Forecasting the future of religion: the next 50 years.

Toward the end of his life, Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Adams, wrote his prediction for the future of religion in the new American nation. Jefferson predicted that Unitarianism would soon become the religion of a majority of Americans because of its rational and democratic nature.

This prediction shows how very wise men can be very wrong when they try to predict the future of religion based upon what is happening in the society of their day.

Let's look back at the religious scene in American society in 1955, when I was a teenager. The major Protestant denominations were experiencing a tidal wave of growth, as hundreds of thousands of people "returned to religion." Fundamentalist religion was relegated to the margins of Society and widely discredited as the out-dated religion of the poor and poorly educated. Who could have predicted that, 40 years later, the same major Protestant denominations would be experiencing a drastic decline in membership and influence in society? Who could have predicted that fundamentalist and charismatic religious groups would be attracting hundreds of thousands of people who were dissatisfied with the religion of those Protestant "establishment" denominations? Who could have predicted that radical-right Christian religion would become a very powerful influence throughout American society?

Secularization Versus Fundamentalism

The question that I want to discuss here is one I have thought about for many years now without finding a satisfying answer. It involves the contradiction between two types of social change in religion: increasing secularization in society on the one hand, and increasing supenaturalism in personal belief on the other. One direction of social change is a constant decrease in manifestations of supernatural belief in the public institutions which influence everyday life. Yet there is also a constant resurgence of belief in all sorts of supernatural phenomena--from evil demons to angels to miracles, as evidenced in public-opinion polls and in the growth of fundamentalist forms of religion around the globe.

This contradiction is nothing new. The contradiction goes back centuries, long before the time of Jefferson. It has its origins in the Enlightenment, when European intellectuals--politicians, scientists, artists, and medical doctors--strove to separate their activities in the public institutions of society from the creedal constraints of religious supernaturalism. Before their time, religious ideology had dominated every aspect of daily life like a totalitarian social system. Indeed, it is still useful to think of that struggle as quite similar to the struggle to free society from a totalitarian ideology.

The first thing we need to do is to ask: "Has there really been a constantly decreasing presence of supernaturalism in the institutions which organize everyday life?" The answer is obvious: yes, there has been. If we look at the ideas used to explain and justify the dominant institutions of modern society --the economy, government, science, medicine, education--supernaturalist ideas are not much in evidence. Aside from an occasional salutation to God, supernatural ideas are not a significant motivating force behind making money or investing money, behind political decisions to support needy people or to use military force, behind medical research into the cause of the AIDS epidemic, or behind the development of new psychotherapies for the mentally ill.

Perhaps the best place to see evidence of the decline of supernaturalism as a motivating force in society is to look at art. When I was in graduate school, I was fortunate to hear a lecture about modern art given by one of the world's leading theologians of the time, Paul Tillich. It was one of the most brilliant and insightful lectures I have ever attended. Tillich suggested that it is great art and literature, rather than theology, which best expresses the spiritual dilemmas, spiritual aspirations, and spiritual pain of any age. Tillich suggested that art is like a weathervane for the spiritual needs of the time. If that is so, where is there evidence of supernatural ideas in modern art? Modern art and literature rarely make any reference to supernatural themes anymore. It is indicative of the religious condition of our times that we can find expressions of supernaturalism only in folk art and in popular culture, in Christian and New Age books. However, these products of folk culture have no influence whatsoever upon the gate, keepers of the elite intellectual culture. It is that culture which creates the ideas of the dominant institutions of society.

This process of the disappearance of supernaturalism has gone much farther in Western Europe than it has in the United States. In my wife's country, France, about 40 percent or more of the people are atheists and agnostics, compared with less than 3 percent in the United States. In France, only about 15 percent of the population affirm a belief in the devil, while, in comparison, about 60 percent of Americans affirm a belief in this evil supernatural entity or force. Regular church attendance is extremely low in France, and in some regions few babies are even baptized. Discussion of religious matters is rarely encountered in the mass media or even in daily conversation. The situation is similar in the other countries of Western Europe: Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Italy, Germany, and so on.

But there is another side to the story. Around the world, we can see evidence of growing fundamentalist supenaturalism among Christians, Muslims, Jews, and even Hindus and Buddhists.

In several predominantly Muslim countries, fundamentalist Islam has taken over governments and imposed totalitarian ideological control. This has happened in Iran, Libya, the Sudan, and North Yemen. Saudi Arabia has been a theological state since its inception; Algeria may be next, if the civil war there is won by Islamic fundamentalists. In these nations, all the institutions of society are guided by Islamic supernatural ideology.

In the United States, the influence of fundamentalist supernaturalism is growing rapidly. Christian schools have spread throughout the country. Hundreds of thousands of children are now being taught with science, history, and literature books that are ideologically distorted to conform to supernatural beliefs. Christian colleges are booming, turning out ideologically trained Christian lawyers, doctors, and businesspeople. Christian fundamentalists have their own ideologically oriented mass media, a large network of radio stations, TV channels, and bookstores. Christian fundamentalists have created effective political organizations that now exert considerable influence within the Republican Party. These organizations have a detailed political agenda based upon their supernatural beliefs.

Do these changes mean that we are now witnessing a reversal of the process of secularization? Can we reasonably predict that more and more aspects of everyday life--government, science, medicine, education, the economy, and maybe even art--will be guided by supernatural concerns and justifications?

Two Forms of Religion

I believe that an answer to the contradiction between secularization and fundamentalism can be found in a Mayan Indian village in Guatemala--a rather strange and exotic location in which to find the answer. It comes from the work of anthropologist Robert Redfield, who studied religious practices among the Mayan Indians. These Indians practice a form of Catholic Christian religion into which they have assimilated much of their previous Mayan religion. The Mayan gods have been transformed into Christian religious ones. The Mayan religion has not been exterminated by Catholic religious dominance but, instead, has become a folk tradition which lives through the outward, official facade of Catholicism. The Mayan religion has survived four centuries after being formally replaced by the Christian religion.

Redfield offers us the insight that there are two basic social forms of religion: institutional religion and folk religion. These two forms exist side by side in a society and influence each other. The village religion is not the same religion as that of the cathedral. Redfield's research also helps us to understand how religions change. When an institutional religion is conquered or becomes eroded, old religious traditions don't simply disappear; they become a folk religion and live on in the daily folk tradition's of the village.

After Christianity became the politically dominant religion of the Roman empire, replacing the ancient pagan religions, the latter lived on for many centuries afterward through family and village traditions. Moreover, the outward facade of the official Christian religion was reshaped in many places to fit the preexisting folk religion of the local area--just as the Mayan Indians did with Catholicism.

In his book The H&M and Future of Faith, Robert Ellwood, a professor of religion at the University of California, suggests that the Christian religion has already become primarily a folk religion. Its power to inform the work of the institutions of industrial societies has been eroded by the process of secularization over the last three centuries. Ellwood suggests that fundamentalist movements constantly emerge, again and again, out of localized folk religious traditions, like unexpected eruptions of lava coming up from a subterranean world. These are revitalization movements aimed at restoring a long-lost way of life in which beliefs and values based upon supernatural preconceptions guided much of everyday fife. In this sense, fundamentalist religious movements are much like the Ghost Dance religion of native Americans in the 1880s, which hoped to restore the vitality and power of the native American religion in the West after it had been vanquished by a very alien way of life. Fundamentalists are strangely correct in viewing themselves in a defensive posture against an alien world.

The Decline of Institutional Religion

Before we can attempt to peek into the future, it is necessary to understand what has happened to institutional, establishment Christianity and how it has been transformed into a contemporary folk religion.

Institutional religion is maintained by "the word": in religious texts, doctrines, and interpretations. Folk religion is maintained through personal experience: through the magical and mystical experiences of childhood, which are repeated over and over throughout later life. Religious texts function merely like charms, to be called upon for emotional comfort and wish, fulfillment; they are not open to critical examination. Institutional religion is maintained and passed on by an elite whose members are very well educated in the wisdom of ancients, as well as in newly revealed sources of truth. Folk religion is maintained and passed on through the family, through the local community, and occasionally by charismatic personalities. Institutional religion attempts to offer a broad historical, transcultural, and idealistic vision of the world. Folk religion is eminently practical: it offers formulas for dealing with the problems of everyday life in a particular time and place. In doing so, it is always parochial and limited by the cultural ethos of the immediate present.

Both forms of religion are susceptible to the vicissitudes of social change. However, folk religion changes much more slowly. Institutional religion can change much more rapidly because its elite is broadly educated and, as such, inevitably informed by new sources of knowledge and wisdom. In contrast, the practitioners of folk religion are either poorly educated for their time or so specialized in ways of knowing that they are rather impervious to new ideas. Today, the practitioners of folk religion may use computers and communicate through the electronic media. They may fly jet airplanes and even use atomic bombs. However, technologically advanced people can still live in a mental cocoon, untouched by the frontier of new ideas.

What has happened to institutional, establishment religion? Why doesn't it exert much influence on the cultural elite which, in turn, influences our social institutions? The simple answer is that the sacred texts and doctrines of Christianity have been irreparably battered by alternative sources of wisdom coming from archeology, anthropology, history, biology, astronomy, and other sources of knowing. Christianity has been largely discredited as a source of wisdom in elite culture, except for the religious elite which remains in charge of the institution.

In contrast, folk religion, as a residue of past Christianity, remains a vital force in everyday life for the vast majority of Americans. This is also true for most people in Eastern Europe and for many in Western Europe.

Predictions for the Future of Religion

It is finally time to risk the foolishness of predicting the future 50 years of religious evolution. I can't envision any new universal religion arising to replace the shell of institutional Christianity. The new religious cults and New Age religions all arise from the seed-bed of folk religions; they lack the vast wisdom and broad, universal messages that are still available in any of the great world religions.

The current wave of fundamentalist fervor needs to be seen as a replay of several past revitalization movements or "religious awakenings" which have arisen during times of very accelerated social change and disruption. In this historical perspective, cur, rent American fundamentalist religion can be regarded as an attempt to revitalize traditional Anglo-American rural cultural values and folkways. Now that it is armed with modem communication technology, it is doing quite well. However, if it attempts to force its parochial folk religion on people of different folk religious cultures, it will experience a great backlash of resentment. American fundamentalist religion is unable to offer a universal religious worldview because its narrow political beliefs are limited by the concerns of the here-and-now in American culture rather than by universal concerns. This is the failure of all culture-bound folk religions.

I believe that the more successful Christian fundamentalism becomes, the more thoroughly it will destroy itself. Unfortunately, it may not self-destruct before it first poisons the democratic political climate of our nation and distracts the government from finding solutions to our serious social problems.

Islamic fundamentalism is a very different social phenomenon. I believe that what is happening in the Islamic world is something akin to the Protestant Reformation. It is a revitalization movement aimed at restoring the lost glory of Islamic culture. Its main enemy consists of former Western colonial powers, which the movement views as having spread Western "secular values" in an attempt to destroy traditional Islamic religious ones. Islamic fundamentalism is closely interwoven with anti-colonialist sentiment and, as such, views itself as fighting an external foreign enemy. Religious Muslims who do not accept fundamentalist prescriptions can thus be regarded as being "traitors." I expect to see Islamic fundamentalism spread across the Islamic world, and I believe that it will become a much greater threat to world peace than communist militancy ever was. People who are easily willing to die for their god are much more dangerous than are people who want to live to create a utopian future.

Finally, what about Jefferson's dream about the realization of a religion based upon reason, the scientific method of inquiry, and humanistic values? As is the case with many beautiful dreams, that is all that it can be. I cannot envision any fertile ground in social arrangements out of which a mass basis for humanistic religion can arise and grow. Such a religion simply lacks a passionate message offering simple answers to questions of ultimate meaning and everyday suffering. Humanism is too individualistic to produce the collectivism necessary to develop massive organizing around a consuming message, although humanistic religions will, to be sure, always find their niche and attract small numbers of followers.

Jeffrey S. Victor is a professor of sociology at Jamestown Community College and the author of numerous essays and articles. His 1993 book Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend (Open Court) won the 1994 H. L. Mencken Award for best book from the Free Press Association.