Book Club - God is Back #5 Winter 2011

Let's end our online book club with the final words of the conclusion:

Secularists need to recognize that the enemy that "poisons everything" is not religion but the union of religion and power--and believers need to recognize that religion flourishes best where it operates in a world of free choice...

This conclusion is surprising to many people. Secularists often want to suppress religion as a whole, while believers want to suppress religions other than their own. It turns out that either form of suppression causes problems.

Without that suppression, we see that religious markets are becoming more and more like other markets in that religion more so than ever is becoming a matter of choice.

Book Club - God is Back #4 Winter 2011

Chapters 10-12 of God is Back are in a section called God's Wars. The authors consider various forms of religious conflict or competition, some of it violent and some of it non-violent.

Ch. 10 explores the "Battle of the Book." I expressed doubts about the authors' assessment of this "battle" in last year's post on this topic (here). In the last few weeks there has been some news about new growth projections of Muslim populations worldwide (here). In short, Muslims are growing at a much faster rate worldwide than non-Muslims. And if you're really interested, you can see the many resources here, though this last page would not be required reading.

I want to draw your attention to "The Great Clash" mentioned in Ch. 11. As the authors state:

[T]here is nothing inevitable about a clash between Islam and Christianity. ... As for the idea that Islam is stuck in a clash of civilizations with the West, this too seems unconvincing. Put simply, most of the fighting is not taking place in that arena. One great irony of the war on terror is that many of the people on George Bush's "enemies list" have devoted themselves to fighting people other than Americans. The jihadis' most important war is not against the West but against apostate Muslim regimes, notably Saudi Arabia; where they do battle with outsiders, it is mainly against what they regard as occupying powers. (pp. 305-306)

Here I think authors have more support for their claim. That we see practitioners of Islam coexist with non-Muslims in many Western countries suggests that any clash, should it exist, is not inevitable. Rather, many of the harshest clashes are in non-Western countries.

Links for HW 5 Question 4

The links originally intended for use for question 4 are not working well, so let's just go with the wikipedia entries:

• Seventh-Day Adventist Church.
• Unitarian-Universalist Association.
  

Please use these links to obtain information necessary to answer question 4. Pay particular attention to beliefs and practices.

Book Club - God is Back #3 Winter 2011

In Ch. 8-9 of God is Back, the authors focus on the exporting of American religion, and Pentecostalism is identified in Ch. 8 as one prime example:

Pentecostalism is the great religious story of the twentieth century. (P. 217)

The success of Pentecostalism is a strange mixture of unflinching belief and pragmatism, raw emotion and self-improvement, improvisation and organization: it is as if somebody had distilled American-style religion down to its basic elements and the set about marketing it globally. (P. 218).

Many scholars trace the origins of Pentecostalism to early 20th Century Los Angeles (pp. 81-84), but its reach is now global. It is particularly successful in Latin America where it is challenging the long-standing religious monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church (p. 215).

The authors identify many reasons for Pentecostalism's success, and you should review what those are. One of those may be surprising to you:

Indeed, one of the things that attracts people around the world to Pentecostalism is its very Americanness. (p. 219)

If that is true, it would not be the first time that a highly influential nation or empire helped cause the spread, either deliberately or inadvertently, of a particular religious group. The existence of the Roman Empire helped Christianity spread, for example. In fact, you could ask if there has ever been a case of a religious group going global that did not have behind it some helpful connection to an influential nation.

Book Club - God is Back #2 Winter 2011

In Part Two of the book (ch. 5-7), the authors look at religion in the United States. Here they see blending of other-worldly and this-worldly, and this is nowhere more evident in the competition between churches.

Across America churches now compete to provide "total service excellence." These pastorpreneurs don't just preach on Sundays. They don't just provide services for the great rituals of birth, death and marriage. They keep their buildings open seven days a week, from dawn to dusk, and provide a mind-boggling array of services: some megachurch complexes even contain banks, pharmacies, and schools. Counseling and guidance groups are routine. So are children's ministries. .... All this emphasis on customer service is producing a predictable result: growth. (pp. 185-186)

The trends identified by the authors can be viewed in many lights. Is it the secularization of churches? Or the sacralization of the secular? Yet, the authors claim that the rapid growth is "forcing churches to become yet more business-like and management-obsessed" (p. 187).

Overall, the authors identify how market forces are at play in many aspects of religious life, from the variety of religious choices available for religious consumers to the practices of religious leaders. Can you think of other ways that market forces are influencing religious life?

We've Made it to Twitter!

The first Twitter reference to our class is here! Many more to come, right? (Just don't tweet them in class.)