> On one hand, those who might have joined and become active in liberal
> faith communities (had they been born earlier) are increasingly choosing
> "no religion":
[...]
> On the other hand, liberal faiths, which sharply limit their
> epistemological claims to coexist with science and restrain their
> socio-political ambitions within the scope of political liberalism, are
> hardly distinguishable from secular humanism in practice -- hence they
> fail to attract those who want religion in a robust sense (without being
> able to intellectually satisfy "atheists, agnostics, humanists,
> secularists and those who do not identify with any religion" enough to
> lead them to join them) .
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Exactly right. Liberal religion represents the passage from the the
traditional god-fearing superstitious beliefs associated with insular rural
societies to the attenuated "reform" kind trying to reach an accomodation
with modern urban cosmopolitain society. It's an historical way station to
unequivocal secularism - or so I like to think.
It's especially pronounced among professionals of our generation, the first to experience post-secondary education on a mass scale. They inherited the religious and ethnic identities of their parents but began to shed the prejudicial and irrational features of each when they became young adults exposed to much wider constituencies of people and currents of thought. However, they retain a certain nostalgia for the old religious holidays like Christmas and Passover and (latterly) Ramadan which they associate with warm family times and community, and define their attachment to the old rituals in cultural and intellectual rather than religious terms. God and regular church-going is usually absent from this equation. We've known more than a few people, who still describe themselves as athiests or agnostics and who hadn't entered a church or synagogue since their teenage years, who resubscribed to more benign reform congregations when they had kids, so their kids should "belong" and shouldn't miss out on the warmth and family spirit of the holidays they remembered from their own childhood. It was a substitute for the left-wing schools and camps to which they would have sent their kids had the left survived and grown.
Their kids have since moved on to universities and jobs, and neither the parents nor the kids have retained their ties to these pallid reform institutions, so it's not surprising their numbers are going down. Today's young people don't seem to have the same need to maintain a religious attachment, or when they do, they embrace the most uncompromising faiths in reaction to the alienation they experience under capitalism in the same assertive way we gravitated to radical politics - not that I would put an equal sign between the two choices.
MG