Americans Unwilling to Bar Heaven’s Gate

Before leaving the topic of American Grace, I should mention the authors’ notably upbeat conclusion. They argue that despite the substantial religious divisions among Americans (both by denomination and between the most and least religious), the vast majority of Americans are very tolerant of each other.

They say the source of this high degree of tolerance is (simply) the high level of diversity among our extended family and friends. Due to a high degree of intermarriage and religious mixing (outlined by survey data), they surmise most people know an “Aunt Susan” or a “Neighbor Al” who is an undeniably good person of a different religious affiliation.

Admirably, Americans are very generous in allowing that people who don’t share their faith can still go to heaven. Putnam and Campbell report the percentages by affiliation of those who believe “people of other religions can go to heaven”(p.535): evangelicals affirm this 83% of the time, whereas all other groups are at 90% or more (Mormons are the highest at 98%).

But the authors note that this question could be ambiguous with regard to what the respondent conceives of when he or she hears “other religions”. So they asked Christians whether people “not of my faith, including non-Christians, can go to heaven”(p.537): Mormons stayed at 98%, Mainline Protestants and Catholics drop from the 90’s to the low 80’s, and Evangelicals drop to 54% (still much better than one might have guessed).

No Basis for Spirituality as a ‘Bridge’

In an effort to improve the dialogue between scientists and science writers on the one hand and religious folks (who are sometimes science skeptics) on the other, it has been suggested that emphasizing a common spirituality might help. This would be possible because even in the case of atheists, the universe inspires feelings of awe and wonder which might be considered “spiritual”. Science journalist and author Chris Mooney made this case in a recent op-ed titled “Spirituality can bridge science-religion divide.”

Some of the religious survey data I’ve been looking at suggests this is not a well-founded recommendation.

The ‘Impersonal Force’ is a Popular Choice

In its Religious Landscape Survey, Pew asked Americans the following: “Do you believe in God or a Universal Spirit?” Then, for those who answered affirmatively, they asked this follow-up question:

“Which comes closest to your view of God? ‘God is a person with whom people can have a personal relationship’ or ‘God is an impersonal force’.”

I found the results here surprising. The 92% who replied yes to the first question broke down this way: 60% personal God, 25% impersonal force, 7% other/both. Here’s some of the breakdown by affiliation: 19% of Protestants believe in God as an impersonal force (13% of evangelicals); 29% of Catholics agree, as do 50% of Jews. It would appear many folks are not fully on board with their official theology. 35% of the nones believe in a God who is an impersonal force (representing half of those who reported a belief in God or a universal spirit).

As a check, I looked at data from the ARIS report, which is somewhat less dramatic. Here they asked a different question – no “impersonal force” option, per se. 70% affirmed a belief in a personal God, while 12% selected the option “there is a higher power but no personal God.” This question elicited a bit more in categories called “I’m not sure” and “don’t know/refuse” compared to similar options in the Pew survey (6% each).

Still, as someone who is broadly in the impersonal force/higher power camp, I was interested to learn I might have so much company.

What do the Nones Believe?

Surveys show that the “nones” (those who report no religious affiliation) are a diverse group. The first observation often made is to note that only a small percentage self-identify as atheists or agnostics. For instance, Putnam and Campbell, on page 16 of American Grace, report that only 5 people in their 2006 “Faith Matters Survey” of 3,108 described themselves by either label. But it would be better to look at some larger surveys which addressed this question.

The Pew U.S Religious Landscape Survey of over 35,000 Americans in 2007 found 1.6% responding as atheist, 2.4% as agnostic, and 12.1% selecting “no particular religion” (total nones coming to 16.1%). In analyzing the “no particular religion” group, Pew looked at their responses to another survey question: “How important is religion in your life”? They found about half of this group answered “not at all important” or “not too important” while the rest answered “somewhat important” or “very important”. Pew decided to label these two groups as Secular unaffiliated (6.3% of the total) and Religious unaffiliated (5.8%) for the purpose of summarizing the results on other parts of the survey.

For one more comparison, the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (with 54,461 respondents) found 0.9% atheist, 0.7% agnostic (out of total nones of 15.0%). It should be noted, however, that the percentage of atheists/agnostics in the survey nearly doubled from a previous 2001 tabulation.

Beliefs

American Grace and the ‘Nones’

I’m reading American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, by Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell. It’s an interesting and statistics-laden study of US religion over the past 50 years.

The book discusses a huge number of issues, trends, and cross-currents, and makes for thought-provoking reading. A topic which I find particularly interesting is the recent growth in the portion of Americans with no religious affiliation (sometimes referred to as the “nones”), and I was curious how the authors analyze the phenomenon.

Books Unblogged: Biblical Theme

I’ve read a few good books in recent times and have been meaning to mention them on the blog. Here are 3 of them.

Bart Ehrman’s book, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, received extra attention due to the inclusion in the book of the story of his personal religious journey. Ehrman was an evangelical Christian as a young person but lost his faith during his progression toward becoming a leading New Testament scholar. But the main part of the book is a very well-written introduction (for laypeople) to NT textual criticism, and it is on this basis that I recommend it for those interested in the topic. His account of the detective work involved in tracking the evolution of various manuscripts and teasing out probable copying errors and deliberate scribal alterations is fascinating stuff.

Recently, the early Christian text The Gospel of Judas received a lot of attention in the media. Some of the excitement about the discovery of this text was probably misplaced since there is nothing at all the (likely) mid-second century text tells us about the historical Jesus or Judas. On the other hand, it is rightly welcomed as another valuable window into the variety of early Christian communities, and it is certainly intriguing that one such community identified with Judas and created a revisionist account wherein he is the one disciple to know Jesus’ true nature. I missed the television special but enjoyed reading the book linked above, which includes a translation and 4 essays. In the first essay, Rodolphe Kasser describes the perilous journey of the manuscript from discovery to publication. In the second essay Bart Ehrman gives a very basic overview of the Gospel in the context of the conventional wisdom regarding the relationship of the Gnostic gospels to the proto-orthodox church. While I like Ehrman (see above), I thought this was a fairly weak essay which ignored other interpretations: for more texture on the implications of Judas and the other Gnostic texts on our view of early Christianity, see this NY Review of Books article. In the third essay, Gregor Wurst briefly relates the gospel to the anti-heretical writings of Irenaeus (who wrote about the existence of a Gospel of Judas), and in the final essay Marvin Meyer helpfully explains the strange and complicated cosmology in the Gospel by relating it to parallels in other texts.

The next book, Harold Bloom’s Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, I really only recommend for those who have found Bloom’s previous work rewarding. The book is his rumination on the “characters” of Jesus and Yahweh from a literary, cultural and religious perspective. The main reason for my caveat is that this book seemed sloppily tossed off in stream of consciousness mode. This made it a somewhat exasperating read for me even though I find Bloom to be an insightful thinker. For those that don’t know, Bloom is a prominent and prolific literary critic with a fairly unique yet also traditional (aesthetic) perspective. His initial renown was for his book The Anxiety of Influence, which outlined his approach to criticism. I particularly enjoyed his take on The Western Canon in a subsequent book. He has expanded his attention to wider cultural and religious criticism in other books, and indeed it rings true that he would have long been ruminating on the relationship between Christianity and Judaism as the ultimate example of the “Anxiety” (fyi, Bloom is writing from a culturally but not particularly religious Jewish point of view). I was interested to find from this book that Bloom finds the Jesus of the Gospel of Mark in particular to be a compellingly “uncanny” character to rival the Yahweh of the “J” thread of what Christians call the “Old Testament”.