MOVING RELIGION TO A BACK SEAT ON THE BUS OF THEIR LIVES…
(…leading them to just be Easter Catholics and Christmas Christians)
Recent demographic research has apparently found that Americans have drifted further away from formal affiliation with any kind of organized religion over the past few decades.
Today, a greater number of them than before consider themselves to be either agnostic or even atheistic. It’s not that they don’t have any kind of religious outlook, but only that they don’t identify themselves as belonging to any particular brand of religion…as they once did. Those Sunday-go-to-meeting observances of the past appear to have lost much of their former relevance in the secular, pluralist, materialist, and hedonistic matrix in which most now live in today…leading them to just be Easter Catholics or Christmas Christians instead.
While this may be at odds with the deist – In God We Trust – mantra of our republic’s founders, it should not be much of a surprise. Although fundamentally based upon Christian moral concepts of right and wrong, the absolute firewall of prohibition in our Constitution against any entwining of church with state brought about a plethora of “denominations” among those professing to be Christian, and acceptance (if somewhat reluctantly) of other faiths as well. Because of that, and because we’ve morphed from a primarily closely knit rural society into a mostly disconnected urban one, we’ve been slowly moving religion to a back seat on the bus of our lives.
Much of that trend may also be due to incidences of extreme sectarianism promoting an absolutist view against anyone else not of a similar denomination or faith. So, disclaiming affiliation with denominations and faiths which promote such views, may be a form of avoidance, because most folks prefer to see the emphasis of “faith” as being a blueprint for righteous living, rather than as an excuse for bigotry and intolerance.
In that sense, therefore, perhaps what those researchers are seeing in America today is a return to the original deist non-denominational perspectives of the founders…not an outright rejection of religion or religious affiliation by today’s mainly materialistic society. But perhaps the real factor involved here is this: those daily news flashes from around the world of disasters, both natural and human-caused, along with a host of crimes and infamies against humanity, seems to have overwhelmed their “faith” in an omnipotent and benign deity, creating instead a sense of doubt about both of those attributes we ascribed to it.
Well, when we look at the extremism of several theocracies ruling in the world today, the Native American concept of having a direct, personal relationship with a deity or Great Spirit…without the clerical intermediary of rabbis, priests, reverends, imams, or temples, churches, and mosques…seems much more appealing.
After all, what is so difficult for any one of us to abide by a simple creed and faith of not lying, cheating, or stealing, and, to willingly offer charity and kindness to any fellow human in need of it, but most of all, not to commit the greatest sin of all…the taking of another human’s life? No amount of ritual observances mandated by clerical authority can bring us any closer to divine approval than that.
Which brings us back to that imponderable question about -belief-, and for that we can only quote from what Voltaire reportedly said on his death bed: “Lord, if you really exist…take care of my soul…if I actually have one..”
CENTURION
