission to create the perfect liturgy. These three temptations do not correspond exactly with the certainty offers most prominent today, but they come close. Where, within the Christian orbit, are the major certainty offers to be found?

One can seek certainty in the institution of the church. This has always been possible, in different ecclesial forms. The most impressive offer of this type has been, for a very long time, that of the Roman Catholic Church. Basing certainty on the institution of the church is also possible in other communities—among high-church Anglicans, among their Lutheran cousins (especially in Scandinavia), and of course in the Eastern churches. But no one can compete with Rome in the splendor of this offer—not Constantinople or Moscow, not Canterbury, certainly not Uppsala.

This splendor has diminished somewhat compared with earlier times—for instance, with the times when John Henry Newman and his friends in the Oxford Movement found their way, one by one, to Rome (while those who stayed behind found ever more complicated reasons why they did not, or not yet, go the same way). The turbulence that gripped the Roman Catholic Church in the wake of Vatican II is the main reason for this diminished appeal (for example, it has been estimated that roughly the same number of people left the Church of England for Rome because the former decided to ordain women as the number of people who went the opposite way for the same reason or for related reasons). Still, there continues to be a powerful Roman attraction, and probably the most important reason for the attraction is the offer of certainty based on the institution.

Second, one can seek for certainty on the basis of an absolute understanding of the biblical text. This, of course, has always been a Protestant specialty, especially in its evangelical variants. Here it is not the institution but the text which is infallible—or, in the more appropriate language, inerrant. Infallibility at the core of the institution or inerrancy at the core if not in the entire text—the psychological gains of these claims are more or less the same.

The offer of certainty on the basis of the biblical text is, of course, powerfully present in American Protestantism. Whenever a question arises, one finds the answer in this or that biblical passage, and then nothing more can happen to one, so to speak. In one version of this procedure the Bible is opened at random and the answering text is the one on which the eye first falls. This latter practice might be termed "superstition" by some. That is an elastic term: Is it less "superstitious" to believe in the infallibility of the pope or of an ecumenical council? What is superstition to one person is to another evidence of God’s continuing action in the world.

And third, one can seek certainty on the basis of one’s own religious experience. This answer to the quest for certainty runs through almost all Christian communities, from the great mystics to the most recent flowering of Pentecostalism. One might call this the "Methodist" possibility. This was, after all, the "method" by which John Wesley and especially his less discriminating successors sought the certainty of salvation in the inwardness of religious experience. Wesley’s "warmed heart" still pulsates throughout the hymnody of English-speaking Protestantism— "I know that my redeemer liveth"—and in the exalted assertiveness of "born-again" Christians.

Essentially the same "method," with this or that variation, thundered through the great American revival movements, from the First Great Awakening to Billy Graham. In a less noisy form one finds it in continental European pietism. Without a doubt, its most powerful expression today is in the worldwide Pentecostal movement, which is rushing like a prairie fire through Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia, and which is apparently beginning to make itself felt in Eastern Europe.

All three forms of alleged certainty have been considerably weakened by the modern human sciences—the certainty of the institution by historical scholarship and the social sciences, the certainty of the text by the findings of biblical criticism, and the certainty of inner experience by psychology and the sociology of knowledge. It seems to me, however, that these challenges were already anticipated in classical Protestantism (though, it must be said again, this was hardly the intention of the Reformers).

The absolutization of the institution was relativized by the notion of ecclesia semper reformanda, the absolutization of the text by the exegetical methods employed by Luther (one may refer here to his cavalier treatment of entire books of the biblical canon), and the absolutization of inner experience by the attacks on "enthusiasm" by mainline Lutheran, Calvinist and Anglican theologians. It is not an accident that the application of modern historical methods to the biblical literature began in Protestant theological institutions, especially in Germany. Here were ecclesiastically appointed theologians who, without hesitation, approached their own sacred scriptures in a spirit of critical inquiry—not, as the philosophes of the Enlightenment would have intended, in order to destroy faith, but on the contrary in order to arrive at a better understanding of the meaning of faith. In the perspective of comparative religion, this was a heroic undertaking—possible only, I would suggest, on the basis of the principle of sola fide.

The middle position between relativism and absolutism which this principle indicates was, I think, already anticipated in earlier efforts of Protestant thought. An important example might be the understanding of the Lord’s Supper. Classical Protestantism rejected the "left" view of the sacrament as a purely human, symbolic commemoration. But it also rejected the understanding of the sacrament as a miracle of transubstantiation. Christ is present in the sacrament (in Lutheran language, "in, with and under" its empirical elements of bread and wine), but without a miraculous transformation of the worldly reality. It seems to me that the same understanding of the presence of God in the world— "in, with and under" its empirical elements—can be applied to the institution of the church and to the biblical text.

Such an approach to religion can, with some justice, be called relativizing. But it is well armored against that extreme of relativization that falls over into nihilism, for it is founded on faith in God who is truth: We may not know what this truth is; we may only get glimpses of it here and there; but, in that faith, we can never give up the notion of truth.

This formulation of a core Protestant intuition comes close to what, over 60 years ago, Paul Tillich called "the Protestant principle": "Protestantism has a principle that stands beyond all its realizations. . . . The Protestant principle, in name derived from the protest of the ‘protestants’ against decisions of the Catholic majority, contains the divine and human protest against any absolute claim made for a relative reality, even if this claim is made by a Protestant church. The Protestant principle is the judge of every religious and cultural reality, including the religion and culture which calls itself ‘Protestant.’" Tillich also calls this principle "a living, moving, restless power," which cannot be identified with any historical manifestation of the Protestant tradition, not even with the Reformation itself.

The latter point, I think, is especially important. Protestant orthodoxy, in any of its forms, has always tried to capture this "restless power" in dogmatic and ecclesial structures. These structures, not surprisingly, have frequently resembled those of Roman Catholicism, not of course in details, but precisely in their "absolute claim." Ecumenical discourse, today as well as in earlier efforts, has commonly consisted in attempting to somehow negotiate these claims. But the "living, moving, restless" spirit of the Protestant principle cannot be captured in theological formulas that can enter into such a negotiation process. This is why such exercises as the recent agreement by a group of Roman Catholic and Lutheran theologians to the effect that the doctrine of justification need no longer be a cause of disunion between the two communities, despite the evident good intentions of those who participated in this exercise, seems strangely unreal. It substitutes the letter for the spirit. If one adds the fact that today, at any rate, the overwhelming majority of the members of the two communities have no idea as to what these ancient controversies were all about and have very different concerns, then the exercise strikes one like a border treaty negotiated by representatives of nonexistent nations.

The Protestant principle implies a rejection of all absolute claims, ipso facto of all offers of restored taken-for-granted certainty. It insists that the believer should live by faith alone—and that, by God’s grace, this is actually possible. Kierkegaard, whatever else may be the failings of his thought, understood this point with utmost clarity.

There is one question, however, that Kierkegaard failed to answer, and perhaps never considered very seriously. Anyone with some sociological insight will ask this question with particular urgency, namely: How can one build institutions on such a fragile basis? And institutions there must be, in religion as in any other area of human life. Otherwise all beliefs and values would be purely subjective, fugitive, incapable of being transmitted from one generation to another. Thus one may want to reject the idea that outside the church there is no salvation, but surely, without a church there can be no Christian history.

But what type of institution can one speak of here? Don’t viable institutions require a strong foundation of taken-for-granted verities, require representatives who exude an air of self-assured certainty? Let us assume that, over time, it is difficult to fake this. And we must ask: If one constructs institutions on the basis of the sort of skepticism that the Protestant principle implies, will these institutions not be extraordinarily weak, associations of individuals with no deep commitment? Can such institutions survive?

Well, the sociology of American religion suggests an answer: Yes, such institutions may be "weak"; the commitment of their members may be rather unreliable; but, yes, they can survive—and sometimes they show a surprising vitality.

The question about "weak" institutions is not new. Several decades ago German sociologist Helmut Schelsky wrote an influential article under the title "Can permanent reflection be institutionalized?" By "permanent reflection" he meant precisely the sort of skepticism and self-questioning that is created when the world is no longer taken for granted. Schelsky gave a qualified answer to the question of his title: Yes, such institutions are possible, indeed can be observed to exist in modern society, but they will differ from the older institutions that had been built on the foundation of taken-for-granted verities. The most important difference will be that the members of these institutions will always remember that they have chosen to belong to them and that this choice could in principle be revoked. Such institutions are, by definition, voluntary associations. The same voluntariness by which people choose to join them may at a later date allow them to leave. In this sense, these institutions are "weak." Conversely, institutions that are experienced as being an irresistible destiny are "strong."

What one must further ask, however, is the opposite of the question asked by Schelsky: How long can institutions based on an alleged certainty survive in the pluralistic situation that constantly challenges that certainty? I think the answer must be that they too can survive—and perhaps for a long time, but with very great difficulty. The survival strategies of such "strong" institutions can be described sociologically and psychologically, but this is a topic that cannot be pursued here.

Schelsky’s question pertains to any institution in modern society. It also, of course, pertains to religious communities. As far back as 1972 Dean Kelley, in his book Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, outlined the traits of what he called "strong religion." These traits are a firm allegiance by the members of a "strong" church to its beliefs, to the point of risking persecution; a willingness to submit to the discipline of the church body; and an eagerness to convince others through missionary activity. Needless to say, in American Protestantism Kelley found these traits markedly present in the evangelical communities and markedly absent in the mainline churches. This contrast, he argued, explains why the former are growing and the latter are not.

In the years since the early 1970s the remarkable growth of evangelicalism and the decline of the mainline churches have given credence to Kelley’s argument, even though it has been shown that the growth of evangelicalism had a lot to do with a higher birth rate among its members rather than with an influx of converts, and even though the decline in mainline Protestantism appears to have reached a plateau more recently. (One may observe in passing that an interesting bit of "anti-Kelley" data comes from the robust growth of Unitarian-Universalist churches in recent years—a community that can hardly be called "strong" in the aforementioned sense!) What is more, the research by James Hunter and others has shown that the "strength" of evangelicalism is not as durable as it seems, as younger and more educated members of those churches are subjected to the powerful influences of the wider culture.

However, let it be stipulated that churches populated by what I have called "the uncertainty-wallahs" are "weak" when compared to churches that, with whatever straining, maintain a posture of alleged certainty. Yet anyone who moves around the world of mainline Protestantism in America comes time and again upon congregations which, without any of the "strong" traits enumerated by Kelley, show remarkable vitality, not only in terms of growth (including the presence of large numbers of young people) but in terms of their members’ expressed satisfaction with the spiritual comfort and nurture they derive from their participation. The studies, for example, by Nancy Ammerman and Robert Wuthnow provide empirical evidence of this. To be sure, this is a form of religion that greatly offends those who would retain the old basis of certainty. It is much less sure of itself, often even hesitant, voluntary and therefore never to be counted upon as durable, and (probably most important) it is often the result of individual, sometimes idiosyncratic, do-it-yourself efforts.

The religious situation in Europe is very different. The culture is much more secularized, the churches (Protestant as well as Catholic) are much "weaker." Yet there too there is empirical evidence of new forms of religious expression, even new religious institutions, that resemble the "weak" American model. I would refer here to the works of Grace Davie in Britain, Danièle Hérvieu-Leger in France and Paul Zulehner in the German-speaking countries.

The thrust of these works is neatly expressed in the subtitle of Davie’s book on religion in Britain since World War II: Believing Without Belonging. What she found (as did her colleagues in other countries of Western Europe) is that, despite the dramatic decline in church participation and expressed orthodox beliefs, a lively religious scene exists. Much of it is very loosely organized (for instance, in private gatherings of people) and has odd, do-it-yourself characteristics. For those reasons, sociologists and other observers have often failed to notice it. All the same, the presence of these phenomena casts doubt on any flat assertion to the effect that Western Europe is secular territory.

But all this is sociological talk. What about a theological view of these matters ? Well, for one thing, I never quite understood why taken-for-granted religion was theologically deemed to be superior to religion by choice. On the contrary, it has long seemed to me that faith is meaningful only in a situation in which its object is not taken for granted. If I am, say, a Protestant simply by virtue of having been born into a solidly Protestant milieu, my Protestantism is no more a matter of faith than my being a Dane, a bourgeois or a person afflicted with hayfever (it is just this that Kierkegaard understood so well). But, I think, more can be said about this.

The apostle Paul can hardly be called a sociologist of religion. Yet what he says about strength and weakness in the First Letter to the Corinthians can also be applied to "strong" and "weak" churches: "God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God."

As Christians we believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and in his glorious return. But that glory is not yet. The triumphant Christ is still coming; we are still in the aeon of the kenotic Jesus—the self-emptying Jesus, who humbles himself by taking human form. The church, while it announces the coming triumph (indeed, that is the core of its message), still bears the marks of Jesus’ kenosis. Where is one to look for the presence of this kenotic Jesus? Probably not in the self-assured, triumphalist institutions that merit the appellation of "strong churches." I would think that he is more likely to be found in those "weak" places—where people are unsure of themselves, groping for a few glimpses of truth to hold onto, even where it seems that the roof is about to fall in.

There are many such places in the world today. Some are places in which Christians are a small, often persecuted minority. In other places the church exists in a wasteland of ideological collapse and secularization (the churches in Eastern Germany are a poignant case in point). Mainline American Protestantism is not a small minority, is not persecuted, and exists in a culture that is less secularized than any in the Western world. Yet its churches can surely be described as "weak" in Dean Kelley’s sense. What I am suggesting here, contrary to much conventional wisdom, is that they may derive a measure of comfort from this very fact and that it is on the basis of this acceptance that they might rethink their mission in American society.

What Religious People Think About the Poor

With religious organizations focusing their efforts on individual spirituality, on meaningful worship experiences, on music, youth pro grams and small groups, is it likely that reli gious commitment is going to challenge people to be con cerned about economic justice as well? Do religious peo ple think about their responsibility to the poor at all? What is their understanding of the needs of the poor? How do they feel about the economic system and the possibilities of reforming it? These are among the questions researchers and I tried to answer by surveying over 2,000 working Ameri cans and conducting in-depth interviews with more than 175 of them (some of these respondents are cited by name in the remarks that follow).

While everyone might agree at some level that they have a responsibility to the poor, only about half of the American labor force say they have thought about their responsibility to the poor at least a fair amount in the past year (see Table 1). Indeed, only 20 percent say they have thought about it a great deal, while 45 percent have thought about it only a little or hardly at all.

Blacks and whites are about equally likely to have thought about it, as are persons from upper-, middle-, and lower-income groups. Older people and the better educated have thought about it more, as have women, while people on the east coast have given it less attention than people in other parts of the country.

The largest differences, however, are between people with an active religious involvement and those who are religiously uninvolved. Church members are significantly more likely to have thought about it than nonmembers, and those who attend religious services every week are about twice as likely to have considered it as people who attend once a year or less.

Contrary to popular impressions that associate such thinking with religious liberals, religious conservatives are substantially more likely to have thought about it than either moderates or liberals. Much of this difference, though, can be attributed to the fact that conservatives are on the whole more active in their churches than liberals. Protestants run slightly ahead of Catholics on such thinking, but the same caveat applies to interpreting these differences.

What is it specifically about religious involvement that encourages thinking about responsibility to the poor? Our analysis suggests two important factors. One is involvement that encourages people to be thoughtful about their relationship to God in general. In other words, an understanding of spirituality in which knowing God requires intellectual effort tends to encourage an individual to think about his or her responsibility to the poor. The other factor is religious involvement that includes specific instruction, not so much about the poor but about believers' responsible use of money. Sermons on stewardship, coming to regard stewardship as a more meaningful concept, and thinking about biblical teachings concerning personal finances all make a notable difference, even when the level of religious involvement is taken into account.

Our analysis also suggests two characteristics of religious involvement that do not encourage thinking about responsibilities to the poor. The first is having a subculture of friends within one's religious community. It might be supposed that such a subculture would reinforce thinking about economic justice. But apparently it is too easy for such subcultures simply to reinforce a comfortable lifestyle. In any event, when level of attendance at religious services is taken into account, those with more friends in their congregations actually think less about their responsibility to the poor. The second characteristic is a moralistic attitude about wealth and poverty. The view that it is morally wrong to have nice things when others are starving often accompanies thinking about responsibilities to the poor -- but when other kinds of religious involvement are taken into account, this view becomes relatively insignificant as a determining factor.

In any case, it's clear that religious commitment, at least certain kinds of it, does encourage people to think more about their responsibility to the poor. If two-thirds of all church members -- and three-fourths of all the people who attend religious services every week -- think a fair amount about their responsibility to the poor, this represents a lot of people. The fact that at least half of regular churchgoers have heard a sermon on stewardship in the past year, and that nearly this many are involved in a fellowship group or Sunday school class, is all the more significant, for such involvement appears to stimulate thinking about the poor.

If this is the case, then an outsider to American society might well be surprised by the realities of everyday life. Knowing that religious leaders have often pressed for social action on behalf of the poor, this outsider might be surprised to find that there was virtually none. Knowing that religious people have mobilized in huge numbers to protest in front of abortion clinics, and that large religious movements have emerged to fight pornography and to turn back court rulings against school prayer, she would undoubtedly be surprised to learn that religious movements oriented toward passing legislation to help the poor have foundered for want of public support.

If we are to understand the peculiar links between religious commitment and economic justice in American society, therefore, we must also locate the cultural pressures that work against taking responsibility for the poor -- some of which are also reinforced by religious commitments. Together these forces channel the ways in which responsibilities toward the poor are expressed. They do not render religious people mute or ineffective. But they do direct their energies and shape their responses.

To begin with, the idea that the poor are closer to God is not widely accepted in America. Even among those who have thought most about their responsibility to the poor, three-fourths reject it. Why? In part because it flies in the face of popular religious understandings. In American culture, God is an equal-opportunity employer. The poor are no worse off and no better off in the sight of God than anyone else. The proper approach is neither to condescend to them nor romanticize them but to "have solidarity with them," as John Phelps, one of the people we interviewed, puts it, "so that together we can accomplish something."

The same logic used to explain why a rich person can still gain entry to the kingdom of heaven applies to the possibility that the poor might have an easier time gaining admission. The rich person will be denied entry only if some egregious moral failing has become evident, or if material pursuits have become an obsession. Wealth alone, or its absence, is not the issue. In similar manner, the poor may have certain advantages, but these can readily be balanced by certain disadvantages. While the poor do not have the burden of being responsible for managing huge fortunes, they may become obsessed with material pursuits simply because they have no other choice. And if the rich can be faulted for moral impurity, so too can the poor. Indeed, the poor may be more sorely tempted to lie, cheat, steal, cut corners, abandon their families and destroy themselves because of economic difficulties

If God leaves it largely up to the individual to be moral or not, there is, nevertheless, some, lingering belief that God may in fact ordain some people to be poorer than others. It is difficult to find this view expressed in bold predestinarian terms, especially not with the implication that God singles out particular-individuals by name and says, "Tom, you have to be poor." There is more willingness to believe that God may give particular individuals a talent for making money than for not making it. Ironically perhaps; religious thinking does combine with social science to suggest that being poor is simply a feature of all societies and, in this sense, can be understood as part of God's plan for humankind. The basis for assuming that "the poor will always be with you," therefore, is clearly present.

Yet answers to the question of why some particular people are poor rather than others devolve immediately to the level of individual behavior. In other words, rather than a systemic interpretation of the problem leading to a systemic view of its solution, the systemic diagnosis provides a framework that says, in effect, this is the way it will always be, and then individual attributes are credited with causing people to stay in poverty or to move out of it. The range of relevant attributes is considerable, but what surface most readily are traits that have allowed the middle class to escape being poor -- and in this discussion popular understandings of work, laziness and financial responsibility are especially apparent.

From these understandings of the poor, then, we arrive at an argument that can lead us to turn a cold shoulder toward the poor -- namely, because they are assumed to be lazy and irresponsible. Given the widespread humanitarian concern that is also part of American culture, however, this argument can also lead to a more ameliorative orientation. In fact, two possibilities can be logically sustained: one, that social reforms must be made that do more to enable those who are willing to do so to work hard and take responsibility for themselves, and two, that charitable efforts must be devoted to helping particular individuals who are otherwise deserving recover from misfortune. Both of these have support, but the second is favored more than the first. To understand why, we must turn our attention to people's understandings of the economic system itself.

Most people claim not to understand the American economic system very well. Those we interviewed sometimes prefaced their remarks on economic issues with dismissals such as "I'm no expert" or "If I knew, I'd be president." In our survey of the labor force, only 11 percent said they understand "very well" how our economic system works, and even among those who said they had thought a great deal about their responsibility to the poor only 18 percent said they understand it very well. One reason why many people seem indifferent to public debates about economic injustice, therefore, may be simply that they feel these discussions are better left to the experts.

Despite not understanding it very well, most people nevertheless believe the economic system is capable of being reformed. In the labor force as a whole, 32 percent say it is possible to make many significant changes, and 44 percent say a few significant changes are possible, while only 18 percent believe economic forces are pretty much beyond control. Significantly, those, who have thought more about their responsibility to the poor tend to be more optimistic about change than those who have thought less (Table 2).

One might wonder, then, if the system can be so readily reformed, why more effort does not go into reforming it. The question is even more puzzling in view of the fact that most people think basic changes are needed. Only 6 percent of the labor force say the economic system is the best we could possibly have.

To understand why the system, according to most Americans, could use change rather than basic restructuring, we must understand Americans' view of materialism. Materialism is a symbol of evil. As such, it provides a language for talking about social ills without attributing them to the economic system itself. To be sure, there are systemic connections, as in the case of people who argue that advertising promotes materialism or that capitalism is at fault. But what seems to trouble people most about materialism is the selfishness it implies. It is understood as a human tendency, a kind of moral failure, rather than an economic or political failure. Moreover, religious teachings that warn believers against such temptations as greed and envy provide a strong rationale for believing that it is these moral failings more than anything else to which poverty and economic injustice must be attributed.

Here is Pam Jones responding to a question about the causes of poverty: "Greed. It's like why is there war? Because you're greedy and you want more. Why are there so many poor? I'm aware of people really living high off the hog, and they have more than they can even really enjoy. So when we talk about quality of living, I think we live at such a high standard that it's not worth it. To have real fancy wallpaper in your room, to me that doesn't really improve my quality of living very much. But to know my neighbors and have a good relationship with them, to have a refrigerator so that food doesn't spoil, those are some basic things."

Greed, then, is a moral failing. Being concerned about it leads people like Pam Jones to live simply and to worry about the corrosive effects of advertising. It is, however, not so different a view from those of people miles apart from her in political ideology. For instance, Doug Hill says men should be the breadwinners and women should stay at home. He believes there is a "fundamental imbalance in society today" because "men are not doing what they're supposed to do." Materialism has encouraged them to send their wives into the workplace, and this has messed up the family, causing its basic values to erode. Pam Jones would disagree violently with this analysis. Yet the common assumption underlying both arguments is that materialism is more than anything else a moral problem. Most needed, given an analysis of this kind, is moral tutelage that encourages people to be less greedy (or to reassert traditional gender roles), not radical reform of the economic system itself.

Americans' opinions about welfare vary strikingly according to how the question is asked:

When asked, "Are we spending too much,, too little, or about the right amount on welfare?" 44 percent of the public said too much, while only 23 percent said too little. But when asked the same question about "assistance to the poor," only 13 percent said too much, while 64 percent said too little. Clearly, the public is more interested in helping the poor than it is in providing them welfare.

The results demonstrate how little confidence the Americans have in government-sponsored social-welfare programs. Only one person in four thinks such programs would help a lot (a third say they wouldn't help at all). In comparison, there is much greater confidence that volunteer efforts would help a lot. Moreover, those who have thought more about their responsibility to the poor are much more likely to express confidence in volunteer efforts than they are in government programs.

The assumption that the economy is basically sound, despite perhaps needing some changes, is probably behind the fact that so many people believe economic growth, hard work and business are all effective ways of helping the needy. There may well be an implicit message to the so-called welfare chiseler who is "just lazy" in the fact that more people believe hard work will help the needy than believe welfare programs will. And where the volunteer efforts that are favored should be located is suggested by the fact that so many people -- especially among those who have thought more about their responsibility to the poor -- believe active involvement in churches would be a good way to help the needy.

From the in-depth conversations we had with people who expressed many different views of the poor, it became evident that church involvement was considered relevant for a variety of reasons. For people like Doug and Linda Hill, church involvement was relevant for at least three reasons: it would help the "haves" to behave more compassionately, it would help the "have nots" take greater responsibility for their own lives, and both groups would find the divine salvation that would cure their poverty of spirit. For people like Pam Jones" Ricardo Alvarado, and John and Mary Phelps, religious involvement was favored mainly as a way of encouraging deeper thinking about the needs of the poor and as a vehicle for mobilizing volunteer efforts.

Although religious organizations have often. been criticized (sometimes by their own leaders) for not doing enough on behalf of the poor, the majority of the American labor force believes they are actually doing a good job in this area. Among the most actively involved, this proportion rises to about two-thirds. Significantly, a larger proportion of people with low incomes feel churches are doing a good job helping those in financial need than of people with higher incomes.

An important reason why people are convinced their churches are doing an effective job helping the poor is that they can cite firsthand examples. They may not know how government programs work, or they may not know what happens when they send a check to United Way, but their congregation is small enough that they can feel directly involved and see the fruits of their labors.

By bringing middle-class people into personal contact with the poor, church programs also reinforce the idea that disadvantaged people should be helped. The reason is often that seeing a need firsthand brings out some compassionate or altruistic sentiment. A person with an acute need is someone who must be helped. This sort of thinking is relatively straightforward. What is perhaps more interesting is the way such firsthand contact transforms the way in which the character of the poor is understood. All too often, their character is implicitly diminished in efforts to account for their situation in the first place: they represent the opposite of character traits thought to be the basis of middle-class success and security. The poor are credited with limited intelligence and an inability to plan; they make bad choices, fall in with bad friends or marry irresponsible partners; are weak-willed with respect to drugs and alcohol or simply lazy. Firsthand contact through church programs reverses those perceptions, making the poor more like "us."

Feeling a common bond of humanness is one of the most powerful sources of altruistic behavior. If this bond is absent, or if, as Mary Phelps observes, "the middle class refuses to accept the poor as human beings, or even 'see' them," little possibility exists of economic justice coming about. What then is there to criticize about people like John and Mary Phelps who find reasons to feel "at one" with the poor? It is possible to admire this orientation and yet to point out that it requires the poor to embody middle-class values, and perhaps even makes accepting them contingent on their conformity to these values. As warm, good-natured people, the poor can be trusted. But what if they were cold, diffident or crafty? They may be admired because of a down-to-earth attitude that makes them seem particularly "real" or genuine. They may be especially admired if they continue to work hard, despite suffering misfortune.

An interest in economic justice may start with empathic identification with the poor. It may be inspired by the sense that these people are "just like us," and so their rights should be enforced just like ours. But if those rights become contingent on poor people's having the same moral virtues as the "respectable" middle class, then departures from these traits provide a way of avoiding responsibility. True empathy requires more than remaking other people to conform to our own image. It requires rethinking our own identity as well. The poor may be a mirror for the middle class. But that mirror should register the faults of the middle class as well as its virtues.

While religious involvement encourages people to favor church efforts to assist the needy, it does so only up to a point. While close to 80 percent of the labor force say they would like churches to emphasize "job training, housing, and other services for the poor" more than they do now, only about a third want to see "a lot" more emphasis devoted to such efforts. Among those who attend religious services every -week, moreover, this proportion is actually lower than among those who attend less often.

It is understandable that active churchgoers do not want their churches to be turned into welfare organizations. They recognize that the primary activities of the church must include worship, prayer, religious instruction and the nurturing of personal spirituality. Yet this view of the churches further orients American thinking about where welfare efforts should be focused. It means that voluntary efforts other than those sponsored by the churches themselves must shoulder most of the responsibility for helping the needy.________________________________________________

 

Table 1

RESPONSIBILITY TO THE POOR

Question: "In the past year, how much have you thought about...your responsibility to the poor?" (Percent who said "great deal" or "fair amount.")

Total U.S. labor force 53

Church attendance

Weekly 76

Monthly 47

Yearly or less 37

Church Member

Yes 63

No 40

Religious preference

Protestant 58

Catholic 51

Other 52

None 35

Religious orientation

Conservative 67

Moderate 54

Liberal 48

Stewardship sermon

Yes 77

No 44

Race

White 53

Black 53

Income

Low 54

Medium 55

High 50

_______________________________________________

Table 2

VIEWS OF THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM

Among those who had thought about their responsibility to the poor:

Great deal Fair Amount Little/None

Percent who said:

It is quite possible to make many

significant changes in our

economic system 40 34 28

It is possible to make a few

significant changes in our

economic system 36 47 44

Economic forces are

pretty much beyond our

control 20 15 20

Our economic system is:

The best system we could

possibly have 6 6 6

Basically okay, but in need

of some tinkering 27 31 30

In need of some fundamental

changes 50 54 51

Needing to be replaced

by a different system 14 7 7

__________________________________________________________

Summary: The results of a survey of over 2,000 working Americans, including in-depth interviews with more than 175 of them, to discover what religious people think about their responsiblity to the poor.

Art for the Soul

Surveys show that 30 percent of Americans claim to be very interested in "learning more about spiritual direction," and another 32 percent say they are fairly interested. People of all ages appear to be interested in spiritual direction, a fact that is notable since churchgoing, prayer and many other forms of religious participation draw more heavily from older rather than younger segments of the population. Women are more likely than men to express interest in spiritual direction, but interest cuts across all levels of education. Church members are considerably more likely to be interested than nonmembers; indeed, the fact that more than four church members in ten express serious interest in learning about spiritual direction suggests that there is a huge opportunity for churches to do more to fulfill this interest.

The data also suggest that interest in the arts is one of the factors reinforcing interest in spiritual direction. Among those at the high end of the Artistic Interest Scale, nearly half say they are very interested in learning about spiritual direction, whereas at the low end only one in eight says he or she is interested in spiritual direction.

The relationship between artistic interests and spiritual direction is not coincidental. Spiritual direction is usually understood as a matter of the heart, rather than one strictly of the mind. Directees are encouraged to clear their minds of intrusive thoughts that prevent them from experiencing the presence of God in their lives. Breathing techniques are often part of the cleansing process. The body’s connection with mind, heart and soul is usually emphasized. Art, music, poetry, and participation in the arts through pottery, weaving, chanting or creative writing are often included in programs concerned with spiritual direction.

Pendle Hill is a Quaker center for study and contemplation in Wallingford, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1930, it was conceived as a kind of seminary for laypeople interested in understanding more about the Quaker tradition and in ministering through their own lives and work. Today Pendle Hill offers weekend conferences and retreats, five-day courses, and a resident study program consisting of three ten-week terms each year. Sally Palmer directs many of the activities at Pendle Hill that connect the arts with spirituality. Through an acquaintance, she joined a weekly meditation group at Shalem Institute outside Washington, D.C., in the 1970s and has been meditating regularly ever since.

"The whole practice of meditation and of silence was very foreign to me, having grown up in mainline Protestant churches. Silence in those days often meant 20 seconds of the choir singing ‘Sweet Hour of Prayer,’ and the minister and everybody else fidgeting. So sitting in stillness, in silence, was totally new to me." At first, meditation seemed bizarre because it was so unfamiliar. "But I was in a covenant relationship with this meditation group and found that although the sitting was very difficult for me and the practice itself took real discipline, it seemed to be impacting the rest of my life in significant ways. In that sense it was reminiscent of my experience as a jogger. I used to jog and hated the jogging itself, but it made a big difference in my life. The group that I met with was primarily clergy and some Roman Catholic sisters. I was one of two laypeople. The sharing of life experiences, our faith journeys, and what was happening in our meditation times was very important and moving to me."

Since 1975 Palmer has lived at Pendle Hill, taught classes, counseled spiritual seekers and headed its art program (except for the years between 1985 and 1990 when she lived and taught at a Benedictine monastery and ecumenical retreat center in Wisconsin). One of her favorite courses teaches students to explore creativity, playfulness and prayerfulness by working with clay; another is titled "Weaving as a Spiritual Pathway." She encourages her students to use "pottery, weaving, or whatever we’re working with as metaphors for their own spiritual journeys."

Typically, the class begins with a period of silence, followed by a quotation connecting weaving to the spiritual journey, and several minutes of silent worship. "I try to let go and ask that the Spirit move through me and work with us in the class. I see all of my students as potential teachers as well as learners and try to create a space where they can teach and offer the wisdom that they bring from their own life experience.’

Weaving and working with clay give students who are otherwise preoccupied with thoughts about their work, their families and personal issues an opportunity to focus their attention elsewhere. The rhythm of the loom or of the potter’s wheel and the tactile sensation of the yarn or clay break through the cycle of ordinary concerns. Sally hopes the students will experience some of the transformation that she experienced when she first started working with clay: "I would sit down at the potters wheel and be lost for hours. I felt a deep connection to an unnamable within me. It was very much a centering process, and I still, when I need to get centered, go to the studio and throw pots. The clay and the earth remind me of my connection with God’s creation, with materials, with the fluidity of clay. It’s very beautiful."

For some students, weaving or working with clay becomes a time of prayer and may even substitute for more traditional forms. Palmer thinks it is still important to pray intentionally, rather than letting artistic practices take its place. She attends daily meetings for worship with the community and helps lead a weekly service of intercessory prayer involving staff and resident participants at Pendle Hill. Over the years. she feels, her understanding of prayer has grown. Yet she believes firmly that prayer ultimately defies understanding. "It’s a mystery to me! That’s part of my fascination, I think. I know that connection is extremely important to me and yet sometimes it seems very elusive."

The trouble with prayer, when traditionally understood as talking with God, is that it too often becomes a purely mental or verbal activity, leaving the body, as it were, in a poor second place compared to the spirit. This is why Palmer believes the physical aspects of artistic work are so important. Weaving and working with clay involve bodily movement. To bring movement even closer to the foreground, she often includes dance and motion in her workshops.

"My work with movement has been an effort to connect with my body and to connect body and spirituality. I sometimes become disembodied in terms of my work with spirituality, but we are given bodies. Furthermore, my faith is incarnational. So the more connection I can make, the better I am in terms of my own spiritual growth. We do shed our bodies eventually, but we’ve got to live with them, and most of the time I do try to honor my body and its needs."

Discipline is a recurring word among spiritual directors and directees. To get anywhere in one’s spiritual life, they insist, requires focusing one’s efforts, perhaps over a period of many years and through times when results seem all too infrequent. Palmer says she took up weaving because it was a way to learn this kind of discipline: "I remember defining it as my spiritual discipline because I found it very difficult. I’m not a natural weaver. There’s a discipline to it that I rail against. There’s a tedium to setting up a loom, and I saw it as a kind of spiritual discipline to engage in this process, and I still do. There is a kind of mantra in the rhythm of throwing the shuttle in the loom, in the setting up of the loom. It’s one step at a time. There s no way you can push it."

The rhythm becomes its own discipline, providing a method for getting from one step to the next, just like the discipline involved in daily prayers, chants, meditation or devotional reading. For Palmer, doing something that does not come naturally puts her in touch with her own limitations and thus with her need for God. Weaving itself becomes a kind of metaphor for her relationship to God: "All of this is very relevant to my own spiritual journey, and I’ve learned a lot about myself by watching myself in the studio, I’m impatient, and yet there is a step-at-a-time discipline in weaving: the weaving of the fabric of life and the interconnection of the thread. Somebody once spoke of how the warp is really the given of one’s life, the pieces we’re given to work with, But what we can do with it is the woof, the design that we weave. All of those are metaphors and images important in recognizing our connectedness: in recognizing that we are given a set of givens, but that we can work with those givens in a kind of co-creation."

Discipline is one of those perplexing ideas that is perhaps best captured in metaphors and images. It is expressed better through the act of writing than as something that one writes about. Knowledge of discipline comes from the struggle, from engaging in the daily grind, more than from theorizing about the nature of discipline. This is why artists themselves provide some of the most valuable insights about spiritual discipline. Whether they have tried to teach others spiritual discipline through the arts, as Palmer has, or have simply found their own artistic endeavors to be a lesson in spiritual discipline, they show that devotional life is not so much about prayer or meditation as isolated attempts to reach God, but about devotion itself as a mode of life, an orientation to the sacred.

Monica Armstrong is a painter who lives in Germantown, Pennsylvania. A devout Roman Catholic, she has been studying spiritual direction for the past few years at Chestnut Hill College. She sees a strong connection between the discipline it takes to be an artist and growth in her spiritual life. "First of all, I’ve got to show up. Set aside a special time that’s regular. Don’t allow interferences. Have whatever it is you need in terms of supplies, whether it’s reading or music or space to move in or whatever it is that you need to open yourself up."

She says the key to showing up is remembering that the responsibility to do so ultimately falls on you: "Nobody can do your art work. You can only do your own. If you don’t balance your checkbook, the bank will do it or your husband will do it or you just go out of business. But if you don’t do your art work, that’s your life undone. The level of commitment that’s necessary to survive as a professional artist is so profound." She sees a direct parallel with her spiritual life: "There’s a way that you can do art and there’s a way you can do spirituality where you can get people to tell you what to do, but it’s their way. If you’re going to do your own life, your own work, your own spirituality, you’re on your own path. You have to do it."

This notion of doing things her own way is not just an abstract idea. Over the years, she has learned that some things help her to pray, just as they help her to do her painting, and others interfere: "I have to have music, I have to do movement. I have to exercise at least four times a week for an hour, or my body gets so tight that I can’t be open spiritually. I hate exercise, but it’s a discipline I have to do."

Michael Eade, a painter in New York, explains the connections among art, spirituality and discipline this way: "I see the daily discipline of making art as a practice, and like the practice of a belief system, I feel bad if I don’t do it. I’m always working on some project. It could be in my thought processes that I’m painting and getting ready for the next day. It is very disciplined. In all artists [who] achieve some level of completeness in their work, there’s a lot of discipline."

An actress who lives in New York cautions that one should not get carried away with the idea of spiritual discipline. "God loves you all the time, and he doesn’t love you more when you pray than he did before." Still, she argues, it takes discipline to grow. "You change if you show up a lot. You can’t expect to meet the cute guy who works at the library if you never go there. You have to keep going there. Prayer is like that: you have to do it a lot. You learn to listen and understand and hear the cues. Acting is like that, too. It isn’t all just standing up on the stage and emoting. It’s listening, learning to listen to each other, watching body stuff, showing up, having the discipline, trying again and again and again and again."

Most of the people we talked to echoed this idea that discipline implies a commitment to hard work, and that hard work is necessary to grow spiritually, just as it is to develop one’s artistic talents. But some of the artists we talked to recognized that this view of discipline is limiting. It focuses too much on the struggle to master techniques and not enough on the desire that propels a person toward painting or sculpture—or prayer—and the fulfillment that comes from pursuing this desire.

One of the best illustrations of this larger view of discipline comes from Jack Stagliano, professor of studio art at Villanova University. As an Augustinian friar, he has had ample opportunity to reflect on the relationships between spirituality and the arts. "Almost all of the art that really engages me comes from the Roman Catholic tradition," he explains, "especially the medieval Latin hymns. Doing and making are acts of faith. I see the process of doing and making as a spiritual exercise. It can be gardening. It can be cooking. It just happens that for me it’s putting paint on canvas.

When asked about discipline, Stagliano’s first impulse is to quote an elderly friar who used to insist that "there’s no growth without struggle." To his ear, this idea reflected the Catholic tradition of mortifying the flesh in order to grow spiritually. Something about it has never seemed quite right He uses his experience as an artist as an example: "I’m not sure whether discipline means punishing yourself by being in the studio a certain number of hours and slaving over a hot painting, or whether it means something else. For me, I would think it’s almost more about finding the time to do the thing, the painting. But the act of the painting may not be a discipline at all. In other words it may be choreographing the rest of your life to allow yourself the three hours of time that you need. That might be the more disciplined part of it." In a similar way, the discipline required to have a rich devotional life may not involve doing something for 15 minutes a day that proves to be painful. The actual time spent communing with God may be quite enjoyable. But to achieve this rewarding time, it is probably necessary to structure the rest of one’s schedule, and that may take discipline.

He believes, too, that discipline, ironically, may consist of getting to the place where one no longer tries to control everything. Artistry requires a certain amount of spontaneity, and there may be a spiritual lesson to be learned from reflecting on this need for spontaneity. Stagliano puts it this way: "I think initially in the spiritual life and initially as an artist one is concerned with what we call ‘formal issues,’ with understanding color theory, understanding how to use line forms, color, design and shapes. In the early spiritual life, discipline means not having your mind wander if you are trying to meditate, or learning to recite prayers from a book. But I think one of the major wisdoms of spiritual growth is essentially learning to let go. I think that’s probably one of the wisdoms of the spiritual life. In my painting, there’s also that need to let a more spontaneous thing occur. I’m sure you’ve heard the story of a Japanese calligrapher who spent his whole life doing calligraphy and finally said, ‘I don’t do the lettering any more. I just hold the brush and the brush does the lettering.’ I would like to think that that’s the direction one moves toward as one grows older in spiritual life, just as in the arts"

The other word that frequently comes up when artists talk about discipline is attentiveness. Learning to sculpt requires being attentive to the configuration of the stone. Becoming skilled as a painter involves being attentive to the colors on ones palette and paying close attention to the details of the model or object or the effect of one’s own brush strokes. Similarly, a meaningful devotional life depends on concentrating one’s attention for a period of time on the act of praying. Attention to one’s desires is important, and perhaps even more important is the attention one pays to focusing on God.

Jack Stagliano learned attentiveness as a student, but it is also an idea that has become more meaningful to his spiritual journey as he has matured: "Attentiveness is perhaps an Eastern idea, although it certainly can be found in the West both in Protestant and Catholic writers. One of the things that I was taught even as a novice by one of our very elderly friars was ‘Do what you’re doing.’ That was a primary thing for us as students. When you were in the chapel, you were to be praying. When you were playing basketball, you were to be playing basketball. When you were doing laundry or scrubbing toilets, you were supposed to be doing laundry or scrubbing toilets. Attentiveness to what you are doing at the moment is most certainly a key to spiritual growth."

These examples make it abundantly clear that not all varieties of music, art and literature are likely to be included as part of people’s devotional activity. In conversations with hundreds of people of all ages, ethnic backgrounds and regions, not a single person mentioned that his devotional life had been enriched by Snoop Doggy Dogg or Motley Crüe. We may have missed someone upon whom these musicians have had a positive spiritual impact, of course. But it is much more common for people to mention classical music or lyrics with explicit Christian content, icons and pictures of biblical characters, or poetry that focuses specifically on spiritual themes.

The variety of music, art and literature that contributes to Americans’ devotional lives is nevertheless considerable. If some prefer to pray with Bach or Beethoven playing in the background, others opt for Amy Grant, Enya, or an old recording of Elvis singing gospel hymns. Poetry from the Bible takes its places alongside selections from Annie Dillard and Maya Angelou.

This material—these songs and pottery classes and poetry—are sufficiently available in the wider culture that virtually everyone is in some way exposed to them. Entertainment conglomerates know that there is a market for gospel and New Age music, and for English choir performances and meditative classical recordings. The same is true of publishing giants that know it is possible to sell 20,000 to 50,000 copies of an inspirational book by Mary Oliver or Kathleen Norris. Congregations are often the places where people learn about these resources, either by hearing a poet mentioned from the pulpit, by singing something that stays with them during the week, or by participating in a small group whose members share tips about favorite authors, new CDs or retreat centers. Yet it is not the congregations that produce or market most of the art and music to which Americans turn in their devotional lives. The artists and publishers, the musicians and recording companies, are industries that extend well beyond congregations or denominations. Moreover, most people who talk about the role of music and art in their devotional lives also mention that their musical and artistic interests have been encouraged by the wider exposure to the arts that they received in school and continue to maintain by attending concerts, visiting galleries and purchasing CDs and paintings.

Because music and art are organized on a scale that far exceeds the control of religious organizations, it can legitimately be asked whether this influence is subverting that of the churches. Our study suggests that this concern is largely unfounded. Americans are, as they have always been, a religious people—generally not noted for the depth of their spirituality, but broadly oriented toward spirituality nevertheless. When they turn in their devotional lives, as a growing number of Americans appear to he doing, to music and poetry and art, they are guided by instincts that were nurtured by their religious upbringing and that are still oriented toward deepening their relationship with God.

The role of music and art in devotional life is also shaped by the pervasive conviction that it is possible to somehow feel the presence of God. Most Americans intuitively sense that prayer should be different from reading the newspaper or studying for a science test. Mood and ambience matter. One’s mind should be quiet. The space and time in which one prays should be set apart, sacralized in a way that differentiates them from the hustle and bustle of daily life. Not all prayer need be this way (certainly not the brief utterances that people squeeze in their workaday routine), but some of it must be the 15 minutes in the morning or evening that people with the most serious interest in spirituality point to as the core of their devotional lives. In these times, one expects to hear from God as one prays – perhaps not audibly, but at least by feeling more comforted, secure or serene. Music and art help. They set the mood, bringing one’s feelings and even one’s body into a state that seems more in tune with the divine.

Pious Materialism: How Americans View Faith and Money

Pundits dubbed the 1980s the Decade of Greed. Yuppies, Rolex watches, Avia sneakers,

Michael Milken, Charles Keating and the Trump shuttle defined the period. Now, faced

with a multitrillion-dollar national debt, we have apparently decided that pocketbook

issues should occupy our attention. A new president has been elected to put our

financial house in order; preachers and poets call us to repent. But what do Americans

really think about money and material possessions? And what role, if any, does

religious faith play in guiding our thinking?

If money talks, it does so with a divided voice. The subject evokes deep ambivalence

within many people. On the one hand, the sentiment prevails that American culture

emphasizes money and material goods too much. On the other hand, most individuals

are themselves terribly interested in money, and few seem able to decide when enough

is enough. Faith, too, has a voice in these matters, but often it is one that can scarcely be

heard. These are among the conclusions emerging from a three-year research project on

Religion and Economic Values at Princeton University. Last spring we completed a

nationally representative survey of the active (employed) U. S. labor force in which

more than 2,000 people participated. We have also interviewed more than 150 people

from various faiths and occupations in greater depth. Their responses provide new

insight into our deepest obsession -- money.

The mood of the '90s may well be more sober than that of the '80s. The view we heard

repeatedly during interviews was that money is indeed corrupting our society. Margaret

Anderson, 40, an accountant who works in a large firm on the West Coast, expressed it

well when she said, "There's an overemphasis on material goods. Like home computers.

You're always having to add things to them. Or furniture. You buy things just because

of how they will look when people come to your house. It's easy to allow money to

corrupt you."

In the survey, 89 percent agreed that "our society is much too materialistic"; 74 percent

said materialism is a serious social problem; and 71 percent said society would be

better off if less emphasis were placed on money. Many of the people we talked to

described the corrosive effect of materialism on their families. Young adults reflected

on how hard their parents had worked. The result was a comfortable life, but one

saddened by emotional distance. Even more common were the young parents who

talked about their own children being corrupted by television and by advertising. Ninety

percent of those surveyed agreed that "children today want too many material things."

And 75 percent agreed that "advertising is corrupting our basic values." Chicago

attorney Stuart Cummings, 33, sees himself as a bulwark of restraint who seldom

succumbs to material desires. But he admits, "I worry about my kids. It's a very

consumer-oriented era for our kids. They grow up watching TV, they see things they

want, every commercial is like beckoning them in. And so I worry about [materialism]

on their level. I'd like to rein things in."

Also prevalent is a view that materialism is at odds with the deeper human values that

have made us a great nation. Teri Silver, 29, a systems analyst who worked for Michael

Milken and is now laid off, says she was sickened by the greed she saw among her

co-workers. But the deep materialism she came to recognize in herself made her feel

even worse. She admits she's totally obsessed about buying a leather jacket. She thinks

we have to get beyond materialism if we are truly going to care for others. "Going

without some things," she says, "would open our eyes to the needs of other people."

It is possible to be cynical about these views. Having listened to people talk at length

about their aims and aspirations, however, I am inclined to give their remarks a more

benign reading. Most of us are quite sincere when we express concern about our

society's pervasive materialism. We sense that our wants are spiraling out of control.

We know there is more to life than having nice things. For many of us, a religious factor

may also prompt our misgivings. We are dimly aware of biblical teachings contrasting

the worship of God and mammon. When journalists write of greed, we remember that

religious authors have had something to say on the topic as well. Secular as our culture

is, 71 percent still agree that "being greedy is a sin against God."

Thinking that materialism is a serious problem, however, seems to have little

connection with how we actually live our lives. Money and material possessions are, in

fact, among the things we cherish most deeply. Our consumer habits are one indication

of their importance. We spend huge sums on consumer products, mount increasing

credit card debts, and perceive ourselves to be under enormous financial pressure. In the

survey 63 percent said the statement "I think a lot about money and finances" describes

them very well or fairly well, and 84 percent admitted "I wish I had more money than I

do." On more specific questions, virtually everyone mentioned having serious financial

concerns.

Another indication of how attached we are to our possessions is that we readily admit

our attachment. When asked how important "having a beautiful home, a new car, and

other nice things" was to them, for example, 78 percent of the people surveyed said

"very important" or "fairly important," while only 22 percent said "not very important."

The responses were similar when people were asked about the importance of being able

to travel for pleasure, wearing nice clothes, and eating out at expensive restaurants.

Of course, money may be regarded as a means for attaining other things, rather than as

an end in itself. Most of us, however, draw such a tight connection between money and

other aims that money itself acquires great value. Freedom, for instance, is one of our

deepest values, and in the survey 71 percent agreed that "having money means having

more freedom." Or, to cite another example, feeling good about ourselves is a basic

value, and 76 percent agree that "having money gives me a good feeling about myself."

The survey also showed that worrying about not having enough money is significantly

correlated with not feeling good about oneself. Most people do give lip service to the

view that money and happiness may not necessarily go together. In the survey, for

instance, only 11 percent said wealthy people are generally "happier than other people."

Yet many of us harbor the conviction that having just a little more money would indeed

make us happier.

Floyd Jackson, 42, an Air Force officer who lives in Louisiana, says the main thing he

learned as a child was that money "could make you happy." His parents were poor, and

they blamed all their problems on not having enough money. Floyd figured he'd be

equal with everyone else if he could just make a good income when he grew up. He says

he still believes this. Now what he wants most is money to buy a few more things -- a

truck and some CDs for his retirement. Asked if he ever worries about money, he

laughs and says, "No, just the lack of it."

That a substantial proportion of us are willing to sacrifice other things in order to have

more money is still another sign of how much we value money. Despite the fact that 66

percent of the labor force say they are working harder than they were five years ago

(and 52 percent would like to work fewer hours), 68 percent say they would be willing

to work even longer hours each week to earn more money. Nearly half say they would

do less interesting work or take a higher pressure job if, in either case, they could make

more money. And these figures are as high among people who are already in the upper

third of the income scale as among those with lower incomes. In addition, 46 percent

say they would play the lottery to make more money.

Our love of money is evident too in our attitudes toward wealth and poverty. Although

92 percent believe that the condition of the poor is a serious social problem, our hearts

are fundamentally with the rich. This fondness for the wealthy is perhaps most clearly

attested by a series of questions asking people how much they admire individuals in

various circumstances. People who work hard, of course, draw the greatest admiration

-- which is one reason why we dislike the idle rich as much as the proverbial welfare

chiseler. But when working hard is taken into account, the wealthy gain our greatest

respect. Thus, 80 percent say they admire "people who make a lot of money by working

hard" -- 11 percent more than those who say they admire "people who take a lower

paying job in order to help others," and 20 percent more than those who acknowledge

admiring "people who work hard but never make much money."

Religious tradition provided earlier generations of Americans with a moral language

that helped curb the pursuit of money. Faced, as we now seem to be, with a sense that

materialism has gotten out of hand and that we are unable to resist its power, some of us

might hope that religious faith would still be a source of wisdom and guidance in these

matters. Yet the results from our study are at best mixed. Faith is certainly more of a

factor in how Americans use money than economists might suppose. But it is

undoubtedly less of a factor than religious leaders would like it to be. Most Americans

do believe their faith is relevant to their finances. Only 22 percent of those surveyed, for

example, agreed that "God doesn't care how I use my money." Nevertheless, the

evidence suggests that faith makes little difference to the ways in which people actually

conduct their financial affairs.

Our thinking about greed provides a vivid example. Given the large majority who

believe that greed is sinful, one of the most striking findings from the survey was how

few people had ever been taught that it is wrong to want a lot of money: only 12

percent. Even among people who attend church every week, this proportion was only 16

percent. In fact, many of the people we talked to in depth found the question itself a bit

strange. What they had been taught, they said, was to want a lot of money. The biblical

teaching about serving God or serving mammon suggests that there might be a conflict

for religious people between valuing one's relationship with God and valuing making a

lot of money. But careful statistical analysis of the survey results showed there was

none. Taking other differences into account, people who highly valued their

relationship with God were no less likely to value making a lot of money

Jesus' warning about the rich man's difficulty entering the kingdom of God might be

another source of concern to Bible-believing Americans. But most of the ones we talked

to were able to rationalize their way out of this difficulty. Most figured riches weren't a

problem unless one had gained them illegally. A few agreed with Jesus, but said that the

rich were probably just too busy to cultivate their spirituality. One would also think that

preachments about the poor might do something to unsettle middle-class Americans.

And of course they do, at least if charitable donations are considered. Yet our basic

sense of being squarely in God's graces remains more or less undisturbed. Two-thirds of

us believe that "God wants me to have the kind of job that will make me happy." More

than half of us believe that "people who work hard are more pleasing to God than

people who are lazy." A majority of us agree that "praying in the morning helps me have

a better day at work." However, three-quarters of us reject the view that "it is morally

wrong to have a lot of nice things when others are starving." And only one person in

five agrees with the idea that "the poor are closer to God than rich people are."

What religious faith does more clearly than anything else is to add a dollop of piety to

the materialistic amalgam in which most of us live. We do not feel compelled to give

up any of our material desires, only to put them "in perspective." When finances worry

us we pray, and that gives us strength to keep on working. In short, a kind of therapeutic

motif is at work. Our faith helps us feel better about ourselves whether we are worried

about our finances, whether we have money in abundance, or whether we fall into both

of these categories.

Critics claim that the churches do a better job of comforting the afflicted than they do

of afflicting the comfortable. Here is clear evidence that supports them. But some of us,

at least, would like to be challenged more deeply than we are about our use of money.

Three persons in four, for example, say they would like churches and synagogues to

"encourage people to be less materialistic." We may not be serious about this, but there

may be room for churches to engage the issue. For that to happen, however, we must

understand some of the impediments. It is not without reason that churches have been

unable or unwilling to address money matters more directly. When we consider why the

churches are failing in this area, each of the following merits consideration:

1. Money is considered too personal to be discussed openly. The darkest taboo in our

culture is not sex or death, but money. Despite business magazines filled with

discussions of money, we still believe that our personal finances are too ticklish to be

discussed with even our most trusted friends. We feel it is inappropriate to burden

others with our concerns. We feel that our money is none of their business. We may

worry about sounding conceited or making someone feel bad. We may well have been

taught in childhood that money is a family secret. In the survey 89 percent said they

never or hardly ever discussed their family budget with people outside their immediate

family. The proportion who seldom discussed personal finances with fellow

churchpeople was even higher -- 97 percent. Ironically, while most of us worry about

our money (and many of us even fret about the fact that we are worried), we do so

alone. We do not place ourselves in a position to benefit from the counsel of others. Nor

do we try to gain the kind of perspective that might come from articulating and testing

our own views more openly.

2. Money and morality are kept in separate compartments. Our culture encourages us to

think this way. Money is allegedly value-free. It is simply a convenient mechanism of

social exchange. Indeed, 68 percent in the survey agreed that "money is one thing,

morals and values are completely separate." We might, therefore, pay attention to what

economic experts say about it, but we do not seek counsel about money from

philosophers or theologians. This does not mean, of course, that Americans are so

materialistic that they have no other values. Seventy-eight percent of working

Americans, for example, say they "think a lot about my values and priorities in life."

But many of us ponder such matters without drawing implications for our economic

behavior. Consider, for instance, the thought processes that guide us in making a major

purchase such as an automobile. We found in our conversations that most people

adopted a consumerist framework in describing how they made such decisions. Their

language sounded like the car commercials they saw on television. The survey showed

the same pattern. Eighty-one percent said they would think a lot about "which dealer

will give me the best deal" and 76 percent said the same about "will it get good

mileage." In comparison, only 43 percent said they would think a lot about "how does

having a car fit into my basic values," and even fewer (20 percent) said they would

think a lot about the question, "Are automobiles consistent with protecting the planet?"

None of this, of course, is very surprising. Indeed, we would probably be shocked if

clergy preached sermons about how to buy a new car. Yet the fact that we let

advertising define our thinking in such a major financial commitment shows how

powerful it is.

3. People seldom think about connections between faith and money. Religious writers

sometimes comment on how frequently the Bible itself discusses money. This message

seems to have gotten through only to a bare majority of working Americans. Fifty-one

percent agree that "the Bible contains valuable teachings about the use of money" But

agreement is one thing; making use of these teachings is another. Only 29 percent said

they had thought more than a little in the past year about "what the Bible teaches about

money," and only a few more (31 percent) had thought this much about the broader

issue of "the connection between religious values and your personal finances."

4. Clergy may be fearful of seeming too interested in money. Most of the pastors we

talked to admitted they found it difficult to preach about money Our research revealed

at least part of the reason pastors feel this way. Many people believe that churches

should be devoted entirely to the spiritual life, rather than having to pay any attention to

material needs. In the survey 43 percent agreed that "churches are too eager to get your

time and money." On another question, 36 percent said "it annoys me when churches

are too eager to get your time and money."

Even more telling was the response to the question of whether people would give more

or less to their church "if the church emphasized giving money more than it does now."

Thirty percent said they would give less; only 7 percent said they would give more. In

contrast, when people were asked what they would do "if the clergy were less

materialistic," 31 percent said they would give more, while only 9 percent said they

would give less. (The remainder said it would make no difference.)

5. Stewardship has lost much of its meaning. One might think that the stewardship

sermon would provide churches with an occasion to offer instruction to parishioners

about money and material possessions. But stewardship is perceived by the public to

mean either something as narrow as charitable giving or something so broad that it has

virtually no specific implications. When we asked people what they thought was the

best definition of stewardship, 10 percent said it meant "giving a certain percentage of

your money to the church," 12 percent thought it was "taking good care of our planet,"

16 percent said it meant "remembering that God makes everything," 40 percent said it

was "using your individual talents in a responsible way," and 20 percent were unsure.

Moreover, only 22 percent said the idea was very meaningful to them; 40 percent said it

was fairly meaningful; 20 percent said it was not very or not at all meaningful; and 18

percent were unsure.

These are all serious cultural impediments. But they are, nevertheless, impediments that

the churches can address. After all, the subject of money is too important to be left

entirely to economists. Money can be discussed in churches more openly than it is

currently, especially in caring and supportive small groups. The moral dimensions of

money can be addressed by theologians and ethicists. Sunday school classes and Bible

study groups can stimulate thinking about the connections between faith and money.

Clergy need to do a better job of communicating their churches' material needs. And

stewardship must be discussed in terms of its specific implications for the Christian life

-- not in vague generalities. The stakes are high. But in facing up to our material

obsessions, we should expect more from churches than silence.