In what researchers described as one of the most comprehensive studies of the U.S. religious landscape, the survey
found that 89 percent of Americans attend a local congregation or affiliate with a denomination. The finding rebuts other
national surveys showing that 14 percent or more of Americans were "religious nones"
Baylor researchers went beyond asking people to identify their faith or denomination and asked for names and addresses
of any worship centers they attend, he said.
"We find that just asking about religious preference, 33 percent of respondents said, 'I don't know about my religion,' "
Dougherty said. "But five questions later, they gave us the name of their congregation."
The confusion stems from the rise of nondenominational churches, he said.
This assessment does sound reasonable. There have been reports that secularism is the fastest growing religious
orientation in America, but they do not chime with anecdotal evidence.
Solar flares would not start fires, but they might bring down the electrical-power grid. Dealing with the
eschatological wolves is a toughie, though.
Meanwhile, back in Bavaria, Benedict XVI continues to say very smart things,
about which the press persistently miss the point. Consider
this:
REGENSBURG, Germany (Reuters) - Pope Benedict invited Muslims on Tuesday to join a dialogue of cultures based
on the premise that the concept of an Islamic "holy war" is unreasonable and against God's nature....Benedict several
times quoted Emperor Manuel's argument that spreading the faith through violence is unreasonable and that acting
without reason -- "logos" in the original Greek -- was against God's nature.
At the end of his lecture, the Pope again quoted Manuel and said: "It is to this great 'logos', to this breadth of reason, that
we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures."...
Benedict, a leading theologian who has always drawn clear lines between Roman Catholicism and other faiths, also
appeared to criticize Protestant churches and contemporary Third World theologians for not stressing the link between
faith and reason clearly enough. ...Benedict stressed that his criticism of modern empirical reasoning "has nothing to do
with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age."
"The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its
application"...
The bit about the Muslims is no doubt interesting from the perspective of the troubles of the current
generation, but Benedict's attitude toward reason is important for the long term. What we should be thinking
about here is not the dreary puppet-show conflict between science and religion, but
the final assimilation of the Enlightenment to the Western tradition. The following excerpt from
Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game (quoted in The Second Religiousness in the
21st century) describes the era that Hesse imagined would follow modernity:
The world had changed. The life of the mind in the Age of the Feuilleton might be compared to a degenerate plant which
was squandering its strength in excessive vegetative growth, and the subsequent corrections to the pruning back of the
plant to its roots...[It had] become common knowledge, or at least a universal sense, that the continuance of civilization
depends on this strict schooling. People know, or dimly feel, that if thinking is not kept pure and keen, and if respect for
the world of the mind is no longer operative, ships and automobiles will soon cease to run right, the engineer's slide rule
and the computations of banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue. It took long
enough in all conscience for realization to come that the externals of civilization -- technology, industry, commerce, and
so on -- also require a common basis of intellectual honesty and morality.
(Here is a full review of The Glass Bead Game).
For two centuries now, there have been Catholics, and sometimes even popes, who thought that the
Enlightenment was what was wrong with the world. The better view, I have long held, is that we should
extend to the Enlightenment, and to modernity as a whole, the sort of sympathetic understanding that we
would extend to any historical era. As Hocking put it, historical progress consists
in large part of the accumulation of "unlosables," of advances that survive the excesses of the ages in which
they are made. Benedict XVI is suggesting that the unlosables of Western modernity, the music and the physics
and the institutions of political liberty, can be preserved through the understanding of reason as the
perception of the logos: reason is not naked logic, but faith in the fundamental comprehensibility of the
world.
* * *
Incidentally, Benedict XVI likes at least one Hesse novel, according to this
bit of text that has spread to a dozen Hesse sites:
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was elected Pope Benedict XVI, once said that Steppenwolf is among his favorite
books because it "exposes the problem of modernity's isolated and self-isolating man". The protagonist, Harry Haller,
goes through his mid-life crisis and must chose between life of action and contemplation.
As I have said before, it is easy to imagine Joseph Ratzinger as a Player at Waldzell.
There is a Waldzell Institute, by the way, whose
name is taken from the Game Center in the Hesse novel, but
I don't know whether Cardinal Ratzinger ever attended one of their conferences.
