Conference yukon::christian_v7

313.0. "FORBES column on religion in America" by JULIET::CLABAUGH_JI () Mon Nov 08 1993 15:35

Here' a column taken from the July 5, 1993, copy of FORBES.
THE LARGER CONTEXT - page 46.

His observations remind me of Nixon's silent majority.  Are
the majority still so silent after all these years?  Or are
the silent ones even in the majority still?

----------------------------------------------------------

STEEPLE ENVY

Written by Michael Novak, author of "The Spirit of Democratic
Capitalism".

The millennium must be nearing again.  Talk of the end of the world
multiplies.  The skies will turn hostile, we are told, the seas will
turn fetid, the air will become unbreathable, the very earth will
burn the soles of our feet.  There is something about the approaching
end of another thousand years that seems to scare the bejammers out
of the culturally powerful.

Just last month we were treated to Norman Lear beginning to sound
like a Hollywood Billy Graham: "Let's face it, we are not a nation
enjoying its material success...A higher GNP, a faste computer
ship and interactive television with 500 channeels are not going
to address the hole in America's heart...We need to rediscover
together what is truly sacred."

To which oration exactly the right reply was given by Pulitzer
Prize-winning columnist Charles Krauthammer: "Rediscover?  For
most Americans there is no need to rediscover the transcendent.
They live with it.  It is called religion."

The film critic Michael Medved plays a game at Hollywood parties.
He asks Hollywood types how many people they think go to church
every week in America.  "No one I know," they often laugh.  "No,
seriously," Medved insists, "guess."  Usually they guess about
1%; the highest estimate he has heard is 10%.

The correct answer, on any iven weekend, is 43%.  This is more 
Americans than watch the Super Bowl on television, the medium's
biggest yearly audience.

Although the cultural elite may not realize it, most Americans
already know what is truly sacred, and know it through religious
traditions for which the year 2000 will not be the first 
millenniem they have known.

As Krauthammer points out, centi-millionaire Norman Lear is the 
founder of a liberal advocacy group whose driving passion is what 
they call the separation of church and state, but whose real 
project is to uproot all traces of religion from our common
public life - People For The American Way.  Yet he professes
to be shocked by "the hole in America's heart."

The human heart has been filled with radical questions for many
thousands of years.  The most beautiful thing in all of creation
is the human person - able to question, to imagine and to create.
Religion is ever born anew in the radical act of questioning
everything finite, everything worldly, everything that seems
finally unworthy of the infinite understanding and love that
restlessly inhabits the human mind and heart.  Bringing that
part of he human person to daily consciousness - teaching us
to lift our eyes and hearts so that we might act always sub
specie aeternitatis - is what Judaism and Christianity (and
other world religions) try to do.  Their aim is to prevent us
from frittering away our days in spiritual proverty.

Many churches today, of course, have given up on this aim.
Under the name of the "social gospel", many churches have
abandoned a sense of the transcendent in favor of scoial reform.
Social reform is a noble purpose, but yet another welfare
program does little to address the hole in America's heart.

The occassion of Mr. Lear's sermonette was a defense of Hillary
Clinton's earlier appeal for a "politics of meaning".  But politics
is about who gets what, where and how.  It is about important,
but not ultimate things.  If you seek a spiritual community, a
link to a higher purpose, a renewal of the honesty, questioning
and courage that are at the base of ethic worthy of the human 
person, you don't join a political party.  You join a historical, 
imperfect, human community called a church  Most Americans know
this.  Why don't Norman and Hillary?

For at least 150 years the great faith of our educated class
(or portions of it, at least) has been a worldly dream, a dream
of a great  maternal redistributive state, egalitarian and fair
and just and compassionate.  Such a state would create a kind 
of paradise on earth.

But the 20th century has been very hard on this dream.  It led to
mounting deficits and debts, deteriorating moral habits, unspeakable
crimes becoming common and the inability of many couples to rergard
marriage as a covenant rather than a cheeap commerical/emotional
contract.  In all welfare states, the numbers of children born 
outside of wedlock multiply.  And accompanying all this is
spiritual emptiness.

It is not the faith of the American people that is in crisis.  It 
is faith in the nanny state.  Our educated elites need a new faith,
perhaps even a very old one, before whose transcending gaze, like
a Rock of Ages, civilizations rise and fall, politics passes, and
even millennia tramp dutifully by.

    What a great column!
    
    Bo