Religion is in trouble in the United States. The word, that is.<\/p>\n
Sociologists say that we are increasingly divided over religion\u2019s place in public life but that when it comes to language, Americans are moving in one direction: toward a new vernacular.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re no longer \u201creligious.\u201d We\u2019re \u201choly.\u201d We\u2019re \u201cfaithful.\u201d We\u2019re \u201cspiritual.\u201d We talk about what \u201cthe gospel compels us to do\u201d or \u201cgospel living.\u201d Or \u201csabbatical living\u201d and \u201cGod-oriented behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n
This is true across the ideological range, but for different reasons.<\/p>\n
On one side of the spectrum are people such as prominent liberal scholar Diana Butler Bass, author of last year\u2019s \u201cChristianity After Religion,\u201d who says the word \u201creligion\u201d is laden with negative, hurtful and political baggage. The 20 percent of Americans who now call themselves unaffiliated with any religious group see religion as much too focused on rules.<\/p>\n
On the other side are people such as super-popular shock pastor and writer Mark Driscoll, an evangelical conservative whose sermons have such titles as \u201cWhy I hate religion.\u201d He preaches that the institutional church has wrongly let people feel good about themselves for their actions (such as going to worship services) instead of what they believe (which should be the Bible\u2019s literal truth, in his view).<\/p>\n
A member of Driscoll\u2019s church produced one of early 2012\u2019s most shared videos, \u201cWhy I love Jesus but hate religion,\u201d which has been watched more than 25 million times. Set to cool music, it opens with a young man asking, \u201cWhat if I told you Jesus came to abolish religion?\u201d Later, it characterizes most churchgoers as hypocrites and religion as a Band-Aid and \u201clike spraying perfume on a casket.\u201d<\/p>\n
I suppose this hinges on what one considers to be the definition of \u201creligion.\u201d\u00a0 I have heard solid teachers make the excellent point that religion has to do with how a human being finds God, whereas Christianity is all about the opposite:\u00a0 how God finds human beings.\u00a0 I have also heard this approached from a sociological angle, that religions are institutional, a matter of specific communities and formalized doctrines and behaviors, as opposed to individual spiritual experience.<\/p>\n
And yet, isn\u2019t it clear that some people are \u201creligious\u201d and some aren\u2019t?\u00a0 Should the term be retained and rehabilitated?\u00a0 Should the reality\u2013communities, institutions, the communal dimension of spirituality\u2013be recovered and defended, as opposed to the \u201cspirituality\u201d of individual private experience?<\/p>\n
Or would Christians do better to oppose all \u201creligions\u201d and to contrast them with the Gospel of Christ?\u00a0 Might that be a good cure for the interfaith movement?\u00a0 After all, didn\u2019t Rome persecute the early Christians as \u201catheists\u201d?\u00a0 Should we become that kind of atheists again?<\/p><\/div>\n<\/blockquote><\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Michelle Boorstein writes in the Washington Post about how virtually everybody\u2013liberals and conservatives, New Agey \u201cspirituals\u201d and Bible-believing Christians\u2013have been turning against the word \u201creligion.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,39],"tags":[2672],"class_list":["post-16151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-religions","tag-religious-language"],"yoast_head":"\n
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