Traveling in Place

Heresies or Spiritual Awakening?

Not long ago, I posted about the “Spiritual But Not Religious,” or SBNR’s, the crowd of folks in America who believe in God, pray, and may even read the Bible, but don’t want anything to do with organized religion.  Somewhere between 14 and 18% of Americans currently fall into the category of “unaffiliated.”  That is, they choose not to identify with any particular religious body.

The growing phenomenon of the SBNR’s is the subject of a lot of scholarly discussion about the state of religion in America.  Two recent books, one by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat and another by religious commentator Diana Butler Bass, have advanced this discussion significantly.  Both Bass and Douthat are dependent on the findings recorded in American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us by Robert Putnam and David Campbell.  (I wrote about this important work soon after its publication in a post called “The Fascination and Frustration of American Religion.”  I suspect Putnam and Campbell’s research will continue to be foundational to any serious discussion of American religion for the next few decades.)

Douthat is a traditional Catholic who laments the loss of Christian orthodoxy in America.  In Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, he writes almost wistfully about the great Protestant-Catholic consensus of the 1950’s that not only resulted in a religious revival but also pushed forward significant social policy, most notably the Civil Rights movement.  Beginning in the late 1960’s, however, the mainline Protestant churches suffered huge losses in membership. 

Counting the Cost

On Sunday, the local newspaper featured a front-page article about Title IX, the landmark legislation Congress passed 40 years ago to prohibit gender discrimination in school athletics.  The story featured several local celebrities who played school sports as young teenagers.  So, for instance, we got to see a picture of the mayor of Syracuse playing field hockey when she was in high school and the provost of LeMoyne College at the free-throw line when she was a member of the Niagara University women’s basketball team.  Most student athletes today have probably never heard of Title IX.  That’s actually a testament to how wildly successful it has been.  Today, nobody would think of barring girls from sports. 

Reading the article sent me back to my own high school career.  I was never an athlete.  I was too thin and uncoordinated.  But my first foray into the public arena was all about sports.  I was a junior and the editor of the school newspaper.  Title IX had been the law of the land for six years, but like a lot of other federal legislation, it had not yet penetrated life in my small Southern hometown.  We had a girl’s basketball team that nobody but the players’ parents ever went to see.  In fact, I didn’t even know it existed until a member of the team told me I should write a story about how girls’ athletics were underfunded at our school.

I contacted the girls’ basketball coach and asked if I could interview her.  I had no idea what I was getting myself into.  My investigation led me to several interviews with female P.E. coaches (P.E. classes were gender-specific in those days) and some very tense interviews with the boys’ football and basketball coaches.  I read the text of Title IX and recognized immediately that our school system was in clear violation of the law.

Towards Multi-culturalism

Three important moments in American culture have recently drawn my attention because they all seem to be pointing in the same direction.

1. On May 17, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that, for the first time in our nation’s history, more minority children were born here than white non-Hispanic children.  In 2011, 50.4% of newborns were either Hispanic, black, Asian, or from some other minority group.

2. Just this week, results of a Pew Center study were released showing that Asian Americans have overtaken Hispanic Americans as the fastest-growing immigrant group in the U.S.  Tougher security along the Mexican border and a strengthening Mexican economy have resulted in a sharp drop in Hispanic immigration.  But this has not slowed the diversification of the U.S. population.  People from China and Korea are now pouring in from the West.  Today, the total U.S. population includes 197.5 million non-Hispanic whites (63.3%), 52 million Hispanics (16.7%), 38.3 million blacks (12.3%), and 18.2 million Asians (5.8%).

3. On Tuesday, the Southern Baptist Convention, formed in 1845 in a split with northern Baptists over slavery, elected its first black President, Rev. Fred Luter, pastor of the Franklin Avenue Baptist Church in the lower ninth ward of New Orleans.  Before hurricane Katrina, Franklin Avenue boasted 8,000 members.  The storm destroyed their building and emptied the lower ninth ward of residents.  The church declined to a membership of 65.  But since then, Luten has overseen the reconstruction of the building and the resurrection of his congregation, which is now 5,000 members strong. 

A Few Thoughts About Father's Day

On the second Sunday of May in 1909, while attending church with her family in Spokane, Washington, Sonora Smart heard a sermon extolling the virtues of motherhood.  (Mother’s Day had just become a national, though unofficial, observance.)  Sonora’s mother had died years earlier while giving birth to her sixth child, and Sonora and her father were raising her siblings.  She adored her father and felt he was slighted by the fact that Americans were celebrating mothers but not fathers.  So she decided to do something about it.

She approached the Spokane ministerial alliance and proposed a local “father’s day” on June 5, her father’s birthday.  The ministers endorsed her proposal, but for some reason chose the third Sunday of June for the observance.  The idea quickly spread across the country.  President Woodrow Wilson even came to Spokane in 1916 to participate in the Father’s Day celebration.  Lyndon Johnson was the first president to sign a proclamation officially declaring Father’s Day in 1965, and President Richard Nixon established a permanent observance in 1972.

So what do we learn from this history?  Face it, Dads.  Father’s Day is an afterthought, a pale copy of Mother’s Day.  Had Sonora Smart (who later married

Leading, Following, and Getting Out of the Way

Remember Lee Iacocca, the iconic leader of the Chrysler Corporation who brought the failing car company back from the brink?  “In this business,” he told America in a series of memorable TV commercials, “you either lead, follow, or get out of the way.”  That line is often attributed to Thomas Paine, though no hard evidence exists that the author of Common Sense ever said it.  It’s also been credited to General George Patton.  More recently, it’s been the basis of a favorite applause line for presidential candidate Mitt Romney.  It’s a quintessentially American aphorism – succinct, catchy, and exuding a sort of swashbuckling strength. 

“Lead, follow, or get out of the way” has been knocking around in my head the last couple of days, not as inspiration but as a point of reflection about what I do.  The line is usually invoked to suggest that “leaders” are strong, “followers” are weak, and those who “get out of the way” are irrelevant.  That characterization might fit in some professions, but not mine.  Being a pastor requires me to do all three.  In order to be effective, I need to know when to lead, when to follow, and when to get out of the way.

Love Your Neighborhood

“Love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18). 

Once, a scholar of the Law of Moses asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?”  Jesus responded with the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), challenging this student of the Bible to broaden his understanding of neighbor to include more than just the members of his tribe or his fellow Israelites.  His neighbor was anyone in a position to help or be helped.  By this definition, all people are potentially our neighbors.

Inspired by Jesus’ parable, Christian preachers for two millennia have been teaching their congregations that our “neighbors” are more than the people who live next door to us.  They include more than the residents of our neighborhoods.  Neighbor transcends nationality and ethnicity.  Christ leads us to embrace all of humanity as our neighbors.

I learned this global understanding of neighbor when I was growing up in a small town with a cohesive community.  In that culture, Christianity served the important purpose of discouraging provincialism.  My faith taught me that the world God loves was a lot bigger than my hometown.  But today, we live in a very different environment.  Close-knit neighborhoods are the exceptions rather than the rule.  Provincialism is no longer our problem.  Instead, too many of us have lost any sense of place or community.

Engaging the SBNR's

I meet them at funerals, weddings, and sometimes they visit my church.  They are the “SBNR’s” – the Spiritual But Not Religious – who have now gained enough notoriety to have their own acronym and be treated with respect as a quantifiable segment of the American public.

Those of us who have been around church all our lives are well acquainted with SBNR’s, though they haven’t always been referred to in this way.  In an earlier generation, they were best known for the confession, “I don’t have to go to church in order to be a good Christian.”  They have explained to many a pastor that they “experience God more in the woods than by sitting in church.”  Some of them are former churchgoers who have been burned by a domineering pastor or an exclusionary congregation.  Most of them, however, only know about organized Christianity from a distance and have little interest in getting more information. 

Polling data indicates that a growing segment of America may be classified as SBNR’s.  Rather than identify with any particular religious tradition, they like to refer to themselves as “unaffiliated,” which is the fastest-growing religious category in our country, now claiming upwards of 15% of the population.  So far as I know, no one has determined how many of the unaffiliated are atheists or unspiritual agnostics and how many would describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” but my gut and experience tell me that the vast majority are the latter.