When Dietrich Bonhoeffer was imprisoned by the Nazi's, he wrote many letters that were later published as Letters and Papers from Prison.  In some of these letters he advanced an idea that he called "religionless Christianity."

The idea has taken on several lives of its own, thanks in part to the fact that Bonhoeffer isn't clear as to what he means by the term and he was executed before the end of World War 2.  Some have taken his thought in the direction of Christian atheism, others have believed that he was looking ahead to a time like our own when religious institutions would diminish and Christians would have to do without institutional church structures to remain followers of Christ.

In The Politics of Redemption, Adam Kotsko advances an intriguing thesis regarding what Bonhoeffer means.  Kotsko writes that Bonhoeffer's definition of religion is "idiosyncratic and narrow" and in a counter-intuitive sense for most of us.  On the basis of the rest of his prison writings, Kotsko makes the claim that Bonhoeffer uses the term "religion" to refer to individualism and metaphysics.

In terms of individualistic accounts of salvation Bonhoeffer writes: "Hasn't the individualistic question about personal salvation almost completely left us all?"  Obviously Bonhoeffer doesn't traffic in the same circles I do (I know plenty of people who think individualistically about salvation) but I resonate with his point.  The idea of salvation as a transaction between an individual and God (who is also an individual) is an idea that I find difficult to hold onto in light of the story of Jesus and the church.  Salvation brings us into new relationships with God and with others.

As to metaphysics, Bonhoeffer goes on to write about "the world beyond."  Bonhoeffer wants a world focused faith:  "What is above this world is, in the gospel, intended to exist for this world.  I mean that, not in the anthropocentric sense of liberal, mystic, pietistic ethical theology, but in the biblical sense of the creation and of the  incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ."

So in Bonhoeffer's religion, individuals are saved from the world in favor of the beyond.  As Kostko puts it: "it seems fair to characterize [religion] as essentially the drama of the soul with its God, a drama for which everything else falls into indifference."

Kotsko goes on to show how this explains Bonhoeffer's critiques of both Bultmann and Barth.  Bultmann is too concerned with the individual soul of the believer.  Barth is too caught up in God as an individual.  But that is for another post (God willing).

If Kotsko is right then the last thing that Bonhoeffer sees is Christianity becoming individuals practicing their faith apart from a community.  Instead, Bonhoeffer is calling for people to practice faith in community (which is different from individuals attending a church service).  And Bonhoeffer's practice is concerned with people in this world and the world itself.  Oddly enough, Bonhoeffer's "religionless" has much in common with "religion" according to the book of James:  "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world."

"When journalists assess religious change in the early twenty-first century, they talk about the growth of the "spiritual but not religious" and the new atheists.  However, the numbers of Americans claiming those labels have been relatively stable in the last decade [1999-2009]. The real switch ha been among those people who once understood themselves to be 'religious only' and who now are heading toward a new self-understanding and public expression--a longing, perhaps--to be "spiritual and religious."
  Christianity After Religion p. 94

In 1999 the Gallup polled Americans on whether they considered themselves to be spiritual or religious.

Here are the results:
    Spiritual only                           30%
    Religious only                          54%
    Both spiritual & religious            6%
    Neither spiritual nor religious      9%

The first and fourth categories garnered most of the news over the next decade.   A renewed spat of books on atheism by the "four horsemen of atheism"* or the "new atheists" were selling well with their proclamation that religion was on its way out.  Surely atheism was on the rise and the last category was growing.  The "spiritual only" category were people who wouldn't darken the doors of a church and the large number looked like another bad sign for churches and religion.

However, Diana Butler Bass draws attention to a statistic in a follow-up survey, a decade later.  In 2009 Princeton Survey Research asked the question again.

Here are the results:
   Spiritual only                          30%
   Religious only                           9%
   Both spiritual & religious         48%
   Neither spiritual nor religious     9%

What has happened?  The spiritual but not religious and the neither spiritual nor religious look the same in 1999 and 2009.  The change is in how, apparently, religious people are now embracing spirituality.

Bass offers several explanations for what happened: the demographic shift as older "religious only" people were replaced by younger ones who weren't afraid of the "s" word; the widening in meaning of the word spirituality from its entanglement with New Age thought in the 1990's and the possibility that the questions asked were different enough to elicit different answers.  She even goes so far to suggest that the "horrible decade" beginning with the religious fundamentalist attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001 made the religious seek new ways to explain their faith.  For example: "I'm a spiritual person who happens to go to church."

All of these play a part, I am sure.  But I have noticed in my church as well as in my own life, more appreciation and even longing for the spiritual even if we don't exactly know how to go about becoming spiritual.

I remember interviewing at several churches in 2004 where I was told one of the things they hoped the next pastor could do was to help the church board grow to be spiritual leaders.  I asked them what they meant.  They didn't really know except that it sounded right.  I didn't know either.  O sure, I knew about prayer and Bible study, confession and communion but I wasn't sure how we could be spiritual leaders.  I still don't have the final answer but as I look back on my life and practices since 2004 I see that I have changed.  My quest for spirituality has changed my life, my ministry and even my religion.

Thanks to Christianity After Religion I've been able to look back and see some changes in my life.  Next week I promise to share some changes with you.


*The four horsemen are Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. Not everyone in the neither spiritual nor religious is an atheist, of course (based on other polls perhaps only 30% in this category would call themselves atheists).

Christianity After Religion is infuriating in places.  Bass aims to disorient us  in order to reorient us.  I know I was ready to throw it down on several occasions and figuratively had to hold my nose as I read page after page and seethed.

But the reading was worth it.

My anger emerged around page 18 when Bass began to report the sense of many today that the church is irrelevant, hypocritical and not worth the time of day and it ended around page 64.  To illustrate, let's look at Bass's example of a non-churchgoer who she calls "Ellen."  Bass's Ellen is the 21st century replacement for "Sheila."

"Sheila" was the face of late 20th century individualistic spirituality in Robert Bellah's influential 1985 book Habits of the Heart.  Sheila had invented her own religion "Sheilaism" which was based on what seemed right to her: loving yourself and being gentle to yourself, taking care of one another. Bellah saw in Sheila the potential that America could have 220 million religions.

Bass suggests that things are different in the early 21st century and to illustrate that change she introduces us to Ellen.  Ellen has been Roman Catholic, Mainline Protestant and Conservative as well.  Every church she has been part of has not met her specifications: too authoritarian or argumentative or not enough service to the poor.  So Ellen has stopped going to church.

Ellen touched a raw nerve in me.  Yes, it is true that many people in church don't do a lot for their neighbors. Yes it is true that church people argue about all sorts of silly stuff.  Yes it is true that we have a legacy (and in many cases a continuing one) of racism, patriarchy, homophobia and paying lip service to the words of Jesus.  But at the same time, there are churches out there where people are trying to love Jesus and serve their neighbors.  There are churches out there where people are accepted for who they are and not judged and I happen to think I attend one of them.

But, I also know that my church and I have a long way to go.  None of us is serving at the same level as Jesus.  Sometimes we argue with each other and even belittle one another.  We differ as to exactly what the freedom of the gospel means.  And sometimes when I hear criticisms like Ellen's I start to wonder what, if anything we can do right.  I get defensive, I think of rejoinders.  Here's one:  No one in my church follows Jesus as well as I do.  Heck, my ideal self is a pretty darn good follower of Jesus.  But then when my family and close friends point out the ways my true self falls far short of the ideal self that occupies my mind's eye... Well, I'm just another beggar.  I'm not any better than the others.  And I suspect that her aspirations aside, Ellen in practice fits right in with us church people.

At bottom, I suspect my real beef with the Ellen's of the world is that I too am aware of the church's limitations but I still suck it up and go.  Why can't Ellen grow up and sit her rear in a pew?

But Diana Butler Bass wants me to get past this understandable reaction.  She wants me to recognize that Ellen is not Sheila.  Ellen's problem isn't that she thinks church is too demanding but that it isn't demanding enough.  Ellen doesn't walk away from church because she's an individualist (like Sheila)  but because she wants a better community.  Bass wants churchgoers like me to notice the dissatisfaction and even anger that is felt by many (but by no means all) of the non-churchgoers in our world.  Oddly enough, I even connect with it!

The truth is, Bass is aware of the fact that Ellen's portrayal of Christianity does not hold for many congregations.  Nevertheless, until we greet the Ellen's of the world with something different from defensiveness, we won't have a prayer.  All we have is the sense that the world is going to "Ellen a handbasket" and the church is toast.

I'm glad I persisted in reading through pages 18-62 of Christianity After Religion.   It felt like a slap in the face but I am more ready to ask questions of the many folks I know who quickly say "no thank you" to any invitation to church but are still looking for ways to connect with God and even a community.  I'm looking forward to asking people questions about how they see spirituality, religion and church.  After all, as Bass points out, one of the untold stories of religion in the early 21st century is the large number of folks who have gone from being "religious only" to "spiritual and religious."  That is the topic for my next post. 

As a college bound Senior in the mid-1980's, I remember telling youth leaders and adult friends that I wanted to study philosophy.  The common reaction I heard that summer was "be careful."  There was fear I would lose my faith.  Ironically, many counselled me to take a degree in English Literature instead.  At the time I went to college Christian philosophy was beginning to flourish again in American Universities:  UCLA had Bob and Marilyn McCord Adams, Notre Dame's Alvin Plantinga was a modal logician worth reckoning with, Nicholas Wolterstorff from Calvin was doing work that would later get him a chair at Yale and George Marsden was at Michigan.  All were doing philosophy as Christians and their work was fresh, relevent and available in  the journal Faith and Philosophy and on the shelves in the library.  As far as I could tell, the same couldn't be said for Christian literature and literary criticism at the time.  Yes, we could look back to C.S. Lewis and Tolkien and my faith was saved again and again by Flannery O'Connor but the thing is, these were all dead authors and critics!

The English department challenged my faith far more than the philosophy department (I majored in English, minored in philosophy)!  At Berkeley the English department had a postmodern bent but the philosophy department was Anglo-analytic.  I remember well the famous philosopher John Searle discussing French postmodernism in 1990:  "Most philosophers can't stand postmodernism.  We treat it as a slum.  We hold our noses as we walk by.  Well," (here he exhaled) "maybe it's time for some SLUM CLEARING!"

As I explained to my pastor as a senior in college:  "Christianity says that there is one truth.  The English department says there are many truths and the philosophers can show you how everybody is wrong."  I figured no truth was closer to one truth than the point of view held by the English Department.

Anyway, for many decades it has been held that going to college can be dangerous to your faith.  Indeed, early studies showed that this in fact was the case.  It was so well documented that for many years researchers stopped trying to demonstrate it again.

However, things have changed!  College is no longer dangerous to your faith.  Quite the reverse.  NOT GOING TO COLLEGE APPEARS MORE CLOSELY ASSOCIATED WITH LOWER LEVELS OF RELIGIOUSITY!  This trend seems to have reversed in the 1990s.

There are all sorts of hypotheses for why this is now so.  Some of it may be socio-economic: there is a positive correlation between wealth and religious practice and there is a positive correlation between wealth and higher education.*
Christian Smith suggests other mechanisms that may have caused the reversal on page 251 of soul searching:
1. Growing influence of campus based ministries.
2.  Colleges have changed their attitudes and programs in ways that are more supportive of the religious and spiritual interests of students.
3.  the growing number of evangelical and committed Catholic faculty who are teaching in secular universities (in fields like philosophy) providing role models for students.
4.  growth of religious colleges and universities.
5.  Ironically, the major long term decline in American students interest in answering questions about the meaning of life.
6.  Postmodernism undercut the authority of positivism, foundationalism and scientism.
7.  American culture seems to have shifted from a secular to a postsecular era.

I'm not sure what to say about this except, wow, I don't think I saw this coming!

*Brad Wilcox has done some recent work on this as has Robert Putnam in American Grace.

In my last post I reported factors that statistically speaking help youth transition to young adulthood with strong faith.  At the same time I've been pondering the fact that while the factors are statistically relevant they aren't close to being 100% effective.

Consider this statistic:  70% of the highly religious young adults had parents who attended services weekly or more.  Not bad!  But that also means that 30% of highly religious young adults had parents who weren't so faithful.  Furthermore,  40% of young adults whose faith took a dive during young adulthood had parents who frequently attended. 11% of young adults who have continued to have weak religious commitments from the teen years on also had parents who regularly attended worship.  Souls in Transition p.245.

Most of us have a suspicion that we what we do as parents matters and sometimes that is true.  But even parents who do well as parents cannot guarantee that their children will have faith (or vice-versa!).

As I think of my own son, who will soon be a teenager, I wonder about how his faith in and understanding of God will change.  Will he (like many a preacher's kid) chuck it all away? Or will he grow in grace and knowledge of the love of God.  There may be occasion to pat myself on the back or on the other hand to kick myself.  But in the end there is so much mystery when it comes to each person and their relationship with God.

I think back on my own life and I can't really see what it was that was different for me than for some of my friends who appeared to have equally devout parents and who attended the same Sunday School and youth group activities.  There were things I saw, things I heard, things I found compelling that they were able to shrug off.  Again and again I came to see that God loved me, Jesus died for me, the Spirit was calling me to live into the person I was created to be.  Meanwhile all that some of my friends saw was hypocrisy, all they heard was preaching (in the sense that they were being preached at) and there were plenty of activities besides church that they found to be more compelling.  It's a mystery.  On my best days I attribute it to grace which I don't deserve.  I am grateful.

I've been plodding through Soul Searching Christian Smith's analysis of the religious and spiritual lives of "emerging adults."  "Emerging adults" is the name for a newly identified "life stage" for adults ages 18-25 (or 30, or 35 or 40) who are not yet "fully adult."

On the one hand, Smith works to dispel the sensationalist fears founded on anecdotal evidence that young adults are leaving the churches in droves.  On the other hand, he raises plenty of concerns for the church, particularly mainliners  like me in the Presbyterian Church USA.

On a positive note, here is what works (statistically speaking) in terms of having young people transition into emerging adulthood with a strong faith:

Highly religious emerging adults contain a large percentage of those who as youths had "parents [who1.] attend religious services frequently,[2]  report high importance of faith and[3] pray very often for their children.  [Highly religious emerging adults were personally more likely when they were youth] to have reported that they had many nonparental adults in their religious congregations with whom they enjoyed talking and that adluts in their congregations are generally very easy to talk with and get to know.  The same group also contains higher percents of those who as teens prayed and read scripture more frequently, definitely believed in miracles, and believed in waiting until marriage to have sex."   p.245

I'm reminded tonight that as a pastor, the most important youth work I can do is to form the faith of adults in the congregation.  How can we as a congregation nurture the faith of parents as well as other adults in ways that invite youth to model their own religious behavior after them.

Actually, that last sentence is a bit misleading.  Youth do model the religious behavior of adults far more than most of us realize.  Exceptions to the rule draw lots of attention but most youth and emerging adults have a religious faith that closely resembles their parents.  So the question is how we can form people in a more robust form of Christian faith that will be passed on to youth and young adults?

Of course kids aren't in Sunday School!  They've got baseball and soccer games on Sundays.  We can't compete with that!

True or False?

Neil McQueen,  in an essay  on why kids don't attend Sunday School like they used to, counters that this point is made without any serious research:

According to a 2003 study by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 61.5% of children aged 9--13 years do not participate in any organized physical activity during their non-school hours. Worse: 22.6% do not engage in any free-time physical activity. This means if you're going to complain about sports in general as your church program's major competition, you can only use it as an excuse for 38.5% of your kids.

While Neil may be on to something, there is some research that suggests otherwise.  Sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton did extensive research into the lives of youth and noted this correlation:

American  adolescent religion and spirituality appear to be significantly related to a larger propensity to get involved in a broader range of other organized social activities. U.S, teens who are more religiously serious and active are also more likely to be involved in a larger number of other programs, clubs, hobby groups, sports, or other organized activities; less religiously active teens tend to be involved in fewer.  This may reflect differences in personailty types, general family orientations toward social involvements, the encouragment and facilitation of religious organizations to get involved in other groups or some other factor.  (p.116 in Soul Searching).

So, while the "sports explanation" only accounts for 38% of youth in general, it may count for a larger proportion of youth who do attend church and Sunday School but not as frequently as earlier generations did.

Of course, I'm playing with statistics here.  The 2003 CDC study is for children age 9-13 and Smith and Denton's study is of an older cohort that overlaps the CDC study.  Also, Smith and Denton's study goes beyond sports.  Nevertheless, there just might be something to the anecdotal claim that begins this post.

As the parent of a ten year old, we haven't had the sports conflict yet but if he continues playing sports it will soon be upon us.  My own take on the issue is that sports and other organized activities do take their toll on attendance.  That being said, the trend cannot be pinned on sports (or other activities) alone.  And I'm also intrigued by the body of literature that show marked social differences(non-age specific)  that correlate between those who do attend and do not attend worship.  These differences and  other cultural shifts that play into church attendance will have to wait for a later post.