[FoRK] An optimistic view of religious evolution

[Dr. Ernie Prabhakar]

Hi all,

Neither pro- nor anti- religion, but a thoughtful study of trends over  
time (and across countries) which some of you might find encouraging...

-- Ernie P.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/secularism

..A lot rides on which of these predictions turn out to be true, and  
on how and where different religions bump up against one another. A  
common worry is that intense competition for souls could produce  
another era in which religious conflict leads to religious war—only  
this time with nuclear weapons. If we are really in for anything like  
the kind of zeal that accompanied earlier periods of religious  
expansion, we might as well say goodbye to the Enlightenment and its  
principles of tolerance...

...However one defined modernity, it always seemed likely to involve  
societies focused on this world rather than on some other. But  
intellectual fashions are fickle, and the idea of inevitable  
secularization has fallen out of favor with many scholars and  
journalists. Still, its most basic tenet—that material progress will  
slowly erode religious fervor—appears unassailable...

You’ll have noticed that I’ve said nothing yet about the United  
States. Talk about an outlier—there on the Pew chart it stands, nearly  
alone, as the only country in the world, apart from Kuwait, that is  
both wealthy and religious...The most important religious phenomenon  
in the United States, however, has nothing to do with the number of  
atheists. It concerns another trend that, like modernization, is  
changing the trajectories of religion worldwide: the creation and  
spread of a free religious marketplace, which partly (though by no  
means completely) revives religious devotion wherever it reaches, but  
also tends to moderate the religions offered within it.

So what happens to religions that find themselves with many  
competitors? Consider what is occurring within the growing American  
evangelical movement. It has built megachurches that meet the needs of  
time-pressed professionals by offering such things as day-care  
centers, self-help groups, and networking opportunities. Its music  
owes more to Janis Joplin than to Johann Sebastian Bach. Its church  
officials learn more from business-school case studies than from  
theological texts. And its young people—well, as the children of  
parents who have gone through a born-again experience, they are not  
likely to be as obedient as the evangelical leader James Dobson wants  
them to be. Having opted to grow on secular terms, American  
evangelicalism is becoming less hostile to liberal ideas such as  
tolerance and pluralism. New efforts to take it in directions  
sympathetic to environmentalism and social justice are a direct result  
of the maturing of the faith, which followed from earlier decisions to  
make the movement more appealing to large numbers of Americans,  
especially the young...

Does the pattern hold outside America? After all, it is often said  
that the promulgation of secular values and lifestyles, one result of  
globalization, is prompting a reactionary religious backlash. There is  
some truth to this argument, but it misses the bigger picture. Most of  
the religious revivals we are seeing throughout the world today  
complement, and ultimately reinforce, secular developments; they are  
more likely to encourage moderation than fanaticism...