c. 2000 Religion News Service
JERUSALEM _ Islam will become a major new force on the American religious scene, presenting new challenges to Christian and Jewish institutions that have traditionally dominated society, according to a new study on the impact of religion in America.
Overall, however, the influence of traditional religious institutions is declining as Americans increasingly perceive religion as a personal quest rather than a binding social force, said the report commissioned by the New York-based Interreligious Information Center but released here during a center-sponsored conference on religion and the media.
“This presents a foremost challenge to clergy, who are still talking in archaic biblical terminology and have not learned how to adapt to modern ways of communications,” said Gunther Lawrence, executive director of the center.
“Clergy must begin meeting their congregants not only in churches and church schools but in social functions and in museums _ in places where people really congregate today,” he said. “The Internet is adding another dimension. Still, religion is something that deals with the human heart, and when you deal with the human heart you need a one-to-one relationship.”
Lawrence is leading the five-day conference on religion and the media in the new millennium.
The recent study, authored by Kenneth Briggs, a former New York Times religion writer and now adjunct professor at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa., asked journalists around the nation to interview 16 leading religious thinkers, as well as grass-roots believers, about what they saw as emerging trends in religion.
Briggs found wide agreement among the scholars about the rising influence of religions that have a more recent history in the United States than Christianity and Judaism. Although Christians remain in the majority in the American population, non-Christian immigrants from Asian and Middle Eastern countries are challenging this hegemony as they introduce Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism and other traditions into the mainstream.
“No longer do large contingents from the churches march boldly under the banner of a `Christian America’ to the drumbeat of `Onward Christian Soldiers,”’ Briggs said in his report. The public square of the future has mosques and various kinds of temples along with its array of churches and synagogues, he said.
“Institutions themselves would appear to be in some peril,” Briggs added, identifying mainline Protestant churches as the “big losers” in the future potpourri of spiritual practices merging in mainstream America, partly because they express a “wishy-washy” theology that confuses their congregants.
“In order to capture followers … religious groups must exhibit a clear set of beliefs and expectations. … These traits would appear to favor Christian evangelicals, Catholic traditionalists and ultra-Orthodox Jews, among others,” the study said of the Jewish and Christian future.
Focusing on social issues, meanwhile, seems to be out of step with the individualism of religious seekers in today’s America, said Briggs.
With a few notable exceptions on the religious right, religion today is largely “devoid of the kind of social activism _ some would call it prophetic call for justice _ that brought religious groups together around civil rights and the anti-Vietnam War movements in the 1960s,” said Briggs.
“That is to say that there will be marginal resistance, but nothing to indicate that the great maxims of religious faith will motivate America to turn from the way it does business,” he said. “Instead, there is the widespread assumption that religion will, in the main, bless the set of economic and political assumptions _ the importance of the bottom line, the protection of the nation’s military interests, the end to welfare and the like.”
DEA END FLETCHER
