WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THE RELIGIOUS WORLD

First in a Series of Five Articles

In these three years I have filed over 150 columns about public affairs and politics. While my life-long vocation has been as a pastor and theologian, only three of these columns have been about religion. Well, that is not quite true. Over the years I have learned to be bilingual. When I talk or write within the religious world I speak “religionese.” When I write or speak within the secular world—such as with these columns—I speak “secularese.” The message, however, is substantially the same. Authentic religion has to do with justice, equity, war, racism—and all the other isms. How we treat the earth as well as how we treat one another are both profoundly religious concerns. I have long since rejected the notion that religion is about some other world, or can be confined to a collection of doctrines to be believed.

One of our nation’s strengths is our Constitutional commitment to the separation of church and state.
The government has no business injecting religious doctrine or structure into public institutions or onto public space. However, the separation of church and state does not mean the separation of religious commitment and public policy. The free exercise of religion implies that people of faith have every right to support or oppose issues and practices which grow out of their convictions. They cannot insist, however, that the government adopt these concerns just because the nation must obey God’s laws, or sanction religious practices.

Congress has no business saying that since church “A” supports a ban on abortion, government must turn that religious doctrine into law. At the same time members of church “A” have a perfect right to lobby for their faith-driven position. Since the nation’s founding, the courts have struggled with the implications inherent in the words: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” So while almost everything I have written flows from my religious faith, I have bent over backward to keep overt religious doctrine out of these columns. Some things are right whether or not they have any religious support. The religious implications are of no political consequence.

For the next while, however, I am going to change my direction from public policy to what is currently happening in religion. Institutions of almost every faith persuasion are currently facing a dramatic reimagining of what they are and how they function in society. They are witnessing both their membership rolls and their effect on culture vaporizing before their eyes. In recent surveys substantial numbers of former adherents are putting down as their religion “none.” A well-known commentator recently suggested that in America the largest single religious preference is “Catholic,” and the second largest is “former Catholic.” The average membership of many previously robust Protestant congregations is now less than a hundred. Already the once powerful evangelical community has seen the top of the hill and is now on the downward slope.

Next week I want to describe what I believe this rapid demise is about. In subsequent columns I will discuss why I believe it is both good news as well as bad news. And somewhere in a few weeks I will be detailing how the ways religious people are revisiting what their institutions are and what they stand for relate to the larger society. I realize I may be walking a narrow ledge. I firmly believe in the separation of church and state. But I am also committed to the solid relationship between ethical values, which religions share with secularism, and public policy.

Charles Bayercandwbayer@verizon.net