Rhetoric Race and Religion
Not long after I earned my doctorate in the history of Christianity, someone asked me, “What do you think will be the future of faith?”
I replied, echoing Dr. McCoy from the original Star Trek, “I don’t know. I’m a historian, not a soothsayer.”
Strangely enough, people think that historians know the future and believe that past holds some insight to where we might be heading.
Last year, I finally gave in to the pressure of prognostication and tackled the question of the future of faith in my book, “Christianity After Religion.” In it, I suggested that religious traditions — most particularly Christianity — are being reshaped through an intense global interest in spiritual experience and personal faith. As old structures of religious life erode, new patterns of faith are forming. These new patterns are changing the way people engage established religions, in everything from congregational life to theology to doing justice. Across the religious spectrum, many people have no language to describe their longings, using instead the term “spiritual” to indicate their frustration with the current state of religious institutions and their hopes for new connections of meaning, purpose, and faith. In the book, I offered a framework for understanding the transformation of faith around three basic questions: How do I believe? What should I do with my life? Whose am I?
Throughout, I explored past movements that remade religious life — the Franciscan revolution, the Protestant Reformation, the Wesleyan revival and the three Great Awakenings of North America — and concluded that the conflict, confusion and dismay around contemporary religion might not signal decline but a new awakening. Awakenings, however, do not arrive on chariots of fire from heaven. Indeed, for genuine reformation to occur, people of faith must work to make it so.
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