Religion as Poetry.

FATHER ANDREW Greeley is a singular figure, the intellectual equivalent of an eccentric Irish bartender who serves up odd spirits--one part illuminating, another exasperating. Besides the novels, which intend to titillate as much as to assure us that Providence lies behind the declensions and conjugations of lust, Father Greeley has produced a serious body of work on the sociology of religion. You can count on him to take to task the foolishness of prelates, professors, and pundits, liberal or conservative. But there the predictability ends. By turns commonsensical and perverse, when he's good he's a helpful gadfly, but when he's bad he's--well, still a man of the cloth.

Religion as Poetry is quintessential Andrew Greeley. Those who think poetry has nothing to do with religion will find useful, if quirky, instruction here. Religious stories, usually the deepest font of faith, are poetry in the sense that they effect spiritual transformation--the way poetry, conventionally defined, provokes aesthetic and emotional reactions. Some exceptional souls may be converted by argument, others have the pathway cleared by explanation, but most begin, as children or adults, with experiences of a spiritual reality that invites rational exploration.

By poetry, then, Father Greeley does not mean mere fancy. Religious stories have concrete effects--not least, they inspire doctrine, institutions, and liturgy. Indeed, his strongest intellectual contribution here is to remind social scientists that to neglect religion is to get the picture--the empirical world of human societies--exactly wrong. Social scientists usually assume that modernization leads to secularization. Several years ago, for instance, the sociologist Thomas Luckmann argued that religion could no longer support a political party. Yet Christian Democratic parties have sprung up in Eastern Europe and still show strong influence in such countries as Germany and Chile. Father Greeley points out that the civil-rights movement in this country and Solidarity in Poland also had religious roots.

The statisticians will have to judge whether Father Greeley's methodology, with its shop-talk of Beta coefficients, viromax analyses, and regression studies, accurately interprets survey data. To the lay eye, some of the results are quite remarkable. Who would guess that about one-third of Americans have had a life-changing, transcendent experience? Forty per cent say they have had contact with a deceased loved one. Around the world, people seem to pray with astonishing frequency. (According to Father Greeley even many atheists pray every week: 40 per cent of Irish atheists, 20 per cent of American ones, 12 per cent of West German.)

To those who think religion crucial for human well-being, all this will come as illumination. Has the eccentric spiritual bartender sobered up? Never fear. With Andrew Greeley, illumination precedes exasperation.

Perhaps in response to the secularism of the sociological guild, Father Greeley goes on to link the good news about the survival of religiosity with the more doubtful belief that faith is more widespread and purer now than in the "mythical" Age of Faith. Some recent medieval studies have raised serious questions about the older, pious picture. But judging the religious beliefs of illiterate populations who left almost no historical evidence is hazardous. Were medieval peasants as baldly irreligious or anti-Christian as recent irreligious or anti-Christian scholars have argued? It is difficult to believe.

Also, though Father Greeley is never a crude optimist or ideologist, he leans toward advocating a gender-blind, personal, and liberal Christianity. He shuns the mythological mishmash of a Joseph Campbell, but his own description of the Catholic heritage as "a rain forest of metaphors" rests on its own swampy ground. For example, a Catholic priest, even one writing as a sociologist, cannot simply assert, "In my own religious heritage, God is both male and female and neither male nor female." True in a sense, but what of the central, hard-edged formulation: Father, Son, Holy Spirit?

For several years, Father Greeley has been developing a theory, retailed here, about the "feminine side" of God and its effects on believers who view the Deity primarily as "friend, spouse, lover." The latter possess a "gracious" image of God, while those who emphasize the Biblical King, Lord, Master terms have an "ungracious" image. The gracious, according to Father Greeley's surveys, tend to support liberal causes such as welfare spending, feminism, and subsidies to AIDS patients, and to oppose militarism.

Some of this reflects differences between Catholics and Protestants. Father Greeley has found, for example, that Catholics are more likely "to imagine God as a woman and support feminist positions." If true, this is an important example of how religious images influence concrete attitudes. But such data also undercut feminist claims that Catholicism devalues women and that an all-male clergy inculcates a sexist view of God.

Ultimately, though, in his justifiable enthusiasm for the poetic function of religion, he neglects what you might call its prose function--its mission to instruct in the plainest terms available. Such overemphasis explains why Father Greeley may be too optimistic about the historical staying power of religiosity. On his showing, countries such as the Netherlands and Norway show strong secularizing trends. The United States remains broadly religious, but why are we all so uneasy about where we seem to be headed spiritually? Now that almost all public institutions convey subtle anti-religious messages and the churches display only a weak capacity to fight back, common sense tells us that both orthodoxy and religiosity must suffer.

At times, Father Greeley recognizes as much. Without the high (prose) tradition, he notes, the popular, poetic tradition either will not survive attack and change, or will fall victim to superstition. He is right to remind us that poetry, properly understood, can reignite religious imagination. But which side should be favored in the quarrel between poetry and philosophy usually depends on where things are headed at any given moment, and we are not exactly in danger at present of excessive dogmatism. Whether religious imagination will become a fire to warm us or a conflagration that carries all away hinges on an old question: how can the people believe unless someone instructs them?