Religous certainty

There are a couple of interesting items in today’s USAToday relating to religion, though quite differently. They pretty well represent the culture on a search for the religion that’s always been there waiting for them.

This is the piece about people looking for a church that fits their needs.

The faithful are restless, a new study of Protestant churchgoers suggests. They’re switching from church to church, powered by a mix of dissatisfaction and yearning, according to the study by LifeWay Research.

Author and radio host Michael Medved makes some good observations about why they may be so restless, why the switching is going on, and what the faithful are really looking for in religion.

The ongoing battle over redefinition of marriage threatens to shatter a long-standing, popular approach to personal faith and biblical morality.

For several generations, most Americans have embraced what could be described as the Goldilocks attitude toward religion: affirming faith choices that seemed not too soft but not too hard, not too hot but not too cool. Majorities viewed easy-going moderation and comforting compromise as the religious path that counted as “just right.”

Conservative Judaism — the “middle branch” of the ancient faith — always exemplified the “Goldilocks” orientation with its emphasis on the “sweet spot” between stringencies of Orthodox observance and the anything-goes adaptability of Reform. But just before Passover, the Conservative movement’s flagship institution, The Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), announced a controversial decision highlighting the painful contradictions of middle way religions.

Following the findings of an expert panel filed last December, JTS signaled its intention to accept openly gay candidates for the rabbinate and to raise no objection to their involvement in same-sex commitment ceremonies. For a movement that still stresses time-honored standards of Sabbath observance and kosher food, this represents a stunning break with tradition.

This is happening to more and more churches, as they struggle with moral relativism and the perception that people want religion to keep up with the times. So they redefine things.

Religious liberals in Christian as well as Jewish denominations call it hypocritical to focus on biblical definitions of marriage or sanctions against homosexuality, while readily disregarding so many other rules from Scripture. Despite Old Testament references, they note, most people don’t marry multiple wives today, or employ slave-like indentured servants in our homes, or avoid eating shellfish. But the Bible merely permitted polygamy and indentured servitude in certain circumstances, never commanding those practices for everyone. In Jewish law, male-female marriage, on the other hand, is a mitzvah — an obligation, a commandment. And to this day, Conservative Judaism still doesn’t sanction shrimp.

As recently as 1992, the committee of leading Conservative legal scholars found that Jewish law clearly prohibited same-sex commitment ceremonies and admitting homosexuals to rabbinical seminaries, but public pressure — not some startling discovery of ancient text — forced adjustment to 21st century trends. Arnold Eisen, chancellor-elect of The Jewish Theological Seminary, declared: “The decision to ordain gay and lesbian clergy at JTS is in keeping with the longstanding commitment of the Jewish tradition to pluralism.

Pluralism means that we recognize more than one way to be a good Conservative Jew, more than one way of walking authentically in the path of our tradition.”

In other words, he now embraces moral relativism in its modern-day “let’s not be judgmental” garb and abandons the traditional role of religion to command or at least suggest clear standards for human behavior and intimate relationships. Jonathan Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, justified this new direction by suggesting that Conservative Judaism couldn’t survive without it. “A movement that wants to attract a younger generation of disaffected Jews had no choice but to make this decision,” he told The New York Times.

Recent history in both the Jewish and Christian communities suggests he’s wrong: Disaffected young people seldom flock to watered-down versions of religious faith that lack continuity or integrity. The rapidly growing denominations are those that make demands on potential adherents and advance clear standards of right and wrong. That’s why Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity has grown while “mainline” Protestant denominations have dwindled, and why traditionalist Catholicism boasts more worldwide vitality than liberal strains of the church. Meanwhile, Mormons uphold multiple restrictions (giving up alcohol, coffee, tobacco, among other things) and yet constitute one of the fastest-growing creeds in the USA.

In Judaism, the same dynamic applies: with tepid, uncertain versions of the faith fighting a losing battle to maintain the affiliation of their young people, while the unaffiliated explore enthusiastic, traditionalist sects.

The bottom line is one between equivocation and moral absolutes.

The marriage issue plays a decisive role in exploding moderate equivocations in Christian denominations as well as in Judaism, as evidenced by the increasingly unbridgeable gap among Episcopalians between those who want to endorse homosexuality and those who hold fast to biblical proscriptions. Denominations must choose their ultimate source of authority: looking either to religious texts or to contemporary sensibilities.

The core question remains the nature of religion itself and our relation to it. Should we challenge ourselves, or our faith traditions? Do we measure religion against personal impulses and values, or should we judge our impulses and values against religion? Should we adjust our faith to suit current trends and to enhance our comfort and convenience, or should we evaluate trends in the light of timeless teachings, no matter how unfashionable or inconvenient?

As G.K. Chesterton said in Orthodoxy, there are many ways to fall, but only one way to stand.