from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- America is Number One Religion: It's Free, So Take Two And remember that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. "The American Puritan," observed the celebrated newspaperman H.L. Mencken, "was not content with the rescue of his own soul; he felt an irresistible impulse to hand salvation on, to disperse and multiply it ... to make it free and compulsory." Mencken wrote these words in 1922. If the salvation of souls was an irresistible impulse for the Puritans, for their heirs it had become a burning ambition. Never before, however, have they been as well placed to realise so much of it. The reason is America's global ascendancy. As the sole surviving superpower, the United States can exert enormous political, economic and even military clout in ways that indirectly assist the activities of its missionaries by breaking down protectionist barriers to the free flow of ideas and by defending the right of its citizens to spread whatever their message might be in every corner of the globe. As well, the US is now the world's cultural hothouse. Increasingly people everywhere find that what they eat, wear and watch, the games they play, even the language that they speak, is influenced by trends set on the streets of Los Angeles and in the boardrooms of New York. Can what people believe be far behind? Is our faith going the way of our footwear and our fashion? Is the world being remade in America's religious image? If you accept the claims of some American evangelists you would certainly think so. According to the Christian Broadcasting Network, for example, its gospel crusades in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania in 1998 resulted in more than 5 million "salvations". CBN, a creation of televangelist Pat Roberston, took its crusade Africa-wide last year. By its own account, that effort rescued an astonishing 30 million souls from the clutches of Satan. If this rate of conversion can be believed, and if it can be sustained despite competition from Islam and mainstream Christian churches, the whole of the African continent will be won over to the Lord by His American disciples within 20 years. Of course, claims are one thing; facts are another. But there is no disputing the radical change in the religious complexion of Latin America in recent years nor the primary force behind it. The proportion of Latin Americans who are Protestant has climbed from 4 per cent in 1960 to about 15 per cent today. Among regular church attenders, Protestants now match Catholics. For the region as a whole, the number of practising Protestants is greater than the number of members of all other kinds of voluntary organisations including those involving politics, culture and sports combined. The numbers, however, have not been chalked up by the historic Protestant denominations Anglicans, Lutherans and so on but rather by largely American-inspired independent, charismatic and evangelical offshoots. Between 1990 and 1992, for instance, more than 700 new churches were established in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro alone. Only one of them, however, was Catholic 90 per cent were Pentecostal. According to a survey undertaken by Brazil's Institute for Religious Studies in the early 1990s, evangelical Protestantism was "the most important movement changing attitudes in contemporary Brazilian society". Under its influence Brazilians were becoming politically more conservative, socially more disengaged, and generally less concerned with the welfare of others than with their own path to personal salvation and material success. Add adherence to a strict code of moral behaviour and blind faith in the literal truth of the Bible and you have the predominant Christian message issuing from the United States. American evangelical Protestantism is the strongest tradition in America's religious history. Though loosely organised, evangelicals now constitute the largest single religious faction in the US, with more white evangelicals outside the US National Council of Churches than there are Protestants within the ecumenical fold. Evangelicals are also the innovators in terms of proselytising whether via radio, television, publishing, religious movies or foreign missionary activity. But theirs is a uniquely secularised religion. Its appeal lies not in any claim to be a faithful expression of time-honoured beliefs and practices or to be an authentic extension of the Christian communities of Europe. In fact, tradition and established church hierarchies were rejected by American Protestants long ago as the corrupting and oppressive remnants of the Old World. Nor does evangelical Protestantism's appeal lie in other-worldliness. That would be inconsistent with the rationalist, materialist culture in which it is embedded. No, the faith of Americans is an easy believism that accommodates itself to the surrounding societal values. Creeds, customs and doctrines are not allowed to stand in the way of the believer's relationship to the Divine. Freedom of conscience means not only voluntary belief but also excessive individualism among those who do believe. Theology has been reduced to a name-it-and-claim it gospel that sanctifies consumer-oriented capitalism and all it has to offer as an expression of God's grace. This is the good news proclaimed to the world by American Christian broadcasters and televangelists. And the message is loud and clear. North Carolina-based Trans World Radio, for example, produces 1,400 hours of Christian broadcasting a week in more than 100 languages. The Nebraska-based Back to the Bible network reaches a potential audience of almost3billion people. The still more expansive operations of the San Francisco-based Far East Broadcasting Company cover the globe with transmissions in 150 languages from radio stations in the Philippines, South Korea and the Mariana Islands. While each of these networks professes to be inter-denominational, all in fact are evangelical. FEBC is typical. While the company insists that it "seeks and supports co-operation with any group proclaiming Jesus Christ as Lord and only Saviour", the extent of its fellowship in practice is limited to Protestant denominations that share the company's same view about the "grea t truths" of the Bible. Much the same is true of televangelists. Their preaching is distinguished by their personality rather than their profession of faith. It is replete with Bible "truths"; it promotes simplistic religious solutions to complex non-religious problems ranging from illness to drug abuse and family breakdown; and almost without exception the gospel interpretation they favour constitutes a theological endorsement of private enterprise capitalism. The effect of this kind of media evangelism is difficult to calculate. Broadcasters and televangelists do not represent "churches" in the usual sense of the word but rather more loosely defined "ministries". As far as these ministries are concerned, mailing lists are of greater importance than membership and if "conversion" produces little more than higher ratings so much the better. Indeed, a major impact of televangelism in particular is its effect on the erosion of the conventional congregation. In place of a physical association among fellow believers, the viewers of televangelism become audiences who enjoy an apparent association with celebrity preachers. The lounge room is both point of contact and place of worship. Within its walls the Christian religion ceases to be relational (believer to God and to others) and becomes a matter of personal conviction and private expression. In this sense a program such as This is Your Day!, which is produced by the Texas-based Benny Hinn's Ministries and airs daily in more than 190 countries, can have enormous if largely unquantifiable effects on religious beliefs and behaviour. More orthodox forms of missionary activity are also producing startling results. These days, for instance, there are more Mormons outside the US than there are within its borders. Among Jehovah's Witnesses fewer than 20 per cent are now American citizens. Not surprisingly, perhaps, a number of countries in recent years have felt the need to curb the activities of foreign Christian missionaries. In some cases, the concerns are more political than strictly religious or cultural. In China, for example, a growing Christian middle class is considered a threat to the Communist Party's grip on power and only last week police in central China arrested 130 members of an evangelical group. Moreover it is not just Americans who have been targeted. Hindu fundamentalists in India, in particular, have as much hostility to Catholic as to Protestant evangelism. One recent victim of this hostility was the Australian missionary Graham Staines who was killed along with his two young sons by religious extremists last year. Still the anxiety expressed by some Israeli lawmakers about outside attempts to convert Jews to Christianity is primarily directed at American evangelists. Similarly, Russia's 1997 law on religion, which discriminates against congregations of fewer than 15 years' standing in the country, hits hardest at US-based Baptists, Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses who have made major inroads since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In June, seven American Protestant missionaries were instructed to leave Bashkortostan, a republic in the Urals. Activities such as theirs have strengthened pressure to add the "negative influence of foreign religious organisations and missionaries" to the list of threats to Russia's national security. The suspicion is that missionary activity has become another vehicle of American cultural imperialism. This is not a suspicion entirely without foundation. The United States is one of the most religious societies on earth. Almost 90 per cent of Americans consider themselves Christian and their conviction is strengthening, not diminishing. In the 18th century, only about 17 per cent of Americans belonged to one or other religious denomination. This figure rose to 37 per cent in the 19th century, 50 per cent by the beginning of the 20th century and more than 60 per cent in the 1990s. More Americans now profess a belief in God (96 per cent) than did so 50 years ago (95 per cent). As many pray (90 per cent) and attend church weekly (41 per cent) as was the case in 1947. Half as many again (63 per cent) regularly give thanks before meals than was the case among their grandparents (43 per cent). Writing in 1990, the British sociologist Steve Bruce observed that it "is one of the many paradoxes of America that a large part of the population of one of the most advanced and productive industrial economies in the world claims to follow a deviant schism of the ancient religion of a small, pastoralist people and believe that God created the world in six days, that all our animals are descended from the pairs saved by Noah from the Flood, and that the world will end shortly in a plan announced in the Bible books of Daniel and Revelations". But a second paradox is equally significant: Americans may believe but they have little knowledge about their beliefs. According to Gallup poll findings compiled by The New York Times Magazine in December 1997, more than 90 per cent of American homes contain at least one Bible, and one-third of American adults claim to read it at least once a week. But a majority of the population doesn't know what a gospel is, almost 60 per cent are at a loss to recall the first five of the Ten Commandments, and one in 10 imagines Joan of Arc to have been Noah's wife. The reasons lie in the origins and early experience of their religious practice. To the refugees from intolerance in Europe, America was the New Zion, a nation set apart "under God" as Abraham Lincoln put it at Gettysburg in 1863, a country in which the religious baggage of the past could be thrown out and belief expressed as the choice of a free people rather than the assumed identification of a culturally captive one. But those sentiments, taken to their logical conclusions, made for any number of innovations and the Puritans' insistence on local church autonomy and independent church leadership only encouraged it. The result was mavericks and schismatics, ready-to-go churches and on-the-spot ordinations and competition between ministers who had to preach a popular message in order to survive. Credibility was soon detached from a fidelity to age-old teachings and traditions and hitched instead to consumer satisfaction from what was alleged to be a more authentic witness to Christ. Out went doctrine along with pomp and ceremony; in came democratic church governance, performance religion and the feel-good gospel. The result is the commodification of religion. Belief is uninformed and ahistorical, easy to access and to change and so immensely powerful where it is popular. In the 1980s, the New Christian Right mobilised this native religious sensibility into a formidable political force which even today no member of the political establishment can afford to ignore. Texas Governor and Republican Party presidential candidate George W. Bush, for example, first raised the likelihood of his candidacy for the White House at a Christian prayer breakfast, later declared that his favourite political philosopher was Christ "because he changed my heart", and commissioned a gospel choir to perform at the Republican Party Convention in July. Not to be outdone, Bush's Democratic rival, Al Gore, a former divinity student, says the question he asks before making any important decision is, "What would Jesus do?" In an attempt to cover all religious bases, Gore has chosen Senator Joe Lieberman as his running mate making him the first Jewish candidate for the vice-presidency and he invited the Catholic Archbishop of Los Angeles, Cardinal Roger Mahony, to open the Democratic National Convention in that city last month. These may be calculated tactical ploys by Bush and Gore in their competition for the Christian vote. But they are more than that. Both Bush and Gore have championed policies that test the US constitutional separation of church and state: Bush by introducing programs in Texas that channel public welfare through faith-based organisations; Gore by saying he would expand these programs with federal funding. And this convergence of politics and religion has increasing international ramifications. Under pressure from conservative Christian groups, for instance, the Clinton administration two years ago signed into law the International Religious Freedom Act. As a result, the US Government now has a bureaucracy whose sole function is to monitor how other countries deal with issues of religious tolerance. Situated within the State Department, the Office of Religious Freedom is headed by a special ambassador-at-large whose first appointee is an evangelical Christian, Robert Seiple. When Seiple produced his first report last year, it was a modest document that for the most part covered ground already dealt with in State Department human rights reports and by the work of other human rights organisations. Some countries (most notably China, Sudan, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia) were given a rap over the knuckles for religious persecution and discrimination but no action was taken against them on those grounds alone. This only incensed those groups that had been instrumental in lobbying for the religious freedom act in the first place. Their supporters in the Congress complained that the administration was not taking the spirit of the law seriously enough and demanded it do more. A close contest in November's presidential election would incline both Gore and Bush to agree. Victims of genuine religious persecution don't stand to be the only beneficiaries of a tougher approach. So do American missionaries who could use the law to appeal for Washington's help to defend and expand their activities abroad. Already, however, American evangelists are making an impression in unlikely places. In June, The Guardian in London published an article that asked: "Are US evangelists having an unhealthy effect on the Church of England?" The concern was clerical abuse but the background to it was the changing relationship between parishioners and their pastors under the influence of American-style therapist preachers. Since then a broader concern has surfaced about the increasingly close relationship between American fundamentalists and the British religious Right and the influence both appear to be exercising on policy debates within the Conservative Party. As far as the Christian camp is concerned, the party should embrace a still smaller role for government, adopt moral solutions to social problems, and encourage a greater role for faith-based organisations in public affairs. If that sounds familiar it may be because a similar agenda is being urged in Australia. But over the past 10 years, the influence of American evangelical Protestantism has been discernible in more obvious ways. Some of the fastest growing churches in Australia are ones that embrace the revivalist and crusading styles of American evangelists. The 1990s witnessed a proliferation of independent Christian schools something much favoured by religiously conservative Americans who distrust secular state institutions to properly educate their children. And a growing number of Australians are embracing core articles of faith of American fundamentalists, in particular Biblical literalism and "creation science". More generally, the influence of American religious experience and expression can be seen in styles of Christian worship and church organisation. Christian worship was once grounded in the recitation of age-old creeds and the re-enactment of ancient ritual. These provided a point of contact between believers and the sources of their belief, integrated individuals into the life of the faith community, and formed the basis of rites of passage through a person's spiritual and social life. Increasingly, however, worship is disconnected from the past; its attraction is its novelty rather than its pedigree and its power is theatrical rather than sacred. Once, Christians saw themselves as members of church communities linked across time and space by their faith traditions. Now, more and more of them identify with fragmented congregations where belonging means little more than pursuing self-redemption. It would be wrong to see these changes simply as the result of the efforts of American evangelists. In many ways the trend toward individual gratification in religion reflects an even stronger pull in that direction in society generally. It would also be wrong to ignore the continuing strength of the Catholic, Orthodox and historical Protestant churches. Still, almost everywhere the membership of these churches is hemorrhaging to the kind of entrepreneurial Christianity favoured by Americans and the born-again certainties they most actively and enthusiastically promote. There are many American Christians, of course, who preach and practise more conventional beliefs. There are many involved in missionary activity who are sensitive to cultural differences and careful to respect them. But the influence of these people must be weighed against that of the juggernaut Christian broadcasters and televangelists as well as the more general but pervasive allure of a culture that promotes itself as the most dynamic, prosperous, liberating and Christian on earth. Americans are handing their brand of salvation on, dispersing and multiplying it. In the process they stand to change Christianity more profoundly than the 16th-century reformers changed the medieval Church, and risk reducing it to little more than the foundation myth of their own sense of manifest destiny. Chris McGillion is the Herald's religious affairs columnist. He teaches in the School of Communication at Charles Sturt University. The Sydney Morning Herald, September 3, 2000 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. 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