Sermon Library
:Religious Literacy - Part 2
Rev. Dr. Gregg R. Anderson
June 15, 2008
Service Theme: Pentecost V - 2008
Pentecost V-2008 Religious Literacy – Part 2 June 15, 2008
Gregg Anderson
Father and Son and a Report Card
A father passing by his seventeen year old son’s bedroom was astonished to see the bed was nicely made and everything was picked up. Then he saw an envelope propped up prominently on the center of the bed. It was addressed, “Dad”. With the worst premonition, he opened the envelope and read the letter reluctantly:
Dear Dad,
It is with great regret and sorrow that I’m writing you. I had to elope with my new girlfriend because I wanted to avoid a scene with you and mom. I’ve fallen in love with Joan and she is so nice even with all her body piercing, tattoos and motorcycle clothes. I am not sure how it happened, but Joan said she is pregnant, but she said that we will dfe very happy along with her other children. She knows a lot about life because she is fifteen years older than I am and she already owns a trailer in the woods and has a stack of firewood for the whole winter. She wants to have many more children with me and that’s now one of my dreams too. She told me that college is really not that important anymore. She said she can make enough money for both of us with her farm that has special produce. Joan taught me that marijuana doesn’t really hurt anyone and there is a great future in it. She is also very religious. She believes in the church of primitive paganism. Don’t worry Dad. Someday I’m sure we’ll be back to visit so you can get to know your grandchildren.
Your son, Benjamin
P. S. Dad, none of the above is true. I’m just over at the neighbor’s house. I just wanted to remind you that there could be worse things in life than my report card that’s in my desk center drawer. I love you! Call when it is safe for me to come home.
USA Today Report
Speaking of report cards, (how is this for a segue?), USA Today carried a featured article entitled Americans Get an ‘F’ in Religion. This national news report was written by USA Today journalist Cathy Lynn Grossman in November, 2007. Her article begins by quoting, 60 percent of Americans cannot name 3 of the 10 commandments and 50 percent of high school seniors think that Sodom and Gomorrah were married and Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. This particular USA Today newspaper article quoted a few other university professors in the field of history, sociology and religion, who all conclude that college and university students today have very little or no religious knowledge of basic religious information and premises.
One of those professors interviewed was Dr. Stephen Prothero of Boston University who had just written the book Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs To Know – and Doesn’t. His first and most poignant paradox is that religion plays a major role and even a significant role in the life of American citizens today, yet most of these religious Americans have very little basic knowledge of religion. The vast majority of Americans, over 85 percent in fact, claim to be Christian, and an additional 12 percent of Americans are religious or spiritual in a number of other faiths, while 2 percent remain spiritual in their own undescribed way and only 1 percent are uncommitted and an even smaller portion of that are atheists.
He continues, “Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that the Bible holds the answers to all or most of life’s basic questions, yet the majority of Jewish people in this country cannot name the five books of the Torah, Roman Catholics cannot name most of their seven sacraments and the majority of Protestants cannot name the four gospels, let alone the leader of the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther and Martin Luther King are undistinguishable even though they lived 500 years apart.
This leads to the very first premise of Stephen Prothero’s book on religious literacy or illiteracy. His foremost premise is: “The United States is one of the most religious places on earth, but it is also a nation of shocking religious illiteracy.’ Prothero is not approaching this problem as a religious zealot, but as an educator stating that belief is not his business and his argument is for empowered citizenship and social responsibility.
The USA Today article also states, “More and more of our national and international questions are religiously inflected.” Prothero says,citing President Bush’s speeches laden with biblical references and the furor when the first Muslim member of Congress chose to be sworn in with his right hand on Thomas Jefferson’s Quran. “If you think Sunni and Shia are the same because they’re both Muslim, and you have been told Islam is about peace, you won’t understand what’s happening in Iraq. If you get into an argument about gay rights or capital punishment and someone claims to quote the Bible or the Quran, do you know if it is so or not? If you want to be involved you need to know what they are saying. We are doomed if we don’t understand what motivates the beliefs and behaviors of the rest of the world. We can’t outsource this to demagogues, pundits and preachers with a political agenda.”
Scholars and theologians who agree with Prothero say Americans woeful level of religious literacy damages more than democracy. “You are going to make assumptions about people out of ignorance, and they’re going to make assumptions about you,” says Philip Goff of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at Indiana University in Indianapolis. Goff cites a widely circulated claim on the internet that the Quran foretold American intervention in the Middle East based on a supposed passage that simply does not exist. It’s an entire argument for war based on religious ignorance.
Dr. Joan Brown Campbell, former general secretary of the National Council of Churches and, by the way, commencement speaker at my last graduation ceremony held in the Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago, said in this news article, “We are impoverished as a people and country by such ignorance. You can’t draw on the resources of faith if you only have an emotional understanding without some textual and contextual sense of religious teachings.” She points her finger toward “Sunday schools that trivialized religious education. If we want people to have serious knowledge, we have to get serious about teaching our own faith.”
Dr. Campbell and My Purpose
Dr. Campbell’s title of the commencement address was “For Such a Time As This.” Her text was from the Book of Esther when Jerusalem and the Jews were again under attack, not just from soldiers, but from a suppression of belief and faith. Mordecai responds to Esther, “For if you keep silent at such a time as this, you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this.” Esther spoke up for her faith, her land and country.
My purpose for attending McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago was to learn more about how to be a unique chapel in a unique town; a town which, on the surface, is not overly interested in religion or religious organizations. Below the surface, there is a significant spiritual interest here. They show up Christmas and Easter, weddings and funerals, specific seminars and individual situations. How do we connect and support these non-religious and very spiritual people in Aspen, Colorado?
Open Doors, Open Minds, Open Hearts
We keep our doors very open, our minds very open, and our hearts very open. We also have something to say, in various ways, that there is a purpose and a meaning to life. It involves a spiritual perspective of life, asking big questions and seeking bigger perspectives. I would like to say bigger answers, but the word “answers” seems presumptuous. In the bigger picture there just seems to be more questions than answers, but that does not mean we can’t have a better framework or perspective in which to place our temporary affirmations.
One thing I learned at the McCormick school is to be more confident about exploring various ways of being a church or in this case, a chapel. A church has a purpose. How a church accomplishes such a purpose varies. The church is currently not as successful today as it has been in the past. To be more successful today and in the future, the church needs to experiment with ways to support people in this day and age. Tradition should be honored, but creativity needs to be explored. This is really true with any enterprise.
Two Major Religious Paradoxes
The fact that the majority of people in this country state on a form that they are Christian, the majority of those people are not involved with any regularity in a church. I suspect this has something to do with Americans having a lot of emotional opinions about religion, but do not have a lot of basic background or knowledge about religion. Dr. Stephen Prothero asks, “How did this happen? And what can we do about it? In order to answer these questions, we need to understand how one of the most religious countries in the world slipped into religious amnesia. When did we forget what we once knew about the Bible, the Apostles Creed, the Westminster confession, the Ten Commandments, the Exodus story, and the crucifixion? How was the chain of memory that once transmitted, religious knowledge from parents to children, priests to parishioners, and schoolteachers to students severed?”
Stephen Prothero divides his chapters in an interesting manner. After discussing the problem of Religious literacy, Prothero has a chapter entitled Religion Matters. In that chapter he talks about the incredibly important role that religion plays within society. It is a force as strong as any other force, if not stronger. It needs attention. And it needs more attention than it has been given over the recent past. The next chapter is entitled Eden: What We Once Knew in which he discusses the very early days of this country when religion played such a role in all aspects of life. Freedom of religion was always respected and was part of our foundation as a country. Government was specifically designed to provide this particular freedom. It was not about a Protestant Theocracy, but a freedom of expression. This is why freedom of religion and freedom of expression are in the same first amendment. The next chapter is entitled The Fall: How We Forgot. It discusses how we went from a country which celebrated religion and religious diversity and respect to a country which became fiercely frightened of religion.
This progression leads to his second major religious paradox in America. Remember that the first major paradox is that America is one of the most religiously fervent countries while also being one of the most religiously illiterate countries. The second major religious paradox in America is found in his statement which reads, “In one of the great ironies of American religious history, it was the nation’s most fervent people of faith who steered Americans down the road to religious illiteracy.” In other words, it was not from some outside demonic force which initiated the problem, but from within certain religious bodies which inadvertently created the amnesia. Dr. Prothero is making some earth shattering, or should I say, heaven shattering affirmations.
Toward a New Religion
Let me conclude and read this page entitled Toward a New Religion. “In this brief history of how households and churches, schools and Sunday schools, spellers and primers, voluntary associations and colleges conspired to plant religious knowledge in Americans, we see both the flowering of religious literacy and the seeds of its demise. Children who read, memorized, and recited passages in the New England Primer, Webster’s spellers, and the McGuffey readers learned much about the basic beliefs and practices, stories and heroes of Protestant Christianity. But by the early nineteenth century the acids of non-denominationalism were starting to erode religious content. Sectarian Protestantism was starting to give way to nonsectarian Protestantism. With this shift came a tendency to emphasize morality since it was in the domain of ethics that Protestants of different denominations could agree. As it became imperative to get along, theology started giving ground to morality. If the point of the New England Primer was to teach children that they were sinners and that Jesus died to save them from their sins, the point the later McGuffey readers was to teach children that God wanted them to work hard, save their money, tell the truth, and avoid alcohol. Their core text was not Paul’s ‘for by grace are you saved through faith’ (Ephesians 2:8) but the Ten Commandments. Already Americans were inaugurating a new form of religion – less sectarian, less doctrinal, more emotional, and more moralistic.”
“In other words, we had already taken one giant step toward the contemporary era in which morality is the essence of religion and the term ‘Christian’ connotes opposition to abortion and gay marriage rather than faith in the incarnation and the redemption – an era in which having a relationship with Jesus is more important than knowing what he actually did, in which believing in the Bible matters more than knowing what the Bible has to say. More than the forces of secularism, it was this sort of religion that would do religious literacy in.”
Religion influences morality, but religion should not be reduced to just being morality. Religion binds ourselves to that which is greater than us. There are many names referring to “that” in this statement, the most typical name is God. It is Father’s Day today. Before the time of writing and printing, there was oral tradition. Oral tradition happened by fathers handing down to their sons precise words and stories about their perceptions of God and heroes of faith. Pen, papyrus and paper made oral tradition obsolete, but it is still the responsibility today of fathers and mothers to hand down stories of faith to their sons and daughters. It made a difference in how people lived four thousand years ago and it will make a difference in how people live today and tomorrow. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Gregg R. Anderson
Aspen Chapel
0077 Meadowood Dr.
Aspen, Colorado 81611
http://www.Aspenchapel.org