I saw this in my local paper, but don't have the URL to the original Miami Herald column.
Masses find
religion a bit less soothing
It's less a crisis of faith and more a
crisis of confidence in the
organizations.
By LEONARD PITTS JR., Miami Herald
"Today, I quit being a Christian."
With those words last week on Facebook,
Anne Rice delivered a wake-up call for
organized religion. The question is whether it
will be recognized as such.
"I remain committed to Christ as always," she
wrote, "but not to being 'Christian' or to
being part of Christianity. It's simply
impossible for me to 'belong' to this
quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and
deservedly infamous group. For 10 years,
I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My
conscience will allow nothing else."
You will recall that the author, famed for her
vampire novels, made a much-publicized
return to the Catholicism of her youth after
years of calling herself an atheist. Now, years
later, she says she hasn't lost her faith,
but she's had it up to here with organized
religion.
"In the name of Christ," she wrote, "I refuse
to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I
refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I
refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be
anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-
science. I refuse to be anti-life."
If that was not nearly enough for Rice's
atheist observers -- one of whom berated
her online for refusing to completely give up
her "superstitious delusions" -- it was surely
plenty for people of faith. But Rice is hardly
the only one who feels as she does.
According to a 2008 study by Trinity College,
religiosity is trending down sharply in this
country. The American Religious
Identification Survey, which polled more than
54,000 American adults, found that the
percentage who call themselves Christian has
fallen by 10 since 1990 (from 86.2 percent to
76 percent), while the percentage of those
who claim no religious affiliation has almost
doubled (from 8.2 to 15).
Small wonder atheist manifestos are doing
brisk business at bookstores and Bill
Maher's skeptical "Religulous" finds an appreciative
audience in theaters. Organized religion, Christianity in particular, is on the
decline, and it has no one to blame but itself:
It traded moral authority for political power.
To put that another way: The Christian Bible
contains numerous exhortations to serve
those who are wretched and poor, to anger
slowly and forgive promptly, to walk through
this life in humility and faith. The word
"Republican" does not appear in the book.
Not once.
Yet somehow in the last 30 years, people of
faith were hustled and hoodwinked into
regarding the GOP platform as a lost gospel.
Somehow, low taxes for the wealthy and
deregulation of industry became the very
message of Christ. Somehow, hostility to
science, gays, Muslims and immigrants
became the very meaning of faith. And
somehow Christianity became -- or at least,
came to seem -- a wholly owned subsidiary
of the Republican Party.
Consider that, after the election of 2004, a
church in North Carolina made news for
kicking out nine congregants because they
committed the un-Christian act of ... voting
for Democrat John Kerry.
Who can blame people for saying, "If that's
faith, count me out?" Has atheism
ever had a better salesman than Jerry Falwell, who
blamed the Sept. 11 attacks on the ACLU --
or Pat Robertson, who laid Haiti's earthquake
off on an ancient curse?
But what of those who are not atheists? What
of those who feel the blessed assurance that
there is more to this existence than what we
can see or empirically prove? What of those
who seek a magnificent faith that commits
and compels, and find churches offering only
a shriveled faith that marginalizes and
demeans?
Its response to those seekers will determine
the future of organized religion.