Skeptical Faith

Google Images Like millions of others, I’ve gotten hooked on Netflix’s House of Cards. In last season’s finale, Frank Underwood, the politician who has schemed his way through a twisted plan to advance his political career, enters a church, gets on his knees and looks skyward.  “Every time I’ve spoken to you,” he says to a God he claims not to believe in, “you’ve never spoken back, although, given our mutual disdain, I can’t blame you for the silent treatment. Perhaps I’m speaking to the wrong audience.” He then looks down, presumably to Satan. “Can you hear me?” he asks. “Are you even capable of language or do you only understand depravity?” Praying to oneself, for oneself Finally, Underwood, looking at the camera, concludes: “There is no solace above or below. Only us. Small. Solitary. Striving. Battling one another. I  pray t o myself, for myself.” As he exits the church he lights a votive candle in an array of lights, then blows them all out. Underw...

Among the earliest of these blogs were a couple of posts about why so many young people decline to participate in religion. The media often refer to them as the “nones” – part of the nearly 20 percent of U.S. adults who responded to recent surveys by responding “none” to the question of religious affiliation. In the earlier blogs I wrote that many young people decline to go to church or otherwise participate in religion principally because religion is irrelevant to them. Obviously, there are many reasons, but I still believe that is chief among them. Religion appears to have little to do with them or their lives. But I also believe that many people, including those between 20 and 40 years old, believe religion is on its way out and they don’t want to be involved with what they and their contemporaries view as passé, something that is only prized by their parents and grandparents. Everybody a "none?" And that’s easy to understand. Unlike previous eras, you can liv...

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across this piece from David Brooks, a well-known New York Times columnist. I’m quoting much of it here because I thought it was so right on. Entitled, “Alone yet Not Alone,” Brooks writes: …There is a yawning gap between the way many believers experience faith and the way that faith is presented to the world. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel described one experience of faith in his book, God in Search of Man: “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement...get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal. ...To be spiritual is to be amazed.” And yet Heschel understood that the faith expressed by many, even many who are inwardly conflicted, is often dull, oppressive and insipid — a religiosity in which “faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirl...

Among the 100 top viral blogs of 2013 is one that included this observation: “Religion is belief in someone else’s experience. Spirituality is having your own experience.” To me, the sense of the passage is that religion involves others – presumably old or dead church men from previous ages – imposing their versions of religious experience on us, making it impossible for that experience to be our own. Spirituality, on the other hand, is something each person fashions for him/herself. The idea would resonate with many young people. According to the Christian Smith study I’ve mentioned before in several blogs, young adults “ focus on individuality, personal relationships, independence and personal autonomy. Participation in religion interferes with ‘identity differentiation’ from their parents.” Many people are looking for something new, something that breaks with the religious practices of older generations. And no question, independence and individuality are worthy of p...