Will America Experience A Spiritual Transformation?

What lies ahead in terms of the religious and spiritual lives of Americans is difficult to predict. Will Americans, in this “dark night” of the nation’s soul, look deeper into their own hearts? Will they seek to reorder the priorities of their lives? Will they make new efforts to discern God’s will for their lives? Will Americans move away from self-absorption and materialism, or will Americans enter a period of deepened secularism as has sometimes happened in American history after crises and military action?

While we do not know the answers to these questions at present, certainly the current time offers a unique opportunity for clergy and other religious leaders not only to give comfort and solace to a confused and grieving populace, but to encourage people to move to a deeper place in their relationship with God and neighbor.

The challenges are great. First, because many Americans seem not to know what they believe, or why. Furthermore, God is popular but does not have primacy in people’s lives. We believe in God, but do we trust God?

Ample evidence can be found to show that religion or religious faith is broad but not deep. And the public themselves readily attest to this. The fact is, despite the relatively high figures among Americans in terms of at least attested belief, many question the impact religious faith is having on individual lives and society as a whole.

Surveys document growing concern among the general public over ethics and morality in society. One Gallup Poll finds 78 percent saying that moral values in this country are either “somewhat weak” or “very weak.”

Have moral values become stronger or weaker during the past 25 years? Seventy-six percent of Americans in a Gallup Poll say they have become “weaker.” What about the future? Six in ten expect moral values in the year 2025 to be “worse” than they are today.

America has, of course, much of which to be proud, including generosity, concern for the individual, and resilience. These have been in great evidence in the weeks and months following the September 11 attacks. But there is also, of course, a less desirable side to America, which damages our image with other nations of the world:

• child pornography;
• continuing high levels of crime and gun deaths;
• widespread child and spouse abuse;
• alcohol and drug abuse and addiction;
• fatherless ness;
• the lack of a sexual ethic.
• And while divorce is sometimes necessary, it has gotten totally out of hand: Every other marriage today will break up, spreading dysfunction throughout society.

Richard Halverson has offered this bleak assessment:

All the symptoms of paganism are manifest in our culture: hedonism, love of comfort, selfishness, greed, child sacrifice, violence, moral and ethical anarchy. We have lost our way as a people and we are paying a terrible price - the disintegration of our way of life. Freedom without responsibility, choice without consequence, liberty without law - or perhaps more precisely, the legalism of anarchy have become our way of life. We have lost the spiritual, moral anchor that secured our nation from its earliest, critical days. We are at sea without a compass, direction or destination.

Will religious faith in America have the power and depth to deal with these unacceptable problems? Much work lies ahead, for a number of surveys show that faith in our society tends not to be a mature or “integrated faith” revealed by a solid commitment to God and lived out in service to others. In one Gallup survey we discovered, on the basis of a 12-item scale, that only 13% of Americans have what might be called a truly transforming faith (from a book titled The Saints Among Us, by George Gallup, Jr. and Tim Jones).

Writing about Christians today, Richard Reeves in The Empty Church, notes:

Christianity in modern America is, in large part, innocuous. It does not require self-sacrifice, discipline, humility, and other worldly outlook, a zeal for souls, a fear as well as love of God. There is little guilt and no punishment, and the payoff in heaven is virtually certain.

In short, survey evidence would seem to underscore what many religious observers have concluded, that faith (in terms of Christians) is being overwhelmed by the culture, and could be called “cultural Christianity.” Our faith is becoming flabby.

But the opportunity for spiritual transformation among both Christians and non-Christians remains strong. Society’s unresolved problems and bondage to self may lead people to see a need to look deeper into their own hearts and lives.

Many observers of the contemporary American religious scene maintain that answers to the confusion and uncertainty of our age lie in the Bible. Supporters of this view point to what they believe to be a crisis of authority. Society, they believe, has lost its moral compass. They worry about trends such as hedonism, narcissism, relativism, and pluralism (the belief that all truths are equal). A majority of Americans, surveys note, are less than convinced that there are “absolutes” – that is, certain things are right or wrong regardless of circumstances.

A New York Times article states that we live in a time of “strong God; no strong rules; no strong superiors, moral or otherwise... Most Americans want to decide for themselves what is right, good, and meaningful.”

Some observers believe we live in a period of “postmodernism,” which rejects any notion of a universal, overarching truth, and reduces all ideas to social constructions, shaped by class, gender, and ethnicity.

Faith communities in the U.S. face no greater challenge than increasing the level of public knowledge and awareness of scriptures and of their faith traditions. Many know little about their own faith traditions, let alone other religions of the world.

Kenneth Kantzer writes about the challenge to Christian churches:

No church can be effective to bring clarity and commitment to a world when it is as ignorant of its own basic principles as is our church today. And, unless we engage the church in a mighty program of reeducation, it will be unable to transmit a Christian heritage to its own children or the society around it.

Adapted from Religion in America, 2002, Princeton Religion Research Center, by Joe Iaquinta (emphasis mine).