19AR24-07
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AR 24:7 - "Political cults" supplanting Christianity?
In this issue:
CHRISTIANITY, ITS INFLUENCE - has it become "a political and social identity, not a lived faith"?
ISLAM - mapping sectarianism's "vague boundaries in Arab political life"
YOGA - its practice in schools is "all but unheard of ... in America's heartland"
Apologia Report 24:7 (1,415)
February 14, 2019
CHRISTIANITY, ITS INFLUENCE ON AMERICA
"America's New Religions" by Andrew Sullivan -- when grains of truth include painful truths. This item from New York Magazine (Dec 7 '18) begins: "Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. ...
"By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying 'Truth' or God (or gods)."
In reference to the "crisis" John Stuart Mill had when he "grappled with [the] deep problem" of realizing that "none of [our] material progress beckons humans to a way of life beyond mere satisfaction of our wants and needs," Sullivan notes: "[T]his architect of our liberal order, this most penetrating of minds, came to the conclusion: 'I seemed to have nothing left to live for.' It took a while for him to recover. ...
"Our modern world tries extremely hard to protect us from the sort of existential moments experienced by Mill.... [The frenetic pace of life seems] all designed to create a world in which we rarely get a second to confront ultimate meaning - until a tragedy occurs, a death happens, or a diagnosis strikes. ... And if you pressed, say, the liberal elites to explain what they really believe in - and you have to look at what they do most fervently - you discover, in [British philosopher] John Gray's mordant view of Mill, that they do, in fact, have 'an orthodoxy - the belief in improvement that is the unthinking faith of people who think they have no religion.' ...
"Liberalism is a set of procedures, with an empty center, not a manifestation of truth, let alone a reconciliation to mortality. But, critically, it has long been complemented and supported in America by a religion distinctly separate from politics, a tamed Christianity that rests, in Jesus' formulation, on a distinction between God and Caesar. And this separation is vital for liberalism, because if your ultimate meaning is derived from religion, you have less need of deriving it from politics or ideology or trusting entirely in a single, secular leader. It's only when your meaning has been secured that you can allow politics to be merely procedural.
"So what happens when this religious rampart of the entire system is removed? I think what happens is illiberal politics. The need for meaning hasn't gone away, but without Christianity, this yearning looks to politics for satisfaction. ...
"Now look at our politics. We have the cult of Trump on the right, a demigod who, among his worshippers, can do no wrong. And we have the cult of social justice on the left, a religion whose followers show the same zeal as any born-again Evangelical. They are filling the void that Christianity once owned, without any of the wisdom and culture and restraint that Christianity once provided.
"For many, especially the young, discovering a new meaning in the midst of the fallen world is thrilling. And social-justice ideology does everything a religion should. It offers an account of the whole: that human life and society and any kind of truth must be seen entirely as a function of social power structures, in which various groups have spent all of human existence oppressing other groups. And it provides a set of practices to resist and reverse this interlocking web of oppression - from regulating the workplace and policing the classroom to checking your own sin and even seeking to control language itself. ...
"The same cultish dynamic can be seen on the right. There, many profess nominal Christianity and yet demonstrate every day that they have left it far behind. Some exist in a world without meaning altogether, and that fate is never pretty. I saw this most vividly when examining the opioid epidemic. ...
"Yes, many Evangelicals are among the holiest and most quietly devoted people out there. Some have bravely resisted the cult. But their leaders have turned Christianity into a political and social identity, not a lived faith, and much of their flock - a staggering 81 percent voted for Trump - has signed on. They have tribalized a religion explicitly built by Jesus as anti-tribal. They have turned to idols....
"And so we're mistaken if we believe that the collapse of Christianity in America has led to a decline in religion. It has merely led to religious impulses being expressed by political cults. ...
"And this is how they threaten liberal democracy. They do not believe in the primacy of the individual, they believe the ends justify the means, they do not allow for doubt or reason, and their religious politics can brook no compromise. They demonstrate, to my mind, how profoundly liberal democracy has actually depended on the complement of a tolerant Christianity to sustain itself - as many earlier liberals (Tocqueville, for example) understood." <www.nym.ag/2WSqoyA>
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ISLAM
"Putting Islam Out of Use" by Ahmed Dailami, a historian and writer based in London (LA Review of Books, Aug 28 '18) -- opens with an example of "the peddling of religious piety in the Arab world [which] is linked to a much broader decline in both mainstream and radical currents of political Islamism. ... While the traditional critique of religious political parties has come from the left, the attack on Islamism now largely proceeds from the right. ...
"Anti-religious political argument still needs bullet-proof pretexts to be expressed confidently, and the most consistent of these pretexts is the accusation of having exploited religion to profane ends such as profit."
Dailami describes how Islam's vague "boundaries in Arab political life are contracting." This is followed by a current historical review from the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 to 2016.
Dailami concludes that "sectarianism can be seen not as a Muslim problem, but as a historical and logical one, a phenomenon that may make Islam in politics far less exploitable than it has been in the past. Denied an alliance with divinity, conservatives may soon face their progressive adversaries on more equal conceptual grounds, newly leveled by sectarianism. And so, even if the conceptual content of secular conservatism isn't momentous, its historical advent - or return, depending on how one sees such a force in Arab history - could be." <www.bit.ly/2I3Gd24>
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YOGA
"Why Schools Are Banning Yoga" by Alia Wong (The Atlantic, Sep 20 '18) -- "In 2016, an elementary school in Cobb County, Georgia, became the subject of heated controversy after introducing a yoga program. Parents' objections to the yoga classes - on the grounds that they promoted a non-Christian belief system - were vociferous enough to compel the district to significantly curtail the program, removing the 'namaste' greeting and the coloring-book exercises involving mandalas. A few years before that, a group of parents sued a San Diego County school district on the grounds that its yoga program promoted Eastern religions and disadvantaged children who opted out. While a judge ruled in favor of the district, the controversy resurfaced two years ago amid concerns that the program was a poor use of public funds in already strapped schools. Meanwhile, just last month the Alabama Board of Education's long-standing ban on yoga caused some ballyhoo after a document listing it as one of the activities prohibited in 'gym class' was recirculated, grabbing the attention of a Hindu activist. ...
"Amy Wax, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who specializes in social-welfare policy, in a 2016 Atlantic story criticized some existing studies on yoga and mindfulness as being of 'low quality and dubious rigor.' Julia Belluz, a senior health correspondent for Vox, has noted that despite a drastic increase in recent decades in the number of studies on yoga, the research tends to rely on small numbers of participants and imperfect comparisons, among other limitations. ...
"The most vocal opponents tend to cite yoga's Hindu and Buddhist roots, arguing that the line between those origins and secular practices is often blurry. Yoga encompasses all kinds of approaches and techniques, some more spiritual than others, but those roots often filter into even the most innocuous of mindful-movement routines. Religious influences are, arguably, even baked into elements as simple as 'om' chants, poses with Sanskrit names, and, as the controversy in Georgia attests, collective 'namaste' greetings. ...
"'Many original forms of yoga are practiced in a religious or spiritual manner,' acknowledges Marlynn Wei, a psychiatrist, therapist, and certified yoga teacher who's written about yoga's educational uses. Still, religion-infused yoga often pursues the same ends as its secular counterpart....
"Adoption of these programs has been uneven across the United States - yoga in schools is far more common in some regions than in others. Programs are, according to <www.bit.ly/2RYQ6xJ> [New York University psychologist Bethany] Butzer's 2015 survey, based primarily in big cities on the coasts, such as Los Angeles and New York City. Areas known for their New Age–y enclaves - such as Colorado and the Northwest U.S. - account for many of the programs, too. Where they're all but unheard of, Butzer's data suggests, is in America's heartland." <www.bit.ly/2URX6xZ>
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