24AR29-17

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AR 29:17 - "What American Religion Looks Like" 25 years from now

In this issue:

AMERICAN RELIGION - will "the coming generation of 'mere Christians' favor institutions that are "not doctrinally intense, and not liturgical at all?"

ISLAM - "warnings of a dangerous idea that can contaminate any religion"

Apologia Report 29:17 (1,658)
April 24, 2024

AMERICAN RELIGION

Competing with Pew Research Center, the Gallup polling organization has its own brief take on religion in America. In "Church Attendance Has Declined in Most U.S. Religious Groups" (Mar 25 '24) here's their perspective: "Forty-five percent of Americans say religion is 'very important' in their life, with another 26% saying it is 'fairly important' and 28% saying it's 'not very important.'

   "When Gallup first asked this question in 1965, 70% said religion was very important. That fell to 52% in a 1978 survey, but the percentage ticked up to nearly 60% between 1990 and 2005. Over the past 20 years, a declining share of Americans have said religion is important, dropping below 50% for the first time in 2019. ...

   "Additionally, [fewer] than half of Americans, 45%, belong to a formal house of worship. Church membership has been below the majority level each of the past four years. When Gallup first asked the question in 1937, 73% were members of a church, and as recently as 1999, 70% were.

   "The decline in formal church membership has largely been driven by younger generations of Americans. Slightly more than one-third of U.S. young adults have no religious affiliation. Further, many young adults who do identify with a religion do not belong to a church. But even older adults who have a religious preference are less likely to belong to a church today than in the past."

   And a (small) surprise: "Among major U.S. religious groups, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints … are the most observant, with two-thirds attending church weekly or nearly weekly." <www.tinyurl.com/nazwvfxk>

   Now, imagine life 25 years hence: "It's Easter ... 2050: Here's What American Religion Looks Like [26 years from now]" by Ross Douthat (New York Times, Mar 30 '24) -- That's right. Douthat took the Gallup data noted above and proposed that we "imagine how these trends might shape American religion a generation hence. ...

   "Start with a group we'll call the neotraditionalists. These are liturgical and doctrinally conservative Christians, with a Roman Catholic core orbited by some Reformation factions, Calvinists especially, as well as some Eastern Orthodox churches, small but flush with converts.

   "The 'neo' as well as the 'traditionalist' matters. These believers have created, rather than inherited, their conservative culture. Generally they are highly educated and upwardly mobile, though their tendency to have large families limits that mobility. The stereotypical neo-trad lives around a city or college town in a conservative state and sends her kids to one of the ever-expanding network of classical high schools. But there are important neo-trad subcultures in big liberal cities, supplying the behind-the-scenes leadership - judges, administrators, wonks - for whatever kind of political conservatism exists in 2050.

   "Next, we have a larger group, the mere Christians. These are Americans we would call ex-evangelical or nondenominational Protestant today, but terms like 'denomination' and 'Protestant' seem quaint in our imagined 2050 and even 'evangelical' is falling into abeyance. Instead most people in this category just identify as Christians, while attending churches with names like Elevate and Rise and Resurrection - institutions that are theologically conservative, but not doctrinally intense and not liturgical at all." 

      Other subgroups considered include the "all-American pagans," the "fast-growing outsiders," and "the intelligentsia." Looking ahead, Douthat asks: "Do progressive-minded intellectuals throw themselves into some mixture of paganism and transhumanism? Do humanists make common cause with liberal Christians or even neo-traditionalists against some threatening techno-future? Can an arid and implausible atheism really endure in a much weirder American future?" Stay tuned. <www.tinyurl.com/2ftj3uuu> (paywalled)

 ---

ISLAM

In "The Rebirth of a Heretical Islam" (Religion & Liberty, Feb 12 '24), Mustafa Akyol explains: "The history of Islam is a complex one and includes a variety of schools and reform movements, a small number of which advocated hatred for and violence against 'infidels' and 'polytheists.' Understanding the roots of these sects is especially helpful today." 

   Thus does Akyol, a senior fellow at Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity <www.tinyurl.com/34jej47r> set the tone for this review of Wahhābism: The History of a Militant Islamic Movement, by Cole M. Bunzel <www.tinyurl.com/yrv2uw9j> (Dr. Bunzel is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University; nonresident fellow at the George Washington University Program on Extremism <extremism.gwu.edu>; and editor of the blog Jihadica <www.jihadica.com>.)

   He continues: "When the terrorist army that calls itself 'the Islamic state,' or ISIS, captured large parts of Iraq and Syria in the mid-2010s, the world was shocked. ... Many [Muslims], simply declared that ISIS had nothing to do with Islam. ...

   "Meanwhile, some Islamic scholars offered a more nuanced explanation: ISIS had something to do with Islam, but only as the rebirth of a much-loathed ancient heresy: the Khawarij, or 'the Dissenters.' This was an extremely fanatical and violent sect that emerged in the middle of Islam's first civil war, in the mid-seventh century. Its members condemned all other Muslims as 'infidels' and set upon killing them. No wonder these ancient Dissenters have been abhorred by both Sunni and Shiite Muslims alike, going down in history as an extremely militant offshoot of a great religion. ...

   "ISIS, however, as evident from all its declarations and publications, did not see itself outside Sunni Islam. Quite the contrary: it perceived itself as the standard bearer of true Sunnism while condemning most other Sunnis, and certainly all Shiites, as 'apostates' that deserve to be punished. ...

   "This was the 'blessed Najdi mission,' or Wahhabism as it's widely known....

   "As Bunzel narrates it, the story began in the 1740s in Najd, the geographic center of the Arabian peninsula - hence the term 'Najdi mission - which used to be a landlocked backwater until the discovery of oil in the 20th century. Here, a passionate preacher named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1792) began to spread a new religious awakening: he called all Muslims to strictly abstain from shirk, or 'polytheism,' and affirm tawhid, or 'monotheism.' ...

   "Islam itself was born more than a millennium before as a campaign against shirk - literally 'associating partners' with God - which is the Qur'anic term for the idolatrous religion of pre-Islamic Arabs. This battle was won quickly, during the very life of the Prophet Muhammad (AD c. 570–632), when idolatry was wiped from all Arabia - partly through preaching, partly through conquest. Since then, all Muslims have affirmed the Islamic motto of monotheism, 'There is no god but God,' and they certainly have abhorred any manifestation of polytheism.

   "But for Ibn Wahhab, this historic victory was just an illusion, because most of the Muslims of his time had fallen back into a new kind of shirk. What he meant primarily was the popular 'cult of saints': Muslims would visit the graves of saints and prophets and pray there to God, hoping for tawassul, or 'intercession,' from these great dead men. ... So these visitors of graves were no longer Muslims but 'grave worshippers.'

   "That condemnation was just the beginning of Ibn Wahhab's campaign. Condemning a theological error, let alone merely criticizing it, was not enough. It was also necessary to 'show hatred and enmity' to it. Those who failed to demonstrate this zeal failed to be good Muslims....

   "[A]s Bunzel defines it aptly, the teachings of Ibn Wahhab would create a movement of 'theological exclusivism combined with militant activism.'

   "A key step in this direction was the historical alliance that Ibn Wahhab created, around the year 1744, with the local ruler of Diriyah, a small town on the outskirts of today's Riyadh. That ruler was Muhammad bin Su'ud, who embraced all of Ibn Wahhab's ideas and committed to championing them, leaving behind a long-lasting alliance between his own family, Al Su'ud, and Ibn Wahhab's family, Al al-Shaykh.

   "From this alliance emerged what historians call the First Saudi State (1727–1818), which Bunzel examines in a chapter titled, 'The Warpath of Early Wahhabism.' ... Among their targets were al-turk al-kuffar, or 'the infidel Turks,' meaning the Ottoman Empire, which was the Islamic superpower of the time that controlled the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, both which would be captured for several years by Wahhabi forces. Their greatest atrocity was the 1802 attack on the Shiite holy city of Karbala, where 'they killed most of its people in the markets and homes,' murdering 2,000 innocents at least, or even as many as 4,500 according to another account.

   "In 1818, this First Saudi State was crushed by Ottoman-allied Egyptian forces. ... [T]he initial ferocity of the Wahhabi movement finally calm down, largely due to the political pragmatism of the new ruler, Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Su'ud, who in 1932 became the first king of modern-day Saudi Arabia. ... [T]his pragmatic moderation did not come with much soul-searching about Wahhabism's initial militancy, which only remained dormant. ...

   "Wahhabism, born in the 18th century, was in fact an offshoot of Hanbalism, which itself was born in the ninth century. But there was a notable stop along the way.... It is [a] latter part of [the Ibn] Taymiyyan background that the Wahhabis inherited, Bunzel argues, taking them to a much more extreme level.

   "Another theme in the book is the rebirth of 'militant Wahhabism' in the second part of the 20th century. ... In the 1960s, however, a new energy poured in from Egypt with the writings of Sayyid Qutb, who spearheaded a militant offshoot of Egypt's main Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood. ... By accepting a life under secular laws and rulers, Qutb believed, most Muslims had begun worshipping 'idols' that had 'usurped God's divine prerogatives regarding legislation.' This concept of 'legal-political shirk,' as Bunzel calls it, would become the battle cry of a new trend called 'Salafi Jihadism,' whose cascade of militancy would ultimately produce al-Qaeda and ISIS. ...

   "As a Muslim, I drew two opposite lessons from it. On the one hand, those who use terrorist groups like ISIS to depict a dark picture about all Islam are dead wrong. Terrorists represent only the most extreme version of the most rigid interpretation of Islam.

   "On the other hand, ISIS and its ilk, as well as their forerunners in the First Saudi State, serve as warnings of a dangerous idea that can contaminate any religion...." <www.tinyurl.com/7rcu6vnb> 

   Related and recommended: Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror, by Mary Habeck <www.tinyurl.com/yc75c6u4>

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