The Future of Religion in America
The recent “Woodstock for Christians” has pundits wondering what’s next for religion in America and elsewhere. We might as well join the conversation.
The New York Times recently reported on an old time “revival” that more or less spontaneously emerged earlier this month (February, 2023) from a relatively spartan chapel on a tiny Christian college campus in a tiny town in Kentucky. It is, of course, no surprise that Kentucky, home of the “Creation Museum,” would somehow figure in such a religious phenomenon. This one all started when students stayed inside the chapel after a regular evening service to pray and sing, and in the early morning hours somehow dialed up the precise recipe for summoning the “Holy Spirit” to drop in and swell the small collective with euphoric love and joy. Strumming guitars, they rekindled the spell the next night, and the next, and the next. Word quickly spread around campus, and soon the chapel was jammed. It became a non-stop worship service, and a living, breathing organism of its own. Word spread more widely, and soon the town was jammed. Here, in this chapel at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky, population 6000, where you can get a “Christ-centered education,” was to be found in palpable form no less than the “Presence of God.”
At least 50,000 people showed up to see for themselves. They came from hundreds of miles away for the “Asbury Revival,” a “Woodstock for Christians” experience. The Christian media snapped to attention, calling it the “first revival movement of the 21st Century.” Locally it was called “The Outpouring.” Perhaps not coincidently, it was happening at the same university that had hosted a similar event in 1970.
An evangelist arrived from Minnesota to “witness” the happenings, and described, “This thing that’s happening there is so organic and raw, not flashy, not cool — it’s the anti-cool.”
This does not tell us a lot. Any “movement” of white conservatives is innately anti-cool.
What is a “revival,” anyway? It’s a “reviving,” bringing back to life, of something, usually something communal. There are “revivals” in art, architecture, fashion, sports and so on. In this case, religion. Periodically in American history, religionists have looked around and perceived that America is not, actually, very religious… even as it swears it is, but does not behave. So a “revival” of that old time religious fervor is in order. It is sometimes referred to as a “reawakening,” bizarre though such an effort may be for those who are determined to remain un-”Woke!”
One must wonder why religion so often needs to be revived. How and why does it get seemingly sleepy, doze off, get uninteresting, unpopular, boring? If it is so great, why does it lose appeal, and have to be “awakened,” “restored,” “returned to?” It’s the same old stories, the same old tenets. Nothing about the “revival” turns out to be new. And in excitedly proclaiming they have awoken to and experienced a truer, purer, “presence of God,” what are the tent revelers really saying about all those other millions of fellow Christians? It was 52 years between those “outpourings” at Asbury. What were all those in-between worshippers worshipping? What are Christians of all stripes practicing in the years, decades, near-centuries, between “awakenings?” Christianity Lite? Half-assed Christianity? Insincere Christianity? Faux-Christianity? It seems queer that such revivals so easily get away with essentially telling every other Christian in the world they are doing it wrong.
Christians tell us that what’s wrong with America is that it has forsaken its Christianity. What we need is to restore God to our schools, our workplaces, the legal system, the media, our culture. One might wonder if American Christians could agree on which God that would be, because they are all very different. The Old Testament God or the New Testament God? The angry, fearsome God or the loving God? The Catholic God or the Protestant God? The mainstream God or the fundamentalist God? The literal God or the symbolic God? Shouldn’t we also ask them to pin down just which period of greater religiosity in American history they would like to return to? The era when American Christians were slaughtering Native Americans, stealing their land… and children? The era when American Christians owned millions of Africans as slaves, and most other American Christians found nothing wrong with this? After all, slavery is condoned in the Bible. The era when American Christians were sending children as workers into factories, mines and timber crews? The era when America’s air, water and land were being polluted without restriction by greedy corporations and Christians said and did nothing? How about when “Christian” Americans declared Civil War upon each other? What we notice about religion is that while it claims to be about love, that affection morphs so easily into hate. As much as American Christians like to believe that America is a “Christian nation,” it is challenging to find very many instances where it acted like one. Unless, that is, by “Christian” is meant nothing that Jesus said but how “Christians” have actually behaved over the millennia.
The first “Great Awakening” supposedly happened in the early 1700s, when New England Protestants got fed up with their neighbors’ religious laxity and sought to pump up the sincerity. That wave dissipated and America went back to its “religious, but only in vague concept” demeanor. In the 1800s there was the “Second Great Awakening” that was more widespread across the nation. Millions were attracted, particularly those who felt oppressed, including women and slaves. The adoption of their oppressors’ religion by Black Americans began around this time. The message of Jesus has always resonated with the downtrodden, even as somehow it has also been twisted and tangled and forged into a weapon of control and/or bludgeoning by those who purport to be its leaders.
Be careful what you wish for. The Second Great Awakening aspired to conservative religious revitalization, but is also partially responsible for energizing both the Abolitionist and Women’s Suffrage movements. Manly proponents of the Patriarchy, heritage and “way of life” (especially down South) could have done without these spawn of, you know, the actual teachings of Jesus. What we now call the “Bible Belt” was back then not at all keen to take his command to “love one another” beyond a wink and a nod between cracks of the whip. Actually, maybe not a whole lot has changed. Slavery is currently illegal, but conservatives are on a tear rolling back rights, you never know.
The Second Great Awakening petered out not long after one of its greatest successes: Prohibition! Yes, the Christian church led the long, arduous and testy way to ban the Devil’s drink across the nation. There was an Amendment to the Constitution, you see, the Eighteenth, voted on by “We the People,” that would ban hard liquor from manufacture or sale. OK, said the people, a bit weary of the tomfoolery and barbarism that seemed to spring directly from the bottle of rot-gut whiskey, rye and rum. In perhaps the greatest bait-and-switch gambit in American history, after the vote a committee of conservative Christians decided that this Amendment really should apply, as well, to wine and beer! But this sleight of hand triumph would prove illusory. It was a fool-hardy exercise which promptly turned most American adult men into criminals, sparked a volatile and violent black-market for the liquid, and even somehow invited millions of women to imbibe for the first time, daringly, defiantly, sneaking a trendy drink in the safety of dual-sex speakeasies that replaced the too toxically masculine saloons they had traditionally avoided. When almost everyone in the country — the most stout-hearted, thick-skulled religionists excluded — realized that it had all been a colossal mistake, a different kind of “revival” was demanded: Bring back our legal booze! The Eighteenth Amendment was repealed in 1933, just shy of 15 years after its ratification. It had changed America, in the precise opposite direction intended. More Americans were drinking than ever. God works in mysterious ways, eh!
Many Americans blamed Prohibition on over-zealous Christianity, while at the same time advances in science were undermining the Bible narrative. The Scopes “Monkey Trial” in the mid-1920s drew wide scrutiny, with, essentially, the theory of Evolution on trial. The monkeys lost in court, but not necessarily among millions of Americans. Religion has been on the run, dodging and weaving, sometimes turning around to throw an unwieldy punch, at science ever since.
Later in the 20th Century there were a several revivals. Again, it was a “renewal,” an “awakening,” throngs of people seeking out rousing preachers, collective praying, stirring music and, sometimes, speaking in tongues thrown in. Reverend Billy Graham made a profitable career of caravaning around the country, and world, spreading the Gospel, revival-style, his arrivals circus-like in their attraction to customers eager for a show.
However, Graham and his revivalist ilk were preaching against the tide of the counter-culture. American religiosity as a whole peaked in the 1950s when a large majority of families were affiliated with a church. By the 1960s, everything was being questioned. Religion was no exception. The long, downward trend in church affiliation began. America became, officially, majority “un-churched” in 2020; only 47 percent now belonging to a church, synagogue or mosque.
Religiosity overall has been steadily atrophying. A recent Pew survey found that 71 percent of the Silent Generation, 69 percent of the Baby Boomers, 64 percent of Generation X, 54 percent of Older Millennials believe in God as an absolute certainty. Barely half of Young Millennials believe. Surprisingly, only 60 percent of the Greatest Generation are certain about God, significantly fewer than their own children and grand-children. What does that tell us? As to whether religion is “very important” in their lives, 67 percent of the Silent Generation, 59 percent of Boomers, 53 percent of Gen-X, 46 percent of Older Millennials, and just 38 percent of Young Millennials agree. As to attending a religious service at least once a week, 51 percent of the Silents, 38 percent of the Boomers, 34 percent of Gen-X, and just 27 percent of Millennials are in the pews. How about praying daily? 67 percent of Silents, 61 percent of Boomers, 56 percent of Gen-X, 46 percent of Older Millennials and 39 percent of Younger Millennials. Just 29 percent of Younger Millennials consider religion a “source of guidance on right and wrong.”
Well, you might be thinking, this just shows how America is failing and falling behind other more devout nations. That would be true if you are thinking of countries such as Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iran, the UAE, India, Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, Jordan, Morocco. If you were thinking of other modern nations, actually, religion is in even worse shape in Canada, most parts of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea. Trends don’t look great for religion.
So, religion is definitely in decline. The time is ripe for revival, renewal, awakening, rebirth. But what kind of revival should we aim forl? What kind of awakening do we need?
Alas, at Asbury, after 15 straight days of revivalist fervor, even having to move to a larger auditorium to accommodate the eager throngs, somebody showed up with measles. Darn that God! Why would He derail such a celebration of worship for Himself? Why not just turn the offender into a pillar of salt, and keep the fun going? Sometimes these “mysterious ways” seem preposterous. The university revoked the Woodstock God festival, and announced that no further “Outpouring” events would be scheduled. Everyone knew it was the end of the dream when all the porta-potties were removed.
Copycat gatherings have sprung up in other churches, especially down South where no thought of incongruity or absurdity exists between waving your hands in praise of the Lord and wanting to cancel Critical Race Theory and the “transgender agenda.” But so far none has been able to clone the Asbury magic. But don’t be surprised if one does. Believers crave to believe.
Back to the Pew poll. Belief in heaven still runs high… 68 percent in Young Millennials. Hell doesn’t fare as well, strangely, as it is so much better detailed in religious texts and iconography than heaven. Only a little more than half of Millennials can go along with the notion of the Devil’s Den, but that actually beats out the Greatest Generation, only half of which, who are still alive, buy into that place of pain and horror. Maybe they are not so daunted or afraid because, after surviving the Great Depression, World War II and the Sixties, they’ve already been there, done that.
One of the most interesting questions of the survey asks whether one has a “feeling of spiritual peace and well-being” at least once a week. Not defined is the term “spiritual.” Nonetheless, seventy percent of the Greatest Generation claim they do. The chart stair-steps down from there: 66 percent of Silents, 62 percent of Boomers, 58 percent of Gen-X, 53 percent of Older Millennials, 49 percent of Younger Millennials. Does one gets wiser and more “spiritual” with age (with or without religion)? Or… do these numbers roughly correspond to the frequency of prayer? But the survey doesn’t tell us whether these folks feeling all spiritual are the same people praying, or not. What is clear is that these percentages dwarf those attending religious services at least once a week. We can’t say for sure if prayer has much affect on “spiritual peace and well-being,” but this survey suggests attending religious services ain’t the ticket! And the religious service is the focal point of the revival. There’s really nothing there, folks, despite what the excited attendees attest. No divinity. No spirituality. Just imagination.
What is the ticket? True spirituality, not religion. And spirituality equals love, in the sense of knowing, bonding and loving the universe. The more of the universe you love, the more spiritual you are. From almost every sacred tradition, from every philosophy, from all systems of ethics and morality, from every indigenous wisdom, even from science itself (though many scientists, laser-focused on their specialty, can’t see the forest for the trees), the quest for transcendence into that communion with what, let’s call, the “Source” (god or otherwise) seems to require one particular attitude: Love. Not worship. Not forgiveness. Not prayer. Not sacrifice. Not rites. Not rituals. Not penitence. Not scripture. Not dogma. Not a savior. Not a church. Not a congregation. Just love.
Any congregation can fabricate bonding and an “outpouring” of love. It gets you juiced up, in the company of like-minded others, a hive-mind is created, an object of adoration is centered, the sound of the throng is thrilling, music can add to the drama, the energy seething, an electricity is generated, the mind wobbles, the heart soars, endorphins flood. It’s a “peak experience.” Well, far more often it’s B-grade ecstasy, but if most of your life has been clonish existence in dullsville, it can seem like heaven. You love it. You love the scene, the crowd, the art, the performers, the team, the preacher, the daring, everyone around you. You can get this “high” at a concert. You can get it at a sports stadium. You can get it doing something dangerous like skydiving. You can get it on psychedelics. You can get it at a religious gathering. Indeed, at a religious gathering the exercise is infused with an infinitely higher objective than rocking out with your favorite band or winning a football championship… you and your fellow “worshippers” are reaching up with waving hands and full voice for God, or Jesus, or Mary, or Muhammad, or Buddha, or whomever deific intermediary might accept your willing embrace and give you a kiss.
But it’s not deep, spiritual love. To conjure that, you need a new mind and you need to be elsewhere.
If religion has such a horrid history of cruelty and violence, oceans of blood, subjection and control, war upon man and nature… if its leaders have been some of the most abominable humans of all time… if it has a long legacy of turning a blind eye to slavery, rape, corruption, genocide… if it repeatedly attempts to destroy science and knowledge… if it is filled to the brim with flimflam operators spinning wild tales and relieving you of your money if not your soul, how is it still revered by so many as the keeper of “spirituality,” and the guardian of “love?” This is plainly preposterous.
Religion does not equal spirituality. Religion is a block to spirituality. The true spiritual quest is a questioning journey requiring growth, movement, sacrifice, pain and transformation; religion locks its adherents in a cul-de-sac of belief, questioning not permitted, removing them — permanently — from any such quest. Those revelers at Asbury aren’t spiritual seekers, they are obeyers singing inside, for and about the cul-de-sac.
Worse still, each religious sects is divided and separated from each other, each believing it has the key truth. Beyond the safety of those cul-de-sacs of belief lies suspicion, distrust, conflict. Religion is inherently divisive. This is far from love. And religion is not even true, a fact that every believer easily recognizes about every other religion, every other “god,” except their own. Not love. Not truth. This is why the world can never come together over religion.
How is it that so many know the origin stories, but refuse to follow the example? You know, Jesus wasn’t a Christian. Buddha wasn’t a Buddhist. Muhammad wasn’t a Muslim. Abraham and Moses weren’t Jews. Mahavira wasn’t a Jain. Laozi wasn’t a Daoist. They did not arrive at their epiphanies, at their spiritual wisdom, at their communion with the sacred by praying, by being in a church, by being in a congregation or by believing what their parents or teacher or society told them to believe. They were spiritually transformed… alone… with nature. Jesus in the desert. Buddha beneath the bodhi tree. Mahavira under a tree. Abraham in the trees. Moses and a burning bush. Muhammad in a cave. Laozi beside a river. The list goes on and on.
Many indigenous cultures, living as part of nature not apart from it, know this, and so send their adolescents, alone, into the wild. Come back when you have learned something. Our modern societies have lost even that. The best we can offer is to gather in churches where we might get a “high,” but there is no true spirituality to be felt. The “love” that is there is shallow, humancentric, or worse, directed toward a non-existent deity. Or when we do traverse into nature it’s to battle her, best her, survive her, or perhaps just allow her to serve as a pretty backdrop to a lazy weekend punctuated by screaming kids, grilled hotdogs and tossed beer cans.
Why aren’t we sending our children into the wild, or at least going ourselves, out there alone, not to compete with or cohabitate with nature, but to allow the opportunity to swell with love for her? In that space, in that mindspace, other doors of perception for both head and heart open.
Spirituality seeks the truth, not myth, not dogma, not comfortable but false answers. What is this big universe? What are we to this big universe? How did we get here, of all places in that big universe? What is our purpose? What is the meaning of it all?
The ancients, including those who wrote the “sacred texts,” could only guess at these questions. They had no data to work with. They knew hardly a single scientific fact. They thought the world was flat. They thought stars were tiny lights. They had no concept of germs. They believed in unseen angels and demons and gods, and these became their answer to pretty much everything. Who could argue?
We can argue! Anyone who doesn’t, anyone who better trusts those ancient know-nothings about the most important questions of life, is a damned fool. We are so incredibly blessed to live at a time when science, divorced from religion though as yet still unspiritualized, has ferreted out if not complete answers a workable framework of knowledge that can finally take a stab at those perennial philosophical questions. We know enough now to know that no religious tale can remotely compare to what actually seems to have occurred to deliver us unto this time and place in this big, beautiful universe. The Greatest Story Ever Told does not belong to a religion, a time, a place, a person, it belongs to you and me and all other things that exist, now or ever before or ever in the future.
Even if most scientists don’t realize it yet, science is spiritual to the core. It is a sincere effort to know the truth. That’s a prime requisite for spirituality (but definitely not religion), as well. Every morsel of knowledge moves us a little closer to understanding the Source. The real Source. Yet the true quality of spirituality is love. This is entirely, intentionally, lacking in science. But should it remain so? Might the next phase of human evolution forward (yes, barring a conservative devolution backward) involve the spiritualization of science. Let’s take what we know from science — from the Big Bang to Evolution to quarks — and allow that information to swell into love within us. Conversely, let’s disallow any spiritual “tenet” or “dogma” that contravenes science.
Science proves the greatest spiritual concept ever discovered: Oneness. Mystics through the ages felt this, knew this, tried to decipher its key, attempted to communicate its existence. Indigenous peoples felt it, too. They invented allegorical tales to gather around. But they simply lacked the data. We have the data. Not all the data, yet, but enough to sketch our direct lineage, our kinship, not just with all life… but with every mote in the entire universe. The Source is sacred. Everything is a shard of the Source. Ergo, the world is sacred! Including us. Ergo, we are sacred! What does this bring to us? With the right mind, it brings love… not just love for our family or love for our village or nation or fellow man or even love for a “god,” but rather love for the ALL. The highest form of love possible. The highest of highs!
Western religion (not so much Eastern traditions), Judaism, Christianity and Islam reject the concept of Oneness. These religions perceive a stark, cosmic hierarchy of black and white dualities. Good is separate from evil. Heaven is superior and separate from Hell. Heaven/Hell are superior and separate from Earth. God is superior and separate from humans. Humans are superior and separate from the rest of nature. Male is superior and separate from female. It’s just a short hop from there to certain types of humans are superior and separate from others. It’s division after division after division. This worldview is not simply flat wrong; it is diabolical. It denies the holy kinship of all things. It severs the sacred red thread of all life. It is anti-spiritual.
On the other hand, what does science say? It tells us the Big Bang starts with a singularity. A Oneness. Everything that exists in the Universe came from that Oneness. Immediately after the “bang” there were no atoms, no elements, nothing solid, nothing wet, no air, no light, just the fundamental forces and a riot of particles. Hundreds of thousands of years passed. Still nothing (for all practical purposes). The particles of the universe were equally distributed, but not entirely. We have pictures of this stage: the cosmic microwave background. Slowly hydrogen atoms began to form. Hydrogen. The simplest element. One proton. One electron. Out of these would be built the universe. Everything from stars to galaxies to super clusters to planets like our gorgeous Mother Earth.
Evolution proves that on this planet all life is related. Everything alive today shares the same DNA. All life comes from a common ancestor. Again: Oneness. What could be more beautiful? More meaningful? More deserving of love? How can we ever feel empty, alone, worthless while honoring this resplendent web?
Evolution describes how no species was just poofed into existence by a capricious god, but evolved tiny step by tiny step from organic chemicals to living, conscious lifeform. Humans are not newcomers to this planet. We were here at the beginning of life, perhaps four billion years ago… except we were bacteria. Yes, our greatest-greatest grandmothers were pond scum. Whether you find that stunningly sublime, or disgusting, precisely measures how close or far you are from true spirituality. Those who stubbornly, stupidly, don’t accept the Theory of Evolution are also unknowingly renouncing the greatest achievement of humanity. Homo sapiens are the champions of evolution! Since cavorting as bacteria, we’ve been everything in between since: some kind of sponge, worms, fish, amphibians, reptiles, small mammals, larger mammals, monkeys. We never got stuck in a niche or rut. Sharks and cockroaches haven’t changed in tens of millions of years. Not us; we’ve been constantly moving on up. You like your arms and legs and stereoscopic color vision? You can thank the trees we lived in for millions of years. If humans are made “in the image of God,” God must also be from the trees. Finally we made it to apehood. We’re still apes, physiologically, to a large degree cognitively. But then, something happened. Maybe we got kicked out of the trees. Allegorically, this is when we were banished from Eden, the realm we were designed by evolution to inhabit. We wandered out on to the African savanna (yes, all humans are Africans — there’s Oneness again)… and eventually began making tools and messing around with fire and scavenging animals (now that was a downgrade our fruit and leaf-eating forebears would have frowned on). Concurrently our brains got larger and larger, and our “cultures” more and more complex. Soon enough we were making jewelry and laying such trinkets in the graves of our relatives. Some anthropologists say this is the beginning of religion.
There is wide disagreement on whether this Earthly experiment in higher ape-ish cognition has been a spectacular success or disastrous failure. On the plus side, we invented language (about a million times), produced outstanding art (though some argue nothing better than at Lascaux Cave 15,000 years ago), built some nifty structures, wrote some lovely music, came up with the printing press, discovered mathematics, then higher mathematics, then higher still mathematics, tamed electricity, learned how to fly, made movies, pondered quantum mechanics, visited the Moon, invented the internet (where you and I are meeting now), made astounding advances in medicine and medical technology (that is still largely unavailable to many people). Best of all, surely, has been science, which paved the way for many of these other achievements. On the minus side, there are the incessant wars, the weapons (including nuclear warheads aimed at your family at this very moment), the slavery, the torture, the murder, the thieving, the bullying, the lying, and, worst of all, the desecration, the annihilation, of the true sacred: the world.
Meanwhile, religion — writ large — had little to do with the science, has shown itself pathetic — at best — at morality, impotent to slow the crime (indeed often a full participant) and unwilling to jump to the defense of the truly sacred, the friggin’ Creation! — because, well, it has things it considers more sacred, false idols to “worship” and “praise,” such as gods and saviors, of which there is literally zero evidence and that the universe did not need to build itself.
Religion has been obsolete for centuries. But its billions of believers will be the last to understand, and have the potential to continue to terrorize the entire biosphere for many more centuries to come. If the future of religion in human culture is more of that “good, old-time” stuff, which is both severely wrong and severely divisive, humanity is likely doomed. We will end up a cosmic joke: the species so intelligent, it destroyed its home! Consider the state of the world today: the places that are the most religious are not where you would probably want to be. Imagine all of human culture committing to that direction! This, indeed, is the dream of billions of religionists who believe that the “End Times,” due any day now, will bring victory and vindication for their sect.
But what if, just what if… the future of “Spirituality, not Religion” turns instead toward the inculcation — just like in Sunday school today — of children to love the ALL. Not just your fellow humans, but the whole, wide, beautiful, creative, magnificent, benevolent, fragile, precious, meaningful, purposeful planet and all of our fellow Earthlings… each in their own way pursuing happiness on this dazzling jewel floating in a spiral galaxy which itself is dancing in the dark of Holy Oneness? What if every human was happy to live in a universe so creative, so benevolent that it somehow managed to create this paradise world for us to love and nurture and defend?
The end game for such a spirituality is a healthy, peaceful loving species of humans sustainably restoring and care-taking this planet and all our beloved, kindred Earthlings into many millennia to come, learning, growing and caring as we spiral around the Milky Way for another few billion years.
The end game for Christianity — that many are praying for — is war, pestilence, violence, apocalyptic destruction of this world, vicious judgment by the god who allowed Levi and Simeon to get away with murdering an entire city yet turned Lot’s wife to stone for looking back at her city, and the vast majority of humans who ever lived being thrown into hellfire… for, get this, eternity! What a “loving” plan! So their message of Jesus — love and forgiveness — was a bait and switch, a fraud! As for what will happen to everything else in this big universe… Christianity doesn’t specify. Why should it? The “worshippers” (the word should give you the willies) of the Creator don’t give a damn about the Creation.
You may say I’m a dreamer. But I’m not the only one.
Which world do you want to live in?
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No Hate.
No Violence.
All Life is Sacred.
The Universe is Magnificent & Beautiful.
Love is the Way.
Copyright 2023, Rusty Reid
