Religion Dispatches
A viral CNN post by Rachel Held Evans argues that millennials are fed up with the church’s reactionary politics and just want Jesus, while Brett McCracken counters in the Washington Post that were they to listen to their elders they’d break out of their twitter-obsessed world and find meaning. But what if it’s not authentic faith they’re looking for at all?
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Since the Rachel Held Evans post that launched a thousand responses everyone is talking about “millennials” leaving the church, but these conversations always seem to be missing an important question: Instead of asking why some people leave, can we ask why some stay?
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So far as I can tell, nothing in our language or in our collective practice, digital or otherwise, holds space for such moments of spiritual pause, however secularized that spirituality might be.
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But atheists not so much.
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The folks most likely to be alienated by Daniel’s book are, unsurprisingly, the seekers—those who call themselves SBNR, of course, but also those who want religious community, or at least want to want it. For these folks, who may be, as she says, “shopping” for a place to belong, Daniel has absolutely no patience.
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The plot of Twilight: a young woman—clumsy and plain—is deeply and unconditionally loved and protected by an all-powerful, omnipotent being whose love makes her special. For a moment, Twi-hards let themselves believe, however crazy it sounds, that they too could be irresistibly beautiful one day, loved by an ideal God-man who sees them, really sees them.
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“I’d feel most comfortable assigning myself to the category of people who prefer not to be assigned to categories,” a fifty-something, Silicon Valley entrepreneur I’ll call Nathan* joked when I asked him how he’d describe his religious identification or affiliation. “But I suppose ‘none’ will do.”
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Religion writers, both journalists and scholars, have had much to say of late about the continued growth of the religiously unaffiliated—especially given the impact of so-called “Nones” in the recent presidential election. But much of what’s been written fails to highlight finer distinctions among Nones. So how to better understand this fast-approaching tipping point in American religion and spirituality?
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An RD holiday sampler of stories & viewpoints we would have liked to read in 2012.