February 3, 2005
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WEEK IN REVIEW DESK
Ideas & Trends: True Believers; More Religion, but Not the Old-Time Kind
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN Published: January 9, 2005
ALMOST anywhere you look around the world, with the glaring exception of Western Europe, religion is now a rising force. Former Communist countries are humming with mosque builders, Christian missionaries and freelance spiritual entrepreneurs of every possible persuasion. In China, underground ”house churches” are proliferating so quickly that neither the authorities nor Christian leaders can keep reliable count. In much of South and Central America, exuberant Pentecostal churches, where worshipers catch the Holy Spirit and speak in tongues, continue to spread, challenging the Roman Catholic tradition. And in the United States, religious conservatives, triumphant over their role in the re-election of President Bush, are increasingly asserting their power in politics, the media and culture.
The tsunami in Asia could spur religious revival as well, as victims and onlookers turn to mosques, temples and churches both to help them fathom the catastrophe and to provide humanitarian assistance.
What does all this rising religiosity add up to? It is easy to assume that a more religious world means a more fractious world, where violent conflict is fueled by violent fundamentalist movements.
But some religion experts say that while it is clear that religiosity is on the rise, it is not at all clear that fundamentalism is. Indeed, there may be a rising backlash against violent fundamentalism of any faith.
The world’s fastest growing religion is not any type of fundamentalism, but the Pentecostal wing of Christianity. While Christian fundamentalists are focused on doctrine and the inerrancy of Scripture, , what is most important for Pentecostals is what they call ”spirit-filled” worship, including speaking in tongues and miracle healing. Brazil, where American missionaries planted Pentecostalism in the early 20th century, now has a congregation with its owns TV station, soccer team and political party.
Most scholars of Christianity believe that the world’s largest church is a Pentecostal one — the Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, South Korea, which was founded in 1958 by a converted Buddhist who held a prayer meeting in a tent he set up in a slum. More than 250,000 people show up for worship on a typical Sunday.
”If I were to buy stock in global Christianity, I would buy it in Pentecostalism,” said Martin E. Marty, professor emeritus of the history of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School and a coauthor of a study of fundamentalist movements. ”I would not buy it in fundamentalism.”
After the American presidential election in November, some liberal commentators warned that the nation was on the verge of a takeover by Christian ”fundamentalists.”
But in the United States today, most of the Protestants who make up what some call the Christian right are not fundamentalists, who are more prone to create separatist enclaves, but evangelicals, who engage the culture and share their faith. Professor Marty defines fundamentalism as essentially a backlash against secularism and modernity.
For example, at the fundamentalist Bob Jones University, in Greenville, S.C., students are not allowed to listen to contemporary music of any kind, even Christian rock or rap. But at Wheaton College in Illinois, a leading evangelical school, contemporary Christian music is regular fare for many students.
Christian fundamentalism emerged in the United States in the 1920′s, but was already in decline by the 1960′s. By then, it had been superceded by evangelicalism, with its Billy Graham-style revival meetings, radio stations and seminaries.
The word ”fundamentalist” itself has fallen out of favor among conservative Christians in the United States, not least because it has come to be associated with extremism and violence overseas.
Fundamentalism in non-Christian faiths became a phenomenon in the rest of the world in the 1970′s with ”the failure and the bankruptcy of secular, nationalistic liberal creeds around the world,” said Philip Jenkins, a professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University. Among the ”creeds cracking up” were nationalism, Marxism, socialism, pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism.
”From the 1970′s on, you get the growth of not just more conservative religion, but religion with a political bent,” said Professor Jenkins, the author of ”The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity.”
Now, the future of fundamentalism is murky, with several contradictory trends at work simultaneously.
There is little doubt that one fundamentalism can feed another, spurring recruitment and escalating into a sort of religious arms race. In Nigeria’s central Plateau State, Muslim and Christian gangs have razed one another’s villages in the last few years, leaving tens of thousands of dead and displaced. In rioting in India in 2002, more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, were killed by Hindus in Gujarat state — retaliation for a Muslim attack a day earlier on a train full of Hindus, which killed 59.
Husain Haqqani, a Pakistani political commentator and visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said that insurgents in Falluja, Iraq, recruited fighters with the false rumor that Christian crusaders with the Rev. Franklin Graham’s aid organization, Samaritan’s Purse, were on the way over to convert Muslims. (Mr. Graham is known throughout the Muslim world for his statement that Islam is a ”very evil and wicked religion.”) Fundamentalism does not necessarily lead to intolerance, said Professor Jenkins of Pennsylvania State. ”People with very convinced, traditional views can get along together for a very long time,” he said. ”But sometimes we get into cycles where they can’t, and we seem to be in one of those cycles right now.”
Analysts are also seeing signs of a backlash as religious believers grow disenchanted with movements that have produced little but bloodshed, economic stagnation and social repression.
In last year’s elections in India, voters repudiated the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, a Hindu nationalist group whose cadres had helped stir up violence in some Indian states against Muslims and others.
And in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, mainstream Islamic groups in September helped elect as president a secular general who had been relatively outspoken about the threat posed by the radical group Jemaah Islamiyah, which is responsible for several acts of terrorism, including the bombing in Bali in 2002.
Fundamentalist movements also stumble because they plan for the overthrow, but not for the governing. Half the Muslim world is illiterate, Mr. Haqqani said, but the Taliban didn’t make a dent in improving literacy when it ruled in Afghanistan. If Iran had a free and fair plebiscite today, Professor Marty said, ”the ayatollahs would be dumped.”
For reasons like this, said R. Scott Appleby, a history professor at the University of Notre Dame and director of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, ”it would be misleading to say fundamentalism is on the rise now.” He added: ”I would say we’re just more aware of it because these people are better organized, more mobile and more vocal than ever before.”
In 2003, Professor Appleby and two other scholars, Gabriel A. Almond and Emmanuel Sivan, published ”Strong Religion,” a book based on research done with Professor Marty for the Fundamentalism Project. The book’s subtitle was the ”The Rise of Fundamentalisms Around the World.”
NOW, Mr. Appleby said, ”There is some evidence, some literature that says fundamentalism is on the decline, that it has peaked or is peaking precisely because it has a tendency toward violence and intolerance, and those ultimately don’t work. They lead to bloodshed, loss of life, and no recognizable economic upturn, and there is an exhaustion with it.”
That is not to say that he does not foresee more bitter, sometimes violent religious clashes. By their very nature, fundamentalists endure because they are motivated by transcendant ideas like salvation or, in some places, martyrdom. Mr. Appleby said he did not expect to see growth, but a persistence of ”deadly pockets of would-be revolutionaries who are empowered to a greater degree than ever by a little technological savvy and organizational ability.”
The American government is poorly prepared to make the necessary distinctions between what is merely religious fervor and what is potentially dangerous fundamentalism, said Thomas F. Farr, who left his post as director of the office of international religious freedom in the State Department about a year ago.
”Most of my foreign service friends would rather have root canal than talk to a Muslim imam about religion,” said Mr. Farr, who now works with the Institute for Global Engagement, a Washington-based group working on international religious freedom.
What they need to ask, he said, is: ”Do these religions have within them exclusivist tendencies in an absolutist sense, or can they be open to other human beings outside their circle? These are inevitably theological questions.”
Photos (Collage by Kandy Littrell; photographs from Associated Press, Getty Images, Reuters, Paulo Fridman/Getty Images for The New York Times, Nikolai Khalip for The New York Times, Rina Castelnuovo, and the Collection of Francesco Bigazzi. (pg. 1); (Photo by Jacob Silberberg/Getty Images); (Photo by Punit Paranjpe/Reuters); (Photo by Dita Alangkara/Associated Press); (Photo by Paulo Fridman/Getty Images for The New York Times)(pg. 4)
Charts
NIGERIA — Christians, left, pray together at the City of David Church in the affluent Victoria Island section of Lagos.
Followers of largest religions, 2005
(Pentecostals are found in most Christian traditions)
Avg. yearly growth of selected faiths, 1990-2000
CHRISTIAN: 61.4 million total
All Nigerian Christians: 3% growth
Protestant (33.4% of Nigerian Christians*): 4.7
Roman Catholic (30.5): 4.3
Anglican (31.8): 3.5
Independent (43.2): 2.3
MUSLIM — 54.7 million: 2.7
ANIMIST — 13.6 million: 2.9
*Percentages add up to more than 100 because many people affiliate with more than one religion.
INDIA — Indian Hindus perform an immersion ritual with a statue of Ganesh, one of their most revered deities.
HINDU — 810.4 million: 1.7% growth
MUSLIM — 134.1 million: 2.0
CHRISTIAN — 68.2 million
All Indian Christians: 2.4
Independent (53.8% of Indian Christians): 3.1
Protestant (28.6): 2.6
Roman Catholic (26.7): 2.5
ANIMIST — 41.9 million: 2.4
INDONESIA — In Jakarta, a celebration of Id al-Fitr marks the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
MUSLIM — 121.6 million: 1.4% growth
NEW RELIGION — 50.0 million: 1.5
Hindu or Buddhist offshoots or combinations of Christianity with Eastern religions.
CHRISTIAN — 30.5 million
All Indonesian Christians: 1.8
Roman Catholic (23.0% of Indonesian Christians): 2.5
Protestant (46.6): 2.3
BRAZIL — Mass celebration at Igreja Brasil para Cristo, a Pentecostal church in So Paulo.
CHRISTIAN — 166.8 million
All Brazillian Christians: 1.3% growth
Protestant (18.2% of Brazillian Christians): 2.0
Roman Catholic (93.5): 1.3
SPIRITIST — 8.9 million: 2.4
Sects combining African, Amerindian and animistic traditions with Catholicism
(Source by Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary)(pg. 4)
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NATIONAL DESK
THE INAUGURATION — THE CEREMONY: RELIGION; References to Pluralism Try to Establish an Umbrella for a Spectrum of Faiths
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN Published: January 21, 2005
The president who swept to victory by mobilizing his conservative Christian base used his inauguration yesterday to signal that his administration was well aware that when it came to religion, the United States was diverse and divided.
The tone was set in the opening invocation by the Rev. Luis Leon, an Episcopalian whose church, the landmark St. John’s Episcopal Church on Lafayette Square, across the avenue from the White House, favors blessing same-sex unions. Father Leon, a Cuban-American, thanked God for fashioning one nation out of ”a multitude of peoples of many ethnic, religious and language backgrounds.”
In his speech, President Bush, a Methodist, made a reference to religious pluralism when he said the nation was sustained ”by the truths of Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, the words of the Koran and the varied faiths of our people.” The phrase encompasses Jews, Christians and Muslims by alluding to the Ten Commandments, the preaching of Jesus and Islamic scripture.
The Rev. Max L. Stackhouse, professor of theology and public life at Princeton Theological Seminary, said of Mr. Bush’s speech, ”It’s a little echo of the remark by President Eisenhower when he said, ‘Our nation is founded on faith, and I don’t care which faith it is.”’
Mr. Bush’s first inauguration in 2001 sparked accusations of religious sectarianism when the two clergymen who blessed the event prayed in the name of Jesus. This time, the president chose Father Leon to replace one of those clergymen, the Rev. Franklin Graham, who was filling in for his father, the Rev. Billy Graham, who was ill in 2001.
The other clergyman from the first inaugural appeared once more, the Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, an African-American pastor in Houston and pastor of what is said to be the nation’s largest United Methodist church, Windsor Village. He is a friend and spiritual adviser to the president from his days as governor of Texas and an early supporter of his initiative to give religious groups more of a role in the delivery of social services.
Mr. Caldwell closed his benediction yesterday by saying, ”Respecting persons of all faiths, I humbly submit this prayer in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.”
Edith L. Blumhofer, a professor of history and the director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill., an evangelical institution, said it was the second time she had heard Mr. Caldwell precede a prayer with a reference to his respect for people of all faiths, and added, ”I think that’s probably an attempt to address the objections.”
In his choice of pastors, Mr. Bush chose an African-American and a Latino, constituencies that the Republican Party is courting. Father Leon arrived in Miami in 1961 at age 11 in a ”Peter Pan flight” that brought Cuban children to the United States and left their parents behind. Mr. Bush attends services at his church.
Father Leon said in an interview this week that he wanted to ”offer a broad prayer as inclusive as I can make it.” He called the inauguration a celebration of the American character, adding that part of that American character is the breadth of ”our understanding of religious freedom, so it’s probably a good time to honor that.”
The choice of clergy members in Mr. Bush’s inaugurations has been less inclusive than even in inaugurations more than 40 years ago, Professor Blumhofer said. The Nixon and Eisenhower inaugurations featured a ”parade of faiths,” she said, with prayers from Protestant, Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Jewish clergy members and a performance by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
Mr. Bush’s innovation has been including Islam, Professor Blumhofer said. Even in his first inaugural speech, he included mosques in a list of religious organizations that serve the poor.
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