Catholic Schism

St. Peter’s RC, NYC (source)

With the resignation of Pope Benedict and election of a new pope, amidst what seems an unending turmoil over sex abuse by priests, pollsters have understandably thought this a good moment to inquire about American Catholics’ attitudes on religious matters. The results describe a major disconnection between the Roman Catholic Church and its American adherents.

A New York Times survey conducted in February found, for example, that by roughly two to one or more, self-identified Catholics favored gay marriage, women priests, priests marrying, artificial means of birth control, access to abortion, and the death penalty – all anathema to the Church. Most said that the Church and its American bishops are “out of touch” with the needs of Catholics (although though most also said that parish priests are in touch).

The media are attending to the events and crises of the moment. It is important to understand that the alienation between the Church in Rome and Catholics in America has deep historical and cultural roots.

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Unholy Alliance: Laissez Faire and the Church

19th C. Evangelical Minister (Source)

I recently received an email from a woman who had read my Boston Review column on how the political left and churches in the U.S. have drifted apart in the last few decades. There had been a vibrant religious left in the 1960s, but now the phrase, “religious progressive” seems (as one liberal commenter to the column insisted) “an oxymoron.” The conservative e-mailer also insisted that a reconciliation of the left and religion was impossible, because “either you understand the Bible or you don’t.  Left-liberals don’t ….”

Our exchange did not go very far. But it made me want to revisit more explicitly the point that the contemporary alliance between laissez faire, free market ideology and conservative Christians is, if not an unholy alliance, certainly an historically unusual one. The two were, for most of our history, in conflict.

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The Left’s Religion Problem

Nun, Ministers, and Rabbis March in 1965 (Source)

Churches are meddling in politics. Ministers are leading social movements, backing and attacking candidates, campaigning from the pulpit.

That was the complaint in the 1950s and ’60s, when clergy pushed for civil rights legislation, nuclear disarmament, and withdrawal from Vietnam.  . .  . In 1964 conservative journalist David Lawrence pushed back: “To preach a sermon . . . calculated to have an effect on the current Presidential campaign . . . raises a question of propriety if the principle of separation of church and state is to be maintained.”

Today, however, religion is associated strongly with the right. The transformation is evident not only in headlines, but also in white Americans’ behavior.

The rest of the post appears as this column in the Boston Review.

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Religion, Politics, and the Sunday Mail

Saturday mail delivery may in the near future be a thing of the past. All the more surprising that Americans once had not only Saturday delivery but Sunday mail delivery as well.

1890s Post Office (USPS)

The century-long struggle that ended postal service on the Sabbath, a campaign to protect both the Lord’s Day and American workers from the ceaseless demands of commerce,  illuminates the complex political alliances and conflicts among churches, business, and organized labor in American history. Protestantism’s political alliances used to be quite different than they are today.

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Spiritual and/or Religious

One hears occasionally, especially in the left-hand part of the country, a comment on the order of “I am spiritual, but not religious.” This is a relatively new formulation. What does it mean? And why is it increasingly popular?

(source)

Religion and spirituality usually imply one another. Most Americans by far describe themselves as both spiritual and religious. The small yet growing number of spiritual-but-not-religious people seem to mean a variety of things by this declaration. But it is not so much a rejection of faith as a rejection of organized religion. Most spiritual-but-not-religious Americans say they believe in God and 40 percent of them believe without any doubt.* In the last generation, many Americans have lost confidence in churches, denominations, and clergy. For some, saying they are “spiritual but not religious” expresses this alienation.

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Still Under God

James Bryce, who would later be the British ambassador to the United States, wrote a major work on American society in the 1880s. The American Commonwealth was a re-do, about 50 years later, of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. One of Bryce’s acute observations was about Americans’ religiosity: “Christianity influences conduct . . . probably more than it does in any other modern country, and far more than it did in the so-called ages of faith.” The common expectation has been that modern times have been eroding Americans’ faith ever since, but as best as historians of religion can estimate, Americans today are roughly as religious as they were in Bryce’s generation. (See this earlier post.)

How well does Bryce’s impression that faith in the U.S. is greater than in other modern nations hold up about 120 years later? The latest data are in and Bryce is confirmed. Americans of the 21st century remain strikingly more religious than people in other nations, especially western ones. It is part of what makes America “exceptional.”

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Sunday Pleasures, Private Faith

In 1892, The Chicago Tribune reported that a judge in Racine, Wisconsin had fined several athletes for playing baseball on the previous Sunday. It went on to whet the readers’ appetite by speculating that the “Sunday observance law war is expected to be more exciting than last summer, as outdoor sports and picnics will be strictly prohibited within city limits on the Sabbath day.”

sabr.org

Modestly-sized Racine, divided between strict Lutherans and more liberal Catholics, was far from the only city to discourage public entertainments on the Sabbath. Even big, bad Chicago: In 1895, a judge fined “Cap. Anson” – who had led his team to five N.L. pennants in the 1880s – “and eight of his ‘Colts’” –- later to be the Cubs – “$3 and costs each for disturbing the peace . . . .  They were found guilty of ‘noise, rout, or amusement’ on the Sabbath,” reported the Tribune. The issue of Sunday observance was not always so amusing. In some cities, it came to violence, with vigilantes attacking Catholic immigrants’ Sunday beer-halls.

About 70 years later, on a Sunday in February, 2012, GOP presidential candidate and observant Mormon Mitt Romney visited the running of the Dayton 500 NASCAR race. He described the event as “quintessentially American.” (Because of rain, the race had to be delayed two days.) Indeed, the Daytona Speedway was first opened on a Sunday in 1934.

The story of the two sorts of Sundays may be that America became irreligious between Cap Anson’s time and the Daytona Speedway’s – but the story is actually more complex than that.

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Tolerating Americans

Given all the furor around “culture war” issues such as gay marriage, prayer in schools, affirmative action, funding of contraception, immigration, and bilingual education, you’d think that Americans were increasingly immersed in virulent intergroup hatred. And yet, over the long haul, the amazing trend has been the increasing tolerance Americans have expressed for group differences.

Anti-Catholic Riot 1844 (LC cph3a07031)

More Americans tolerating more Americans shows up with regard to religion, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. And it’s not just in words; it’s also in action. In this post, we’ll take a look at some numbers and consider what the tolerating trend means. Some might wonder if it is even necessarily “a good thing.”

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The Abortion Puzzle

In the last 40 or so years, Americans’ attitudes on many social issues – especially on issues having to do with gender and sexuality – became markedly more libertarian. Americans increasingly supported women’s rights, women working, and women seeking positions of authority, including running for president. Americans also became notably more laissez-faire on most sexual issues — premarital sex, living together out of marriage, and even homosexuality. (Interestingly, Americans became less tolerant of extramarital sex.) On religion, too, Americans accepted more individual choice.

U. of Az. Wildcat

Yet Americans’ views on abortion, an issue that blends gender, sexuality, and religion seem to have changed little since the 1970s.

Two recent essays in Contemporary Sociology suggest that the context of the abortion debate has shifted. It is now much less about the role of women and more about something else.

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Make-Your-Own Religion

In their best-selling 1980s book on the tensions between community and individualism in America, Habits of the Heart, my Berkeley colleagues Robert Bellah and Ann Swidler, along with three other coauthors, described the version of religion that a woman whom they called Sheila had described to them. She believed in a faith of loving and being gentle with oneself; she labeled this theology “Sheilism” – “just my own little voice.” The authors of Habits saw her declaration as an expression of a growing tendency in America toward isolation and self-absorption raised here to an ethical principle.  (The term “Sheilaism” is now so well-known it has its own Wikipedia entry.)

(spiritualpracticefoundation.org)

There were and are other signs of a make-your-own religious boom. Outside of the standard religious structures, we see the excavation of old, pagan traditions like Wicca and the construction of hybrid, New Age faiths and Eastern blends with practices such as yoga and Kabalistc mysticism. Inside standard religious structures, variants such as independent churches, new liturgies and rituals, and even re-defined theologies have emerged. Some religious leaders describe all this as “cafeteria-style” faith: take what you like and disregard the rest. (And there is a Wikipedia entry for “Cafeteria Christianity,” too.)

Such religious inventions may well have burgeoned in recent decades, especially since the 1960s. Getting good numbers to test that assumption would be difficult, especially when so many “new religious movements” are informal and some even hostile to becoming formal institutions. But one thing is clear: This is not new.

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