It has been almost forty years since I went on a weekend trip to visit a friend who lived in a smallish city in southern Pennsylvania. Lovely folks, each and every one, and I was treated just like another member of the family–i.e., very well indeed.
But on Sunday morning everybody, including myself, got up, got dressed, got in the car, and went to church. It was the last time in my life I can remember actually going to a church on a Sunday morning. My friend’s father was the minister of the church. There wasn’t anything pushy about it; they were Lutherans, not wild-eyed wacko evangelicals. To them Christianity was as much a part of daily life as brushing their teeth or walking the dog.
Even then they seemed like throwbacks—not so much because of being Lutheran, but because it all seemed so natural and unexceptional to them and to everyone around them. But I had come from a different place, I suppose a more modern one, a place where such matter-of-fact Christianity was rare, if not downright invisible. The only Christians I knew made a big deal out of it, bothered the heck out of everybody, made a great big show of their piety and in the process made great big asses out of themselves.
I look around at the United States of 2010 and realize that this country is finally joining Europe in letting its religious foibles evaporate. One needn’t listen to the loudmouths of the Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris variety to observe the increasingly irrelevant place of Christianity in American life. Just look around. People don’t pay much attention to it any more. Americans just don’t care. Shrill grandstanding by religious bigwigs might merit brief attention as the latest dog-and-pony show, but that’s all. Mr. Ratzinger says some very silly things, but then again so does Tom Cruise. Fred Phelps is an obnoxious creep but then again so is Mel Gibson. None of the sound-byte producing media mavens, including Mr. Ratzinger, mean anything to anyone save momentary diversions from one’s everyday activities, rather like listening to an exchange on talk radio or catching the last five minutes of Oprah before the evening news comes on.
I teach in a UC Berkeley program that leases space from a Baptist seminary about three blocks from the main campus. It’s quite a sizable place, with a Bernard Maybeck-designed main building, several residences, a church, and two newer halls. My program leases the two newer halls. The seminary proper is more or less a dead zone. You never see anyone coming in and out of the building, although sometimes lights are on and cars are parked in their private parking lot. Enrollment information about schools, including seminaries, is public record and so I was able to ascertain that this particular seminary has an enrollment of about 58 part-time students. Their FTE (full time equivalent) is: 3.
That’s right. Three FTEs. There are three full-time tuitions coming into that school. At $13K a year, they are pulling in $39K on full-time students. I would hazard a guess that they couldn’t be generating more than $60K total tuition dollars, if that. Obviously they are paying their staff way more than they are taking in, not to mention faculty. Heck, basic maintenance probably costs more than their tuition revenues. They’re probably one earthquake, or good solid lawsuit, away from closing altogether.
Thus the leasing out of their space. Not only my program, but also an Islamic group rents out their classrooms. When you get right down to it, there really isn’t a Baptist seminary there any more. It’s just a for-rent classroom building run by a Baptist organization.
That’s only one small corner of the Protestant universe, but it is symptomatic, I think, of the precipitous decline. Who the hell goes to a seminary any more?
Folks keep trying out “alternate” religions, mostly the soft-soap varieties that pride themselves on being all-inclusive and don’t demand anything from anybody. It takes no great spiritual effort to fit in at a Unitarian center or to sit on a pillow with your eyes closed in your friendly neighborhood zendo. Nor are there any penalties for early withdrawal. Get bored with it, get tired of it, and move on to something else. Maybe Advaita next, or 4th Way.
All of that tells me that what we are witnessing is a vestigial reaction to the idea of being part of a religion. Sometimes people aren’t ready to untie the knot altogether, ergo the flirtation with Zen or Vipassana or Nyingma or Advaita or 4th Way or Unitarianism: a way station along the journey to abandoning the whole shebang. But the shebang is being abandoned, and has been largely jettisoned by vast swathes of American society.
I have no problem with any of this; in fact, I made this particular journey myself some time ago. I follow Theravada (Vipassana) Buddhism, but less and less as time goes by. I never approached it as a religion, and when confronted with a professional Buddhist cleric in the form of a monk, I almost always reacted with aversion (and still do.) Buddhist monks are no better than any other variety of full-time religious: small-minded, pompous, inexperienced, arrogant, naïve, self-deluded, fat-headed leeches who have chosen to make a full-time career out of superstition, nonsense, and unsolicited busybody meddling. And for this they expect people to feed, clothe, and house them.
My response: in a pig’s eye, buddy-boy.
Buddhism isn’t the answer to Christianity’s impending extinction. Neither is Hinduism or Zoroastrianism or Shamanism. The only viable future for a truly humanistic and humane humanity is for religion and all its monstrous conceit to fade away until it has become only a vaguely amusing diversion, something you read about in the history books or that pops up on the evening news with all the “well what do you know about that” charm of a Japanese soldier discovered tucked away in a Pacific island cavern, still holding down his post for good old Emperor Hirohito.
That’s how the wind is blowing, anyway. May the breeze stiffen and waft the moldy old thing away even sooner.