> Copyright 2005 D. Patrick Miller
>
> SPIRITUALITY UP, RELIGION DOWN IN AMERICA
>
> It may come as a shock to many Americans to learn that the number of
> Christians in our country is steadily declining -- and that
> evangelical Christians in particular represent only 7% of the
> populace, with no increase in their numbers over the last decade.
> Meanwhile, a full third of American adults now say they are 'spiritual
> but not religious.' What does that mean exactly? And why aren't these
> numbers making news?
Well, mostly I think this is good news, though I wonder how and even whether it translates politically.
The trend is not surprising:
1. The demographics support it. As people get older and realize that you can't take it with you, that you are increasingly less able to be a perfect object, that what makes you happiest has nothing to do with most of the material crap you slave to amass -- "spirituality" beckons. On the negative side: It's something else to be concerned with, to make "progress" with, to be win at, to amass. I'm not saying it's just another form of greed; I'm just saying it could be. I notice, at any rate, that alternative life-style mags are mushrooming. Minimalist, simple, calm, restorative, plain, mindful, reflective....these are the new magic words. It could fizzle into another form of consumption -- but I don't think so.
2. Because the hunger is real. Which dovetails into another aspect of the zeitgeist: the inevitable weariness with and reaction against the "I got mine" era, at the end of which, we are more isolated, fragmented, exhausted, poisoned, sick, and weak than before. People may not be able to understand why this has happened but they feel it. After the great cultural upheaval, the wars, and the revolutions of the sixties (which includes half the seventies), folks were exhausted, and then the Reagan/Thatcher revolution swept over everything -- but it is getting thinner and thinner, bubblier and bubblier, and it will probably devolve into a great economic and natural disaster. It's just a question of when. I think people feel this. I remember reading Karl Kautsky's
"Foundations of Christianty" -- a really good book -- and feeling a spasm of recognition when he describes Christian asceticism being shaped by the excesses of the late Roman empire -- the greed, the arrogance, the vomitoriums, the wholesale carnage, the delusions of grandeur. Bush as a post modern Caligula? Why not?
3. The way this is now unfolding at the level of the individual is not in itself bad news. It's good that people want to think things through for themselves; it's good that they want to pay attention; it's good that they want to stay sane and alert rather than buy into some mass-marketed form of evangelical hypnosis. It's bad that they're not organized and I don't think the Democrats will be the ones who will be able to organize them.
We'll see.
Joanna