Got Religion? The Challenge of Religion in 21st Century America

The first synagogue to take root in North America more than 350 years ago was Congregation Shearith Israel. This community of Sephardic Jews hailing from the Spanish-Portuguese community came with their deeply held beliefs of how the world works, how communities are formed and how they are maintained and began to earnestly set out to repeat that pattern on the shores of the Atlantic. Yet, something was very different here than it was in any other context that the Jews had lived in before. The explicit religious pluralism and religious freedom (including a freedom from religion) that began to coalesce and form in that second half of the 17th century presented a significant new reality. What were the tools within the communal tool belt to enforce conformity: Excommunication? Denial of synagogue honors? What use were they in this new world? Excommunicate me! I’ll just blend into the larger society. Deny me synagogue honors? I’ll create my own synagogue!

Therefore, the challenges presented in the new book by Naomi Schaefer Riley Got Religion? How Churches, Mosques and Synagogues Can Bring Young People Back (2014, Templeton Press) are far from new. The particulars of our generation may be different and indeed the level of religious freedom, both freedom of religion and freedom from religion, is markedly more pronounced in the beginning of the 21st century than it was in any other era of the American story. Yet, the challenges of community cohesion, transmission to the next generation and relevancy in a changing world have been with us since those first Jewish colonists arrived in New Amsterdam in the 1600s.

In every book offering a diagnosis and cure for the problems impacting religion in the author’s era, one can discover a great deal about the biases that guide the author. Furthermore, it is within those biases that one can glimpse the fault lines that run through religious discourse. Some sixty years ago the sociologist Will Herberg published the now famous work Protestant, Catholic, Jew in which he argued that eventually we will observe the shedding of the ethnic particularities that define so much of the religious experience of these three religious groups and what would emerge would be three grand categories of universal religious faith with only the slightest of differences between them. The immigrant generation will pass away and their children and grandchildren will leave behind their “old world” customs, whether they be from Russia, Ireland or Germany.

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