Bill's Faith Matters blog

Here's a model of a life that truly mattered

Patriotism, meaning a commitment to one's country, is quite different from a commitment to one's faith tradition. But they share at least this in common: Both require an unswerving willingness to speak the truth, to question and challenge policies and actions that seem destructive and to know not only what you stand for but what, in the end, you must stand against.

That's one reason that the recently published book Patriot, by now-murdered Russian dissident Alexei Navalny is full of lessons not just for people who love their nation but also for people who love and want to protect and promote their religion.

Navalny, an atheist who converted to Christianity after the 2001 birth of his daughter, wanted to do both. And he did, right up until Vladimir Putin's criminal regime ended his life earlier this year when he was a prisoner in an Arctic Circle corrective colony.

It is a remarkable story that should inspire readers to be courageous in the ways they call their governments and their faith communities to stand for truth and justice. Navalny knew of the countless ways in which Putin's reign was based on lies and crimes and he never tired of pointing that out.

Although he doesn't say much in this book about it, he also knew that the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church, which he had joined, have sold their souls to Putin and thus abandoned their core theology -- theology that was vital to Navalny's ability to stand up to Putin.

The history of scandals within religions is long and sordid. In recent years in the U.S. it has included the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests and the protection of those priests by their bishops. There have also been scandals related to clergy misusing or stealing money and scandals of clergy marital infidelity. And on and on.

Each of those needed a Navalny. Sometimes one would emerge to call attention to what was going wrong, but not often enough. Perhaps it would help if Navalny's new book were required reading for clergy and for lay leaders in congregations and other religious organizations.

And if the U.S. had had more Navalnys in the Vietnam era, we might have known sooner about the lies that U.S. officials were telling us about how that war was going (never well). Imagine the lives that might have been spared, including a couple of my high school classmates.

Navalny is clear about the need of all citizens to know not only what they are against but also what they are for. In the 1980s, for instance, he writes that "people of sound mind" were "against the endless lying on television and in newspapers, against empty shelves in the shops, against the hypocritical party elite wearing their mink fur hats. Even more important, though, demonstrating against the U.S.S.R. was fighting in favor of something positive," after which he mentions everything from rock music to the right to travel abroad to good medical care "without being expected to bribe the doctors. . ."

And he bemoans the reality that quite often "almost all the young democrats, reformers and free-market champions of the 1990s have become fabulously rich while changing their spots to become conservative pillars of the state."

One admirable trait that shines through this book is Navalny's willingness to acknowledge his errors of judgment, including "my blind support of (Boris) Yeltsin (president of Russian from 1991-1999) despite his disregard for the law."

So it's clear that as we speak the truth to power, we also need to speak it to ourselves when we're wrong. And we must recognize the way the systems in which we operate are -- or can be -- corrupt and eventually corrupting of us.

Navalny puts it this way: "(I)f you are behaving corruptly for the benefit of someone else, why would it not be okay to do a little bit of the same for yourself? The system soon swallows you."

So in whatever he did, he writes, he made sure that the underlying principle was transparency.

Transparency is part of what good journalism provides for a country and a culture, as George Packer writes here in the current edition of The Atlantic:

"Journalists will have a special challenge in the era of the Trump Reaction. We’re living in a world where facts instantly perish upon contact with human minds. Local news is disappearing, and a much-depleted national press can barely compete with the media platforms of billionaires who control users algorithmically, with an endless stream of conspiracy theories and deepfakes. The internet, which promised to give everyone information and a voice, has consolidated in just a few hands the power to destroy the very notion of objective truth. 'Legacy journalism is dead,' Musk crowed on his own X in the week before the election. Instead of chasing phantoms on social media, journalists would make better use of our dwindling resources, and perhaps regain some of the public’s trust, by doing what we’ve done in every age: expose the lies and graft of oligarchs and plutocrats, and tell the stories of people who can’t speak for themselves."

Which is exactly what Navalny bravely tried to do.

Navalny made a choice about how to live his one wild and precious life, as poet Mary Oliver called it. And he chose truth over the endless lies of the Russian leaders because, as he writes, "I want our children and grandchildren to know that their parents were good people and that they spent their lives trying to create something positive."

As for Navalny's conversion to Christianity, he doesn't dwell on it much in this book, though at one point he writes this: "The fact is, I'm religious. Which exposes me to constant ridicule. . .But I'm a believer now, and I find it helps me a lot in the work I do." And through it all, he has kept an inspiring sense of humor, writing, ". . .as long as you can see the funny side of things, it's not too bad." In the end, he says that his "job is to seek the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of his family to deal with everything else." Bingo.

By the way, as you may know, Navalny's widow, Yulia, (pictured here) continues the important work of her dead husband. You can find her doing some of that on this YouTube channel.

Oh, and here is an interesting Good Faith Media story about Navalny that focuses more on his Christian witness.

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A KC-BASED MEDICAL ASSISTANCE GROUP

Speaking of good works that buck the systems of the world, as I was above, did you know about the Palestinian American Medical Association, which was founded in Kansas City in 2013? I didn't either, until I read this KCUR article about it. It was cofounded by Dr. Majdi Hamarshi, who teaches critical care at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. So as the old year wanders off and the new one muscles its way in, don't lose faith in humanity. There still are good people doing good work out there. Let's join them.

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P.S.: Do you know what the Native American Church is and why its members use peyote in their worship customs? This Associated Press story will give you answers. You're welcome.

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ANOTHER P.S.: My latest Flatland column -- about truth, religion and the demise of local newspapers -- now is online here.

A homey and homely Christmas story from the past

As I've done on a few Christmases here on the blog, I'm resurrecting a Christmas story that I wrote for the now-defunct Sunday magazine of The Kansas City Star in 1982.

It draws on the characters in a manger scene that was in my family's home when I grew up in Woodstock, Ill. I hope you enjoy it, even if you've read it before, perhaps even when it was first published more than four decades ago.

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AN ACCOUNT OF CHRISTIANITY'S RISE

A friend from my boyhood days in India, Markandey Katju, has written this version of how Christianity emerged from Judaism and spread across the world. I'd be interested in your views about what he got right and what, if anything, he didn't. You can email your answers to me at [email protected].

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P.S.: To his great credit, President Joe Biden has commuted the death sentences of 37 federal prisoners to life in prison without parole. It's not quite the same as doing away with the death penalty, but it's a huge step in the right direction. Capital punishment is a moral stain on whatever government allows it. Thanks, Mr. President. But now let's abolish the death penalty in all cases in the U.S. (and around the world).

If there's life beyond Earth, what does it say about God?

The good folks at Linda Hall Library in Kansas City currently (since October) are offering a display that raises the question of whether there is life beyond Earth (not counting temporary residents of the International Space Station).

As usual with Linda Hall exhibits, it's worth seeing, as I did recently. Because the library is focused on science, I wasn't surprised that this exhibit didn't get into the question of what it would mean to world religions if it turns out that Earth is not the only planet in the cosmos that sustains life. But that question is, nonetheless, well worth asking and investigating.

Perhaps, from a Christian perspective, the place to start is by ignoring the biblical literalists who contend that Earth was created in six 24-hour days and that this astonishing (miraculous?) achievement took place just a few thousand years ago. That path will get us nowhere except properly laughed out of science departments at universities.

One intriguing verse, John 10:16 in the New Testament, has Jesus saying this: "I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd."

Here and there, over time, a few people have suggested that Jesus was speaking about life elsewhere in the cosmos.

If you want to wander deep into those uncertain woods, take a look at this biblical interpretation site, which offers several possible options for what John 10:16 means.

If, after several months of study you emerge with a clear answer, I want to be the second to know.

And here, at a Catholic-based site, is an essay that looks at a slightly longer passage in John that includes verse 16 and asks the same questions about aliens out in the universe.

"What," the author asks, "if Christ is not referring to the Gentiles as those who are not of 'this fold' but to alien life, or intelligent beings who are not of the one fold of the human race? I believe the remainder of the passage raises this possibility."

If the adherents of the three Abraham faiths -- chronologically, Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- mean what they say about a god who created the entire cosmos out of an impulse of love and who does, indeed, love humanity and all of nature, I can't think of any reason such a god would limit the focus of divine love to humans on Earth. Well, except maybe not wanting to keep track of a family that big and spread out.

That position may make logical sense, but it proves nothing about what's out there in the ever-expanding cosmos that science now says came into existence in a flash some 13.7 billion years ago.

Let's also consider that this is a universe that, from the beginning, has experienced the dissipating effects of entropy, or increasing disorganization, as predicted by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which I wrote about recently here.

That whole discussion, of course, raises difficult questions about the nature of God and about the purpose of creating something that slowly, over billions of years, collapses in disorder as sun after sun burns out and the cosmos finally goes silent, obviating a need for keeping or telling time -- and, thus, a need for alarm clocks.

So my desire in raising all this is to suggest you go see the Linda Hall Library exhibit and to hope that it complicates your thinking instead of simplifying it. People free to express their doubts and admit their ignorance are, frankly, a lot more interesting (and maybe mentally healthier) than people married to false certitude. Which is why I once wrote a book called The Value of Doubt.

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WHAT'S NEXT? PACIFISTS TAKING UP ARMS?

If this isn't a sign of the apocalypse, I'm not sure what is. Methodists -- Methodists -- are engaged in lethal fighting against one another in Africa, as this RNS story reports. The details:

"Violent clashes have broken out between groups of Methodists in Nigeria and Liberia as a divide over the ordination of LGBTQ clergy and same-sex marriage has split the United Methodist Church.

"In the eight months since the UMC voted to strike a condemnation of homosexuality from its governing Book of Discipline, tensions have arisen in Africa between dissenting congregations seeking to leave the 56-year-old denomination and those choosing to remain. The fighting between the two factions in Nigeria has left one adult and two children dead."

The truly sad thing is that this intra-Methodist fight is really over a tragic misreading of scripture that leads to a dehumanization of LGBTQ+ people. Stop it, Methodists. Just stop it.

Even in the face of a dissolving cosmos, there's room for hope

As we move to the end of a remarkable year that has been challenging in countless of ways, I've been thinking about the big picture. You know, an eternal view. A cosmic sense of things. It's been one way to reconvince myself that I cannot, individually, change everything I want to change in the world -- from ending wars to stopping crime to creating peace everywhere.

I must be both realistic and yet willing to use my prophetic voice to make a difference where and when I can.

To ponder things in this way, it's important to think about how people of faith (I am one) respond to some puzzling realities about the cosmos.

For instance, the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that there is increasing disorder in the universe -- a universe that most people who pledge allegiance to one of the world's great religions believe was created by a force or person we call God. The cosmos is expanding and as it does it's also falling apart. Try holding together that creative tension -- a creator who creates something that, starting with the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago, is dissolving into increasing chaos through the forces of entropy.

As Adrian J. Adams writes in his book Which god is God?, which I wrote about recently here, "Time is passive. It simply measures the increasing disorder of the universe. And it always moves toward the future, never the reverse. Time's direction follows the steady unwinding of the universe. . .When the universe runs out of fuel, it will be a cold, dark expanse." He then quotes a theoretical physicist as saying that "once time has nothing left to measure, it will stop."

And then where will you go dancing on Saturday night?

Facing such a long-term reality, it is easy -- and understandable -- to lose hope and to ask about the ultimate purpose of our lives.

But the reality is that the Apostle Paul had it right when he wrote in I Corinthians 13 (King James Version): "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face. . ."

In other words, it helps to acknowledge what we don't know and, beyond that, what -- this side of paradise -- we can't know. And if we believe in a loving, creative god, we simply do what we can to respond to that reality in loving and creative ways.

Some friends who have been crushed by the results of the last presidential election have told me they are doing their best to work on what needs to be fixed locally. They are not exactly ignoring what they suspect will be a chaotic and destructive four years of national drama and change, but they are pledging to do what they can where they can and to hope they might be wrong about their national and international fears.

The same approach -- active engagement with what you can change, less worry about what you can't -- also can be a useful way to handle state, local and even family issues. (And the overlap among them all.)

It's too easy, of course, simply to say that God is ultimately in charge and so you and I don't need to worry about -- or do -- anything. That would not please the God I know and it would make it easier for the forces of destruction and chaos to have their way.

So as the cosmos moves toward increasing disorder, our job is to do what W. H. Auden said, in his poem "September 1, 1939", was his job: to "show an affirming flame."

(The image above here today came from this site.)

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I SWEAR THIS IS TRUE

An ancient stone bearing the Ten Commandments is to be auctioned off today with the bidding starting at $1 million, this RNS story reports. But wait. One of the commandments is missing, the one that says "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain." I tell you about that in case you win the bidding and only then realize it's missing 10 percent of the text, an error that causes you to take the Lord's name in vain.

Some post-election political guidance for clergy and congregations

Since the recent election -- and even before -- leaders of religious congregations have been struggling with the question of whether and how to be "political" in what they say and in how they guide congregants to act.

For Christians, it's important to recognize that what became Christianity after its eventual split from Judaism showed its political nature from the very beginning. For instance, the first creed of the church was the simple phrase "Jesus is Lord." And that was a deeply political statement because it asserted, in effect, that in that Roman colony of Israel, Caesar was not Lord.

But there's a difference between being political and being partisan. The latter is to be avoided by American religious leaders, in part because being partisan may jeopardize their tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service. But it does not mean that congregations and their leaders can't openly discuss, wrestle with and live out political approaches to some of life's issues.

In this commentary by leaders of Kansas Interfaith Action, which describes itself as "a statewide, faith-based issue-advocacy organization representing moderate and progressive people of faith in Kansas," Rabbi Moti Rieber and the Rev. Dr. Mandy Todd discuss several of their recommendations to other clergy about all of this. It's worth a read.

Their particular concern is that the incoming Trump administration seems in many ways to promote the abhorrent idea of Christian Nationalism, even White Christian Nationalism, which amounts to a radical misreading of the gospels and a refutation of the idea that Americans should be free to follow any religious tradition without being coerced by the government.

Rieber and Todd write this: "The most important thing religious leadership can do at a time like this is continue to hold and articulate our core sacred values – love, inclusiveness, diversity, nonviolence, caring for the least of these, caring for the stranger. These are the things that last; these are the teachings our religions are based on. If we compromise our values for the sake of political expedience or even job security, then who are we and what are we doing?"

Then they offer this: "There are two issues that we believe any mainstream congregation should be able to talk about. The first is LGBT inclusion. Every Mainline denomination, at least on the national level and usually on the local district level as well, is affirming. Many of the people who are against full inclusion have left already, yet those who remain often maintain control of their church’s position on the issue. Denominational resources abound that can help any skillful pastor have this conversation with their congregation, which can lead to fruitful spiritual development for the whole community.

"The second issue is immigration, about which the Bible could not be more clear. This can be spoken about in terms of caring for the stranger or being against racism or xenophobia. Yes, people might perceive that as being 'political' or 'partisan' but that’s because they are political and partisan and can’t see anything outside of that framing."

In a time when participation in institutional religion in the U.S. is waning -- and has been for decades -- it's important that leaders of religious traditions, including lay leaders, not abandon the core ideas of their faith. That doesn't mean weekly anti-Trump sermons. (I wouldn't put up with that, either.) But it does mean speaking the truth about the responsibilities that people of faith have to love the seemingly unlovable, to care for the downtrodden, to welcome the stranger and to do all those other counter-cultural acts that God (however one identifies God) clearly requires.

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INDIA MOVES DEEPER INTO ANTI-MUSLIM HATRED

In rather sharp contrast to the interfaith peace and harmony envisioned by Kansas Interfaith Action (see above), the political leaders of India, where I spent two years of my boyhood, seem increasingly to be adopting the attitude that Muslims are a destructive, repulsive force in the country and must be dealt with harshly so that Hindu Nationalism can succeed.

This article by my friend Markandey Katju, a former justice on India's Supreme Court, offers his take on this disaster.

"Of late," Katju writes, "fresh atrocities on Muslims have occurred, sparking national outrage. For instance, in Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh, a Muslim couple was forced to give up their newly purchased home in an upscale residential colony after facing protests from Hindu residents.

"Protesting residents raised slogans against the former owner, Dr Ashok Bajaj, asking him to take the house back. The protesters argued that the couple’s presence near a local temple was 'unacceptable' and cited concerns about the safety of their women.

"The Hindu residents, led by figures like Megha Arora, demanded that the house sale be revoked. Under pressure, the couple decided to resell the house to a Hindu family, highlighting the deep-seated discrimination and segregation still thriving in Indian urban centers."

(Just so you know, Katju identifies himself as a Hindu atheist, meaning an atheist who comes from a Hindu background as a Kashmiri Brahmin.)

In any case, India's current leadership has besmirched the country's reputation as a civil society, and, as Katju writes, it could get worse. It all breaks my heart as someone who, for most of two years, lived on a college campus in India near a Muslim village, played with Muslim children and was friends with many Hindus and Indian Christians as well.

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P.S.: I have abandoned disgusting X, formerly Twitter, and have moved to Bluesky, which so far isn't disgusting. You can follow me on Bluesky here, and I hope you will.

Can nature's sharing systems be a model for our economy?

Scripture from many religious traditions has things to say about economic matters and about how we are to treat others, particularly those in economic need.

In the New Testament, for instance, we read this in I Timothy 6:10:

"For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains."

Still true today.

And in the Hebrew Bible, the first use of money occurs in Genesis 23, when Abraham, after some negotiation -- and to be fair to the land's owner -- buys a plot of land for 400 shekels to bury his wife Sarah.

The question today for people of faith in the U.S. is whether our economic system -- which I would characterize as semi-regulated capitalism -- works well for everyone. The obvious answer is no. If it did, the poverty rate would be zero. Instead, it was 11.1 percent last year, the latest time for which U.S. Census Bureau figures are available. (That figure represented a very small decrease from the year before.)

So what can or should we do about that? There are some wonderfully provocative suggestions in a new book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, a book I recommended here on the blog earlier this year.

"In times of crisis," she writes, what she calls the "gift economy surges up through the rubble of an earthquake or the wreckage of a hurricane. . .When human survival is threatened, compassionate acts overrule market economies. People give freely to one another, and bonds of ownership disappear when everyone pools resources of food and labor and blankets in solidarity. When systems of governance and market economies of debt are disrupted, networks of mutual aid arise."

True, but is it realistic to think that something like a "gift economy" could replace our current capitalistic economic model?

Kimmerer isn't so starry-eyed as to suggest exactly that, but she does advocate modifications to our economic activity -- changes that can be modeled after what is seen in nature, when, for instance, serviceberry trees provide food for birds in a complicated, mutually beneficial relationship of soil, seed, air, water, animals and more.

Such changes might challenge the common standard that speaks of economies being based on the idea of scarcity (when bird flu cuts down the supply of eggs, the price of eggs rises). As she writes, "With scarcity as the main principle, the mindset that follows is based on commodification of goods and services."

So, she writes, "the challenge is to cultivate our inherent capacity for gift economies without the catalyst of catastrophe. We have to believe in our neighbors, that our shared interests supersede the impulses of selfishness."

She suggests we pay closer attention to how organic systems work and engage in what she calls "biomimicry," or learning from nature.

"Ecological economists," she writes, "ask how we might build economic systems that meet citizens' needs while aligning with ecological principles that allow long-term sustainability for people and for the planet."

One way to move toward that, she suggests, is to encourage the development of "intentional communities," an idea I wrote about a few years ago here.

What I especially like about Kimmerer's writing is that she doesn't make excuses for systems -- whether ecological, economic or something else -- that don't work for everybody. She challenges them and insists that we can do better.

Kimmerer is a biologist and teacher, but at times she sounds like a prophetic moral voice calling the rest of us to use our own prophetic voices to change broken or inadequate systems. And that'll always preach.

(By the way, until a few years ago I had never heard of serviceberry trees. Then a friend gave me small one, which I planted in our back yard. But within a year or so of that planting, we sold that home. If the new owners discover me sneaking a look over what is now their backyard fence, it's because I'm checking to see if that tree thrived or died. Hoping for the former, and so, no doubt, are the birds that eat the tree's berries.)

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MISSUSING AND DISTORTING DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

German Lutheran martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer has been much in the news lately because of a deeply flawed new movie about him ("Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin.") and because, well, of the times in which we live. If you know only one thing about Bonhoeffer you know that he was involved in an unsuccessful plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler and that the plot's failure led to Bonhoeffer's execution at the end of World War II. But this RNS opinion column says that today's left and right political sides are both misusing Bonhoeffer to score points. Not surprising.

It's hard to pull someone out of his or her historical context and find a perfect fit for today's circumstances. And that's clearly true of the complicated but fascinating Bonhoeffer. That's not to say that his books, especially The Cost of Discipleship, aren't valuable today. Sometimes those books are crucial for an understanding of what it might mean today to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. But it's far too easy to cast Bonhoeffer into a left or right hero by distorting his life.

As Charles Marsh, who teaches religious studies at the University of Virginia, writes in the piece to which I've linked you, "The relative dearth of explicit political discussion in his writings has made it easy for those with differing theological and ideological stances to cast Bonhoeffer in their own image."

People are doing it with Bonhoeffer and they're doing it today with Luigi Mangione, the alleged assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

Also: Here's a piece in which the author asserts that "it isn’t just conservatives who wish to claim Bonhoeffer. I suspect Bonhoeffer would be appalled to see how progressives are using his name, as well." 

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P.S.: Thousands of faith leaders and others across the U.S. are pleading with President Joe Biden to commute all federal death sentences before he leaves office. Capital punishment has been dwindling as a response to terrible crimes, but it's still around and needs to be put to death itself. Here is a copy of the letter to Biden and a list of its signers. Feel free to write to Biden yourself. You can do that here. And here is the Good Faith Media story about all of this.

As 'private religion' gains ground, what's being lost?

Each day I become more aware that I've not been introduced to many interesting writers whose thoughts have complicated the thinking of readers. One I recently discovered is Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosopher who taught at McGill University and who has written piles of books.

Out of curiosity, I picked up his 2014 book, Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays. Reading Taylor takes some work, some commitment and access to a dictionary.

But I was drawn into his essay called "The Future of the Religious Past," in which he mentions "a definite movement toward unbelief. . .among the educated classes," a movement that began to show up in the late 19th Century. Some of this was in response to a change in emphasis among some people of faith who began to move from deep engagement in communal faith practices -- regular worship services at which hymns are sung together, creeds are recited and sacraments (baptism and Holy Communion, primarily) observed -- to a more personal style of religion, which can include meditation, contemplative prayer and other practices that can be done by oneself.

It's what Taylor calls "personal religion," and the core question he raises is whether it is more or less important than what we might call "communal religion." (Taylor favors the latter, though he makes room for the former.) He uses the term "enchanted world" to refer to the kind of collective ritual that religion offers and the term "disenchantment" to refer to a move away from corporate worship and toward a more personal religious style.

The period of obvious religious disenchantment that the U.S. has witnessed for at least the last, say, 70 years has corresponded to an increase in personal religion and a growing willingness to describe oneself as "spiritual but not religious," a term that I often find is almost meaningless except as a way of saying that someone is either theologically illiterate or has been injured by institutional religion to the point of needing to abandon it.

So let's think a bit today about personal vs. communal religion.

And let's start with Timothy Gombis, an affiliate professor of New Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary, who writes in this essay that "(t)he documents of the NT (New Testament), with a few exceptions, are addressed to communities and not to individuals. Many of us know this and it may not be too shocking, but the significances of this reality must continue to transform how we envision Christian identity.

"Nobody in the first century had a Bible. Most people in the first few Christian generations were illiterate and couldn’t have read their Bibles even if they had them. When Scripture was read, it was read to communities who listened to it. When NT letters were circulated and read, they were read aloud by individuals to communities."

Indeed, one of the attractions to people who became First Century Christ followers was the sense of community and the way that community welcomed everyone, especially society's poor and marginalized. Inside of the community, of course, there were things people could do and did do to practice the faith in individualistic ways, but the sense of community seemed to be insistently dominant over what Taylor calls individual religion.

Noting a decline in attendance at worship services since the start of the Covid pandemic, Jim Black, author of this Salvation Army article, says that "(t)he unfortunate conclusion is that more and more people are foregoing corporate worship and claim to be substituting personal worship instead."

He suggests people who have moved in that direction risk losing something important: "(T)hrough Jesus, (God) makes it possible for each individual to be in a personal relationship with Him at any time and in any place or circumstance. What more could we need or want? The answer is that by itself, the personal relationship would be sufficient. But in typical God fashion, He wants us to have more than that! He provides a third level of worship and relationship with Him — 'But if we are living in the light, as God is in the light, then we have fellowship with each other, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from all sin.'” Black here is quoting 1 John 1:7. So there's another argument for communal religion over against personal religion.

Finally, I want to share this article about reformer John Calvin from a writer in the Reformed Tradition, which is where, broadly, I locate myself as a member of a Presbyterian Church (USA) congregation, though there are certain points of that tradition with which I argue.

Phil Majorins, author of the article to which I've linked you, writes this: "Calvin starts by framing his theology of worship within the context of church attendance and participation. He understands regular church attendance and community involvement as a  necessary component of Christian discipleship. It is a bedrock that some take for granted. In my own Northern California context, weekly church attendance is a radical idea. Our church has a small core group of weekly attenders, but most 'regular' attenders of our church show up once or twice a month. An individualistic and 'rootless' culture, compounded by little communal pressure to attend church, means that those who choose to come to church really want to be there. On the other hand, this results in stunted individual spiritual growth and difficult soil for growing a vibrant and stable community. This aspect of our ministry is a regular source of frustration."

So private religion, in other words, can result in "stunted individual spiritual growth." I get that. But I also know that there can be -- and needs to be -- room within communal religion for private practices, perhaps in the way that from time to time Jesus sought to escape the demanding crowds. I think that produces a creative tension that can benefit both the individual and the community.

I'm curious about your experience with both communal and private religion and why you prefer one or the other. You can email your thoughts to me at [email protected]. And let me know whether I can quote you if I decide to do a follow-up on this blog post.

(The photo at top today shows the Communion table on a recent Sunday at my church. Holy Communion, or the Eucharist, is widely considered the central sacrament of the Christian church and is an example of communal religion.)

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ANOTHER STAINED-GLASS CEILING SHATTERED

Mother Bethel AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Church in Philadelphia, the historically Black denomination’s founding congregation, just got its first female senior pastor. The Rev. Carolyn Cavaness, that pastor, responded this way: “Who would have ever thought? It’s such a victory on so many different levels.” It is, but how sad that it's taken so long. This should have happened long, long ago. In the same way, it was sad that it took my Presbyterian congregation until this year to call its first female senior pastor, a mere 159 years after our founding. As welcome as these changes are, there are large parts of institutional religion that still want nothing to do with female pastoral leadership. Sigh.

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P.S.: There's good news in the way of journalism that covers religion. Religion News Service, the stories of which I often give you links to, and National Public Radio have announced a new partnership. Among other things, this means that RNS reporters now will be heard on NPR stations reporting on how developments in religion are affecting our lives. The press release to which I linked you adds that "The partnership is funded by grants over a two-year period from Lilly Endowment Inc. to NPR and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations to RNS."

The reasons people leave religion are, in the end, pretty simple

The growth in the number of religiously unaffiliated people in the U.S. -- called the "nones" -- is a news story several decades old.

But the response to this phenomenon from institutional religion's leaders has been haphazard and often not very fruitful. One reason may be that they simply haven't understood very clearly why people have left their congregations and what they're looking for.

The answers aren't all that mysterious, as this Religion News Service opinion column suggests.

Jana Riess, senior RNS columnist, writes about a new book that explores this subject: "In Goodbye Religion: The Causes and Consequences of Secularization, sociologists Ryan Cragun and Jesse M. Smith say the reality is actually pretty boring."

In other words, people leave for mundane reasons. As Riess writes, "Despite many religious Americans’ idea that people leave religion because they wanted to sin, 'it’s a fairly boring story,' Smith said in a recent interview. He and Cragun studied data about time usage in America and found that nonreligious people use their extra time on Sundays to…do more laundry, basically.

“'They’re just doing normal things, right? None of it is crazy. They’re not out at the bars spending hours and hours. They’re spending a little bit more time with their family and a little bit more outdoors. They go hiking, they watch more TV and they get more work done,' Smith said.

"Oh, and, according to the book, they might be a tiny bit more statistically likely to be having sex. Perhaps in between loads of laundry."

One interesting response to the phenomena of people leaving faith communities comes from this column in the current issue of The Christian Century, by Jonathan Tran: "I want to say, if people want to leave the church, let them go. If they think they’ve found greener pastures, why keep them from them? They will have left the church for what the church should have been. And if they want to leave because they lack hope, we’ve already lost them. What we in the church can’t do is change what we are called to in order to keep people from leaving. The goal of church has never been getting people to stay; it’s getting people to come. We believe the best way to get people to come is by being who we are called to be, holding fast to the hope that if we do, they will come."

Riess mentions another interesting reality about the out-flow from institutional religion: "Leaving religion is not just for white men anymore, if it ever was. In past years, the archetype of someone who left religion was a young, well-educated white male. Today, the nonreligious look as diverse as the general population, a function of more and more people either leaving religion (religious exiters) or being born into nonreligious families (cradle nones). As a result, said Cragun, 'Just focusing on demographics doesn’t tell us very much.'”

There are no easy answers to stopping or reversing this phenomenon, but it helps, I think, to remember that everyone is searching for meaning, for purpose, for an understanding of life's core purposes -- to say nothing of the need for community. If congregations aren't providing plenty of opportunities to help people with all of that, those congregations deserve to slip away to nothing.

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A TRICKY PAPAL TRIP TO TURKEY IS COMING

Pope Francis has announced that he will visit Turkey next year, the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, out of which emerged the Nicene Creed, which declared Jesus Christ to be both fully divine and fully human. That gathering in 325 CE was, in some ways, a way for the church to react to Emperor Constantine's desire for unity in the church -- no matter how theological disagreements got settled.

So there are a couple of issues with this trip. One is that it reopens the history of how theological arguments sometimes got resolved in the early Christian church -- via political pressure (from Constantine), who probably didn't have a dog in the fight over defining the nature of Christ. In secular legislative terms, it opens up the law- or creed-making process so that people can see how the sausage is made -- often in a messy, compromised manner. Second, it puts the pontiff in some kind of relationship with the authoritarian leader of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose record on human rights is pretty abysmal. To maintain his moral credibility, Pope Francis will have to find a way to be critical of the president's policies and actions while the pope is a guest in the country.

But Francis has managed such juggling acts before, and we're confident he can do so again.

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P.S.: It's the season for the annual "Journey to Bethlehem" pageant that my congregation puts on. You can go on the journey (kids, especially, love it) from 7 to 9 p.m. this Friday and from 5 to 7 p.m. this Saturday at Second Presbyterian Church, 318 E. 55th St. (55th and Brookside) in Kansas City, Mo. And if, on Saturday, you see one of the "Wise Men" who looks like me, say howdy. It probably is me.