Category: DOC Thoughts
cross Sightings
I stopped wearing the cross years ago. There are times when I wear it, Good Friday, as a religious symbol during worship, but otherwise it is not the symbol of my practice of Christianity that I choose to wear. It has become a marker of Christian consumerism that it was never meant to be and in some ways represents bumper sticker faith. Rather, I wear the first symbol of the practice of Christianity, the fish. It is counter-Christian culture and better represents my discipleship and my journey in faith. Martin Marty offers an interesting Sightings on the topic of the cross and secular society.
The Secularization of the Cross
— Martin E. Marty | June 27, 2011Weekly, year in and year out, we sight new evidence that defining what is “religious” and what is “secular” remains difficult in the United States. One way to trace some attempts is to read The Humanist, as we often do. “Cross Purposes,” in the current July-August issue, is an example. In it Rob Boston plots the curious, not always thought-through, and apparently self-contradictory actions by “the religious right” which “secularize” the Christians’ sacred “central symbol.” Boston provides legal examples.
He takes for granted that “the cross is the most [sic] preeminent symbol of Christian faith,” the unifying marker for more than one billion people, the reminder to them of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. You’d think believers would guard the centrality and sacrality of the cross. Yet, to achieve certain worldly and civil ends, many recent court cases reveal the religious right leaders in public contexts saying, in effect, “Never mind. We don’t mean it. The cross isn’t really religious. . . it has become a generic symbol to memorialize any dead person” (e.g. in the Salazar v. Buono case where friend-of-the-right Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia ruled that the cross can be a secular symbol. If so, asked plaintiff Buono, a Catholic, “why don’t we see crosses in Jewish cemeteries?” Similarly, a Utah court said the cross can be deprived of religious significance, as on highway signs).
Boston writes that such uses of the cross reduce it to the “level of a public service announcement,” which is “a novel interpretation of law and theology, to be sure.” Agreed. You’d think firm Christians would be the first and loudest to protest such reductions, but in these court cases they promote the secularizing practice. For this “meager payoff,” as Boston calls it, “the religious right is willing to deny the meaning of the most significant symbol of Christianity.” He is brusque: “Rubbish. Who looks at a cross and thinks, ‘My, what an interesting way to arrange two planks of wood?’” Why, he asks, with this reduction prevailing, should believers still be asked to “take up the cross”? Why make it the focal point of churches, incorporate it into devotional art, and celebrate it in hymns? Has any non-Christian, he asks, ever felt compelled to cling to “the old rugged cross?”
Believers and non-believers alike have reason to back off in some cases on this scene, and not always be crabby, jumpy, and super-scrupulous about the intrusions across the “wall of separation of church and state.” Ours, we remember, is a messy religious, secular and pluralist society in which lines are never clear and walls are seldom the best symbols for separation, which is complex and changing. Sometimes to keep the civil peace or civil tone, citizens can wink and live with the mess a pluralist and contentious society creates.
Boston may be over-alert to these issues, but he raises enough flags that Christians, including many not only on the right, may become more aware of the risks. “At the end of the day what will [the cross-planters on public spaces] have achieved?” Not all of their games played with the cross as symbol have to be as cynical as Boston sees them. There can be naïveté and generalized reverence in some of these cross-posting moves. But critics may be doing articulate Christians a favor when they observe militant Christians having mounted crosses alongside highways and atop mountains, “simply and conveniently forgetting they did so by denying the symbol’s importance. They should ask ‘what if the secular symbolism sticks?’” For many, it has stuck.
References
Rob Boston, “Cross Purposes: What’s Behind the Religious Right’s Drive to Secularize Their Central Symbol?” The Humanist, July-August 2011.
a “Sightings” that observes Youth Ministry
Generation Wandering
— Martin E. Marty | June 20, 2011Backlash against the hyper-institutionalism of religious organizations in the 1950s led first to revolt (“the sixties”) and the birth of a lifestyle summarized in the mantra, “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual.” Today some returnees are nervy enough to lash back with an opposite mantra: “I’m not spiritual, but I’m religious.” Neither pole is a bargain. “Spiritual” often comes across as pridefully individualistic. Other believers and seekers don’t live up to their standards. But “religious?” Brought up on Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth—who wrote a section on “Religion als Unglaube,” (“Religion as Unbelief”) —newer generations have not tried to acquire bragging rights about “organized religion.” Between and beyond them is another cohort who simply don’t care for either. Most of them tend to be young post-believers, who have the reputation of shrugging a shrug in the apathetic mode.
As the generations come and go, some religious scholars and leaders have tried to discern directions of the younger folk. Now and then we like to forget our weekly sighting of events and trends in the current week, as Sightings goes online, and take a longer look. So this week, instead of drawing on editorials and reports, we reach to—of all things!—a philanthropic foundation’s annual report. This time it is the religion-friendly Lilly Endowment, based in Indianapolis, whose works are felt across the nation and beyond. A section in the Endowment’s 2010 Annual Report caught and held our eye: “Revitalizing Ministry with Youth and Young Adults.” It features creative doings on several fronts, beginning with an ambitious venture at Princeton Theological Seminary.
The Lilly Endowment, which supports numerous experiments, observes the youth themselves through mainly sociological studies. They found some surprises, which they banner in the subheads of the Annual Report. “Originally, what surprised me most is that teenagers are not that different from adults.” “A lot of us thought that churches had it backwards by not devoting more resources to youth.” More: “American teenagers generally do not have negative views of religion; in fact, they have an openness and curiosity about religion,” and they “tend to reflect the religious beliefs and traditions of their parents and are not particularly interested in rebelling or seeking alternative religious paths.” As pews were emptying and the backs of the young turned, youth ministers, for a generation and more, often decided that their main mission to keep the attention and loyalty of the young, was to entertain them, to rely on excitements of the sort that appeal in the secular pop culture of youth.
To read and realize what notable researchers like Christian Smith at Notre Dame find and project is one thing; to find ways to counter the “merely secular” or “merely spiritual” expressions is another. Most researchers, writers, and youth ministers in the various denominations are highly aware that trends among youth cultures rarely make their work easier. They have to be counter-cultural, but not cultishly so, as once they tried to be. As we read the Lilly Annual Report, the work of Smith, and Princeton’s Kenda Creasy Dean, and others, we draw some inspiration. On the nether side, however, if the exodus of the young continues, most of what issues from the “organized religion” of adventurous youth will be not rejection so much as boredom with communities of faith which claim to challenge the young in the midst of limitless distractions, only sometimes succeeding.
References
Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame
http://csrs.nd.edu/The National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR)
http://www.youthandreligion.org/Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford University Press, 2005).
Lisa Pearce and Melinda Lundquist Denton, A Faith of their Own: Stability and Change in the Religiosity of America’s Adolescents (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Christian Smith and Patricia Snell, Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (Oxford University Press, 2009).
Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church (Oxford University Press, 2010).
Faith Formation Learning Exchange, “The Spirit and Culture of Youth Ministry,” Winter 2009.
http://www.faithformationlearningexchange.net/uploads/5/2/4/6/5246709/spirit__culture_of_ym_essay.pdf