Faiths yield to the 'religion of me'

By Madeleine Bunting

LONDON: Easter is that time of the year when Britain's churches swell temporarily with seasonal believers. But every year even this peak congregation shrinks across the country by a few more thousand. One of the most extraordinary social revolutions in the 50 years since the World War II has been the decline of institutional religion in western Europe.

If current rates of decline continue, there will be no Methodists in the UK by the middle of the next century. Each year, 50,000 Roman Catholics in England and Wales give up going to Sunday mass.

The declining number of vocations to the priesthood in France, once regarded as the elder daughter of the Catholic church, is leaving parishes empty. Seminaries are closing in Ireland, the country which once exported a surplus of priests to serve all over the world, for lack of candidates. The absence of an institutional faith makes contemporary western Europe, historically and anthropologically, a strange new experiment in human culture.

After all, institutional religion is thriving in virtually every other part of the globe, including America, where many still regularly attend church.

Every previous society has developed and lived by a religious tradition which explained the place of the individual, the community and the cosmos; it ordered relations between people (particularly over sexual reproduction) and with the environment.

Rituals expressed and reinforced the tradition. In many cultures, this tradition was maintained and interpreted by priests who acquired great authority from their position. In western Europe, shared beliefs, ritual and religious hierarchies are being swept away.

But the conclusion commonly drawn from the decline of religious institutions -- that this is a process of secularization -- is wrong.

Polls in the UK consistently indicate that the vast majority of people -- more than 70 percent -- say they believe in God. Many admit to praying even if they never go in a church, mosque or synagogue.

Many have developed a powerful philosophy of life which incorporates the search for the universal values of truth, love and beauty, but has moved outside the institutional faiths. Millions of people are, individually or in small groups, fumbling towards a new formulation of faith and the signs of it are everywhere.

Look first in language. The radical theologian Don Cupitt points out how in recent decades the word "life" has become hugely popular, loaded with complex philosophical meaning: "get a life, that's life, she loved life, there's more to life, I want to get my life back together again, my life has fallen apart, life goes on, I've got a life to live, live dangerously, quality of life, right to life, that's what life is all about, I've only got one life, live life to the full".

Many would agree with his conclusion that the focus of contemporary spirituality has shifted from the traditional religious preoccupation with life after death to life before death -- the here and now.

Cupitt identifies some of the ways we use the word: life has an imperative -- one must keep up and play one's full part in it, one has a responsibility to enjoy and explore it (live life to the full).

The best tribute to be paid at a funeral is that the deceased "loved life"; loving life means accepting its vicissitudes. "We are learning to love life disinterestedly," claims Cupitt.

Loving life is living in the present, and finding in the moment an intensity and authenticity of experience: "there's more to life than this."

Perhaps the fascination with drugs and sex is this quest for an intensity of experience in reaction to the often banal superficiality of consumer materialism.

Cupitt concludes, "We have supposed that what has been happening has been the secularization of religion, and we have failed to see the much greater event of the sacralisation of life, even though it has already deeply affected all of us."

This new formulation of faith has abandoned the western preoccupation with the intellectual and rational. People are not interested in what you believe but how you live your life.

It is the practice not the theory which now concerns us. We are contemptuous of creed-based religions. Their obsession with what people did or did not believe has inspired over the past millennium a history of terrible persecution and violence in which thousands died for the sake of fine points of theological dispute such as transubstantiation.

Contemporary faith has lost its cosmological ambition. It cannot explain how the universe happened or how and why we emerged from the mud in evolution.

It cannot even explain the arbitrary brutality of suffering and death. Its purpose is not to provide explanations; it has been recast as a pragmatic philosophy, something to help us find happiness, reduce our suffering, find peace of mind and meaning in this life.

The emphasis has moved to intuition, emotion and empiricism; some would argue that the pendulum has swung too far the other way, and that suspending all critical rationality can lead to a dangerous credulity in which cults and quackery flourish.

The core principle of this faith is individual autonomy -- "no one can tell you how to run your life" is the personal mantra. All previous religions have developed hierarchies and figures of authority. Now, everyone is on his or her own journey. What is lost is bigotry and condemnation, but what is gained is tolerance.

At its best, this radical democratization of religion places huge opportunity on each individual. At its worst, it suggests that everyone is reinventing the wheel because there is no respect for what previous generations have learned -- tradition -- or for the role of teacher.

But this tolerance opens us up to the globalization of religion; the exclusive claims of the monotheistic faiths become hard, if not impossible, for many people to subscribe to.

A 100 years ago, western Christians' understanding of Hinduism and Buddhism was negligible, the great religious revolution of the 20th century has been a huge growth and understanding of other religious traditions.

The dialogue between faiths and the discovery of a commonality of many principles and beliefs is happening all over the world, although it attracts much less publicity than the conflicts between faiths.

The spiritual has moved into daily life and is no longer something separate and apart which properly belongs in the church; the western understanding is of the sacred and secular as being totally distinguishable.

Now we are much closer to the Hindu or Confucian practice where the gods are worshiped in the home; potentially, we can now place the sacred in everything implicit and underpinning all of daily life.

-- Guardian News Service