Robert Wuthnow’s book, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II, was published in 1985 and studied what he perceived to be a significant restructuring of the church that began to develop after World War II. The restructuring is in the civil religion that functions as the moral and spiritual backbone of the country and significantly influences society. Wuthnow observed that in the United States, up until World War II, there was a single civil religion that all Americans adhered to and thought of as Christian in nature. After WWII, there developed two distinct civil religions, one favored by religious liberals and one favored by religious conservatives.[1] They had a set of core understandings in common. First, they believed that religious values were the key to morality and a healthy society, both privately and publicly. Second, they believed in the importance of transcendent values in relation to which the nation would be judged. Third, they believed in the relevance of certain biblical principles such as compassion, equity, and liberty. Finally, they believed in and drew upon a common heritage of Judeo-Christian symbols and stories.[2]
Where the liberal civil religion differed from the conservative civil religion was in a far more universal and not concrete understanding of what is a church. The focus of the adherents shifted to the actions of good people to roll back bad social conditions. The adherents usually became involved with protest activities, antinuclear coalitions, holistic health groups, positive thinking seminars, and therapy groups. They developed the belief that change is brought about through quick direct action that affects the structures and rules of society, which in turn will change the hearts of the people. They began to believe that Christians needed to meet the needs of the people first in order for them to be able to hear the good news. They understood that morality was socially derived but framed in the private realm for individuals. Their focus became people across the U.S. believing that they have a global role to play because of the country’s resources and that it is a God-given mandate to build the global community over any specific nation.[3]
The conservative civil religion adherents developed a very different set of core understandings. They emphasized a belief that the kingdom of God and the second coming of Jesus needed to be understood literally. They believed that the spiritual world is separate from the concrete world. The adherents usually became involved with healing ministries, prison ministries, bible study groups, charismatic groups, and groups concerned about world hunger. They believed that change is brought about through slow deliberate action geared at changing the hearts of the people so that they themselves begin to change the structures and rules. They believed that people needed to hear the good news and save their souls because we may not be able to meet their immediate needs in time. They framed morality in a public context; morality was God given and absolute. Finally, they believed that the U.S. has a special place in the divine order of the universe.[4]
Wuthnow argues that two key things happened as a result of the development of two civic religions. First, how we worship and our role in worship changed. The corporate body became subtly transposed into a service agency for the fulfillment of its individual members. The church shifted its language from corporate language to personal language putting the emphasis on the individual over the group. How to empower the individual to be morally committed was more the issue than how to construct moral community itself. Fellowship was seen mainly as a byproduct of individual devotion, and its role was mainly derived from individual needs to ensure the individuals’ freedoms and imbue them with inner conviction.[5]
The second important development was that the two civic religions began to negate each other in the public eye, allowing what Wuthnow saw as a developing third alternative to replace the liberal and conservative civic religions. He saw this new civic religion functioning as a non-religious alternative driven by progress and technology. As long as life is getting better because of our technological progress and life is improved for everyone in general, our advancements become the justification for what we do rather than using religion as the means to justify our culture.[6]
David Tracy gives a better insight to what this new civic religion is doing without directly naming it in his book, On Naming the Present: God, Hermeneutics, and Church. He describes what is happening to our culture as a reduction of the project of modernity into simply another tradition as techno-economic concerns become our primary focus regarding all levels of life. What we are doing is privatizing everything that is not beneficial for technological or economic advancement. We are replacing the ends with the means and no longer asking why we are doing what we are doing. This means that “we have seen our lifewords, in all their rich difference, increasingly colonized by the forces of a techno-economic social system that does not hesitate to use its power to level all memory, all resistance, all difference, and all hope.” He responds that in order for Christianity to move forward, we will need historical subjects with memory, hope, and resistance.[7]
In The Empty Church: Does Organized Religion Matter Anymore?, Thomas Reeves builds on Wuthnow’s idea of two civic religions. For Reeves, the key issue is the privatizing of religion that resulted from the divide in the civic religion. This resulted in a secularization that is growing throughout our culture, which negates all religions, including Christianity, and leaves them as private, irrelevant personal matters. The key turning point for this came in an intentional attack on the constitutional idea of the separation of church and state. Reeves argues that, “Numerous national figures, including Supreme Court justices, have taken the position that the First Amendment commanded not only the separation of church and state but the separation of religion from public life.”[8]
Reeves states that the U.S. courts have helped this secularization to take place in this way: Since 1982, the Supreme Court has followed “the endorsement test” on church–state questions. In the words of the legal scholar Gerard V. Bradley, the principle “holds that public authority may do nothing that might be construed as a sign that religion is a good thing, that religion is a component of human flourishing in a way that something else (assuredly comparable, which the justices call ‘nonreligion’ or ‘irreligion’) is not.”[9] In other words, Reeves says that the U.S. courts have argued consistently that if you are a public figure in authority, you should never say anything that would imply that religion of any kind is a good thing for people. He sees liberals on the Supreme Court as wanting to make government a relentless engine of secularization.[10] Reeves’ argument is that this privatization of faith and secularization of public space is hurting the church by trying to make our public life a place where God is not necessary, needed, or wanted. The result is that as Christians, we do not know how to talk about our faith publicly or how to engage our culture in a meaningful way guided by our faith.
[1] Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 13.
[2] Ibid., 257.
[3] Ibid., 62-63, 69, 131, 212-213, 219. Wuthnow describes the differences in contrasts throughout the book, I pulled them together for a simpler summary and comparison.
[4] Ibid., 62-63, 68, 131, 212-213, 219. Wuthnow describes the differences in contrasts throughout the book, I pulled them together for a simpler summary and comparison.
[5] Ibid., 55-57.
[6] Ibid., 286.
[7] David Tracy, On Naming the Present: Reflections on God, Hermeneutics, and Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988), 8–11.
[8] Thomas C. Reeves, The Empty Church: Does Organized Religion Matter Anymore? (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 37.
[9] Ibid., 47.
[10] Ibid., 47.
No comments:
Post a Comment