That “more than 4 in 10 Americans have switched their religious affiliation since childhood or dropped out of any formal religious group” is more “a mark of the health of American religion” than of its sickness.
1.....In the history of our land of freedom, religion is one of the social currents that ebb and flow. While Yale was founded primarily to produce Christian ministers, the student body of the year 1800 had not even one professing Christian. But after a series of “awakenings,” before century’s end Yale and America were overwhelmingly Christian. Today, dropping “out of any formal religious group” is the most noticeable phenomenon. Tomorrow?
2.....A philosophy is a way of seeing the world; a person may become familiar with a number of philosophies. But a religion is a way of seeing and living in the world: how a person lives is single, and its depth is that person’s religion. / Every religion appeals for converts as the best way to live. / A society open to religious conversion potentially advantages every religion. / Accordingly, Americans’ freedom to make religious choices is “a mark of the health of American religion” and of American society.
3.....The diametrical of this radical freedom in America is Islam’s radical unfreedom. For conversion out of Islam, the Qur’an threatens the ultimate punishment, death. Most American Arabs are Christians. But as Islam grows in America, no one can predict how this radical difference will be resolved.
4.....An ironic side-benefit of this increased religious mobility in America is its effect on an old argument that no religion can be the true one or even the most true one: since almost everybody dies in their birth-religion, the true or truest religion can be available only to a few. Therefore (the argument went), no religion can claim to be the only true or the truest religion. (Of course in most of the world, religious mobility remains rare.)
5.....In his 800-page magisterial “A Secular Age,” Charles Taylor details a massive cultural reason for the present attractiveness of the secular mentality and consequent tendency to choose churchlessness. Not just with the Enlightenment, but as early as the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, there was a shifting away from God-centeredness (theocentricity) to humanity-centeredness (“the anthropocentric shift”).
6.....Scientism (the belief that the only real knowledge is scientific knowledge) intensifies this shift from God-and-religion to humanity-and-secularism by its own philosophical base, namely, materialism. / Give a little boy a hammer, and he looks around for something to hit. Give adults (scientists) commensurability, and they look around for something to measure: what is “real” is what is measurable, which is matter and its spacetime extensions. / Science learned so much from all that measuring and testing that the resulting technological world easily seduces to the false conclusion that the commensurable sets the limits on “reality” and “truth.” / To avoid being seduced, one need only to observe (1) that like the little boy’s hammer, commensurability is only one tool, and (2) that no measuring tool is applicable to most human values.
7.....Public-school factors pushing Americans into secularistic churchlessness: (1) the evolutionism (bio-scientism) taught in our public schools, and (2) the fact that for the past 45 years, teacher-led prayer and devotional Bible-reading have been forbidden. The effect is that our schools are reverse madrasaas, reason excluding faith.
8.....9/11 was only the most dramatic evidence of the fragility of our technological world and of the religion (scientistic secularism) and philosophy (materialism) emergent with it. Stay tuned for “awakenings.”
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