Unaffiliated
The Pope will shortly be making the rounds here in New York City. I haven’t paid much attention to his visit, but it so happens that Eileene will be going into town to keep her sister company at Comicon, a big, geeky convention anchored on comic books, but with sizable helpings of other kinds of geek culture, so she expressed concern over what two big events would do to the traffic.
Benedict has a tricky job keeping Americans in the fold. We’re so attached to our personal freedoms that US Catholics routinely treat Papal edicts as advice to consider, instead of the absolute and unquestionable edicts passed from the all-knowing and all-powerful to us, through his anointed vicar on earth, as Catholic teaching holds. To my mind, calling yourself a Catholic who practices birth control (or sees nothing wrong with homosexuality, or approved of going to war in Iraq, or whatever) sort of like calling yourself a vegetarian who eats eggs and milk and fish and maybe some chicken and occasionally a bit of steak.
But the Pope can’t very well just write off US Catholics, so I’m sure his visit is something of a recruitment drive. Like George Carlin says, it’s all about the warm bodies. All that remains to be seen is whether Benedict thinks he can get more people in the pews with a soft line that can tease back free-minded Americans turned off by an authoritarian church, or with the hard line the True Believers around the world secretly (or not-so-secretly) long for. Whichever tack he takes, it will raise attendance for a little while. Then the aura of celebrity will fade, and we’ll settle quickly back into our secular habits.
Because, despite the ugly Christian-American so prominent in the news since their rise to political power in the heyday of the Reagan era, and despite the continuing reports that the US has a far higher percentage of self-identified “very religious” than other developed nations, and disturbingly high poll results of people who insist evolution is a fraud and that gays are an abomination, despite a sharp rise in Catholics thanks to the current wave of Hispanic immigrants, despite alarmist news reports of skyrocketing interest in and conversion to Islam, the fastest growing religious denomination is “no religious affiliation.”
That’s not quite “atheism”—okay, it’s not atheism at all. That “fastest growing” status is due primarily to Americans who still believe in God, but have finally decided they want nothing more to do with organized religion. Some of their reasons are rooted in ugly stories of abuse; some of them grow from youthfully rebellious exploration of New Age/wicca/college secularism/whatever that never went back; some of them are reactions to the ugly streak of public religion so much alive in our country today.
Still, it fills me with hope. Parents with “no religious affiliation” is much more likely to let their children think critically about religion, and critical thought about anything is always helpful, even if the kids think it over and stick with theism. Even more promising, citizens with “no religious affiliation” are taking the country back to the religious freedom on which it was founded, where religion, no matter how intense, is a private affair, a matter between the believer and his God, and not a public one between the believer, his God, and everyone the believer things God wants him to hate.
I don’t think it’s too much to hope that the zeal of today’s politico-religious movements are less a sign of strength than of weakness, a fervor born of a sense that secularism really is leaving hard-line theism behind in modern society. Too much to expect, perhaps, but not too much to hope.