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| Photo Credit: Dima Konsewitch |
For
most of the 20th century, smart people assumed -- with smug certainty
and probably more wishful thinking than they'd be willing to admit --
that humanity's long obsession with religion is finally winding down.
God is dead -- done in at last by the forces of enlightenment and
reason. Humanity is now free to chart a new course, without worrying
about the Big Bad He-God In the Sky.
But, as the last 30 years have rather brutally demonstrated to American progressives (religious and otherwise), those reports of the death of religion turned out to be greatly exaggerated. Here
we are, with a firm foothold in the 21st century, and it's pretty clear
that God is very much alive and well and living almost everywhere on
the globe (except Europe and Canada, as we shall shortly see).
God
or no God, the religious landscape of the planet isn't what it was in
the last century. In fact, it's changing in some essential ways. And
whether you're a person of faith or no faith, those changes have deep
implications for the way other important factors -- culture, technology,
economics, the environment, and politics -- play out as this new
century unwinds.
What
follows is a quick summary of some of the key drivers that are changing
the landscape of faith around the world. It's hardly comprehensive, but
I did try to hit the high spots. (Agree? Disagree? Got another one to
add, or a point to amplify? Drop a comment below, and let's talk about
it.)
1. God Is Not Dead
In
2007, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life went around the world
asking people a straight-up question: "Religion is very important to
me." Yes, or no?
The
numbers in Europe were low to middling. In Great Britain, 33 percent of
those polled said religion was "very important" in their lives. The
number was 27 percent in Italy, 21 percent in Germany and 11 percent in
France. Poland came in at 36 percent, with Russia at 14 percent and the
Czech Republic at 11 percent.
Closer
to home, the numbers in Canada looked pretty much like those in
England. And in the US, you will not be surprised to learn, the numbers
were about twice as high as they were in Europe. Here, about six out of
10 respondents said that religion was very important in their lives.
But
when Pew went to Latin America, Asia and Africa, the numbers were
radically different. In Guatemala, 80 percent of those polled said
religion was "very important" to them. That number was 77 percent in
Brazil and 72 percent in Honduras -- but only 39 percent in Argentina.
In
Asia, the "yes" total was 95 percent in Indonesia, 92 percent in India,
91 percent in the Philippines, but only 12 percent in Japan. And in
Africa, Senegal checked in at 97 percent, Nigeria at 92 percent and
Angola at 80 percent.
So
the world is still a very religious place, indeed, though it's still
not well understood why Europe should be such a secular anomaly. (My own
guess is that its long and bitter history of religious wars simply
exhausted Europeans, and they've given up religion as too divisive to
tolerate.) These numbers show pretty clearly that modernism didn't kill
religion, and postmodernism isn't likely to, either. Faith may be on the
wane in a few spots, but it's still kicking hard everywhere else.
2. The Center of Gravity for the Christian World Is Moving South
A few years back, a spate of books like Philip Jenkins' The Next Christendom and Globalizing The Sacred: Religion Across The Americas by
Manuel Vasquez and Marie Marquart argued that Latin America is going
evangelical at such a furious rate that Protestants could outnumber
Catholics as early as 2025.
Further
examination of this trend suggests that it's not happening quite that
fast. While people in these countries often do succumb to the charms of
Christian missionaries, a lot of those conversions don't stick for very
long. Even so: Protestantism is growing in the global south, and the
conversion cycle is rapidly introducing Protestant ideals and values
into these cultures, which could over time create some deep shifts in
Latino culture.
In
Africa, Christian and Muslim missionaries are squaring off in turf
battles that transcend national borders, and researchers from the Pew
study cited above are frankly worried that conflict and competition
between the two conversion-oriented faiths could eventually lead to
political disruptions and military confrontations. Increasingly, an
African's most defining affiliation isn't his or her tribe or nation,
but his or her faith.
Meanwhile,
here at home, American Catholics have noticed that a growing number of
the priests serving their churches are coming up from the global south
-- and are often far more traditional than their comparatively liberal
congregations. As these priests move up through the church hierarchy in
the years ahead, this southern traditionalism may make the church even
more conservative as the century rolls on. Over the long term, this
trend could easily alienate North Americans and Europeans to the point
where the Catholic Church becomes largely a phenomenon of the southern
hemisphere in another generation or two.
3. The Kids are Different
The
religious trends of the country over the past 40 years have been
dominated by the religious preferences of the Baby Boomers and
Generation X -- two generations that have been highly individualistic
and inner-directed, generally preferred individual "spirituality" over
group-oriented "religion," and distrusted all forms of institutional
authority -- especially religious authority. By and large -- and
especially as they've aged -- the religious focus of these two
generations has been on personal salvation, rather than changing the
world.
The Millennials, on the other hand, distrust religion for somewhat different reasons.
According
to research conducted by Barna, this is an ethnically diverse
generation that was born connected, and does almost everything in tribes
and teams – a tendency that is already making them more communal and
outer-directed in their spirituality than any group we've seen since the
GI generation. For them, faith is meaningless unless it leads to
action. The thousands of community service hours they logged as
teenagers instilled in them
a strong sense of social justice, huge confidence in their own ability
to make a difference, a growing trust in their ability to create
effective and inclusive institutions, and an conviction that religion
should be about serving the world instead of perfecting yourself.
This
shift has implications for every religious institution in the country,
but it's particularly rocking the foundations of Christian
fundamentalism. A Barna Research study
last year found that large numbers of young adults from evangelical
homes are leaving the faith because they dislike their churches'
limiting attitudes toward science, the arts and sexuality. They
don't like the right-wing culture war. They grew up with it, they're
tired of it, and they want their elders to knock it off.
Because of this, the ones who were raised in megachurches are abandoning those churches in droves. They're
not particularly interested in policing theological boundaries; if they
affiliate with a faith at all, it will be because they're looking to
join a community where people are coming together to work on the stuff that really matters: social justice, poverty and the environment.
4. Atheism Ascendant -- and Not Just in the Cities
We're
also seeing a resurgence of atheism. Much to the surprise of both the
very religious and the entirely irreligious, non-theism consistently
shows up as the second or third most popular philosophical worldview
across most of the US. According to a 2008 survey by the City University
of New York, atheism is cited as the number one orientation (by proportion of adherents) in Washington and Idaho, and it's number two or three in almost all the other states.
Nationwide,
atheists rank #3 overall, just behind the Catholics and the Baptists --
and the numbers are even higher among Americans under 30.
But
what's really weird about this is that it's not just a phenomenon of
the liberal coasts. Non-religious people make up a higher percentage of
the populations of Idaho, Montana and Nevada than of California,
Massachusetts or New York. It turns out that rural does not equate to
religious after all -- a trend that has some interesting political
implications in the decades ahead.
5. Environmental Ethics Go Mainstream
The
global inter-religious dialogue on the theology of environmentalism has
been going on for about 20 years now, which is long enough that it's
soaked through an entire generation of young clergy, and is now being
absorbed into their congregations.
The
idea that the living earth and its vast matrix of interlocking systems
are inherently sacred was a heretical idea just 25 years ago. But when Pat Robertson goes on TV
and tells his flock that climate change is serious and real and Jesus
wants them to fix it (though he's very recently recanted), you know
there's some real change afoot in the way even some conservative
Christians are assessing their relationship to the planet. As we look
ahead to solving some of our big problems, it's good to note that (with a
handful of very noisy exceptions on the right-wing Christian
Nationalist side) most of the world's most prominent religions have
taken up the task of teaching people what's required, and priming them
to act.
6. The Marketplace of Spiritual Ideas Is Going Global
It's
a small world, and it keeps getting smaller. We've got twice as many
people as we did 50 years ago. But we've also got far more access to all
those people, through trade and the Internet and social networks, than
we could have even imagined a decade ago. And that interconnectivity
stands to change our religions along with everything else.
The
Internet has opened up a virtual global souk of religious ideas. Last
year, I went online and downloaded the PDF of an 80-year-old book that
was the only account in English of life among the traditional Yezidi
tribes of Kurdistan. They're almost extinct now, since their remote
homeland has been a war zone for the past 30 years. But if you're
interested in their unique folkways -- or in Apache girls' coming-of-age
rites, or what goes on in Mormon temples, or reading comparable
translations of the Kama Sutra -- well, there's a vast feast of amazing
material just a quick Google search away.
This
is already resulting in massive religious cross-pollination -- a trend
that could move us toward a sort of syncretic, celebratory sharing of
traditions that could be very healthy for everyone. But, on the
downside, it's getting easier for fundamentalists to find each other,
too. Some scholars of Islam report that apocalyptic stories of the
Hidden Imam, long suppressed by ayatollahs and mullahs, are taking on
new themes that were clearly borrowed from Christian fundamentalist
end-times tales. (Startling, yes -- and also proof that not all change
is for the better.)
And
for some faith groups, especially those that thrive on secrecy and
restricting information or criticism, it's making life just plain hard.
One wonders if the full scale of the Catholic sexual abuse scandal would
ever have been known if the victims hadn't been able to find each other
on the Internet. Mormonism isn't faring at all well in this new
environment, either: members and would-be converts can easily find
accurate historical information about the church's early history that
church leaders had been suppressing for decades, out of (apparently
justified) fear that it would undermine the testimony of the faithful.
7. Religion as a Way of Reclaiming Cultural Identity
All
this syncretic sharing and blending may yield some weird and wonderful
things, but there's a counter-trend here, too. In the developing world,
some groups are very consciously re-connecting to their traditional
religious roots as part of their struggle to resurrect national and
cultural identities that have been lost through generations of colonial
oppression.
The
best example of this is the re-emergence of the hijab among Muslim
women the world over. While women have no choice about this in many
Islamic countries, a woman wearing a hijab on a Western street is likely
making a voluntary statement of pride in her Islamic identity, and
affirming her own culture. Likewise, in Russia, the Orthodox Church is
re-emerging as Russians reconnect with their lost culture and history in
the aftermath of the Soviet era.
While
it's great to embrace the global spiritual marketplace where we're
welcomed in, it's also important to recognize and respect when people
are leaning harder than they might otherwise on religious traditions
because they offer a fragile lifeline back to a lost cultural identity.
8. New Empires, New Religions
It's
a historical truth that religions tend to spread and grow right
alongside rising economic and political powers. In this century, the
world's two up-and-comers are India and China. As they become bigger
players on the world stage, we can expect that those countries' dominant
religions -- Hinduism, Confucianism and Buddhism in particular -- will
become far more visible and influential on the global religious scene.
9. The Hardest Truth: Fundamentalism Isn't Going Away
The
best we're ever going to do is contain it. Authoritarian religion, like
authoritarian politics, takes root wherever people feel like they're
losing control over their traditional ways of life. This is why
fundamentalists are taught in their churches to look for potential
converts who are going through important life transitions, or have just
sustained some kind of heavy emotional loss. They know those people are
vulnerable, and may be receptive to the idea of having someone else make
their decisions for them.
Unfortunately,
there are going to be a lot more of these vulnerable souls in the world
as we go through wrenching process of moving off of carbon fuels,
rebuilding our economy and our infrastructure, and coping with the
dislocations caused by climate change. A lot of people's well-ordered
lives are likely to be devastated by events, and in the aftermath, they
may be willing to follow anyone who promises to restore structure and
meaning to their lives.
It
seems likely that these movements could become far more prevalent in
the transitional years ahead of us. They could even become big and
powerful enough to slow the transition process down, or stop it
altogether. This
is yet another reason we need to plan a responsible and intelligent
transition to a new economic and energy paradigm. As long as people see
themselves moving toward a better future, we'll probably be able to keep
the religious and political authoritarians at bay. But the risk is
real, and we need to be thinking about it now.
10. Technology Changes Everything -- Including Faith
Technology
is already challenging our ideas of what it means to be human, to be
alive, to be a spiritual being. Genetic engineering, cloning,
nanotechnology, bionics, and computers that can outsmart us have been
the stuff of science fiction for 60 years, but that future is now here,
and it's going to be interesting to watch our current crop of religions
wrestle with the new ethical and theological questions these
technologies raise.
Probably
unsurprisingly, the biggest breakthroughs on these fronts are being
made in the very same countries that Pew found (back in item #1) to be
the least religious. And yet the world's religions are going to have to
find ways to deal with these changes. in fact, this rethinking of the
whole human enterprise as we've understood it for the past couple of
millennia may be the biggest challenge faced by all the world's faiths
in the coming century.
If
they do the job well, I think we may end up with a far more expansive
and inclusive sense of the sacred than we can possibly imagine right
now. In fact, this century may be giving us the best chance humans have
ever had to create a global spirituality built on enduring human values:
compassion, justice, community, and the common drive to share and
celebrate the wonder of our lives.
But
if they do it poorly, religion may continue to be the biggest obstacle
to taking the decisive steps we need to deal with our growing number of
human-created crises.
Religion
changes, and will continue to change. But if the last century didn't
knock the religious impulse out of us, it may be time to accept that
it's here to stay.
Sara Robinson, MS, APF is a social futurist and the editor of AlterNet's Vision page. Follow her on Twitter, or subscribe to AlterNet's Vision newsletter for weekly updates.
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