Wrestling with Religion

  Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) was the first professor of sociology, refining on the positivism of August Comte. He approached the mores and institutions of society as realities to be studied objectively (statistically if possible) in structural relation to each other. Earlier writers had condemned religion as bad science, false cosmology concocted by priests. Instead, Durkheim asserted that religions, like all living institutions, serve living purposes. Their truth resides in their power to produce social cohesion and cure the disease of anomie --the alienation and fragmentation that results from loss of shared meaning. Religions exist, not because priests invented them, but because they are stable and self-replicating social realities. For skeptics in the 1700s, religion was simply bad science, destined to fall before the real thing. Auguste Comte (1788-1857), an early advocate of sociology, agreed with this but worried about it. For him, Christianity served vital functions, promo...

  J. R. R. Tolkien's dragon from The Hobbit,  infected with "dragon sickness" or greed A billionaire President became a hero of evangelical Christians despite his wildly unChristian personal morality, including two divorces, unrepentant adultery, counterpunching, holding of grudges, and habitual name-calling--all condemned in the Gospels. This variant of Christianity emphasizes opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage (and, more recently, transsexualism), issues on which Jesus is silent. We may speculate what Christ's teachings might have been on these issues, but making a hero out of a billionaire ignores the most frequent and explicit of Christian teachings. One of his strongest teachings about wealth, the story of the Rich Young Man, appears in three gospels. Taken literally, Jesus says that the wealthy can't saved unless they donate everything to the poor:  As Jesus started on his way, a man ran up to him and fell on his knees before him. “Good teacher,” h...

In The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Movement in the Western World in a Few Centuries, Rodney Stark charts sociological processes to explain the movement's success. After the crucifixion, there were about 140 believers in Jerusalem (Acts 1: 12-15). Three centuries later, some 35 million Christians were spread over the Roman Empire (pp. 6-7). When the Emperor Constantine recognized Christianity in 313, he merely acknowledged  a dominant movement in his empire.       Earlier historians either found this explosive growth inexplicable or explained it as evidence of God's favor. As a persecuted popular movement, unaided by military power, the messianic Jewish sect that became Roman Christianity seemed unique, its rise to power inexplicable, but Stark explains it as a convergence of social processes, a perfect storm but a natural one.      Stark came to this conclusion after his study of th...

  First Corinthians. the longest epistle reliably attributed to the Apostle Paul, is one of the most influential and controversial. It is a response to church politics in an ancient Greek city, with authoritarian posturing in a male-supremacist, slaveholding culture. Paul and the Corinthians took for granted values most Americans reject, social structures resembling today's conservative Islam.  For long stretches, the epistle bogs down in its historical limitations. In a passages loved by antebellum planters, Paul tells slaves to accept "the life that the Lord has assigned" (7:17), to remain chattel and make the best of it (7:21).  Chapter 11 obsesses over men's and women's haircuts and headgear, as if the scarfs and coiffures of 1st-century Greece were sacramental. Even the angels are fashionistas (11:10). Paul explicitly assumes, like Greek philosophers such as Plato, that women are misshapen men, inferior copies of men just as men are of God (11:11). Lacking p...

Ordinarily I travel by rail and have no need of those hospitable families that take in travelers on country roads. In the summer of 1890, however, my appointment as a census agent took me "dead in the country," as the saying goes, where the setting sun caught me miles from the nearest hotel. On one occasion, with an overcast sky and rumbling on the horizon, I came upon an impoverished settlement on a hillside by the road. Six or seven cabins--some of them built, I would guess, before the Indian Removal--overlooked a roadside field of weeds. In the semicircle of ruts that was the village's street, I met barking dogs and ragged children. A bearded man stood in the door of one cabin, his thumbs hooked in his belt, his capacious belly overhanging it with the grace of one who knew his place to be large enough to accommodate his girth. He regarded me in the gray light and extended his arms. "Sir," he called out, "would you be needing lodging for the night?...

Conservatives resist change. Progressives embrace it. This isn't just politics, I think, but character. These are opposite approaches to life. The difference seems to depend on tolerance for uncertainty. Conservatives and liberals are often contrasted, but that's misleading. Because of the conservative two-step , most American conservatives today are old-fashioned liberals.  Conservatives tend to accept contemporary injustices and oppose, on principle, reforms to correct them. Novel reforms, they fear, will only make matters worse. Extreme conservatives oppose all untried reforms and dream of returning to the culture of their childhood, if not of earlier. Pure progressives believe that progress is inevitable, that history is a benign steamroller. My own progressivism is more pessimistic. I simply acknowledge that changes happen. If we don't at least try to promote good changes, bad ones are likely to accumulate. Continual reforms are needed. A conservative friend of m...