Reprinted with permission from the Star Tribune, Minneapolis, MN, November 20, 1996.
According to recent polls, 70 percent of Americans belong to a church or synagogue. By this measure, our nation is more religious than ever.
At the nation’s founding, for instance, only 17 percent of the population were church members; when the Civil War began, the figure was 37 percent. Today, 90 percent of Americans say they believe in God and engage in prayer. Eighty percent believe they will be called before God to answer for their sins, and 66 percent claim to have made a “personal commitment to Jesus Christ.” Fully 86 percent of teenagers say they believe that Jesus is God. Astonishingly, in a 1994 Harris poll, even 52 percent of non-Christians expressed belief in Jesus’ Resurrection.
But if we Americans are such a religious lot, why does our culture seem to grow coarser each year? If the Judeo-Christian ethic is widespread and thriving, why do Madonna and Howard Stern top the bestseller lists? Why the rampant materialism, broken families, soaring drug use among middle-class teens, and a 30 percent illegitimacy rate? Perhaps our much-touted religiosity is only “skin-deep.” For most of us, it seems, religious faith means “whatever we want it to mean.” According to a 1988 Gallup poll, the vast majority of Americans agree that people “should arrive at their religious beliefs independent of any church or synagogue.”
As we lose our grounding in doctrine, we’re also losing familiarity with the sources of Judeo-Christian morality. Few, for example, can recite the Ten Commandments — formerly drilled into children as a matter of course. Indeed, Gallup has labeled us a “nation of biblical illiterates.” Fewer than half can list the four gospels, while 70 percent of teenagers do not know why Easter is celebrated.
Modern America exhibits a puzzling paradox — widespread religious rhetoric, coupled with a faith increasingly drained of content, and often having little practical effect on our lives. The origins of this phenomenon are complex. But one factor seems to be that religion — like institutions ranging from the education establishment to the helping professions — has been powerfully influenced by the reigning “therapeutic culture.”
Traditional Christianity demanded a great deal of believers. It required that they strive to reject worldliness, to be “in the world but not of it.” It called them to repent of their sins and to “die to self,” cultivating virtue, self-discipline and humility. But the therapeutic culture — a product of the 19th century Romantic movement and the rise of psychology— champions very different goals. It holds that the highest goods for man are “self-esteem” and self-realization, and the sense of well-being they produce. It promises that if we “follow our bliss”— setting sights on health, safety, pleasure and prosperity — we will tap into the authentic and creative “self” that is normally repressed by social constraints.
Thirty years ago, the psychologist Philip Rieff predicted that the new therapeutic culture would dilute religious faith into an amorphous, all-purpose “spirituality.” Modern man, he wrote, saw himself as born to be pleased, not saved. By trading the soul for the “self,” he observed, we would eventually feel free to “use all god-terms” indiscriminately, and to embrace any “faith” so long as it consoled, but did not judge us.
Those who doubt Rieff’s prophetic powers need look no further than the Minneapolis Convention Center. There hundreds of women from many Christian denominations recently gathered for the third anniversary of “Re-imagining,” a feminist conference billed as “a Second Reformation … much more basic and important to the health of humankind than the first.” These women came to hear ordained clergy, and professors from places like Yale Divinity School and New Brighton’s United Theological Seminary, as they “re-imagine[d] all that has been passed on to us through two thousand years of Christian faith.”
“Re-imagining” demonstrated vividly how a free-floating “spirituality” can lead us to worship that with which we are most comfortable and familiar: ourselves. At “Re-imagining,” God was strictly a sideshow, as participants worshiped at the shrine of the Female.
According to “Re-imagining”’s organizers, “Sophia,” or Wisdom, is “the suppressed part of the biblical tradition,” the “female personification” of God. Yet the prayers participants offered to Sophia seemed little more than lip service. Their most fervent praise was reserved for themselves. (Conveniently, Sophia is also at “the place in you where the whole universe resides.”) During the “Ritual of Milk and Honey,” for instance, participants begrudged Sophia a line or two, but quickly got on with the business of “celebrating” “our unique perspectives, intelligences … and processes; … our bodiliness, our physicality, the sensations of pleasure, our oneness with earth and water.” “With our warm body fluids,” they chanted, “we remind the world of its pleasures and sensations.”
The decor at “Re-imagining” reflected this deification of the Female — no stained glass windows here. One wall boasted large nude “portraits of menopausal women,” while the “goddess wall” invited contemplation — not only of the Virgin Mary — but of deities like Ishtar, the vengeful Babylonian goddess of war; Kali, the bloodthirsty Hindu goddess of destruction, and the Mesopotamian Lilith, described, in part, by Webster as “a female demon dwelling in deserted places and attacking children.”
Yet despite this indiscriminate elevation of the Female, “Re-imagining”’s real bone to pick with the Christian God seemed not that he is “male,” but that he judges. Sophia, by contrast, is the answer to the prayers of a therapeutic world. She recognizes no sin but the corporate transgressions that one speaker listed as “sexism, white racism, classism, ableism, heterosexism and ageism.”
Above all, “Re-imagining” sought the Holy Grail of the therapeutic culture –– what one of its original organizers called “that wonderful space where we are truly free to be ourselves.” But what would it be like to attain this elusive promised land –– a world without rules, limits or universal Truth? As Ishtar and Kali graphically remind us, humankind’s natural proclivity to greed, lust, injustice and cruelty suggests that –– far from being “wonderful” –– such a “space” would closely resemble the Christian conception of hell. Worshiping a god who looks like us may seem liberating for a time. But so limited a deity can never sustain those who “walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” as we all must.
This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Jan/Feb 1997).
