For some reason, we engaged in a conversation today about religion. And during the course of that discussion, we determined (with the help of Google) that Catholicism constitutes about 20% of American Christianity, which represents about 46% in total of the religious affiliation of the American population. At the end of WWII, about 80% of Americans identified as members of a Christian faith and only 13% of Americans were unaffiliated with one religion or another. Today, as that Christianity cohort has shrunk by 43%, the unaffiliated cohort has grown by 230% from 13% to 43%, almost equaling the number of Christians. Even that big of a swing belies the real fall-off in Christian religious affiliation since the immigration trends over that period of time has come largely from Latin American and Asian immigrants that tend to be quite connected to their religion, which is usually Christian and especially Catholic. It is no wonder the Catholic Church considers itself to be in a crisis of faith.
But for the last decade or so, that trend away from religion and the church, seems to have halted or at least stabilized. In some ways the papacy of Pope Francis, a humble and liberal pontiff, has exemplified the wish for the church to return to its historical base as being a vehicle for nurturing Christian values of helping the poorest and neediest rather than being a vehicle for power and control. This morning we have awoken to the news that the ailing pontiff, Pope Francis, has died after an extended respiratory illness, and the Catholic Church is now at a juncture that may set the course and trend for the next decade or more and inform us of whether religion, as most visibly exemplified by church membership and sway, will regain its upward momentum or return to a pattern of decline and dissipation. What a strange thing that we started this conversation among a group of Christians (two Catholic, two Protestant and someone like me that is a bit of both) on the day before this watershed moment in religious history. What was that about?
There have also been, as you might expect, a good deal of news articles about faith in America of late. The theme seems to be about a renewed interest in organized religion in America. The thinking seems to be that especially among younger Americans. There is something missing that they hope to find in religion. Religion seems to help people by giving them what sociologists call the “three B’s” — belief in something, belonging in a community and behaviors to guide their lives.
I first remember encountering religion at about the age of five. I’m not so sure I was in search of belief nor was I really looking for any behavioral guidelines, but I certainly cared about belonging to a community. We were living in a small tropical valley in Costa Rica at the time, and I was attending kindergarten at a local school while my sisters went to a small American system school on the campus of the Institute where my mother was working. Being a young blonde haired American boy in a local school with nothing but swarthy local Latinos was more challenging than I would’ve wanted. I was far more the center of attention on the playground than I liked, and the focus was very much on my blonde hair. It caused me to wear a cap every day despite the warm tropical weather, but that was to no particular effect since pulling off my cap while running around the playground became very popular pastime among the other boys. That program came to a sudden halt when I attempted to self-barber a solution and became a slightly different center of attention on the playground that the children called “Coco pelado” (bald coconut). While this doesn’t sound like anything to do with religion. it very much was. On Sunday my family had the choice of attending the local Catholic church, which was largely a formal Latino service in Spanish and Latin and attended by many of the same families and children that I encountered on the playground. The alternative was a small Presbyterian community Church run by a family from Iowa who were there as missionaries. That Presbyterian service was in English, and usually included a potluck luncheon with the other American families afterward. In other words for me and for my entire family, there was no contest as to which Sunday religious program made sense for us. It was at that point that I began to be less Catholic and more protestant.
After our two year tour in Costa Rica, we moved to Madison Wisconsin so that my mother could attend graduate school. On her meager fellowship earnings, all we could afford was a small cracker box house that happened to be in a community supported by a Presbyterian Church congregation. The church was in easy walking distance from our home so it was the logical house of worship for my family as my sisters and mother and I settled into a New World in Midwestern America. Once again belonging to a community, one which was actually quite foreign to me given that I had lived six of my seven years in Latin America. Based on those two stories alone, it’s safe to say that to me religion was very much a matter of belonging to a community.
Flash forward to my high school days. My freshman year of high school was spent at Hebron Academy in Maine. This was a prep school that looked exactly like the prep schools you see in movies like Dead Poet Society, or The Emperor’s Club. Those schools are largely Protestant in their orientation and it was a requirement at Hebron that students attend church service on Sunday morning and then Vespers on Sunday evening to sing hymns. If that wasn’t a complete indoctrination in the ways of Protestant religion I’m not sure what was. But then we moved to Rome and suddenly I was put into school at Notre Dame International Prep, a decidedly Catholic school, run by the Brothers of the Holy Cross. The school required students who were Catholic to take a course in catechism. If you were not Catholic, you were required to take a course in ethics. I declared myself a non- Catholic and my ethics class was taught by a seminarian from the American Seminary of Rome, where he was studying to become a priest in the Catholic Church.
In my view that turned out to be a wonderful way to blend my upbringing as a Catholic and my upbringing as a protestant. That is where I picked up the other two B’s. I spent time thinking about and studying situational ethics which went a long way towards informing my beliefs about the world and helping me guide my behavioral approach for a lifetime. Strangely enough, one of my great memories from high school was attending the ordination ceremony of my ethics teacher, which was held in Saint Peter’s Basilica and presided over by the Pope. So this week, while I ponder the happenings in Rome, as the Holy See works through its process of convening an enclave to select the new Pope. I think it’s safe to say that I’m not a Catholic, but I’ve always said that I am very much a Christian not so much because I believe in the dogma of any church, but rather because I believe in the behavioral aspects of what Christianity tries to teach its members to follow. I know that those behaviors are not so very different than the behaviors suggested in Judaism or for that matter in Islam, but it’s so happens that my upbringing is a Christian upbringing, so it is what I tend to relate to. It is the community that I feel I belong to more than any other.