Across the country, chapels designed to offer passengers refuge and reflection in bustling airports are making changes: Removing denomination-specific decor, adding special accommodations and hosting services geared to accommodate an increasingly diverse group of travelers flying with faith. In Atlanta, it means a simple stained-glass window marking the entrance to the 1,040-square-foot chapel on the third floor. Inside there’s room for 30, and a library stocking everything from Gideon Bibles to Jewish mystical texts. A large floor mat provides a cushiony spot to kneel for prayer; officials don’t set it aside for any specific faith. “There are representations of almost every faith,” said Cook, who recently oversaw a $200,000 renovation that more than doubled the chapel to its current size. “There are Buddhists in their orange robes, there are some Hindus … I helped a Wiccan one time.”

In the article, Walker describes the multi-faith chapel space at Atlanta’s airport. There, the floor is decorated with a large compass (and little else). While the Rev. Chester Cook talks of accommodating faiths that need to face a certain direction to pray (like Jews and Muslims), I couldn’t help but think that it would be perfect for a Wiccan, or group of Wiccans (or any type of Pagan, really), to do a quick ritual on their way to someplace else. While this trend of converting specifically Christian chapels into multi-faith spaces may have more to do with saving money and conserving space, it is still a welcome shift away from the “Christian default setting” that has dominated so many public spaces over the years.

“However, what both Weber’s analysis of disenchantment and counter-claims as to the importance of contemporary re-enchantment often share is a tendency to make an easy association between religion and enchantment on the one hand and secular rationalism/scientific atheism and disenchantment on the other. In fact there is a long history of occasions when very modernist secular events seemed highly enchanted to many of those participating in them. Wordsworth’s response to the French Revolution, containing a reference to “reason” as the “prime enchantress” of the earth, being but one famous example. Likewise, organised religion can often be experienced as profoundly disenchanting, as the work of generations of writers, from James Joyce to Jeanette Winterson testifies.”

In short, the old binary of religious=enchantment and secular=disenchantment may be too reductive in today’s world, in fact, as one recent academic collection of essays argues, the new forces re-enchanment have no problem with “secular rationalism”.

“…enchantment continues to be understood as anti-rational and quasi-mystical, a source of cognitive deception and affective indulgence … modernity produces an entirely new array of strategies, compatible with secular rationality, for re-enchanting a disenchanted world. We perceive this as being an exciting new trend in current conceptualizations of Western modernity…”

To Pagans, the “spiritual but not religious”, the scores of “no religion” agnostics who believe in God, and the many other groupings taking part in the West’s re-enchantment, it isn’t a choice of Dawkins or Pope Benedict. Instead, it is melding of the best aspects of rational and secular progress with the immanent and transcendenat spiritual experiences provided by various religions and philosophies. While the old binary view of religioun and rationalism continues to duke it out, Pagans are having their (secular re-enchantment) cake and eating it too.

“Sometime in July, Flowers — award-winning teacher of English and religion, expert in mythology, past director of Plan II, confidante of PBS journalist Bill Moyers, consultant to NASA and corporations around the world, author of three poetry volumes — will move away from her home in West Lake Hills to commence a personal and romantic adventure with Bill Bradley in New York City.”

In honour of her leaving, the Austin American-Statesman has reprinted a profile of Flowers from 2002, shortly after she was named as the new director of the LBJ Library. In it, Flowers recalls how the goddesses of ancient myth, specifically Demeter and Aphrodite, helped spur her forward into becoming a powerful woman, and sparked a lifelong love of myth.

“Sometime before the sixth grade, the Bookworm of Abilene happened upon the beauty of mythology. To her delight, Flowers discovered that the women in Greek myth were star players in moral drama. While not always virtuous, the Greek goddesses were spunky and brazen. They wielded power. They were the focus of stories. “The Greek myths were the only stories I could find, in fact, that involved powerful women,” says Flowers. “These goddesses: They throw their weight around! Demeter blasts the world! Zeus has to beg her to stop!” Flowers was so enthralled by the Greek myths that she carried a personal copy of Edith Hamilton’s “Mythology” back and forth to school with her throughout the sixth grade. But since this was West Texas, circa 1958, shy Betty Sue Marable covered her book of myths with aluminum foil — concealing the cover illustration of the naked Perseus, sword in hand, hoisting up the head of the slain Medusa.”

I encourage reading the entire profile, for while Flowers is no Pagan in the formal sense of the term, she lives a life that sings with the virtues of the ancient world. A powerful personal example that refutes the idea of Christianity or moral chaos. An individual who embodies some of the best qualities of the emerging post-Christian cultural reality.

“Turning the [ARIS] report over in his mind, Mohler posted a despairing online column on the eve of Holy Week lamenting the decline—and, by implication, the imminent fall—of an America shaped and suffused by Christianity. “A remarkable culture-shift has taken place around us,” Mohler wrote. “The most basic contours of American culture have been radically altered. The so-called Judeo-Christian consensus of the last millennium has given way to a post-modern, post-Christian, post-Western cultural crisis which threatens the very heart of our culture.” When Mohler and I spoke in the days after he wrote this, he had grown even gloomier. “Clearly, there is a new narrative, a post-Christian narrative, that is animating large portions of this society,” he said from his office on campus in Louisville, Ky.”

Meacham reinforces the ARIS data (and Mohler’s “gloomy” outlook) by supplementing it with some recent Newsweek polling that says 68% of Americans think religion is losing influence in American society, and that less than half (48%) now believe that religion “can answer all or most of today’s problems”. But as I’ve pointed out before, we should be clear that “post-Christianity” doesn’t mean Christianity is going away, or that America will soon be overrun by secularist stormtroopers, but that (as Mohler points out) there is a new narrative concerning religion that displaces Christianity as the lone voice of moral authority. What is this new narrative?

“In 1992 the critic Harold Bloom published a book titled “The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation.” In it he cites William James’s definition of religion in “The Varieties of Religious Experience”: “Religion … shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they consider the divine.” Which is precisely what most troubles Mohler. “The post-Christian narrative is radically different; it offers spirituality, however defined, without binding authority,” he told me. “It is based on an understanding of history that presumes a less tolerant past and a more tolerant future, with the present as an important transitional step.” The present, in this sense, is less about the death of God and more about the birth of many gods.“

In other words, a society welcoming to religious minorities and Pagans. The “others” that saw a growth spike in the ARIS numbers that Mohler finds so troubling. While Meacham turns introspective towards the end concerning Christianity’s place in out modern society, he does little to anticipate how much better a post-Christian society might be for those who don’t necessarily agree with the privileged place the dominant monotheisms have held for so long. That the “birth of many gods” will not lead to moral anarchy as Mohler and other conservative Christians fear, but a more (religiously) tolerant age.  Pagans will most likely be a very small minority for some time into the future, but there is a chance that we’ll see in our lifetimes the emergence of geographic regions where minority faiths like ours hold enough sway to influence elections and social policy. A time when what an elected official swears in on, or who leads an opening prayer, will no longer be seen as a possible front in a manufactured culture war. I, for one, look forward to this growing “post-Christianity” and hope the “gloomy” forecasts of conservative Christians aren’t simply a bout of self-obsessed pessimism.

…a post-Christian world is one where Christianity is no longer the dominant civil religion, but one that has, gradually over extended periods of time, assumed values, culture, and worldviews that are not necessarily Christian (and further may not necessarily reflect any world religion’s standpoint). This situation applies to much of Europe, in particular in Central and Northern Europe, where no more than half of the residents in those lands profess belief in a transcendent, personal and monotheistically-conceived deity.

This trend is no longer isolated to France or Germany, it has been gaining stream in the Americas as well. As it happens, the forces who prefered a Christian-dominated society are becoming increasingly hostile and defensive.

A television advertisement shows Bolivia’s President Evo Morales dressed as a shaman. He is knocking away at an image of Christ; a document marked ‘New Constitution’ is emblazoned with the slogan: “Choose God, Vote No”. This ad has been put out by evangelical groups concerned the new constitution will lead to legalized abortion and same-sex marriages. Neither issue is mentioned in the document, leaving room for ambiguity.

Polls show that the referendum on a new secular constitution, which would place the Catholic Church on equal footing with indigenous religions, will pass, leaving Christian groups increasingly worried about the “public will”.

Same-sex marriages are not ruled in the document. Gabriela Montaño Viaña, the presidential representative in Santa Cruz, said the constitution “could open the door to a civil law allowing homosexual marriage if there was a public will to do that”.

Why the worry over what “the public” wants? Because it seems that many conservative/traditional Christian thinkers believe that without the cultural and religious dominance of Christianity, we will all slide into amoral paganism.

…the West is not becoming secular, it is becoming visibly more pagan. Further, the failure to address the pagan nature of the West will lead to a failure to fully address the challenge of Islam.  Scripture presents only one real alternative to the worship of the one, true God. That alternative is the worship of natural forces given personal forms as various deities. These forces included such things as the state (pharaoh or emperor worship), war, fertility (the baals), wisdom, love, the sun, moon, and stars. These deities were worshipped because their adherents believed they supplied the vital necessities of life — children, health, security, material well-being, and personal power and renown. Paganism, in this context, would be defined as allegiance to, reliance on, or preoccupation with specific natural powers as the source of one’s well-being and happiness.

The true enemy then isn’t “secularism”, but what they fear the process of secularization will bring about. A post-Christian (and ultimately post-secular) re-enchantment that  gives birth to a new multi-religious (pagan) world. Christian groups have responded with increasing hostility to this process, and some are slowly re-embracing once-discarded ultra-conservative factions as a sort of rear-guard action against the secular onslaught. But are all the fears of this “pagan” future justified? Conservative journalist and pundit Heather Mac Donald argues that we shouldn’t fear moral chaos as secularism continues to rise in the West.

The religious superstructure of centuries past has been dismantled.  Rising in its place is a remake of religion “in the image of mass-consumer capitalism,”  according to a sociologist of American religion at the University of Notre Dame.  That remake offers up easily digestible bits like the “5 Minute Theologian”  and “7 Minutes With God.”  Only a quarter of Americans attend church weekly.  Yet moral chaos has not broken out; society has grown more prosperous as secularism expands.  Empathy with others, an awareness of the necessity of the Golden Rule, survive the radical transformation of religious belief, it turns out.  Perhaps because a moral sense is the foundation, not the result, of religious ethics.

In other words, ethical and moral behavior isn’t the result of Christian cultural dominance, but a part of natural human development. Something that any clear-eyed religious historian would know to be true. While I, for one, welcome our new secularist overlords, I fear what the increasingly radicalized fringe groups will do when they believe “spiritual warfare” and repressive ballot measures are no longer enough. While I think a post-Christian future is inevitable, I worry about the birth pangs necessary to realize this brave new world.

“We succeeded in supplanting the pagan holiday, but we didn’t rid ourselves of the pagans. Instead, a good many of us joined in, gradually helping to associate Christmas with over-consumption, drunken revelry, and self-centered celebration. One can’t help but wonder if Christ would just as soon have us call what America now celebrates something else, something that doesn’t invoke his name. In this I find myself increasingly on the side of the grievance-minded and the anti-Christians—let’s publicly call this big event the “Happy Holidays,” or “Winter Festival,” or even “Saturnalia,” and stop—for the love of God—calling it Christmas.”

We here at The Wild Hunt fully support Woodlief’s proposition for Christians to fully surrender to a post-Christian inevitability. Here’s hoping his suggestion for all Christians to “quietly celebrate the birth of Christ in our churches and homes” reaches far and wide! Now that Pagans have retaken Halloween, and the tide is turning for the Winter holidays, could it be time for “the grievance-minded and the anti-Christians” to set their sights on Eas… I mean Eostre?
]]> http://wildhunt.org/blog/2008/12/christians-want-to-give-it-back.html/feed 6 http://wildhunt.org/blog/2008/06/sci-fi-religions-of-future.html http://wildhunt.org/blog/2008/06/sci-fi-religions-of-future.html#comments Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:06:00 +0000 Jason http://wildhunt.org/blog/2008/06/the-sci-fi-religions-of-the-future.html Over at Religion Dispatches, scholars Gabriel Mckee and Nick Street take a look at the growing intersection of religion and science fiction. From the formerly satirical Church of Jediism, to the intense religion-soaked warfare of Battlestar Galactica. According to both authors, the convergence of religion and science fiction fandom may provide a road-map for the future of religion.

“Nick Street’s recent essay on Battlestar Galactica viewed the show as a harbinger of the future of religion whose fans’ immersion in media and technology becomes a sort of spiritual practice in itself. One of the strangest religion stories in recent memory also involves a science fictional religion: the Church of Jediism … the [recent drunken] Vader attack [on members of the church] opens a window into an international new religious movement that, like Battlestar Galactica, may show us the shape of faith to come.”

McKee acknowledges that the confluence of sci-fi and faith is hardly new, obliquely referencing the Heinlein-inspired Pagan religion of The Church of All Worlds, and noting the sci-fi-faith of Scientology.

“Of course, neither BSG nor Star Wars is the first science fictional religion to gain prominence. The hedonistic Martian religion described by Robert A. Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land was a direct influence on late-60s communes, and Scientology was launched with an article in an issue of Astounding Science Fiction.”

Street, in his essay, hints that the demographical “nones” and “spiritual but not religious”, who are a prime component of sci-fi fandom, could very well be gestating the faiths of the future from the modern “Dionysian” Western theatrical tradition of movies and television.

“If the fate of the Dionysian cults that birthed the Western theatrical tradition holds any lesson for American Catholicism, mainline Protestantism and the other traditional religious institutions that are shedding members—and isn’t it delightful to think that it might?—it’s that the interplay between inspiration and the forms of religious practice and observance must always be fluid. Imposing a sober orthodoxy on rituals intended to pierce the veil that separates the mundane from the sublime almost always diminishes the force of the experience; then, as Plato observes in the Ion, priests and poets become ‘like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the influence of Dionysus but not when they are in their right mind.’”

There is every possibility, as we continue to move into a post-Christian world, that modern Paganism will soon be joined by any number of sci-fi fandom cults at ecumenical councils and inter-faith gatherings. The question is how will the large numbers of nature-oriented Pagans deal with science-oriented futurist religionists? Will there be tensions, or will we both see ourselves as fruits from the same “Dionysian” tree.

ADDENDUM: By using the phrase “nature-oriented” I wasn’t trying to set up an either-or dichotomy between nature and technology, only that science-fiction-based NRMs may have very different theologies from modern Pagan religions (many of which sacralize the natural world to differing degrees). These may (or may not) create tensions between the groups. Personally, I love my modern technology, including the laptop I use to write on this blog.
]]> http://wildhunt.org/blog/2008/06/sci-fi-religions-of-future.html/feed 8 http://wildhunt.org/blog/2008/05/iceland-perfect-pagan-country.html http://wildhunt.org/blog/2008/05/iceland-perfect-pagan-country.html#comments Sun, 18 May 2008 13:38:00 +0000 Jason http://wildhunt.org/blog/2008/05/iceland-the-perfect-pagan-country.html John Carlin of The Guardian looks at why Iceland is the happiest place on Earth.

“Iceland … tops the latest table of the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Index rankings, meaning that as a society and as an economy – in terms of wealth, health and education – they are champions of the world. To which one might respond: Yes, but – what with the dark winters and the far from tropical summers – are Icelanders happy? Actually, in so far as one can reliably measure such things, they are. According to a seemingly serious academic study reported in the Guardian in 2006, Icelanders are the happiest people on earth. (The study was lent some credibility by the finding that the Russians were the most unhappy.)”

The secret to their happiness? According to Carlin, a big part of it is their lack of connection to Christian ideas of morality, and a deep connection to their Viking and pagan ancestors.

“As a grandmother I met on my first visit to Iceland, two years ago, explained it: ‘The Vikings went abroad and the women ran the show, and they had children with their slaves, and when the Vikings returned they accepted it, in the spirit of the more the merrier’ … It is a largely pagan country, as the natives like to see it, unburdened by the taboos that generate so much distress elsewhere. That means they are practical people.”

Indeed, from reading Carlin’s take, Iceland sounds like a paradise for the Pagan spirit. A land that incorporates a deep respect for women, industriousness, a focus on family and community, a robust social safety net, a healthy capitalistic economy, and a sense of social justice that bypasses the backwards-looking morality that often marginalizes outsider groups and derails progress. For instance, while the culture warriors in America are sharpening their knives after California approved gay marriage, homosexual couples in Iceland have enjoyed the same benefits as married heterosexual couples since 1996, which was expanded in 2006 to include protections for adoption and artificial insemination.

As for full-blown religious Paganism, Iceland has that too. It was the first Scandinavian country to give legal recognition to Asatru (1973), and is home to famous Heathens like Hilmar Orn Hilmarsson, a musician and producer who has worked with artists like Bjork and Sigur Ros, and serves as Chief Godi of the Icelandic Asatru Association.

So when we muse about what a “post-Christian” future will look like, perhaps we should turn to the Scandinavian countries like Iceland, where such a reality exists and thrives. It could be that the best of what a “pagan” future holds has been here for generations, waiting for the rest of us to notice.
]]> http://wildhunt.org/blog/2008/05/iceland-perfect-pagan-country.html/feed 0 http://wildhunt.org/blog/2008/05/peek-into-post-christian-future.html http://wildhunt.org/blog/2008/05/peek-into-post-christian-future.html#comments Tue, 13 May 2008 13:14:00 +0000 Jason http://wildhunt.org/blog/2008/05/a-peek-into-the-post-christian-future.html Ruth Gledhill of The Times examines new survey data on religious attendance in Britain, and the results aren’t looking too good for Christianity.

“Church attendance in Britain is declining so fast that the number of regular churchgoers will be fewer than those attending mosques within a generation, research published today suggests … Churchgoing [Christians] across all denominations in England will fall from about 3 million today to about 700,000 in 2050. In Wales it will tumble from 200,000 to 42,000 and in Scotland, from 550,000 to 140,000. The figures take into account the recent boost to Catholicism from the number of Polish immigrants to Britain, particularly in Scotland.”

The new data comes from UK-based Christian Research, who regularly publish updates on church attendance and adherence in their “Religious Trends” studies. While the Times article gives special focus to Muslim fortunes in this brave new (projected) Christian-minority world (at least in terms of attendance), the rising tide of declining Christian attendance raises all religious minority boats.

“The forecast to 2050 shows churchgoing in Britain declining to 899,000 while the active Hindu population, now at nearly 400,000, will have more than doubled to 855,000.”

So if Muslims and Hindus are going to benefit, what about the Pagans? According to the last British census, there were around 40,000 Pagans in the UK. But many Pagans believe there are a lot more, from conservative estimates of nearly 300,000, to (un-sourced) articles claiming there are a million Pagans. If census growth rates hold steady in the next fifty years (and if these latest projections hold true for all non-Christian faiths), religion in Britain won’t be taken over by Muslims, instead we can look forward to a Britain locked in a precarious balance between the remaining Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Pagans.

Aiding the growth of minority faiths will be the economic decline of Christianity in Britain. As attendance drops, the large institutional structures maintained by the Church of England and the Catholics will become unsustainable. Something that could happen in less than thirty years.

“The fall – from the four million people who attend church at least once a month today – means that the Church of England, Catholicism and other denominations will become financially unviable. A lack of funds from the collection plate to support the Christian infrastructure, including church upkeep and ministers’ pay and pensions, will force church closures as ageing congregations die.”

Of course, predictions of future events could always be altered by factors yet unforeseen. However, it does give us a glimpse of how a post-Christian world might look, and what our place might be in such a world. Will we be ready for a time when modern Pagans hold political office (and pandered to by politicians looking to get into office), are looked to for social guidance, and considered completely mainstream? We in America may get a preview of such a world sooner than we think in the UK.
]]> http://wildhunt.org/blog/2008/05/peek-into-post-christian-future.html/feed 3 http://wildhunt.org/blog/2008/03/ramifications-of-post-christian-society.html http://wildhunt.org/blog/2008/03/ramifications-of-post-christian-society.html#comments Wed, 19 Mar 2008 15:33:00 +0000 Jason http://wildhunt.org/blog/2008/03/the-ramifications-of-a-post-christian-society.html Reverberations from the Pew Forum’s groundbreaking U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, the first independent survey to place modern Paganism over the one million mark, are still being felt. Recently The Chronicle Review, a publication of The Chronicle of Higher Education, explored some of the ramifications of these findings.

“…findings in the study shed new light on issues around which there has been no scholarly consensus … it is becoming increasingly obvious that the term “Judeo-Christian” no longer makes sense, given how many Americans are neither. But the favorite terms to replace it – “Judeo-Christian-Islamic” or “Abrahamic” – seem equally inappropriate. It is not just that Buddhists, who do not trace their roots to Abraham, may outnumber Muslims, who do. It is that the combined percentage of those who identify themselves as either Hindu (0.4 percent) or from “other world religions” (0.3 percent) does so as well. We are not one nation divided into three monotheistic faiths. We are a nation characterized by many faiths, as well as by none.”

If America is no longer a “Judeo-Christian” (or “Abrahamic”) country, what does that mean? Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, claims that the era of a common Christian morality is coming to a close.

“The fact that we now have so many religions in this country suggests either that no common morality is possible, or that, if it is, religion cannot be its most important source. The ways in which religious diversity either increases or detracts from speaking about the common good ought to be a subject stimulated by Pew’s conclusions.”

Which means that we could see a day when divisive “culture war” and other “social issues” will cease to be a tug-of-war between liberal secularists on one side, and conservative Christians on the other. Instead, there will be a variety of viewpoints and moralities involved in the discussion, changing the entire dynamic of debate.

Some will wonder if this is simply a statistical “blip” before some new Great Awakening re-asserts Christian moral dominance in America, but Wolfe says that data points to Christian denominations having retention problems across the board, including the “conservative” and “evangelical” denominations.

“Protestant denominations … were all losers … Pew has found that the strictest of all churches, at least in the sheer amount of proselytizing time and energy it requires, has the lowest overall retention rate … whatever the case in the past, there is no strong evidence of strict churches attracting a disproportionate share of members now … If the religious world of adults in the United States is diverse and in constant flux, the religious affiliations of young Americans, who will be tomorrow’s voters and citizens, are even more so. Three times as many Americans under 30 as those over 70 are not religiously affiliated.”

These problems haven’t escaped the notice of conservative and evangelical churches, but their attempts to fix what they define as an “image problem” may be too little and too late.

“Christians are supposed to represent Christ to the world. But according to the latest report card, something has gone terribly wrong. Using descriptions like “hypocritical,” “insensitive,” and “judgmental,” young Americans share an impression of Christians that’s nothing short of … unChristian.”

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we’ll be living in some sort of multi-religious utopia any time soon. Those in power rarely let go easily, and we may see battles over issues of religious morality and political influence get a lot worse before they attain a new balance. America may have woken up into a new “post-Christian” society, but the hangover from two hundred years of Christian dominance will most likely give us headaches for many years to come.
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