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The Future of Religion
A Sermon Given
by The Reverend Roger Fritts
on March 7, 1999
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
What is the future of religion? One of the simplest ways to look at the future is a straight line projection. For example, if population continues to grow at its current rate, in the year 2025 there will be more then eight billion people on the earth. This is a simple straight line projection. Following this logic:
- If the number of people becoming Christians continues at the current rate, in year 2025 three-billion eight-hundred million people will call themselves Christians.
- That same year, 2025, Islam, the fastest growing faith worldwide, will have two billion Muslims.
- In 2025 one-billion people will call themselves Hindus.
- Four hundred million people will call themselves Buddhists.
- Sixteen million people will call themselves Jews.
This straight line projection puts the number of Sikhs at thirty-four million in 2025, and the number of nonreligious people at one-billion.
These projections are accurate statements, when we remember the qualifying statement "If the numbers continue to grow at the current rate." However, because the future is full of surprises that can change the behavior of the individuals, cultures, nations, and religions, none of these projections is very reliable.
So a second widely used approach to predicting the future is to see the past as a series of cycles that will be repeated in the future. For example, looking at European and American religious developments, Princeton sociologist Robert Wurthnow reports that revitalization movements in religion have occurred regularly over the past five hundred years.
- A major revitalization of religion was the Protestant Reformation from the 1530s to the 1560s. During that time Unitarianism was born in Europe.
- The next major revitalization of religion was the Puritan awakening from 1630 to 1650, which took place in England and to a lesser degree here in America.
- About one hundred years later another major revitalization in religion was the Second Great Awakening, which occurred in the 1740s and the 1750s, and deeply influenced Protestant religion in America.
- One hundred years later another great revitalization of religion occurred. This was New England Transcendentalism, which occurred from the 1830s to the 1840s. Prominent leaders include Unitarians Henry Thoreau, Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller.
- The most recent revitalization movement in religion was the New Age awakening that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. In this cyclical view of American religious history, Woodstock was a religious revival.
All these movements were loaded with passionate attacks against the morality of the time. All of them were spearheaded by young people. All set forth new values. And each was separated from the prior awakening by approximately one hundred years.
In two books about cycles in American history, William Strauss and Neil Howe describe these religious movements as the summers in the cycles of American history. The sixties and seventies were a summer cycle of American history. Now, they say, we are in an autumn cycle. In about six years, they say, we will enter another winter in the cycle that is American history.
According to their theory of history, the past crises in the United States were:
- Revolutionary War.
- Civil War.
- the Depression followed by World War II.
If historians Strauss and Howe are right, America is in for another major national crisis starting around 2005.
If they are right, what does this say about the future of religion, at least in America? We know from history that during wars attendance at churches increases. Recently there was a high level of average church attendance in the United States in 1991 during the Gulf War. Average attendance in American Churches has been on the decrease since 1991. In fact the average number of people in the United States attending church has dropped below 40 percent for the first time since the 1930s. If the cycle theory is true, we can expect an attendance increase in religious communities during and after the coming crisis.
According to the cycle theory, after we weather the crisis, starting in about 2025, our society will become much like it was in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Americans will feel a new sense of unity and clarity about our purpose as a nation. The number of people attending church will be high. This will last until the next big revitalization movement, which will occur around 2050, when the new hippies and transcendentalists will again shake things up.
The actual evidence supporting this cyclical theory of history is shaky at best. However, even if the cycles' theory is not well documented, I still find it comforting, because it helps me explain the peaks and valleys of life.
So these are two ways to predict the future of religion. Straight line projections, where we look at current trends and project them into the future, and cycle theories, where we view history as a series of repeating eras.
A third approach is to identify the basic changes in our society that are shaping the future. According to this approach, if we can identify the basic changes that are taking place, we can understand what tomorrow will bring.
The computer and the Internet are examples of basic changes that are shaping our future. A few weeks ago I read a report I found on the Internet published by The Los Angeles Times about the future of religion. The entire story focused on how the Internet is changing religion. They gave several examples.
- A Moslem living anywhere in the world, can log onto IslamiCity and listen to the call to prayer spoken in Arabic and the Friday sermon at a Los Angeles mosque. And I actually did this last week in preparing my sermon on Islam.
- Buddhists seeking enlightenment can go to BuddhaNet and ask for insight into the meaning of life.
- Jews can turn to thewall.org to type out messages, which students in Jerusalem print out and place in the Western Wall.
- Christians can log into the Crystal Cathedral's Web site each Sunday to hear that church's version of Christianity. Hundreds turn to the Crystal Cathedral's online counseling service, where they can confess their troubles to volunteer counselors in chat rooms.
Some researchers estimate that within eleven years, 10 to 20 percent of United States Internet users will rely entirely on the Web for worship.
For some people the Internet also provides a new type of pastoral care. John Schwartz wrote an article in the business section of The Washington Post a few weeks ago about the California teenager who had leukemia. The teenager's struggle with this illness was chronicled online by the boy's father. On the Internet the father went into a level of detail that would be impossible to put in the newsletter of a religious organization like a church. He wrote an ongoing, compelling account of his son's illness.
Just as powerful as the father's account, was the interplay between the storyteller and the many online readers. The web site included constant responses from many readers containing advice, praise and prayers. }Some of the comments were uplifting, some heart breaking, and as with any community in any family, some were boorish and inane, like those of the relative who visits the hospital and wants to tell you about his operation.~
John Schwartz wrote in the Post:
Anybody who tries to tell you the Internet is an evil place, that friendships made there are not real, that the people are fake -- well those folks just have not been to places I have been. I would not judge an unfamiliar town by its dirty bookstores or singles bars, and I hope that someday the people focused on the dangers of online life get to . . . [These] kinds of places where the human spirit is affirmed and hope thrives in the face of despair.
Of course, when Buddhists, Hindus and Jews gather in their temples, when Moslems gather in their mosques, when Catholics gather in their cathedrals, and when we gather in this church, we can shake hands. We can hug. When we touch, we feel affirmed and reassured. We feel caring and compassion expressed in human contact. When people sit in isolation in front of a computer, the same quality of interaction cannot take place. Therefore, no matter how effective the Internet becomes as a tool of communication, I do not believe it can replace a more traditional religious community.
These are three approaches to predicting the future of religion:
- The straight line projection of data,
- the attempt to identify the cycles of human history,
- and the study of the changes that are shaping our future.
A fourth way we can explore the future is the pessimistic approach, the doomsday approach to history. If we are pessimistic about life, if we feel depressed, if we have been greatly disappointed in our own lives, we are likely to offer pessimistic assessments of the future.
I read a sermon recently by a minister who took this approach. He predicts that in the future the authority of both clergy and religious groups will decline because of sex scandals and financial corruption. He predicts that after the recent political scandals people will distrust every type of leadership including religious leaders. In this scenario some people will obtain emotional satisfaction by attacking the clergy. This minister predicts chaos in religious organizations as churches are consumed by petty struggles for power.
This minister also points to the commercial culture that dominates the life of most people, as a sign of the decline of religion. He says a desire for the latest gadgets or for a trip to the latest theme park has replaced a sense of the Holy and the Sacred.
Worship, says the pessimist, is becoming a form of popular entertainment. Martin Luther designed the sermon as a way to teach people about religion. Today, however, the Sunday service has become a circus, the congregation is the audience, the minister is the clown. The goal is to make people feel better, not to raise fundamental issues about God, or meaning or morality. In this scenario religion will decay as people seek the brave new world of physical pleasure and feel good spirituality.
This is a pessimistic view of the future of religion held by one of my colleagues who is clearly in need of a sabbatical.
On the other hand, some people are eternal optimists. Consider for example the Unitarians who organized the first World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. More than one hundred years ago they brought together religious groups from all over the world. This was the first time many people in the United States had ever seen a Hindu or a Moslem. Some of the organizers had a dream that these groups would some day unite in a continuing parliament that would meet like a United Nations of religions. They hoped that by bringing people together, religious leaders would try to eliminate the wars between the different religious faiths.
Today some optimists still hold on to that hope. Some people still have a dream that one day all the great world religions, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Christianity will form a world parliament of religions to develop civil relationships between people of different religious beliefs. Someday through a parliament of religions Jews and Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus, Protestants and Catholics, will agree to live together in peace. I love this optimistic vision and I pray that some day it will come into being.
So what is the future of religion?
- For the keeper of statistics, it is three billion eight hundred million Christians in twenty-six years.
- For the believer in cycles, it is coping with a coming crisis in the United States, which will be as bad as the Civil War and the Second World War.
- For the believer in technology it is religion on the Internet.
- For the pessimist, it is a downward decline marked by unethical clergy, sadistic lay persons, petty power struggles and superficial worship.
- For the optimist, it is a world parliament of religions where people work to affirm their common values and learn to respect each other's differences.
But of course no one knows the future for sure. We can only do our best to influence it in positive ways, and then accept our own limits and let reality unfold.
It is March. Several good people in this community died during the past few months. We mourn their loss. The rest of us have made it through the heart of the winter. The cold rains of the last week gave us gray days, but they promise a spring that will be rich in color.
Soon the leaves will sprout and the cherry trees will blossom. And it is time to welcome into our community those who have joined the church over the past few months. I invite those who are to be welcomed as new members to come forward at this time, for they are the future of this church.
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