Faith in Context

Extramarital Affairs & the Party of "Traditional Family Values"

Today we hear yet another Republican elected official confess to an episode of extramarital sexual activity. Again, he admits to behavior that is out of line with the fundamental values that he has fought for (as well as the minimum standards expected of an elected official in America), but refuses to resign his office. Since Newt Gingrich there have been about two dozen of these among Federal elected officials and it seems the rate of discovery is increasing.

How can the right-wing position maintain any credibility with all of this? Are we to conclude that the people who push for a marriage amendment to the constitution, making even limited abortion a jailing offense, and abstinence-only sex education for teenagers evidently include many who do not really believe in these things? Or, are those who feel these values are more important than helping the poor or reforming health care simply so tempted by extramarital and premarital sex that they are driven by their strong, inner needs. (In other word, if I am terrified that I might violate a certain moral standard, perhaps I would like to see a law passed to reinforce the "guard rail" or "fence" against this temptation.)

Why have none of the religious leaders who have pressed so hard for "traditional family values" come forward to suggest that the Senator and Governor who have most recently confessed to extramarital affairs need to resign from public office? Is the political strength of the Republican Party more important to these religious leaders than traditional family values? Do they really believe in promoting Christian values in public life, or is it simply a ruse to use Christian faith to promote a certain brand of politics?

People of faith in the Republican Party have some very important questions to answer deep in their own hearts. Christ is the onlooking Lord they need to answer to, not political opponents. But, the fundamental sincerity of the conservative political groups that promote "traditional family values" is clearly in question. How many of these groups are simply fronts to manipulate Christians and how many of them are authentic expressions of faith? Stay tuned. Evidence is surfacing.

Texting in Church

There has been a lot of complaining about people texting while sitting in church, despite the fact that some cutting-edge pastors are actually incorporating the practice into a more dialogic approach to preaching. It should be noted that every new technology has been opposed by conservative church people at some point in history. When the organ was first introduced, there were those who opposed it as "the devil's instrument." It is likely that the theological assessment of new technology has to be more nuanced and sophisticated than simple opposition to anything new. Unless, of course, what one is really worshiping is tradition--the lack of change.

AOL's E-mail Addiction Survey sheds some light on the question: Where are people when they check their e-mail (on whatever device)?

• 67% are in bed
• 59% are in the bathroom
• 50% are driving
• 39% are at a restaurant or bar
• 38% are in a business meeting
• 15% are in church

Before you jump to conclusions, remember that only a small minority of Americans actually go to church. Far more sleep, use the bathroom, drive, eat at restaurants, etc. The 15% who are checking their e-mail in church may constitute a third to half of all church attenders. The number would, of course, vary by denomination/faith community, as well as with the demographics of each local congregation.

What does GMs failure mean to the church?

General Motors filed for bankruptcy today: the largest industrial corporation to fail. There was a time in the 1930s when GM's top management could challenge the Congress and the President of the U.S. It was often seen as the model for management and organization, even in denominations and faith-based nonprofits. Now it has failed as a corporation; "the mighty have fallen," to use a Biblical phrase.

What does this mean for the church?

1. No institution can ignore changes in the world around it, make decisions that suit the established leadership on the basis of internal considerations and traditions, and hope to survive in substantially the same form forever. Eventually the decades of missed opportunities, conservative decisions, and failure to take seriously the new context, new generations, etc., will cause the organization to collapse. Religious organizations have no exemption to this reality.

2. One way to understand the current economic situation is that it represents a tidal wave of institutional failure because almost all corporations, banks, universities, nonprofits, and denominational entities have top leadership that has refused to come to terms with the social change that is happening all around us and has been accelerating for some time. Since the 1980s the leadership of organizations in America have been in some kind of collective dream state, out of touch with reality. Eventually reality bites you.

3. If the response to the current predicament is simply more of the same, then things will only get worse. Organizations of all kinds, and especially the church, needs to mobilize the creativity and knowledge of the people at the grass roots. That is where the Holy Spirit works. That is where God is leading people to try new things and launch new ministries.

What Do You Make of The Shack?

It is at about 40 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. It has sold more than five million copies. It is a novel entitled The Shack by a first-time author, originally self-published with the help of two pastors that raised just $300 for a marketing budget.

Summary by Jenn Cavanaugh, reviewer for Youth Worker Journal: "God sets aside a weekend to lead Mack, a man overwhelmed by a family tragedy, into a more trusting relationship with Herself. Yes, Herself. All three persons of the Trinity take turns reconstructing Mack's notions of God. His image of God as a white man is among the first challenged. Discourses on freewill and theodicy transpire over meals and yard work. Putting words in God's mouth is a risky business, and the lapses into trite Sunday School formulas are precariously balanced by more winsome moments. The result is an extremely human rendition of God but a generally orthodox and thought-provoking one. [It] serves as a rendezvous point for any whose pain has obscured a sense of the presence, or goodness, of God-with-us."

It is important to keep this phenomena in perspective. The circulation of this volume is still way below that of The Da Vinci Code, although, in fairness, that book had an established author and a major publisher behind it. And there are evidently no published demographics on who is purchasing The Shack. Nonetheless, Why do you think this book has become so popular? Is it being read by people outside of church circles?

Death of a Treasured Colleague

Carl Dudley is well known to pastors and an outstanding name among researchers of religion. He was a good friend, writing a back-cover endorsement for my 2003 book, Adventist Congregations Today. I worked closely with him on the steering committee of the interfaith Congregational Studies Partnership. He passed away on Wednesday (April 22) at age 76 from complications due to cardiac amyloidosis. I know that he is grieved in the hearts of many thousands of friends.

Carl was co-director of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research and professor of church and community at Hartford Seminary from 1993 to his retirement in 2003. He continued to participate in the Congregational Studies Partnership until recently. Before he came to Hartford, he spent 20 years as director of the Center for Church and Community Ministries and professor of church and community at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. He was a Presbyterian pastor, serving Berea Presbyterian Church in St. Louis for more than a decade and congregations in Albany, New York, and Selma, Alabama, prior to that.

He was the author, co-author or editor of 16 books, and pastors have found his volumes on the small church and church-based community action to be especially helpful over the years. He helped to develop the foundational literature in congregational studies and is counted among the inventors of this research discipline. He served at one time as president of the Religious Research Association (RRA) and was an active member of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSA) and the Association for the Sociology of Religion (ASR), often contributing to all three journals. He was a valued friend and treasured colleague among the research community and among pastors. Carl was also loving husband, father and grandfather, regularly opening his home to friends. He is survived by Shirley and their five children and nine grandchildren. Email me if you want the contact information for the family to send your condolences.

Religion & Attitudes About Business

I have found a very interesting piece of research that seeks to identify the impact that religious faith has on the attitudes of individuals toward the behavior of business corporations. I have written before about the widespread belief in America that commercial corporations should be considered amoral entities without the same moral standards and ethical behavior that we generally require of individuals. This is an issues that, I believe, has played a significant role in the current economic problems in our country and around the world.

This study includes a large sample from 20 nations so as to generate significant samples for each of the world's major religions. Respondents were asked (among other things) to indicate if they think that business corporations should focus on profit, make ethics primary or take a middle path somewhere in between. Below are the results:

	Profit	Ethics	In between
Buddhists	19%	56%	20%
Hindus	51%	30%	18%
Muslims	31%	29%	37%
Catholics	24%	37%	38%
Protestants	23%	32%	44%
Orthodox	35%	33%	21%
No religion (“Nones”)	22%	36%	40%

Overall (including other data in the study) the three researchers who directed this study conclude that religion has only modest effect on attitudes about corporate ethics and social responsibility, but is difficult to see that religion makes any difference whatsoever on this fundamental question. As a theologian and pastor, I cannot believe that God does not care how corporations behave, especially those owned and managed primarily by believers. Why are people of faith so ambivalent on this item? Have the large business corporations become the contemporary idols of the 21st century?

Source: Brammer, S., Williams, G. and Zinkin, J. (2006). "Religion and Attitudes to Corporate Social Responsibility in a Large Cross-Country Sample."

From the Long View of History

This is a quick summary of Alister McGrath's new book, Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution--A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-firstby reviewer Ronald Rittgers, who teaches Reformation history at Valparaiso University in Indiana. It is an extremely insightful and concise background for what is happening today:

Protestantism is dangerous. It is an explosive and ultimately uncontrollable force that can destabilize and undermine church an government. It can reject time-honored truths, traditions and institutions-- including its own--and posit new ones in their place, only to repeat this process again and again. Protestantism is infinitely restless, constantly moving in many divergent directions at the same time. Like evolution, it possesses astonishing power to create highly adaptive religious organisms and equally astonishing power to destroy them if they fail to develop appropriately.

Why is Protestantism so dangerous? Because it is based on a dangerous idea: that they Bible is the main source of authority for the Christian religion and that all Christians have the right to interpret it for themselves.

Newsweek Cover Story

When I posted an item about the new ARIS data a week ago, I had no idea that the same topic would be the cover story in this week's Newsweek magazine. (Dated April 13) The headline is sensational, more sensational than the article itself: "The Decline and Fall of Christian America." The fact is that decline has set in (as I pointed out last week, based on the ARIS data), but it is way too soon to talk about fall.

The sensationalism is unfortunate. It will be waved off by conservatives as a sign of liberal bias on the part of mainstream journalism when they should be paying attention. Somewhere in the past two years there was a tipping point in American history. Two years ago "the" Evangelical president was in the White House and his party controlled both houses of congress and the Supreme Court. Jim Dobson could think that "traditional family values" and a big radio audience gave him the right to select the next president of the U.S. The only thing the old Evangelical establishment got out of the election last year was the Veep slot on the losing side. Evangelicals like Jim Wallis who used to be considered fringe elements are now regularly advising the new president, the first African American president. More than anything else this article is an attempt to suggest a broader narrative answering the question "what happened?" Its basic thesis is certainly true so far as can be seen with current information and projections: the dominance of traditional Christian religion in American culture is fading.

This is article is written by The Editor of Newsweek, Jon Meacham. He is an active Christian, a vestry member in two Episcopal churches, St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue and Trinity Church Wall Street, both in Manhattan, NYC. He also serves on the Leadership Council of Harvard Divinity School. He has written a book on the mix of religion with politics in the history of the U.S.: American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers and the Making of a Nation (Random House, 2006). It is presents the facts about exactly how the major figures in the formation of America were religious: What did they believe? How were they involved in religion? What did this have to do with how the founding documents and decisions were constructed. He is a career journalist, raised in Chattanooga and starting as a reporter at the The Chattanooga Times. He is now 40 and was hired by Newsweek in 1995 as a staff writer.

Networking Technology & Human Behavior

At least 67 million Americans are signing on at least once a month to social networking web sites such as Facebook and Parks Associates, a research firm based in Dallas, reports that it will grow to 95 million over the next five years. There is a massive generational shift underway in the use of this kind of Internet service; about 70 percent of adults under 35 use networking sites at least once a month compared to 37percent of those over 35.

What do these young adults use Myspace, Facebook, etc., for? Nearly half simply check on what their friends are doing, one in ten or less meet new people, play games, post pictures and use the sites to look for jobs. Only about one in twenty use these sites to listen to music or view videos. There seems to be a tendency to bring over from television the passive consumption model of using the web. Far more of users of networking sites simply look at material on line rather than contribute or create content. For example, 72 percent watch videos, but only 21 percent upload videos; 65 percent look at photos, but only 45 percent upload photos; another 45 percent read blogs, but only 30 percent publish blogs.

There is evidence that American are behind the curve on the adoption of new technology as a key arena for relationships and seem to drag their feet as the social media revolution moves ahead. Asked to select a short, singular description of the Internet, only four percent of Americans picked "a place to meet friends" in a survey conducted by TNS Global based in Stamford, Connecticut. One in five selected "email box," 17 percent "source of information," and 14 percent see it as "a news source."

Americans communicate with their friends and relatives face-to-face more often than by email or cell phone, while Koreans and Chinese are more likely to use their cell phone or email to do so. In Canada, France, Finland and Italy people are about equally likely to use email as face-to-face contact.

American Religious Identification Survey - Round 3

A couple of weeks ago major news media reported the release of the American Religious Identification Survey 2008 data. This is the third time since 1990 that this massive survey has been conducted across the nation. It is known as ARIS among researchers.

I have had time to digest the report, which is now published by the Institute for the Study of Secularism at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, which makes that city the capital of the sociology of religion in America. The Hartford Religion Research Center (base for the Faith Communities Today collaborative, FACT) and the Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life (producer of a series of books on regional studies of religion in America) are also located in the same city. In fact, the three "think tanks" are located within two miles of each other.

The new data show that most rapid growth in America is among the "Nones," or people who say they do not identify with any religion. This segment has nearly doubled in two decades. It was eight percent of the population in 1990 and 15 percent in 2008. Over the same period the percentage of Americans who identify with some branch of Christianity has declined from 86 percent to 76 percent. The only segment among Christians that is growing in terms of the size of its piece of the pie is made up of those who say they are non-denominational or belong to a non-denominational church. The mainline Protestant denominations are in steep decline, but even the percentage of Americans who identify as Evangelicals is in decline. For example, the percentage of Americans who say they are Baptists, has declined from nearly one in five in 1990 to only 15 percent today.

The ARIS team added some new questions this time around that give further insight to how secular America is becoming. Only seven in ten Americans report that they have been through some religious initiation ceremony (baptism, Christening, circumcision, confirmation, bar mitzvah or naming ceremony). A slightly smaller number of married adults report that they had a religious wedding service. Only two-thirds expect to have a religious funeral when they die. In other words, about a third of Americans do not participate in religious rites of passage in any faith.

The trend will very likely continue as evidenced by the age data. The Christian and Jewish groups are all over-balanced toward older adults, while there is a definite tilt toward the youngest generations among the "Nones," new religious movements, Islam and Eastern religions. The majority of African Americans no longer identify themselves as Baptist and the percentage of Hispanics who say they are Catholic has declined significantly.

If you would like a PDF of the entire report, email me at msahlin@creativeministry.org and I will gladly share a copy with you. It includes data for each state (and DC), except Alaska and Hawaii. (I guess it is too expensive to send graduate research assistants that far away.)