Faith: What to Keep, What to Discard

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This blog is published every Thursday. But for the first time in five years, I won’t be publishing Skeptical Faith next Thursday, Jan. 11. I’ll be on a week-long expedition to an ecologically rich area on the border between Colombia and Venezuela. I hope to publish again on Jan. 18.

As a graduate student in Journalism/Mass Communications in the late 1970s, I surveyed Catholic students about their religious beliefs and practices.

I partnered with the Catholic student parish and fortunately, with a professor in the Sociology Department who was the university’s expert on polling. In the process, I learned a lot about sampling, most of which I’ve forgotten. But I was much more interested in how students would respond.

In general, the results were encouraging for the parish. The students were fairly orthodox in their beliefs and by today’s standards, conservative in their practices and behaviors. Most attended Mass regularly. Most were drug-free. Most agreed with the statement, “While I have doubts, I feel that I do believe in God,” and most believed that they would remain Catholic.

But in the category of behaviors, you could already see some slippage from traditional Catholic positions. Many respondents, for instance, said that pre-marital sexual relations, pornography, abortion and divorce were acceptable “under certain circumstances.”

Very Different
I would like to see the results of the same survey in a similar population today. I’m sure they would be very different.

Some religious conservatives may hope they would not be. And some religious liberals would hope that much of current “doctrine” would disappear. But don’t you sometimes get the feeling that these differences, sometimes bitterly fought over, are simply a matter of tribalism? I’m a liberal, so I defend anything that appears liberal. I’m a conservative, so I’m against anything that liberals favor.

But no matter what liberals and conservatives think or want, religion has evolved and will continue to do so. For religious leaders, the key is figuring out what to keep and what to discard. For Christians, the question is how to maintain the essence of Jesus’ message but not cling to non-essentials.

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Religions must evolve because we do. And the failure to understand this, in my view, results in the failure of today’s religion to speak to contemporary people, especially new generations of adults.

“Even though today’s Christians believe ‘the same thing’ as in past centuries,” writes Tomas Halik, the Czech theologian and philosopher whom I often quote, “they believe it differently; even when they say the same words, they understand them differently; even when they perform the same rituals in the same surroundings, those surroundings and those rituals play a different role in their lives than they did in the lives of their ancestors.”

But making decisions about what should be kept and what should be discarded shouldn’t be left to “public opinion.” For believers, approval of society can’t be the criterion. Let’s take the traditional precept against sex outside marriage, which is widely and routinely ignored in western society.

Did this huge and rapid change happen because our great thinkers got together and decided that, based on intense biblical study and traditions in the ancient church, sex outside marriage is perfectly aligned with the teachings of Jesus? I don’t think so. It happened because, in large part through the influence of the media, young people started ignoring the precept while abandoning traditional religion. And the church failed to respond.

And, of course, nothing has a more intense attraction for humans than sex. A poorly understood precept that is poorly explained, when any explanation is attempted, doesn’t stand a chance. So the sexual revolution occurred without the church taking a shot.

So what do churches do now? Uh, just keep ignoring it until the great disconnect between the church’s official position and actual practice goes away? How could that do anything to help people see the value in the Christian view of love and sex?

Horse Out of the Barn?
I think there’s a view among church people that “the horse is well out of the barn” and it would be close to impossible to round it up. But it’s not too late for churches to develop a theology of sex, something that is based on the gospels and early church tradition (how ancient Christians interpreted Jesus’ teachings) and something that would be a true aid to modern people.

A simple prohibition would be akin to shutting the barn door, pretending that the horse is still in the barn. What is needed is a theology of sex that focuses on what constitutes romantic love with the aim of salvaging it from the meaninglessness of the “hook up” culture and its subsequent self-loathing.

And it’s not enough that such a theology be developed and discussed among theologians or confined to the pages of religious publications. Pastors and parish staffers must start addressing the subjects that people are actually dealing with today. To me, nothing is worse than silence.

Sexual practices are only one example, of course, of how believers must continually adapt their beliefs to everyday life, and vice versa. You can’t expect the beliefs and practices of the university students of the 1970s to be the same as today, but you can expect that for Christians, they be based on the teachings of Jesus and faithfully and loyally followed.