That’s not true, at least over the scope of the entire nation. To point out a couple of examples- here in Texas, in a fairly conservative DFW suburb, a Muslim guy got elected to the Euless city council despite surprisingly hateful and vicious attacks on him about his religion by his GOP opponent and the House Representative for the area. And the Speaker of the Texas House for the last few sessions (Joe Straus) is a Jew. So he not only got elected by the public, but he ended up getting elected to the speakership by his legislative peers.
I imagine it’s similar elsewhere. There are certainly hateful people out there who hold their religion against them, but I don’t think they’re in the majority in most places.
And also its current incarnation is a complete 180° on what “laïcité” is and was put forward as an educative principle, too. It used to be somewhat equivalent to the US’ “freedom of religion”, that is to say “the State shouldn’t be in bed with nor push any flavour of religion nor persecute people based on their religion, and kids **really **shouldn’t be indoctrinated into a religion by their teachers”. These days it’s been consciously turned into “You’re a practising Muslim ? OK, we’re going to make this a new Problem, for Reasons”.
This because our laws make it pretty hard to discriminate based on race (but on the flip side, also pretty hard to document or quantify racial discrimination) ; but religion’s been a republican socio-cultural bugaboo for 200 years, so it’s an easier sell. And cover.
Eh, I dunno. In France we had l’Abbé Pierre (a Catholic monk who founded a Goodwill-like charity and was often mouthing off about social justice using the quintessential Catholic rhetorical weapon : the guilt trip
). We also have Mgr. Gaillot, a Catholic Bishop who got dinged by the late John Paul II for championing LGBT causes before it was cool. I think he’s still nominally the Bishop of a diocese that doesn’t materially exist. The St. Bernard church in Paris has also become a symbol and safe-haven for immigrants & refugees, in large part due to the 1996 events* but also because the local priest was politically involved in these issues (he’s regrettably dead now).
in case it didn’t make the news abroad (it was kind of a big deal over here) : in 1996 some 300-350 West African immigrants & refugees threatened with deportation “occupied” the church with the support of the local priest (under the traditional role of catholic churches as “asylum grounds” against secular justice) ; then after deliberation the government sent in the cops in violent shock&awe fashion. Appropriately enough, at the moment the cops decided to bust through the doors with fireaxes (a visual that was shocking even to this terminally atheist, Protestant-raised bloke), the priest was busy reading a translation of MLK’s “I have a dream” speech to his flock.
Well, we’re a bit short on baptists. Will you accept Catholics?
There’s the founders of a zillion orders dedicated to social justice in the form of free healthcare, education (both paid and free, with the paid centers usually having a % of free students), many of the more successful ones in France (La Salle, Company of Mary, Ursulines…). There’s the RCC-led cooperativist movements of the 60s in Spain and I expect other places: my own house was built by a cooperative created through the push of the local pastor and on land donated by the parish; same holds for about 1/3 of Tudela or 1/10 of Pamplona by current surface. Then there’s the thousands of lay people who founded and funded schools and hospitals (the “House of Mercy” in Tudela was founded by a childless, married couple, Miguel Eza and María Ugarte; it served as hospital, hospice, orphanage with and without loss of parental rights, and school; 18th century).
A while back I tried to find out which public school, in the sense of owned and operated by the government, was the first one in Tudela. Turns out the public schools have the bollocks to count the Escuelas de Castel-Ruiz as “the first public school”. Father Castel-Ruiz SJ used his personal inheritance to open two parallel schools (hence the plural in the name), one for girls and one for boys. The request of a tailor to have his sons taught sewing along with the girls eventually led to all classes becoming co-ed. That was in 1618. There’s been similar stories for centuries.
It’s hard to generalize about 330 million people, but as a rule of thumb huge swathes of the United States are inhabited by prudes who are rooted in the ‘do what the religious guy tells you’ form of moralism.
When I lived and worked as a journalist in the United States I was frequently puzzled when my colleagues would insist that certain pieces needed to include the viewpoint of some religious leader (almost always called a community leader) when the issue at hand had nothing to do with religion. This is virtually unheard of elsewhere in the western world.
This is part and parcel of why Trump’s base will not decline: submission to authority, no matter how misguided, is considered a virtue for many Americans.
You’ve actually missed it. US religious culture isn’t about submission to a religious authority. It’s about tribalism and self-identification. The reality is that most people don’t know what their religious authorities even say and would gladly hop churches if it were something they disagreed with. Barna group is a Christian demographics firm and they did a study where something like 4 out of 5 Christians would switch churches if they thought the church didn’t agree with their political beliefs and only some small number in the 10 percent range would switch political beliefs if they thought their church didn’t agree.
The capitalist system of religious ideas in the US has produced what are effectively tribal groups of yes men. Evangelicals are not Republicans because they are Evangelicals. It’s that Republicans go to Evangelical churches. If you’re a liberal, you stop going to Evangelical churches and go to mainline churches instead or drop out of Christianity all together. What you get are religious echo chambers where there is no top down control, but rather groups that think alike. It happens among the non-religious as well. They just use other means of communication and different social pressures. The reason you include the viewpoint of the religious leader is not because his view will somehow persuade his flock, but rather that his view is representative of his flock and thus an entire segment of society. Europe with its more centralized church structures doesn’t necessarily get this dynamic.
I think that this is something that people not in church culture really don’t get. Churches are notorious about running off pastors and ignoring bishops and leadership in the US. I’ll see a Facebook post from a bishop of an evangelical denomination saying that some US generally Republican policy is bad and then underneath it you’ll get 200 posts about how the leadership has lost its way and two years later at the next conference, they vote the guy out. American Protestantism is very much a bottom-up model of leadership and leaders who don’t represent their followers end up on the chopping block. It’s extremely common. A good example of this is Carlton Pearson. He was a major, influential Evangelical with a megachurch and a major TV following who embraced universalism and he ended up with his church foreclosed on and his wife leaving him and now he’s pretty much just drifting around aimlessly. This isn’t uncommon. I can name dozens of churches that have blown up over a pastor disagreeing with his flock over a minor point - some that are absolutely ridiculous. The church members don’t do soul searching and question their preconceptions, they just find somewhere else that they agree with.
This certainly props up my bias that a large segment of the US population who claim to be Christians (loudly and fervently and especially saying how much they rely on their faith in God and how much that changes their lives) are not Christians at all, and join a church ONLY as a virtue signal and a political act.
I suppose America is more culturally religious than most of the West at this point. We probably wear our religion on our sleeve more than many places. I myself attend a Methodist Church, and am fairly low-key about it. I don’t hide it, but I don’t go out and street-preach either. My church has liberals and conservatives, and everything in between. Our preacher doesn’t tell us how to vote, or what to think on politics. And if he did, most people would shrug him off and do what they want anyway. Some of the most religious people I’ve ever known were hard left-wingers, and some of the biggest atheists I’ve ever met were hard right-wingers.
When you’ve met one American, you’ve met one American. We’re all over the map in every facet of life, including personal morality and religion. It is what it is. We’re going through a tough patch in our politics right now. But we’ll get through it, and hopefully correct the error in 2018 and 2020.
Keep in mind that all laws are based on some sense of morality from somewhere, whether inspired by Judeo-Christian beliefs or some other.
Not quite it. It’s more that American Christianity is a ‘Choose-Your-Own-Adventure.’ Just like the rest of American culture. There is little doubt that Evangelicals believe in God and Christ as savior of the world. They believe the Apostle’s Creed, though they may not choose to say they believe it. The thing is that Christianity is extremely diverse. A Southern Baptist and a Coptic are both Christians, but they may not have a clue what’s going on with the other group. Because of this diversity, there is always a denomination/church that fits your beliefs.
There’s also the reality that among low-church Protestants, theology is not emphasized and is in fact derided. Evangelicals would look at you with a dumb look if you started talking about the hypostatic union. They just don’t care and would probably find your interest in such things to be evidence of being ‘head smart and heart foolish’ - which is a particularly bad thing. Low-church Protestantism came out of the Second Great Awakening and is an emotional style of religion where the details don’t matter and in fact are considered ‘bad.’ Fretting about the details and deeper theology is likened to Pharisaicalism. If you’re hung up on the rules, then it means you lack a relationship. (The irony is that they tend to be the most rule-bound religious groups, they just don’t write their rules down.) What matters to them are these relational and emotional spiritual moments. Because of that, the church hierarchy and even their written statements from the church they attend tend to be easily dismissed because what’s important is the relationship to God, not the particular name on the building and if the name on the building doesn’t match up to their particular relationship with God, they find a different building. To them, the beliefs held by the people that own the building are less important than the emotions they feel when they are in the building. So what happens is that they have these preconceived political beliefs, when those beliefs are preached against, they get uncomfortable as most of us do when our preconceptions are challenged. They interpret this discomfort as a sign from God that these beliefs being preached are wrong or heretical. They then go somewhere where they don’t get this discomfort.
It’s not about virtue signaling or lacking belief. It’s that the beliefs are extremely personal and disconnected from a larger body. I can’t tell you the number of times that you’ll hear “God told me to…” followed by some sort of crackpot idea or sometimes heretical one, that is justified simply because it’s emotionally pleasing and God wouldn’t give them good emotions if what they were doing was bad. It’s actually one of the reasons that Trump has a following among Evangelicals. He is extremely good at using emotion to advance his points. The logic of the ideas doesn’t matter, what matters are the emotions that they invoke. Evangelicals have a heavy reliance on emotion as a means to guide decisions. When Trump gives a speech, they get an emotional high which they interpret as a ‘good’ thing. So they look at the words and they may disagree with them, but the underlying emotion still feels positive, so they say “He must be God’s choice because I’m getting a pleasing feeling.”
I don’t know if it’s quite that simple. It’s true that a lot of so-called Christians are pretty hazy on what Christianity actually entails. But I think more people join for the community aspect than anything else. In modern American society, that’s one of the largest ways that people get enmeshed in support networks. In other words, they want to be part of the church community, but they’re not really sure what the difference between say… Lutheranism and Episcopalianism are, only that they like this particular church and their support network, and they don’t like the one down the road for one reason or another.
Ultimately though, the separation of church and state and the subsequent proliferation of churches means that church-shopping is inevitable. And the US will be particularly bad about it (or good, depending how you feel) as we never had a state religion or even a sect that that had historical dominance as European countries and the Catholic and Anglican Churches did.
I also think it’s why a lot of churches tend to be kind of cult-like; they try and raise barriers to exit by wrapping you so tightly in the church that leaving is a major disruption to you and your family’s lifestyles.
And I agree with what Senoy says about the theology of all this. The market nature of US Christianity means that the biggest churches are going to reflect what their constituents want, not what the doctrine and dogma of 2000 years says. Sort of like crowdsourced religion in a sense. That’s why you see heretical garbage like the “Prosperity Gospel”. People don’t like being told that being wealthy is a hindrance to being a good Christian, so they find some asshole who tells them that God wants them to be wealthy, and that’s a reflection of how good they are. And since these clowns went to seminary somewhere (we assume), and have a big church and a lot of followers, they’re comfortable with it and satisfied, despite running about 180 degrees to two millenia of Christian thought.
I never said these were particularly skillful or effective leaders: it takes charisma to lead people where they don’t want to go, and that’s a rare talent.
When people want to be a certain way they will chew up and spit out the leader and pick a new guy, but that doesn’t lessen their desire for a strong leader in anyway – it just means that the group gets ornery that the leader isn’t actually able to usher in the reality they want.
The preference, however, is for a strong man who can lay down the law to his opponents.
Fake that and you can be in charge for a long time.
I’m not sure though that it’s anymore pronounced a tendency than in any other group. Humans seem to have evolved to like leadership. I would posit though that it is perhaps less pronounced among American Protestants. I think that they function much more closely to an anarcho-syndicalist society than many other groups. The reason is simply due to the preponderance of options and the essential voluntariness of their organizations. There are about 400 thousand churches in the US, about one for every 1000 people. The sheer number of options is overwhelming. If you live in a town of any size at all, you have 30 different churches within easy driving distance. Switching churches is basically a free choice unless you are Mormon or Catholic. Protestant denominations are typically in communion with one another or they simply don’t care. There is some societal pressure, but typically you can just choose not to associate with the previous group if you don’t care to. Going from a Methodist Church to a Baptist Church to a non-denominational church is something that is extremely common. Shoot, I know people that attend multiple denominations, sometimes on the same day. The only penalty is social (which actually is one of the reasons that people have issues with American Christianity. When all you have is social penalties, that tends to be what you get good at, but I digress.) A typical Protestant church in the US loses between 10-15 % of its congregants in any given year. So if you have 100 people attending on January 1, 10-15 of those people won’t be attending your church by January 1 of the next year. That’s normal and that’s what is expected. If a church can’t replace at least 10% of its congregants per year, it’s a dying church. It’s true that there are churches with charismatic leaders that grow by leaps and bounds, but they can also die just as quickly. The church I’m in now was averaging 800 in attendance in 2006 and now we’re at 250. That same year, a church on the other side of town was averaging 600, they peaked at over 3000 by around 2013 or 14 and now they are down to 2000 (that church has had the same pastor since 1986, so it’s not just a leader issue.) There’s a church a block from us that started with 20 people 3 years ago and now they are up to 180. I’m not saying strong leadership isn’t part of it, but American Protestants are fickle. They’ll abandon a leader in a heartbeat if they aren’t happy about it. They get attached to leaders just like any other group, but if they aren’t perceiving that their ‘needs’ are met, they move elsewhere relatively easily and commonly.
Right now the theory is that social groupings have a lot to do with it. If you’re a family with pre-schoolers and you go to a church where there are 10 other families with pre-schoolers who are all friendly and you start going to each other’s homes for barbecues and taking trips together, you tend to stay. If you’re the only one, then you tend to leave. The old established denominations actually move their leaders with regularity to prevent cults of personalities. United Methodist pastors move every 7 years as an example. If you’re attending an established denomination, you learn not to get attached to a leader because they’ll be gone in no time, so the churches tend to cluster around different interest groups more than leadership.
[QUOTE=senoy;21083164Switching churches is basically a free choice unless you are Mormon or Catholic.[/QUOTE]
I can’t speak about catholicism, but in mormonism the individual members deal with conflicts of opinion by basically inventing personal variant ‘nano-sects’ - personal study is encouraged, and as long as you don’t range too wide in your beliefs (or aren’t too vocal of these deviations) you can basically invent your own personal religion. I’m surrounded by Mormons and in talking with them about the details of their beliefs not one of them believes the same things as any other. And they don’t realize they don’t.
Of course if your beliefs deviate too much - like noticing that Smith was a con artist, for example, at that point you generally choose to leave the church in practical terms, if not official ones.
That’s true, but they can’t actually switch churches in the same way that Protestants can. If you’re LDS, everyone else is heretical and LDS is the ‘one true path.’ Catholics are a little looser about it, not everyone else is a sinner, but you can’t just flit away willy-nilly either. Catholics are the ‘one true church.’ and God might be merciful to the others, but they’re not really right. Protestants typically don’t have those issues. Open communion is common and differences between denominations are generally considered mild. As a United Methodist, I can go to a Baptist church or an Assemblies church (or a Catholic Church for that matter and from the UM side of things can even take Eucharist, but the Catholics wouldn’t be happy about it, so we typically don’t) and still maintain my UM membership and there’s really no issue with it. It’s no different than if I go to the UM church on the other side of town. That’s fairly typical in Protestantism (although Pentecostals sometimes think the non-glossolalia churches are screwed up and there are certainly social divides between the gay-affirming denominations and the non-gay-affirming ones. Typically church leadership says you’re fine, but their congregants will be all over you for sinning.) Overall though, Protestants can go wherever they want without any penalty from their ‘base’ church or they can even switch ‘base’ churches and come back later with no issues. Most denominations will even let you move memberships just by taking a piece of paper that says ‘Bob was a good member of our church. Let him into yours now.’
Learn a new thing every day - I had no idea that any christian church would potentially reject members. I figured that all of them followed the “come in, sit down, stay a while” model. To think you’d need a recommendation astounds me. (Probably because I was raised mormon, and mormonism will take anyone with or without a pulse, likely because more members means more money.)
I do not think that your observation on Europe is accurate. In my country, Germany, ethics is a constant factor in public debate. The topics we discuss may be different from yours, but they do not begin and end with the refugee crisis. Sexual morals are not quite as high on the list and our debates have perhaps less of a religious bent. But to generally say that we focus on pragmatism rather than ethics is mostly cliché. Whether or not that is a good thing I honestly am not sure.
Not to Hijack, but that is my opinion is the same reason that Ayn Rand has so many adherents. People will gravitate to whatever philosophy tells them to do what they wanted to do anyway.
I personally want to sleep in on Sunday, so I ended up athiest.
Typically, there are multiple stages to church-goer. The first is attendee. Anyone can attend pretty much any church. I can think of very few instances where people have been barred from attending and those are very extreme examples like threats or acts of violence against others.
Then there is usually something akin to baptized person (whether in spirit in the sense of ‘being saved’ or in water) There are all sorts of theological implications behind this act, but it typically is used as a starting point for being a ‘Christian.’ Different churches use different language, but regardless of whether you’re talking ‘being born again’ or ‘sprinkled’ it’s generally seen as a moment of grace entering your life.
After that, you choose membership. Membership typically involves going to classes and learning the basics of the church in which you want membership as well as the Christian religion as a whole. It usually involves promises to support the church and be a good person. Technically, you can have your membership revoked or denied membership in most churches. I would say that it rarely happens. In my church, I think that I read that a lay member hasn’t ever had their membership stripped, largely because our judicial system is an extremely convoluted system that is required to err on the side of reconciliation (It made news recently because church charges were brought against Jeff Sessions. Technically, he could have his membership revoked for his comments on immigrants. Realistically, he would likely quit the church before it ever got to a formal rejection and even more realistically, it won’t go anywhere. His pastor is required to speak to him, he’ll likely say, “you should be nicer to immigrants.” Jeff will say, “Agree to disagree.” and that’ll be the end of it.) The benefits of membership are… you get to vote, serve on committees and you get to say you are a member. For membership transfers, you just need a piece of paper saying that you already did it at your earlier church and then they bring you up front, say “This is Bob Robertson, he’s transferring his membership from Lawndale Church of the Nazarene where he was a member for seven years. Feel free to stop by and say Hi.”
As for communion, we’re an open table, so that means that anyone can take it regardless of their membership or beliefs. I don’t think that every Protestant Church is open table, but it’s fairly common. Since it’s a sacred rite for us, we ask that you take it seriously and in a willing desire to get closer to Christ, but if you’re an atheist that just wants a small snack, how would we know and what would we even do about it?
The rest of these are specific to the United Methodist Church, but there is generally something similar in most Protestant denominations. I think after membership, you can become a lay minister which basically means you can preach if the pastor is out of town, but in practice it means that you take a couple of theology classes. People who aren’t lay ministers still preach and people that are lay ministers don’t have to. It doesn’t really convey much of anything in advantage other than a certificate. Again in practice I couldn’t even tell you who in our church if anyone is a lay minister.
Technically, there is also a lay delegate as a level, but it’s really just an elected representative to the conference. There are no requirements for it other than you convince everyone to vote for you and you’re a member. As a former lay delegate, it’s largely a boring and thankless task unless you’re just really into church governance. Most of the job is approving budgets and voting on a conference lay delegate to general conference. It consists in sitting in a large meeting room and arguing about line items and best use of funds. At least once every conference someone will get up and expound on why the church has lost its way and that we have spiritual issues. At this point, half the people will sigh at the interruption and half will nod along glumly. Occasionally someone will propose some radical change to the doctrine. There will be some argument and it’ll get referred to a committee where they get to fight about it.
After that, you can become clergy. They have a whole hierarchy themselves. Usually starting as a Local Ministerial Candidate, then becoming a Conference Ministerial Candidate, then becoming an ordained elder, clerical delegate to General Conference and finally bishop. For all of their positions there is usually educational requirements, boards of review and then you get voted on by the conference.
Anyway, I’m way off-topic. Bottom line is that it is possible to reject members, it happens rarely. More often they just don’t feel like taking the classes and decide that a vote isn’t really a worthwhile thing anyway. Anyone can attend without membership.
I agree on the point about people joining churches for the community. That’s a natural thing, when you join a group or organization, making friends, making connections, going out and doing good works, etc. My wife has been a great example of that in our church. She volunteers for a lot of things, and has made a lot of friends.
In terms of what is heretical or not, I think there are a few basics where most denominations agree: The Divinity of Christ, virgin birth, resurrection, forgiveness of sins. A big rift is in the “how do I get to heaven?” question. Catholics and some others think you work your way into heaven, in addition to your belief in Christ. Some denominations think that you are saved by the Grace of Christ, and you can’t work your way into heaven. I tend to think that we are all batting for Team Jesus in the Christian world, and I don’t get hung up in the details.
