By Gerald Slusser, PhD.
November 2001

     Already in Mid-November we are starting to look forward to that season of joy in the Christian year known as Advent and Christmas. It is conventionally a time for great displays of colored lights, winter themes for parties and the exchange of gifts. The lighting displays fronting private homes seem to get more lavish and often truly beautiful each year. But underlying the joy and the bright lights there is an abiding anxiety in American society, indeed in all Western Civilization. We seem to be nearing the end of an era and not just since September 11’s tragic events.

    Ecclesiastes or the Preacher, who wrote several hundred years before the Christian era, was not at all optimistic about life. He doubted that any lasting meaning could be found for human life, but advised that it was better to be obedient to God anyway. In many ways his angst reflects the mood of a great many people in Western Civilization today. The underlying cause of this sense of meaninglessness appears to be closely related to the generalized loss of the power of religion. Is there any way to rediscover the lost meaning? What is the next season for humanity? Yeats’ words haunt us “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” Is September 11, 2001 a prelude? And if so, to what?

    In the United States only a half-century or so ago the Church was a major force in society, a major influence on the moral criteria which reigned in the general social order, and even in politics, and on main street, although often it was more lip service than reality. Yet in 1962, a leading American historian listing the ten most important forces in America did not include the Church. When asked why, he replied that the Church simply was not that influential any longer. Quite a change from fifteen or twenty years earlier when two or three American theologians had appeared at various times on the cover of Time magazine. The great psychologist, C.G.Jung, observed in the early teens of the 20th Century that the churches were emptying. In a year-long residence in Glasgow Scotland in 1960, one of the most surprising things to me was that the great churches of that city were mostly empty on Sunday. At one church the sanctuary designed to seat 1500 people was attended by an average of 30 or so. It was an appalling sight to one who was accustomed to seeing the great sanctuaries of American churches filled. But the story of Europe is being followed here too. The general church membership, of the mainline protestant denominations is steadily declining and has been for over 40 years. You may object that many churches are growing and that is true, and that a majority still say they believe in God, but the overall picture is not one of significant growth in numbers and certainly not in influence.

    The decline of the importance of religion, specifically of Christianity, however, did not begin in the 20th century, but about 400 years ago. The onset of the decline is marked by the first real discoveries of science by Galileo about the year 1600. After peering through his primitive telescope and thinking about the implications of what he had seen, Galileo, dutiful to the Church, took his findings to the Church Fathers. What he said was simple: the earth is not the center of the universe; actually it revolves around the Sun. After due deliberation the Church Fathers told Galileo he had to be wrong because the Bible said the Sun revolved around the earth and so did common sense. When the young scientist insisted, he was put on trial. The outcome was that he agreed not to say anything further about his discovery and the Fathers agreed not to burn him for heresy. Galileo is reputed to have said sotto voce as he left the court, “nonetheless, it moves”, referring to the earth.

    Science was on its way in and religion felt called to do battle as supposed fact after fact of the Bible was challenged on empirical grounds. Over the next two hundred years the seven-day creation, Moses ordering the Red Sea to stand back for his crossing, the Sun standing still, Jesus being born of a virgin and many other dogmas were discredited by science. Very simply it was said of these: there is simply no proof for them and they contradict what we have learned about the world. Few of the founding fathers of the United States were still believers in the literal truth of such Biblical stories. The time for understanding the Bible literally, as history told in a straightforward manner, was coming to an end. Ecclesiastes said, “There is a time for everything”, but what now is the coming time? It should be noted that understanding the Bible literally, i.e. as literal history, was only one of four main ways to interpret the Bible in the Medieval period. But when the historical truth was “disproved” it seemed to threaten the meaning of the whole.

    Some religious leaders tried to come to terms with the new facts of science but in reality were capitulating, compromising, and giving up their most important basis viz. personal religious experience, without even knowing it. Others faced the scientists head on and said “you are just wrong”. No workable compromise seemed to be available; it was either the literal history Bible-religion or science with no in between. The open fighting ended with the Scopes trial in 1925, but the war was far from over and gradually science won. Today it is certainly a minority who would affirm the literal truth of many Biblical stories. Some Church groups, of course, are still teaching that position and their members seem to believe it. Meanwhile, the forces released by the scientific revolution begun in the Seventeenth Century had resulted in that great political and philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment. As I will try to detail in a couple of paragraphs, that movement resulted in the creation of the modern democracies, the ending of slavery, the feminism movement and a host of other very good things. Thus, on the one hand, science seemed to be killing religion and on the other to be providing unimagined blessings for millions.

    The philosophical movement called the Enlightenment was named by certain thinkers and writers, primarily in London and Paris, who believed that they were more enlightened than their compatriots were and set out to enlighten them. They believed that human reason could be used to combat ignorance, superstition, and tyranny and to build a better world. Their principal targets were religion and the domination of society by an hereditary aristocracy. In France the battle cry voiced by Voltaire was “Remember the cruelties!” He was referring to the cruelties that had been carried out by the church during the Inquisition and in the Crusades. The Enlightenment thinkers represented, as did the scientists, a dramatic evolution in consciousness. They proclaimed and battled for the equality of all humans. It is from their tradition that our Declaration of Independence derived its words inserted by Thomas Jefferson “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Here in these two stances of the Enlightenment we see the dignity and the disaster of modernity: it rejected all religion and it applied the rational power of its rational consciousness to the practical issues of life. Dogma was out, Church authority was out, and reason was in. The popular historians Will and Ariel Durant called modernity the “Age of Reason and Revolution”. The problem, which only gradually appeared over the next two centuries was that reason, the application of the scientific method, had no way to assess values, no standards of right or wrong by which to measure human actions. What had seemed self-evident to Jefferson could not be demonstrated scientifically.

    A major shift in identity was also occurring due to these changes in worldview. The shift was from a communal, or role identity in which one identified oneself by one’s place in the community and by the roles and rules of the community, to individual ego identity. The modern individual was born only a few hundred years ago in any general sense. Of course there were persons who so understood themselves long ago, e.g. Socrates, but the norm, the average was a collective identity, one of the tribe as it were. Even the concept of perspective in art did not arise until after the Renaissance. The free individual arose with the Enlightenment. What was lacking in the Enlightenment view of freedom was its religious foundation. As Robert Bellah has noted “Surely it is important for America that the moral truths which made freedom possible should be passed on to each new generation. Every generation of Americans needs to know that freedom--freedom--consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.” The individualism of the Enlightenment lacked this vital qualification.

Science was immediately put to the use of improving the status of human beings through the use of technology. Thus by the 20th century people in Western civilization looked to science and technology for salvation from the practical problems of life. The Industrial revolution quickly followed the political revolutions. Modernity had arrived with its blessings, democracy and equality, practical worldly progress in technology, and its curses, the loss of values and meaning. Worse yet, science had not only denounced certain claimed facts of the Bible, but had denounced the entire testimony of inner experience, particularly religious or mystical experience. So the entire authority of religion was in question. Religion is always founded in, usually intense, inner experience. By discrediting the reality of inner experience, science gutted religion of any authority.

    So where are we now in the evolution of civilization? Ken Wilber, a prominent American philosopher says “today’s ‘modern world’ actually consists of several different currents, some of which are “modern” in the specific sense (growing out of the liberal Enlightenment), others are carryovers from the premodern world (remnants of mythic religion [literal, or fundamental Biblicism] and, most rarely, remnants of tribal magic), and still others of which are postmodern.” I would group Bin Laden’s followers with the hard line fundamentalists, though their “Bible” is the Koran; they are thoroughly premodern and ethnic in orientation, collective in identity and thus see Westerners as “heathens” suitable only for conversion or slaughter. Rather simply, I would say we live at the end of a great historical era and such endtimes seem always marked by great uncertainty and unrest. We live in a time between times.

In a sense this is an essay in prophecy. Not prophesy in the sense of predicting the future. The ancient Biblical prophets did not predict like fortunetellers, they read the signs of the times and it is that which I am trying to do here. What do the “tea leaves” of current events and movements lead one to expect? I have outlined briefly above two major steps in the process of human and cultural evolution, the shift from the premodern to the modern and the shift to the postmodern in which we now find ourselves. Modernity is the god that failed, its fallacies are now realized; neither science nor technology will save us; they give us no values, only facts. This is the postmodern dilemma. Can the value-laden insights of religion be recovered without going back to premodern religion, a journey that is quite impossible for most moderns? We certainly do not wish to give up the dignity, the great improvements in human life and government, which the liberal Enlightenment, plus science and technology produced. Few are arguing that religious authority could provide the necessary moral and value structures we need.

    Again, Ken Wilber has pointed out a very important lesson: scholars from Max Weber to Jurgen Habermas have seen Modernity as characterized by “the differentiation of the cultural value spheres”-i.e., the differentiation of art, morals and science. No premodern culture had made this differentiation; these value spheres were fused and all were under the rule of the established religion. For us, it is taken for granted that art-aesthetics, empirical-science, and religion-morals are differentiated, i.e., they are separate endeavors and entitled to go their own way. Our problem is that they have become dissociated, broken totally apart as if they had no relationship and worse yet, the other two realms are treated by scientific materialism as not really real because they are not material.

    Each of these spheres has different type of language associated with it. The expressive-aesthetic sphere language is a language of feeling and emotion, as in I feel, I experience, it is an “I” language. It is language about interior perspectives and values and experiences. The language of science is not personal, it is one of dispassionate objectivity about “things out there”, about “Its”, the facts about the material order of the world. The language of morality is one of relationships between people in the interaction of personal relations; it is language about the “We” domain, our duties and responsibilities to one another. Can it not be the case that all three have equal claim to validity and hence equal claim on our consciousness? Because Modernity differentiated the We values from the “It” truths of science, political or religious tyranny could no longer determine what was objectively true; that right now belonged to science, the “It” realm. The Galileos of the world were freed to report what they were seeing and concluding. By differentiating the “I” from the “We”, the collective we could no longer rule tyrannically over the “I” and hence the political democracies and individual freedom arose. Government was by the authority and permission of the people; equality, freedom and justice ensued. But lacking the value sphere flawed the freedom. It lacked the profound religious insight that freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.”

    For the first 150 years or so of the American experiment with democracy, it appeared that it was indeed for the people. One must express some doubts that such is still the case. Robert Bellah, one of the most astute observers of our socio-political and religious scene says “In 1970 after 25 years of economic growth in which almost everyone shared, America reached the greatest degree of income equality in its modern history and we had a vigorous civic culture. In 1990 after 20 years in which the profits of economic growth went entirely to the top 20 percent of the population we have reached the high point of income inequality in our modern history and our civic life is in shambles. This inequality has increased steadily since 1990. We have seen what Michael Lind calls the revolution of the rich and what Herbert Gans calls the war against the poor. A polarized society in which most of the population is treading water, the bottom is sinking and the top is rising . . . It is a society in which an oligarchy has replaced an establishment. Reversing that trend is our greatest need and it certainly will not be easy.” The moral sphere finds this state of affairs offensive; the Enlightenment positions of freedom, and equality seem forgotten. Were the ancient Biblical prophets here today, one feels sure they would be denouncing this situation.

    Now we must ask finally, how, if at all, can religion come back into our lives? I have already suggested that it cannot be by the reestablishment of premodern religion or by a literal interpretation of the Bible. Arnold Toynbee, the great British historian, said many years ago that the most important event of the 20th century was the encounter between Christianity and Buddhism. That seems to be a strange idea, until one begins to explore the ways in which these two great world religions can enrich each other. But some things will have to be more or less surrendered by each. For Christianity, it will have to be its exclusive claims that Jesus is the only true Son of God. This seems already to have been the insight of the Gospel of St. John, in which sonship is extended to all humanity, but this position was revised, or ignored by the later Church. Christianity will also have to give up the idea that a personal Creator called the world into being in seven days; that a literal Adam and Eve walked in a literal Garden of Eden and so on. The other ways of reading sacred literature will have to be reclaimed and further developed. It will have to be seen by each religion that the other has been and is a valid way of truth and meaning. The teachings of Buddha regarding one’s relation to God will have to be accepted, viz. “thou art that”, a teaching that accords very well with St. John. The necessity of the religious practices of meditation and, or contemplative prayer will need to be taken seriously by Christians and Jews, and the teachings of Moses and Jesus regarding morality and individual responsibility will have to be taken seriously by the East. And this mutual respect and insight and enrichment will have to include the other major world religions Islam, Taoism, and Zen to name the most prominent. It has been well said that only a religion that unites us is true religion, that religion that divides is false. If the world religions made such adjustments and stood together then the next step of bringing together the insights of science with religion would be far more possible.

Because the Enlightenment, in following science gave its allegiance to only one way of truth, scientific materialism, that conviction will have to go. Science, with its emphasis on the “It” realm excluded the human interior of the individual and of culture and thus the truths that these can discern. These are the realms of beauty and value and meaning. It is through religious discernment, a discernment that can come through contemplative prayer and meditation that the clarity of values will be regained. We need an integration of all three spheres; i.e. of the individual interior, with feeling, emotion, intuition and so on, of the communal with our treasured ways of relating to each other, plus the values of love and compassion, and the exterior realms that are the proper province of science with its truths about the material world.

    Regaining the values from the interior and cultural realms will awake us to the disaster of the global and national economic situation that is increasingly dividing the rich from the poor. The pressures of the global market economy are impinging on all societies in the world. The chief consequence of these pressures is the growing disparity between winners and losers in the global marketplace. The result is not only income polarization, with the rich growing richer and the poor poorer, but a shrinking middle class increasingly anxious about its future. Who seems to be in control of these forces?

    First is the emergence of a deracinated global elite. They are the people who know how to use the new technologies and information systems that are transforming the global economy. Such people are located not in communities but in networks that may link them, flexibly and transiently, to others all over the world. Educated in the highly competitive atmosphere of excellent universities and graduate schools, such persons have learned to travel light with regard to family, church, locality, and even nation. It is here, though not exclusively here, that we clearly see the process of individualization an individualization that convinces people that freedom is the freedom to do anything they want. (See Robert Bellah, ,Habits of the Heart). (Now, in July 2002, the headlines feature corporate greed and malfeasance of incredible proportions. These facts add to the intuition of Bellah from a few years ago that something is radically wrong with the values of the “ruling” class, i.e., the very rich and their minions.)

    I think that nothing less than a union of world religions who have made peace with a reformed science can reenlighten, [perhaps even rehumanize is not too strong] these deracinated world figures. For the most of them, today’s Churches, Synagogues, and Temples have no voice at all and the morals are the amorality of being free to do anything they want. A great danger emanating from this powerful elite is its loss of civic consciousness, of a sense of obligation to the rest of society, which leads to a secession from society into guarded, gated residential enclaves and ultra-modern offices, research centers and universities. A sense of a social covenant, of the idea that we are all members of the same body, is singularly weak in this new elite. One analyst recently called this a "duty-free" elite.

    Again to quote Robert Bellah, “What is even more disturbing about this knowledge/power elite is not only its secession from the rest of society, but its predatory attitude toward the rest of society, its willingness to pursue its own interests without regard to anyone else.” [In this latter sense, they have a great affinity with the thinking of Osama Bin Laden.] In tandem with the growth of this knowledge/power elite there has been the growth of an impoverished underclass, the people from whom the elite are most anxious to secede. This underclass is to be found in the great urban sprawls that no longer deserve the dignity of being called cities, all over the world from Los Angeles to Calcutta. The global underclass, as in a distorting mirror, reflects individualizing tendencies evident in the new elite. Here too family, locality and religious belonging are weakened, not because of successful individual competition, as in the case of the elite, but because of a Hobbesian struggle for existence that is always only one step away from catastrophe. The story of the creation of the underclass, a story which involves blaming the victims rather than recognizing a catastrophic economic and political failure of American society, serves not only to soothe the conscience of the overclass--it even allows them to wax indignant at the cost of welfare in a time of expanding deficits.” Why do our leaders not heed those great injunctions from the Hebrew Scriptures to care for the poor and the oppressed? Do they not remember Jesus’ words in Matthew 25 when those on the left-hand side ask why they are consigned to the lower realm and Jesus says, "I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink. I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me." And when they ask when did we do these things, Jesus answers "as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me."

    [For Bellah’s complete comments see the web site following:  The Good Community

    The present downturn in the economy can only make this situation worse. What seems to escape the attention of the power elite is that the greater the difference between the ultra rich and the impoverished underclass, the greater the potential for a disastrous breakdown of society. Our social order lacks the glue of a common religious belief that held it together for the first hundred years of the republic. If we continue the present direction, and that seems the direction chosen by the present administration, the rich will get still richer and the poor will be still poorer. The social pressures generated by that gap will press government toward a police state, perhaps using the terrorist threat as a justification. This certainly need not be the course of events and one may hope and act to see that the time for this “rough beast” has not come round. If in our own lives we can begin to reverse the tragic split between the realms of science and religion, between the “I”, the “We” and the “It”, that will be an important beginning. Not only for ourselves as adults, but even more so for our children as they grow and mature, it is critical that they do not get indoctrinated into the mistaken confusions of the postmodern way of thinking. This is a task confronting not only parents, but also educators at every level, not the least in our great academic institutions that seem too often to be the home of this confusion.

    What is to come? No one can say, of course. The science of futurism has proved to be a guessing game more than a science, similar to predicting the stock market. But there is an encouraging and increasing interest in the realm generally called spirituality, as distinguished from organized religion. Spirituality has to do with one’s personal faith, the ultimate concern of one’s life and how that ultimate concern relates to the Ultimate. We can no longer be sure what is meant when we hear the word God, but the Buddhists might teach us Westerners that the Ultimate is too far beyond the human to be amenable to our intelligence. Hence the Buddhist term the Ultimate, simply Emptiness, because It cannot be qualified by any concepts. The deepest conviction of all the world religions is that the Ultimate can be trusted; that life is not a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. Spirituality is the quest for that kind of faith as a personal realization; an ultimate concern that gives one the freedom, the right, and the inner power to do as one ought and to know what that is.