In a recent work on the battle of Musa Qala Wadi in southern Afghanistan, the author told of American soldiers driven by the “preaching of evangelical padres who viewed Afghanistan as a kind of American jihad against Godless heathen.” Such a tone from the ministers of the Church sounds eerily reminiscent of the fervor surrounding the evangelical support of the first World War. It was a fervor so intense and widespread that even men like Billy Sunday and Harry Emerson Fosdick found common cause in calling the Church to support the war. Yet in the end, Fosdick and many others came to question their initial support.

As today’s armed forces become more religiously diverse, and as the moral underpinnings of traditional strategies are questioned, the Church will find its traditional message of “Dues vuelt” no longer fully accepted. Perhaps these events and the questions naturally arising from reflections on ten years of war will prompt the Church to rethink its relationship to society and war. A healthy skepticism of political power and a return to rigorous ethical decision making instead of patriotic jingoism will greatly aid the Church in reevaluating its past and preparing a clearer message for the conflicts of the future. Perhaps only then will the Church be able to focus itself on the message that “He shall judge between many peoples, and shall decide for strong nations far away; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

Filed under: Essays ]]> http://religioninamerica.org/2011/12/11/a-season-of-remembrance/feed/ 2 requiredtestblog Wreath at Arlington http://religioninamerica.org/2011/06/15/the-rapture-index-how-the-hermeneutics-of-rapture-predictions-are-modern/ http://religioninamerica.org/2011/06/15/the-rapture-index-how-the-hermeneutics-of-rapture-predictions-are-modern/#comments Thu, 16 Jun 2011 02:34:43 +0000 Lincoln Mullen http://religioninamerica.org/?p=1181 ]]>

There are a whole host of adjectives used to describe fundamentalist religion: backwards, anti-modern, reactionary, unscientific, ante-Diluvian.* The idea behind all of those descriptions is that fundamentalist religions have fallen off the train of progress. It’s a whiggish notion that religion, like society and politics, is advancing to greater freedom, rationality, and liberality thanks to science; consequently, fundamentalist religions that don’t share those goals are backwards, and will fade away in time.

It’s also a notion that is wrong.

As George Marsden points out in his influential book Fundamentalism and American Culture (reviewed here), the prediction that fundamentalist Christianity will die out in America is as old as fundamentalism itself, which has managed to outlive its predicted demise. So far from being anti-modern, fundamentalism is a modern form of religion.

Marsden argues for fundamentalism’s debt to modern, scientific ways of thinking in several ways, but the argument most relevant to recent events concerns hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is the set of principles by which one interprets Scripture. In the recent furor over Harold Camping and his predictions of a date for the rapture, the question that has not been much asked is how he went about pulling a precise date out of obscure scriptures.

My point, borrowing from Marsden, is that the hermeneutics of Camping and his ilk are compatible with, even indebted to, modern ways of thinking. To be sure, calculating a date for the end of the world is a practice old enough to be condemned in the Talmud. But the methods of Camping et al. are a peculiarly modern take on an ancient tradition.

Witness the Rapture Index, a website that tracks the signs of the times indicating the end of the world. The website lists a series of categories, such as inflation and ecumenism, then tracks whether they are getting better or worse. The aggregate of those numbers serves as index, like the Dow Jones or S&P500, indicating whether the end is drawing nigh. You’ll notice that the Rapture Index, unlike the stock market, is just off the all-time high.

The categories for the Rapture Index have been derived from the inductive, scientific study of the Bible (cf Marsden, p. 60). The index’s creator has read the Bible as a set of proof texts that speak about the end of the world. Then, its creator has examined and quantified the natural world, like a scientist or technocrat. The findings are being distributed on the Internet. And the findings bear the form and authority of a stock market index, a quasi-scientific way of conceiving of the economy. In an age of stock market collapses and government bailouts, what could be more modern?

* Well, maybe not “ante-Diluvian” and certainly not “anti-Diluvian.”

The chaplaincy is also being stretched further as minority groups compete for equal recognition alongside the traditional triumvirate of Judaism, Protestantism, and Catholicism.  The recent addition of the first Buddhist chaplain and the push for atheistic chaplains also challenges the narrative of US civil religion as conceptualized in the Judeo-Christian framework. While the military chaplaincy has survived several legal actions calling for its disbandment, these changes in social structures and the growth of numerous religious identities across the forces provide the institution with its greatest challenge yet.  As seen in the changes in the chaplain crest, the corps is searching for a more nondescript way of visualizing itself and an identity that embraces the growing religious diversity of the United States. The corps’ responses to these challenges over the next few  years should be closely watched by all observers of the nation’s rapidly shifting religious landscape.

It bears pointing out that homosexuality and gay marriage are two distinct, though commonly conflated, issues. First, evangelicals must determine whether homosexuality is a sin and, second, whether that means that the state should ban homosexual marriages. The second  position does not necessarily follow from the first. Few evangelicals, Christian Reconstructionists excepted, believe that the state should enforce all biblical standards of behavior. It is possible to believe that a behavior is wrong but not support its criminalization. It’s hard to imagine modern laws criminalizing blasphemy, adultery, or poor attendance at church (all of which were penalized in Puritan New England), but other state-enforced, evangelical-supported moral norms remain, like strict bans on prostitution, drugs, and, until 2003′s Lawrence v. Texas, homosexuality. Among evangelicals, there are two categories of immoral behaviors: those which are considered wrong and should be banned by the state and those which are wrong but not deserving of state condemnation.

Interestingly, homosexuality appears to be shifting from the first category to the second, but gay marriage is not. For example, John Piper, a popular conservative evangelical author and the pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, recently wrote a post which criticized the idea of gay marriage. Piper offers a traditional theological critique of homosexuality, citing Romans 1:25-27 and I Corinthians 6:9. Yet, he’s not a theonomist; he acknowledges that not all sins should be legally prevented, including pornography and even homosexuality itself, but he argues that the legal significance of marriage (tied to inheritance, taxes, and the like) requires a clear statutory definition. If gay marriage is codified, society will have institutionalized and sanctioned homosexuality. He writes, “The issue is not whether we block a sinful behavior, but whether we imbed [sic] it in our laws.” Piper would have the state permit homosexuality but ban gay marriage. His views represent the majority opinion among American evangelicals.

However, that kind of compromise does not satisfy other evangelicals. If you remember the statistics I mentioned earlier, a significant minority of evangelicals believe homosexuality to be wrong and oppose gay marriage but support civil unions as an alternative. Some left-leaning evangelicals, like Sojourners and its prominent founder Jim Wallis, have supported homosexual civil unions for some time. This does not make Sojourners or Wallis unqualified supporters of homosexuality. Recently the organization has been criticized by LGBT activists for not accepting homosexuality in full and, like Piper, they believe that marriage is foundational to American society and thus oppose homosexual marriage. Yet they believe that excluding homosexual citizens from the various civil, legal, and financial benefits which are only given to married people is a violation of homosexuals’ equality under the law with heterosexuals. Their solution is civil unions, which offer the benefits attached to marriage without the name itself. Speaking broadly, left-leaning evangelicals have lined up behind Wallis while right-leaning evangelicals, like Piper, oppose both civil unions and gay marriage. Until recently, support for civil unions appeared to be just another political litmus test between the two factions, an intractable issue with clear lines of division.

Nevertheless, a new option for evangelicals has emerged. Just this month, Thomas Kidd, a religious historian at Baylor University and a Southern Baptist, wrote a post for Patheos entitled, “Why Churches Should Stop Performing Marriages.” Kidd argues that Americans should extend the separation of church and state to marriage. He writes:

State-defined but church-performed marriage is a relic of medieval Christendom, or the idea that the functions of the church and of the state closely overlap. Some Protestant reformers, including the early Puritan founders of New England, rejected this intermingling of church and state. They saw marriage as an exclusively civil rite, and they refused to perform church weddings at all.

Yet today, most evangelical ministers happily serve as civil functionaries when they recite the words, “By the power invested in me by the state of…”. Kidd believes that this intermingling encourages a “harmful confusion” and leads “many people who otherwise make no serious pretentions to faith [to] still think that their marriage should be consecrated in a church with pews and stained glass.” This incentivizes church marriages for nominally religious couples who want the legal and financial benefits of marriage without having to seriously commit to a church. Kidd believes that evangelicals should stop “fighting to make the government defend a biblical view of marriage.” It’s “a losing battle precisely because the government can’t play the role of the church.” Evangelical ministers should perform matrimonies and leave marriage to the civil authorities. Marriage has become a cheap imitation of the real thing, a mishmash of tax writeoffs and shallow religiosity.

It’s plausible that Kidd’s opinion is informed by his expertise in the history of evangelicals during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Revolutionary America and during the Early Republic, many evangelicals, like Baptist minister John Leland, supported constitutional disestablishment at both the federal and state levels. Leland was not fond of the pre-Revolutionary system of established churches  in which a denomination (predominately the Congregationalists and Episcopalians) received a religious monopoly from the state while dissenting denominations (mostly evangelical groups like the Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians) were discouraged or even actively persecuted. Evangelicals allied themselves with humanist intellectuals like Thomas Jefferson and banned religious tests in the federal constitution and then defeated establishment state by state (Massachusetts was the last to topple in 1833).

Marriage, however, was not disestablished and, during the nineteenth and especially the twentieth centuries, the state attached a host of legal and financial privileges to the institution. Oddly enough, the collapse of the institution of marriage in the US came at the same time that marriage enjoyed its greatest level of formal government support. The state had instituted tax policies to try and encourage strong marriages but these incentives had little or even an adverse effect. State support may have vitiated rather than invigorated marriage.

Does that mean that removing state support for marriage might actually strengthen the institution of marriage? Although it may seem counterintuitive to modern day evangelicals,  removing state support for marriage might do just that. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, both prominent sociologists of religion, have argued extensively (see their brilliant book The Churching of America) that a religious free marketplace encourages vitality, innovation, and growth while state-protected religious monopolies cause stagnation, apathy, and decline. Indeed, contrary to the claims of Christian nationalists like David Barton, America has become steadily more rather than less religious over the past three hundred years. Finke and Stark argue that America’s exceptional religiosity among developed nations is a direct consequence of disestablishing religion during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

By disestablishing marriage–severing the connection between state and church–might it also become a more meaningful and vital institution? Perhaps it’s still beyond the Pale of the evangelical imagination, but Kidd is just the latest in a long line of evangelicals to suggest an extension of the separation of church and state. The state can no more create healthy, biblical marriages than it can sustain healthy, biblical churches. Furthermore, if Finke and Stark’s “religious economies model” is any indication, disestablishing marriage may have a beneficial effect on the institution itself. People would no longer seek nominal marriages in order to gain legal and financial benefits. Matrimony would become a more exclusively religious institution and marriage a civil one.

Even more pragmatically, embracing the disestablishment of church and state in marriage could prevent a harmful anti-evangelical backlash in the future. If polling data is any indication, support for gay marriage has been steadily increasing and skews young and educated. If evangelicals continue to be the strongest opponents of gay marriage, they could one day find themselves in the shoes of their counterparts in Canada, where preachers are barred from speaking critically of homosexuality or gay marriage because ministers are representatives of both state and church.

John Leland’s 1776 warning of the consequences of a state-supported clergy remains timely:

“No man or set of Men are entitled to exclusive or separate Emoluments or Privileges from the Community but in consideration of Public Services.  If, therefore, the State provides a Support for Preachers of the Gospel, and they receive it in Consideration of their Services, they must certainly when they preach, act as Officers of the State and ought to be accountable thereto for their Conduct. . . . the Consequence of this is, that those whom the state employs in its Service, it has a right to regulate and dictate to; it may judge and determine who shall preach; when and where they shall preach.  The mutual obligations between Preachers and Societies they belong to . . . must evidently be weakened — Yea, farewell to the last Article of the Bill of Rights! [The fourth article of the Virginia Declaration of Rights adopted in 1776].  Farewel (sic) to “the free exercise of Religion!”

One of those questions is what is happening with the demography of world religions. The question how many people practice which religions and where, and how that’s changing, is probably the most important question for students of contemporary religion—and for practitioners of religion too. For world Christianity, a large and fascinating literature has been published in the past decade or so, books such as Lamin O. Sanneh’s Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity and Whose Religion Is Christianity?: The Gospel Beyond the West, Philip Jenkins’s The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity and The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South, Mark Noll’s The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects a Global Faith, Lian Xi’s Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China, the collection edited by Lamin Sanneh and Joel Carpenter titled The Changing Face of Christianity: Africa, the West, and the World, and the 2001 edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia. Besides books, there is a new set of scholarly institutions for the study of world Christianity, such as Calvin College’s Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity, book series at Oxford University Press and Baylor University Press, and initiatives within the Conference on Faith and History to connect scholars of Christianity within the United States and Latin America.

What’s the big deal? Here are some numbers: In 1950, 80 percent of Christians lived in Europe or North America, but in 2005 a majority lived in the southern hemisphere. In 1900 Africa was home to 10 million Christians, but in 2000 it was home to 360 million Christians, who are now the continent’s religious majority. In 1900 there were 80 thousand Protestants in China; today there are 50 million Chinese Protestants and 17 million Chinese Catholics. Those changes are, for rapidity and magnitude, the most significant changes ever in the demography of any religion. In the estimation of Philip Jenkins, a leading scholar of this shift, “The era of Western Christianity has passed within our lifetimes, and the day of Southern Christianity is dawning.”

Over the next few weeks or months I plan to write a series of posts about digging into the demographic data on world religions. At Religion in America we’ve looked at quantitative studies of religion before, most notably in posts on declines in religion, the United States as a religious outlier, and on American denominations and income. What will make this series different is that I want to start from the beginning with raw data on religion from the Association of Religion Data Archives. (Not the very beginning, though, since others will have gathered and curated the data.) And I want to be explicit about what I’m learning both about quantitative methods such as demography and statistics and about digital humanities tools like R, SPSS, and maybe GIS. Finally, I want to produce original charts and graphs from ARDA data about religion in America and around the world. Each post will have a heavy methodological component (skip it if you want), but it will also have a historical point as well.

The next post will be about gathering the datasets and learning the analytical tools, with some data about worldwide religious adherence to whet your appetite for what’s to come.

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* For the figures cited, see Lamin O. Sanneh, Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), xx; Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 4; Lian Xi, Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). Estimates of the number of Christians in Africa and China vary widely, but the numbers cited are sober, middle-range estimates; even lower-bound estimates are within the same order of magnitude. See also David B. Barrett, George Thomas Kurian, and Todd M. Johnson, eds., World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). The quotation is from Jenkins, Next Christendom, 3.