essay on the religion of the future

The Religion of the Future

Roberto Mangabeira Unger

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ISBN 9780674729070

Publication date: 04/08/2014

How can we live in such a way that we die only once? How can we organize a society that gives us a better chance to be fully alive? How can we reinvent religion so that it liberates us instead of consoling us?

These questions stand at the center of Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s The Religion of the Future . Both a book about religion and a religious work in its own right, it proposes the content of a religion that can survive faith in a transcendent God and in life after death. According to this religion—the religion of the future—human beings can be more human by becoming more godlike, not just later, in another life or another time, but right now, on Earth and in their own lives.

Unger begins by facing the irreparable flaws in the human condition: our mortality, groundlessness, and insatiability. He goes on to discuss the conflicting approaches to existence that have dominated the last 2,500 years of the history of religion. Turning next to the religious revolution that we now require, he explores the political ideal of this revolution, an idea of deep freedom. And he develops its moral vision, focused on a refusal to squander life.

The Religion of the Future advances Unger’s philosophical program: a philosophy for which history is open, the new can happen, and belittlement need not be our fate.

• Roberto Mangabeira Unger is the Roscoe Pound Professor of Law at Harvard University.

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Future of Religion

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• First Online: 29 September 2023

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• Tamás Landesz 4 , 5 , 6  

Part of the book series: Future of Business and Finance ((FBF))

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The belief in God and religion is no longer considered essential for societal functioning in many parts of the world. The future of religion is the topic of many debates, and while some believe religion will die out, others believe that it will evolve to accommodate social changes. People are increasingly turning to spirituality, and there is a growing trend toward the “spiritual but not religious” label. The rise of secularism and multiculturalism and increasing understanding and shaping of the world through science has led some to believe that the future of religion may be that it has no future. Others argue that religion still has a role in society, and a universal religion based on morals will prevail. The current trend shows that some countries with a high proportion of atheists also exhibit a well-balanced society, raising the question of whether a robust economy, the rule of law, and quality education can replace the need for a religious foundation. The Internet could be a potential source for gathering followers, and virtual movements are gaining popularity at rates never seen before. As artificial intelligence (AI) blurs the boundaries between humans and machines, it is argued that the concept of “singularity” has become mainstream, leading some to believe that a superhuman AI will be created that could conceive of ideas and invent technological tools more advanced than anything we have today.

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Transfigurism: A Future of Religion as Exemplified by Religious Transhumanists

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Science, Religion, and Naturalism: Metaphysical and Methodological Incompatibilities

• Religious institutions
• Belief in god
• Fundamentalism
• Artificial awakening
• Spirituality

Yalda Aoukar

Özlem denizmen, olivier oullier, siri trang khalsa, lisa witter, patrick youssef.

The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. –Nobel Prize winning physicist and inventor of the holograph. Dennis Gabor, 1963

Looking at human history, people’s faith and their relationship to religious institutions have been transforming continuously.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury’s BBC Future essay, “Tomorrow’s Gods: The Future of Religions,” ( 2019 ) argues that religions are born, grow, and eventually die. The belief in God was once necessary for society to function, as it ensured people followed rules, but today, people obey laws made and enforced by governments not by God. With secularism, multiculturalism, and the increasing understanding and shaping of the world through science, there seems to be a new consensus emerging that the future of religion may be that it has no future.

The reason behind the existence of religion has been a topic of discussion for centuries. Voltaire ( 1768 ), an eighteenth-century French polymath, suggested that if God did not exist, people would have to invent him because belief in God is essential for societal functioning. He believed that religion helps in building social cohesion by bringing communities together.

According to Olivier Oullier (2021), French professor of behavioral and brain science, people are back to the “believe thing”; it is growing and going against the fact that there is more technology and science: “People need to hang on to something.”

But if Gods and shared faiths are fundamental to ensure social cohesion, what happens if we take them out of the equation?

1 “Spiritual But Not Religious”

When asked about religious labels, people often opt for the dating-website cliché “spiritual, but not religious.”

Lisa Witter (2021), cofounder of Apolitical Foundation, poses the question, what does dopamine mean for our lives? Beyond religion, how we meditate and go much deeper, finding presence: “Elites around the world are meditating. The same should be thought to our military and children, the notion of social and emotional learning.”

Özlem Denizmen (2021), social investor and influencer, thinks that in the future no religion will be relevant, but religion of universal morals will prevail, based on actions people do: “We will see very empowered individuals through biology, technology and all that, like a united religion of the world… with police giving fines when you break a rule.”

According to National Geographic, “Americans may be getting less religious, but feelings of spirituality are on the rise. There are more atheists around today than ever before. Even without organised religion, people believe that some greater being or life force is there somewhere. They still cling to superstitious tendencies.”

2 Markets Over Religion

The current trend shows that some countries with a high proportion of atheists also exhibit a well-balanced society. This raises the question of whether a robust economy, the rule of law, and quality education can replace the need for a religious foundation. It is uncertain whether these countries achieved social stability due to secularism or if it was the other way around.

According to Connor Wood ( 2015 ) of the Center for Mind and Culture in Boston, some argue that secular institutions have roots in religion, whereas others equate religion with superstition and believe societies could progress more freely without it. Wood suggests that while capitalism cannot be called a religion, many of its institutions have religious elements, and the stock exchange and similar trading spaces have become like temples to Mammon. He argues that people need authority to guide their behavior, and this can lead to alliances between political strongmen and religious fundamentalists, which poses a challenge for secularists.

3 Bridge the Gap

A major religion could change and adapt to win back nonbelievers, as seen in the eighteenth century with the Great Awakenings in the United States. However, some social scientists argue that religions must accommodate social change and acknowledge their flaws to make up for lost ground. The lack of political support in the secular West makes it unlikely for new religions to emerge, but the Internet could be a potential source for gathering followers. Virtual movements are gaining popularity at rates never seen before.

4 Artificial Awakening

In 2015, members of the online “Rationalist” community LessWrong created a thought experiment called “Roko’s Basilisk,” which posits that those who don’t help to bring a benevolent superintelligence into existence will be perpetually and retroactively tortured. This idea is similar to a short story called “Answer” by Fredric Brown ( 1954 ) in which a supercomputer is asked if there is a God, and it replies “Now there is.” Anthony Levandowski, an artificial intelligence (AI) entrepreneur, founded a church called “Way of the Future” to support the peaceful transition to a world primarily governed by superintelligent machines, but the church’s creed also included keeping track of those who help or hinder their cause. Levandowski shut down the church in 2020.

Culkin ( 1967 ) argued that as we develop AI, we are creating new mysteries and myths, and the next generation will depend on machine learning algorithms for answers. McLuhan also famously said, “We shape our tools, and thereafter, our tools shape us.”

According to futurist Roy Tzezana ( 2016 ), AI is blurring the boundaries between humans and machines, and the concept of “singularity” has become mainstream thanks to two futurists, Vernor Vinge ( 1993 ) and Ray Kurzweil ( 2005 ). Both Vinge and Kurzweil believe that a superhuman AI will be created that could conceive of ideas and invent technological tools more advanced than anything we have today. While some scientists like Steven Hawking and Elon Musk have expressed concern that superintelligent AI could become uncontrollable and pose a threat to humanity, others see the great opportunities such a singularity holds. They believe that if kept under control, a superintelligent AI could solve many of the world's problems.

5 Reality Bites

In his best-selling book, Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari ( 2016 ) argues that “the foundations of modern civilisation are eroding in the face of an emergent religion he calls ‘dataism,’ which holds that by giving ourselves over to information flows, we can transcend our earthly concerns and ties. Other fledgling transhumanist religious movements focus on immortality—a new spin on the promise of eternal life. Still others ally themselves with older faiths, notably Mormonism.”

Paul-Choudhury ( 2019 ) notes that in the 2001 UK census, Jediism was the fourth largest religion, with nearly 400,000 people claiming it. Although it has since dropped to seventh place, this still represents a significant number of followers. Paul-Choudhury suggests that religions may never truly die out or that a new religion may be on the horizon.

Brian Grim ( 2015 ) in his World Economic Forum blog posits that the idea of organized religion dying out is incorrect. He claims that recent research shows that the growth of religious populations worldwide between 2010 and 2050 will be 23 times greater than the growth of nonreligious populations.

According to Grim and Connor’s ( 2015 ) interpretation of a global study in Demographic Research, the growth of religious populations will have a significant impact on global wealth distribution. In addition to the emergence of China and India as economic powers, the leading economies of 2050 will also feature the most diverse religious groups in recent history. The growth of the global Christian population is projected to be about the same rate as the overall global population growth between 2010 and 2050, with the largest share of Christians expected to be in sub-Saharan Africa by 2050. Muslims are expected to lead the world in population growth. The growth of the global religiously unaffiliated population is slowing. Hindus are expected to significantly increase, mostly led by the rising economy of India. The number of Budddhists is expected to remain at nearly 500 million but is projected to decrease as a share of the world’s population, whereas the number of Jews is anticipated to increase slightly. The number of people belonging to other religions is expected to grow but decrease as a share of the world’s population.

In my view, discovering aliens and life in the universe would be the most extraordinary discovery. It would give us a better understanding of life itself. According to Harari ( 2023 ), humans could be creating a new god or alien entity in the form of sentient AI, that could eventually control us by hickaking the operational system of human civilization, which is language. Regardless of its origin, alien intelligence raises enormous existential questions, including -and especially—those about God.

6 Input from Interviewees

Cofounder and managing partner at Bracket Capital

Data and trends in recent years seem to all point in one direction: that humanity will likely be living in an increasingly religious planet by 2050 and beyond. The dominant religious communities of Muslims and Christians are expected to be at parity by then, and the rate of people identifying as “unaffiliated” is expected to globally decrease. I believe this will have undeniable effects on national security, policy, and society as a whole. Nationalism rooted in religious identity (that we have seen proliferate over the last two decades) combined with the ease of digital communication will likely lead to more spontaneous conflicts around the world. More traditionally secular geographies such as Europe will see their social fabric tested, likely leading to further far-right governments with more stringent immigration policies being elected. Lastly, social mobility and demographics will reset the traditional stereotypes of a binary religious system defined by a Muslim South and Christian North with more porous dynamics between the two.

Opinion leader in women empowerment and founder of Para Durum

In the future, no religion will be relevant, but religion of universal morals will prevail, based on actions people do, very empowered individuals through biology, technology, and all that but with a very poor ecosystem. We shall see a united religion of the world, and the police will be giving fines when you break a rule.

Professor of behavioral and brain sciences, cofounder, and chairman of the Board of Inclusive Brains

Religions and science have one thing in common: They require those who practice them to have strong beliefs. Beliefs help people cope with life. They help make some (sort of) sense. This said, science and religion differ in the way they (try to) explain the world.

Opposing science and religion is a narrow-minded approach: first, because religion is a form of applied organizational and behavioral science, and second, because people too often mix faith and religion. Faith is a belief. Religion is a system. It is an efficient example of applied behavioral and organizational sciences. Faith and what it entails (that a form of God exists) can be a scientific option for scientists who can’t explain some phenomena.

Objectivity, neutrality, independence, and absence of biases do not exist. These are concepts that our brains invented to make us feel better and/or provide meaning to our lives. But at the end of the day, what will make the difference between a belief and a fact is the rigor of the method and replicability of the outcome. This is where science and religion are different too.

Founder and CEO of Stance Advocacy Services

A defining element of the human experience is the desire to understand why we exist. This search is a part of our past and will be part of our future. As we gain understanding of the brain and the source of consciousness through technology, this process of discovery will be focused more internally than externally.

Hopefully, the future will give humanity the opportunity to put greater emphasis on the universal values present in all religions as a source of unity, community, and belonging for all.

Executive, serial entrepreneur, writer and public speaker, cofounder, and executive chairman of Apolitical

What does dopamine mean for our lives? Beyond religion, how we meditate and going much deeper and finding presence. Elites around the world are meditating; meditation is being taught to our military and children, leading to the notion of social and emotional learning.

Regional director, Africa, International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)

Our multipolar world is increasingly fragmented; governments see battlefields as fertile ground to shape strategic balances of power. In 2050, it is estimated that the world will reach parity between Islam and Christianity. Climate change in many parts of the world will impact our cultural and religious practices, hence, our social cohesion as a result.

With growing inequalities and deepening of domestic disorders, religion will facilitate peace and counter growing fragmentation. During wars, religion should reinforce military ethics and help socialize the rules of war and prevent grave violations.

Brown, F. (1954). Answer . https://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html . Accessed 2021

Culkin, J. M. (1967). A Schoolman’s guide to Marshall McLuhan. The Saturday Review, 51–53 , 70–72.

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Grim, B. J., & Connor, P. (2015). Changing religion, changing economies: Future global religious and economic growth . Report prepared for the Global Agenda Council on the Role of Faith.

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Landesz, T. (2023). Future of Religion. In: Landesz, T., Varghese, S., Sargsyan, K. (eds) Future Intelligence. Future of Business and Finance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36382-5_17

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• Published: 19 June 2018

The future of the philosophy of religion is the philosophy of culture—and vice versa

• Mike Grimshaw   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8829-061X 1  

Palgrave Communications volume  4 , Article number:  72 ( 2018 ) Cite this article

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This paper reads the future of the Philosophy of Religion via a critical engagement with the thought of Paul Tillich and diversions into other thinkers to support the main thrust of the argument. It takes as a starting point Tillich’s discussion of the relationship between religion and culture in On the Boundary (1967), in particular his statement “As religion is the substance of culture, culture is the form of religion” (69–70). With (unlikely) diversions via TS Eliot and Karl Barth, the argument is developed through a re-reading of Tillich’s work on a theology of culture and in particular the statement from Systematic Theology III (1964b) that “…religion cannot express itself even in a meaningful silence without culture, from which it takes all forms of meaningful expression. And we must restate that culture loses its depth and inexhaustibility without the ultimacy of the ultimate” (264). Central to the rethinking of this paper is then the reworking of Tillich’s statement in On the Boundary that “My philosophy of religion …consciously remains on the boundary between theology and philosophy, taking care not to lose the one in the other. It attempts to express the experience of the abyss in philosophical concepts and the idea of justification as the limitation of philosophy” (52). While this can be seen as expressing the basis of continental philosophy and its creative tension between theology and philosophy, this paper inserts culture as the meeting point that holds theology and philosophy in tension and not opposition. That is, a theology of culture also engages with a philosophy of culture; just as a philosophy of religion must engage with a philosophy of culture; for it is culture that gives rise to both theology and philosophy, being the place where they both meet and distinguish themselves. The final part of this paper articulates a rethought Philosophy of Culture as the boundary space from which the future of the Philosophy of Religion can be thought, in creative tension with a Tillich-derived radical theology.

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Preface: setting the scene.

This is an essay in conjecture—and deliberately so. It seeks to find a point from which to tackle the question of ‘‘what if’’ and ‘‘what for’’ regarding the future of the Philosophy of Religion. In doing so, the central figure from which to base this engagement is the great German-American theologian Paul Tillich; but because this is a deliberately discursive, conjectural essay, other figures arise, are named, perhaps engaged with and other times just briefly alluded to. This is a deliberate approach, for this article is a type of thinking piece that seeks to exist as a type of collected signposts: signposts from the past in that Tillich himself died over half a century ago and so to draw upon him for the future is to claim some form of continuity from his ‘‘then’’ to our ‘‘now’’ toward some possible future. A central aim of this essay is to draw theology back into a critical engagement with the Philosophy of Religion, positioning a radical secular theology as a way to think a future secular Philosophy of Religion.

As the collection of papers to which this essay belongs addresses, there appears to be a widespread sense of crisis within the Philosophy of Religion. This seems to have arisen due to an overly focused attention and discussion on arguments as to the existence or non-existence of God. The issue is that having debated this, what can now be said? In short, it can be caricatured as: here is an argument for God’s existence or here is an argument against God’s existence. But for most people this is an increasingly irrelevant argument. Their response will be: yes, I agree or no, I don’t; but few will be convinced to change their mind from one view to the other. To be blunt, the crisis is one of relevance. Kevin Schilbrack has identified a similar set of issues, stating the traditional view of Philosophy of Religion is too narrow , intellectualist and insular (Schilbrack, 2014 : p.10); from this critique he develops his own manifesto for a global philosophy of religion (Schilbrack, 2014 : p.140) whereby “the future of philosophy of religion should be more inclusive, more focused on practice, and more self-reflexive, but I do not think that Philosophy of religion should give up the traditional normative task of evaluating religious claims about the nature of reality.”(Schilbrack, 2014 : p.140). And therein lies the nub of the issue—even for someone attempting to rethink the future of Philosophy of Religion—because, how is that reality performed and experienced, expressed and constructed? For most people, the question is twofold: firstly, what is done or not done in the name of religion and why; and secondly what can be done or not done in the name of religion and why? For religion is as much a way of doing as a way of thinking; or perhaps in a more nuanced way the question could be: how does the doing of religion affect our thinking and how does the thinking of religion affect our doing? Yet this is where theology can be of help, for theology has never just reduced itself or limited its main focus to the question of the existence or non-existence of God. Rather theology seeks to apply the critical thinking regarding questions of God and religion to all of existence. In particular, arising from the encounter with modernity, in the mid-twentieth century there emerged what can be termed ‘‘death of god’’ theologies and secular theologies that realized they could not just focus on arguments for or against God’s existence. Footnote 1 This is why the rethinking of Philosophy of Religion is undertaken via a critical engagement with Theologies that themselves had to rethink their future in modernity. It is also interesting to note that an important mid-twentieth century collection of essays on Philosophy of Religion that in many ways, from its own time, attempted to address a very similar question to that posed by this collection, labeled itself “New Essays in Philosophical Theology” (Flew and MacIntyre, 1955). As the editors noted, their choice of title occurred because ‘‘Philosophy of Religion’’ “has become, and seems likely for some time to remain, associated with Idealist attempts to present philosophical prolegomena to theistic theology” (Flew and Macintyre, 1955, viii). Interestingly for this current essay and its call to engage with death of god and secular theologies, the editors of that collection observed: “We realize that many will be startled to find the word ‘‘theology’’ so used that: the expression ‘‘theistic theologian’’ is not tautological; and the expression ‘‘atheist theologian’’ is not self-contradictory. But unless this unusual usage of ours is adopted we have to accept the paradox that those who reach opposite conclusions about certain questions must be regarded as having shown themselves to have been engaged in different disciplines.” (Flew and MacIntyre, 1955, viii). So, we could say at the outset, that the future of Philosophy of Religion is to regain that name of philosophical theology and so be open to the expressions noted above in 1955. This also provides a background to what is expressed in this essay, for I also venture a future via the early theology of Karl Barth because many who found themselves as death of God or secular theologians (in particular Altizer, Hamilton, Vahanian) had arisen out of the theology of Barth and, taking seriously Barth’s criticism of modernity, sought a new relevance in light of modern, twentieth century secular culture. For just as theology had to come through its own crisis of meaning in modernity, perhaps Philosophy of Religion (or a reworked Philosophical theology?) can now gain from an encounter with those forms of theology that arose seeking a critical engagement with meaning in late modernity. Crucially, such theologies understood theology to be a constructive task of critical engagement and meaning, and it is here that the theological thought of Paul Tillich provides both a model and resource. For Tillich’s theology occupies a boundary between theology and secularity and between religion and culture, attempting always to express just what it might mean to be modern—and what we may need to draw upon to do so; and here TS Eliot provides a way to rethink what needs to be recognized.

This is also a time in which I find myself increasingly referencing Mary Ann Caw’s definition of what she terms ‘‘the manifesto moment’’ that is positioned “between what has been done and what will be done, between the accomplished and the potential, in a radical and energizing division” (Caws: xxi), a moment of crisis expressing “what it wants to oppose, to leave, to defend, to change” (Caws: xxiii) . These first decades of the twenty-first century seem to be decades of crisis—whether economically, politically, or socially. These are times where on the one hand we believe that via technology anything is possible—and yet the choices made seem increasingly to be those that privilege the self—and/or sectarian interests. At such times, the manifesto arises as the claim of the need to rethink so we can act in new ways. As such the manifesto moment is where the critical thinking is done, thinking that is necessarily both conjectural and radical, thinking that seeks to overturn existing orthodoxies and expectations in the hope of creating the possibility of something new, something better: a call for emancipation. What follows is an attempt to do via considering the future of Philosophy of Religion.

The time of crisis and the ‘‘necessary problem’’

We find ourselves in a time of crisis for the Philosophy of Religion—a crisis of meaning, a crisis of focus, a crisis of intent. Of course, it would be easy to state that such a crisis is inevitable given the two constituent elements of philosophy and religion; that is, what we have is the magnification, the concentration of existing crises in philosophy and religion. These are crises of meaning and crises of what future—if any—they hold that is positive. Yet is perhaps the sense of crisis is to be expected. If philosophy and religion do not think of themselves as existing in some form of crisis in modernity then we have, in effect collapsed out of modernity into that situation defined by Jean-Francios Lyotard whereby the post-modern is the return to pre-modern ways of thinking (Lyotard: p.79). For I would claim religion is ‘‘a necessary problem’’ for modernity that modernity seeks to continuously define itself against. Central to this is the challenge modernity throws down regarding religion as collective expression and claim of truth and religion as individual belief. We can trace this to the rise of the Enlightenment and the challenge to religion as political, cultural, and intellectual power. To be modern, I would argue, is to find some problem with religion as collective and individual claim; that is, to find a problem with how religion both seeks to interpret the world and human existence and meaning—and more so, how religion as collective entities and religious individuals may seek to challenge and undo modern understandings and values. For to be modern is to seek to live after religion—and yet religion continues, as both collective and individual claim, signaling that modernity is a project and not a realized state. This is why ‘‘religion is a necessary problem’’—for it reminds us that modernity is an unfinished project of emancipation within this world. Furthermore, if we trace religion back to relegare (to bind together) and to relegere (to re-read) then religion operates as the claim of an alternative to how things are organized and thought in modernity. To be modern is perhaps to attempt to live after religion—yet not be able to properly do so. To be modern is to recognize the existence of religion as a collective and individual sign that the hopes and dreams of modernity have yet to be realized. Therefore, when religion is not seen or experienced as a problem perhaps that is when we have slipped-over into the post-modern? For in the post-modern, religion becomes something we need not be emancipated from; rather it either becomes the source of an emancipation from the world and/or a means of accommodation to the world: in Marxist terms, the return of the opiate of the masses (Marx, 1844 ). As we shall see, the postmodern is also perhaps the end of the hopes and dreams of modernity, a type of collective and individual giving up of the modern aim of emancipation. We saw this shift into the post-modern with the rise of religion as just yet another lifestyle choice and part of identity-politics. That is, religion for many was not viewed as either an individual or collective problem, rather it did not matter whether people were religious nor what type of religious. We could say that such a turn to religion became an uncritical form of what Foucault termed the technologies of the self. (Foucault, 1988 ) Religion became a personal choice and expression and was not regarded nor experienced as a challenge nor critique of the collective status quo of contemporary society. Instead we saw a retreat into prosperity gospels, ecstatic Pentecostalism, and forms of evangelical emotionalism and pietism all focused upon personal salvation, often in a perverse combination of spiritual and economic divine favor. We also saw the rise of various forms of New Age beliefs as well as the turn to western Buddhism. In neo-Weberian terms, this is re-enchantment of the self, within capitalism.

Of course, such expressions are not pre-modern as per Lyotard’s description, but in their underlying endorsement of the status quo (often especially the economic status quo) and the retreat to personalist responses they signaled a shift whereby religion was, in the main, no longer experienced in the west as a problem or societal critique. Or perhaps, to be more accurate and in particular, Christianity was no longer experienced as such. At most, Christianity was regarded as a personal and collective oddity— and importantly, often regarded and dismissed as irrelevant to contemporary society. Even the rise of American evangelical Christian politics can be understood as part of this postmodern turn because this was a retreat into a form of Christianity that, in the main, turned its back on the challenges of and from modern theological and biblical scholarship. Also, its pursuit of various forms of Christian theocracy (if often never named as such) was in itself the pursuit of a pre-modern Christian governance.

Likewise, the rise of Islamic politics was and is in its own way a retreat into types of postmodern identities—whether in the rise of the revolutionary Islamic state in Iran or that of Isis, which combines postmodern identity-politics, social media religion, and nostalgic Islamist politics to tragic ends. For a theocracy can never be modern, but it certainly can be postmodern and the theocratic tendency is one form of the postmodern in the contemporary world. Similarly, the only form of religion that is really regarded and experienced as a problem in the West is that labeled radical Islam or Islamist and is so regarded because of terrorist actions and its challenge to both secular and Christian social and cultural norms. Yet here we need to be clear that whereas Christianity was regarded as a type of ‘‘necessary problem’’ for the modern West to define itself via and against, Islam is not seen or responded to in this way. Rather Islam is more often regarded as an alien problem, an external problem, a problem not central nor internal to Western self-definition. For Islam is often regarded as expressing a non-Western religion and culture (despite—or rather perhaps because of, the long history of Islam in the West). For Islam in the West is still a minority identity (despite the scaremongering of ‘‘Islamic demographics’’ evident in Europe) and so is also still responded to as part of both Western postmodern identity-politics and the identity-politics of multiculturalism.

A central theme of this essay is that while Christianity exists as and continues to be a ‘‘necessary problem’’ for Western modernity, this means it is also an intellectual and cultural resource to both draw upon—and react against. To understand how this may be so, it is useful to consider what TS Eliot expressed in the appendix to his Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948). First delivered as radio talks to the recently defeated Germany in 1946 and arising from Eliot’s pre-war The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), he now expanded his central theme of the unity of European culture as expressed by the arts and ideas that arose out of a common Christian culture into a wider post-war discussion of culture. Eliot also saw the possible reconciliation of Modernism and Christianity as the way to restore an anti-romantic modernity against the newly defeated Volkgeist of Germany. He was, however, careful to state that the basis of European unity in a history of Christian culture did not necessitate or imply a unified contemporary Christian culture. Rather, in the modern world, the acknowledgment of a shared heritage to be drawn upon does not necessarily involve a shared belief in the present day. Developing the line of argument that would later become his famously all-inclusive definition of religion as culture and culture as “part of our lived religion” (Eliot, 1948 : p.31) Footnote 2 , Eliot commented: “It is against a background of Christianity that all our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe the Christian faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all spring out of his heritage of the Christian faith for its meaning.” (Eliot, 1948 : p.122).

This is why Christianity was expressed and experienced as a ‘‘necessary problem’’ for modernity, for modernity in the West was a modernity that arose from and in reaction to Christianity—and most importantly, from and against a Christian culture. Importantly for our discussion, Western philosophy arose primarily from a combination of, reaction to, and various rejections of classical thought and Christianity—especially, Christian theology. Therefore, any attempt to rethink philosophies in the West needs to take heed of Eliot’s insight; even if the philosophy is directly situated to reject Christianity or a Christian-derived culture, it does so because of the culture and context that sits behind it.

As has been argued, the shift to the postmodern was a shift that at a cultural level no longer saw any need to seriously engage with or even acknowledge this Christian cultural heritage. While there may have often been an uncritical turn to ‘‘the religious’’ and ‘‘the spiritual’’ in the postmodern shift, it tended to do so in a highly individualistic manner. The postmodern, especially in popular and mass forms, too often and too easily drew upon religion and that nebulous criteria deemed ‘‘the spiritual’’ as resources for identity-politics, becoming primarily used in an eclectic personal assemblage.

I have referred to Eliot because I believe he expresses a cultural truth that we seem in danger of either forgetting or misinterpreting today. For on the one hand, the emphasis on a shared or common heritage is either conveniently forgotten and/or summarily dismissed by those seeking to emphasize difference. While there was indeed the need of a corrective turn toward the acknowledgement of plurality away from a mono-cultural, mono-theological hegemony, this can and did, too often and too easily, result in a dismissal of any shared heritage or cultural lineage as merely hegemonic imposition. Yet conversely, from within such a postmodern turn, in the face of competing pluralities and identities, there is an increasingly conservative retreat into cultural, religious, and theological singularities that result in the promotion of a purist cultural and religious sectarianism against often ill-defined ‘‘others.’’ Therefore, in the case of both extremes, I wish to position Eliot’s statement as a necessary reminder of what is at stake at a time when many in our globalized societies are attempting to reconcile postmodernism and religion in forms that are types of Volkgeist . This in itself raises serious issues for Philosophy of Religion, for does it follow such moves down an essentialist, romanticist line and become in effect a de facto justification for such forms of postmodern religion? For as noted earlier, the Post-modern openness to a plurality of beliefs and cultures and viewpoints has also, unfortunately, resulted in the rise of conservative—and increasingly extremist—religio-cultural claims that increasingly circulate through both non-digital and digital outlets, expressions and networks: political parties, lobby and protest groups, print and digital media, social media, and the internet. This rise in what can be termed counter-modern positions has occurred because the theory of postmodernism as applied to beliefs, spirituality, and cultural difference (to challenge hegemony and allow difference) as has been replaced by the bureaucratic politics of postmodernity as applied to cultural identity (the creation of new hegemonic demands of classification, reordering, and rights). In particular, the shift from the Enlightenment’s suspicion and rejection of religion to the notion of the equality of all beliefs in a relativist fashion in a spirit of tolerance has had the unforseen result of the revival of intolerant expressions of faith as identity-politics. In short, we have seen the rise of the demanded tolerance of the intolerant.

What makes Eliot’s statement concerning a shared heritage different from postmodern essentialist claims is the recognition the heritage does not have to be believed in . In effect, Eliot’s statement is one of religious and cultural agnosticism, in that the agnostic (and also it could be argued, the atheist) assumes their position in reference to particular statements and expressions of belief. This issue of particularity sits at the center of Eliot’s cultural criticism. European culture has a particular legacy that each particular individual responds to by dint of being European. Yet this legacy of Christianity and Christian culture is not a collective demand as a belief upon any European individual as an individual . The individual, although they may find their thought, actions and creations occurring under the cultural influence of the legacy of Christian culture, are not, as individuals required, demanded or imposed upon to believe in Christianity. A cultural secularity has occurred that guarantees the freedom of the individual, even though the religious legacy continues, both implicitly and explicitly—to shape and define the culture they live, work, think, and create within. This is the background to the state of crisis we find ourselves in.

On how to rethink the crisis; or, hopes and dreams?

As for our present situation, the cultural critic Dick Hebdige described it thus: “Postmodernity is modernity without the hopes and dreams which made modernity bearable” (Hebdige: p.195). While Hebdige was writing 30 years ago, in many ways we still find ourselves in what could be called the postmodern interregnum: a modernity beset by postmodern banalities and exclusions without the possibility—it seems—of hopes and dreams to make the present bearable. What we have instead of hopes and dreams is a culture of distraction, the digital intensification via social media and the internet of that situation so telling dissected by Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). So, to veer via Marx and his famous critique of religion as the opiate of the masses (1844), we find ourselves in a new form of digital capitalism where the opiate of the masses is a combination of postmodern identity-politics and data screen distraction.

A Barthian interlude?

I know this essay is really meant to be about what Tillich can offer us, but bear with me please for just one further deviation. If we are to think philosophically, religiously, and theologically about the crisis of modernity then we need to also look back a century to what Karl Barth did in Der Römerbrief of 1918/1919, for as Robert W. Jenson claims, Barth’s commentary “theologically divides the twentieth century from the nineteenth” (Jensen: p.2). With Barth’s Der Römerbrief a new type of theological modernity came into being: a rupture against the failures of the hopes and dreams of nineteenth century liberalism—whether theologically, religiously, or culturally. In many ways—and I acknowledge that it is perhaps heretical to say so—Barth’s Der Römerbrief was a type of proto-post-modern moment in and of itself, for it signaled a theology ‘‘without the hopes and dreams that made nineteenth century theology and culture bearable.’’

It is well known that Barth’s commentary arose as reaction to the manifesto of support for the Kaiser in 1914 signed by 93 of the most eminent German intellectuals. This occasioned nothing less a crisis of faith in the liberalism that provided his theological and cultural world up to that time. As Barth writes in 1915, “It was like the twilight of the gods when I saw the reaction of Harnack, Herman, Rade, Euchen and company to the situation” (Busch: p.81); later reflecting in 1927, “they seemed to have been hopelessly compromised by what I regarded as their failure in the face of the ideology of war” (Busch: p.81). Barth regarded this failure to be an ethical one that in turn prompted him to proclaim “their exegetical and dogmatic presuppositions could not be in order” (Busch: p.81). This is the context in which Barth turns to Romans , a turn to this text as part of a challenge to contemporary German culture Protestantism, liberal theology and a rejection of that which had developed in the wake of Schleiermacher. Romans was, therefore, positioned also against the romantic movement, idealism and pietism. (Busch: p.100) So a perceptive reader can see that while, on the one hand, I have stated that Barth’s Der Römerbrief could be a proto-postmodern rejection of nineteenth century theological and cultural modernity, on the other hand, Der Römerbrief is positioned against the forerunners of todays’ postmodern crisis. It is this that makes both Barth’s Der Römerbrief and the original Romans of Paul such fascinating—and troublesome—documents to engage with today.

One of the interesting moves of continental philosophy in the first decades of the twenty-first century is a turn to Romans , a turn back to Paul Footnote 3 —but not so much a turn to the possibilities offered by Barth. For Barth proclaims a problematic neo-orthodox theology in a critical confrontation with modernity. That is, Barth’s theology demands to be a necessary problem for modernity, holding modernity to account: modernity as theological event and modernity as cultural event. Barth’s turn to Romans is driven by the centrality of the term and idea of KRISIS Footnote 4 as biblical event that demands a theological response. For Barth, the crisis of the War and the support of the German theologians for war led to the KRISIS that asked as biblical and theological question ‘‘what decision is to be made?’’ For Barth the KRISIS was how could theology be done given the support of theologians for what had occurred? This act and the resultant KRISIS signaled the end of theology as was and the need for a new theology. Here Barth links the War to a central theological issue. The crisis of the war and more widely of modernity occurred because theology became religion. Theology gave up its role as what can be labeled corrective KRISIS and became that which celebrated human hubris in acts of divisive and destructive idolatry. For in Barth’s reading of Romans he finds the centrality of a theology opposed to all human attempts to reach God and express God’s will. These failures are identified as religion. Against religion stands Christianity and in Barth’s expression of Christianity, it rejects all human attempts to order and dominate. In his commentary Barth gives a list of all that Christianity does not support: Individualism, Collectivism, Nationalism, Internationalism, Humanitarianism, Ecclesiasticism, Nordic enthusiasm, and Devotion to western culture. Furthermore, Christianity “observes with a certain coldness the cult of both ‘‘nature’’ and ‘‘civilization’’, of both Romanticism and Realism” (Barth: pp.462–463).

Barth’s turn to Romans is, therefore, a turn to a text of KRISIS in response to what he perceived as a contemporary KRISIS. In this re-turn to biblical theology and exegesis Romans became the text from which a critique of modernity and its hubris could occur and in doing so Barth repositions Romans as a text for the later critics. This turn occurs also as part of what Graham Ward identifies as the post-1914 crisis of confidence regarding language and representation, a “crisis of legitimization and confidence in Western European civilization” (Ward: p.7).

In Barth’s Der Römerbrief we have the situation of crisis (intellectual, cultural, political) as the problem of the age and the challenge of KRISIS (theological and biblical) expressed as time of decision, challenging that which is and demanding a decision in response. The war is, therefore, both crisis and KRISIS for Barth, and the crisis of the culture is symptomatic of the wider KRISIS of the age. The war, therefore, expresses clearly the KRISIS that the modern world finds itself confronted with. As the Jewish critic Will Herberg observed in 1949 , Barth’s Der Römerbrief “put to an end the smug self-satisfaction of western civilization and therewith to western man’s high illusions approaching omnipotence and perfectibility” (Herberg: p.50). Furthermore, as Herberg reminded his contemporary post-WW2 audience, crisis occurred as two types. There was the contemporary sense of crisis of seeking a truth but of which we cannot be sure we have reached and the Greek KRISIS, which is that of judgment. (Herberg: p.50).

Getting to Tillich via the ‘‘neo-”

Barth serves his purpose here with the twin signposting of crisis and KRISIS. I would suggest that as we proceed we need to also hold onto Herberg’s delineation, for the crisis of the future of Philosophy of Religion is perhaps because it has veered back from KRISIS. That is, does Philosophy of Religion involve judgment? Or is it, as Schilbrak critiqued, too narrow , intellectualist and insular? (Schilbrack, 2014 : p.10).

So, when does Tillich make his appearance—and how? To get to Tillich and what he can offer, I suggest we should also remember James Clifford’s aphorism that “ ‘‘Post’’ is always shadowed by ‘‘neo’’”(Clifford: p.227). The crisis of religion can, therefore, be understood via this as the rise of the neo-modern. And what of the crisis of philosophy? Again, I would also situate philosophy as the alternate ‘‘necessary problem’’ of modernity; for both religion and philosophy attempt to hold the modern—that is the modus (the just now )—to critique and challenge (or in Barthian terms, to the judgment of KRISIS). Likewise, modernity was often suspicious of the basis and authority of claims made by the religious and the philosophical, especially if they claim a non-material basis. What occurred was a type of unresolved dialectic whereby any synthesis occurred within modernity and with a greater compromise of either religion or philosophy than of modernity itself. The question became one of what degree of accommodation could modernity make? Or more truthfully, what degree of accommodation was modernity prepared to make? This saw the rise of secular religious thought as a rethinking of religion as ‘‘necessary problem’’ within modernity. For philosophy, the issue was a different one. Lacking the public impact and collective identities that religion its various forms could call upon, philosophy either retreated to the academy or became political philosophies that in mass movements such as fascism or state communism were tragically—and inevitably I would argue given their hegemonic ideological collectivism—expressed in totalitarian regimes of oppression and mass death.

Conversely, in the turn to the postmodern—which is as Lyotard observes also the turn to the pre-modern—religion and philosophy hold a less problematic place; why is this? Because religion and philosophy become in effect, lifestyle choices, reduced to the personal away from the public and so while we may be in a crisis we lack the corrective of KRISIS.

Why Tillich matters

It is now time, finally, to bring in Paul Tillich (1886–1965) as a resource for a rethought neo-modern possibility that restores religion and philosophy as the necessary problems of the neo-modern. I want to begin with his famous statement (almost now a Tillichian cliché) from On the Boundary (1967), that “As religion is the substance of culture, culture is the form of religion” (Tillich, 1967 : pp.69–70). Yet what is often forgotten or perhaps even deliberately excluded, is the equally important statement that precedes this: “The relationship between religion and culture must be defined from both sides of the boundary” (Tillich, 1967 : p.69). This is why I included the earlier digression via Eliot for he attempted such definitions in his analysis.

Tillich’s starting point is that “religion is an aspect of the human spirit” that “presents itself to us as religious” when “we look at the human spirit from a special point of view” (Tillich, 1959 : p.5). Tillich clarifies this by stating “religion is not a special function of man’s spiritual life, but it is the dimension of depth in all of its functions” (Tillich, 1959 : pp.5–6), and then he provides his famous description: “Religion, in the largest and most basic sense if the word, is ultimate concern, and ultimate concern is manifest in all creative functions of the human spirit” (Tillich, 1959 : pp.7–8).

This provides our entry point for reconsidering the future of Philosophy of Religion. For as Tillich articulates, to attempt to separate thinking about religion from thinking about culture—and vice versa—is to fail to properly engage with either religion or culture. Yet, to be clear, this does not mean that our thinking on either involves an uncritical engagement, for as has been outlined, the issues of postmodern culture are expressed in postmodern religion just as the turn to the uncritical self helped to drive the worst excesses of postmodern culture.

Of course, both religion and culture are notoriously difficult concepts to pin down and define, which is a central reason why they are often engaged with academically via the interdisciplinary lens of ‘‘studies.’’ So, let us attempt a clarification here: to think about religion and culture via Tillich is also to think about these concepts and experiences via the legacy of Western Christian thought and culture. Of course, the expressions of religion and culture can be expanded outwards from this legacy, but this legacy is, as argued via Eliot, central to Western modernity and what we are arguing for here is a neo-modern turn and engagement that restores religion and philosophy as ‘‘necessary problems.’’ Therefore, to think about religion as a ‘‘necessary problem’’ via Tillich is also to think about religion as ultimate concern present in all creative functions of the human spirit. That is, the ‘‘necessary problem’’ that takes form as ultimate concern in culture. Religion is, therefore, to be thought about as that which raises ultimate questions within cultural expressions. However, to remember the other side of Tillich’s insight, these cultural expressions also put forward that, which as ultimate concern, is to be thought of as religious. These may—and indeed probably will and I would argue should—challenge that which we wish too easily, from the side of existing religion, philosophy of religion, theology and their institutions, to prescribe and define as ‘‘religion.’’ Otherwise, in our thinking about religion, we are only thinking about that which we (from the side of religion) expect to be religious and accept as existing religion. We forget that cultural expressions arise out of the concerns, questions and experiences of culture. In our view culture includes that heritage Eliot emphasized and, importantly its current expressions that arise out of—and against—that heritage.

Ultimate concern is, therefore, an expression arising from hermeneutics: how do we interpret the times we find ourselves in and what do we give rise to that offers a critique? It is in this way both religion and philosophy occur as ‘‘necessary problems’’ in modernity because they exist as problematic critiques of and from within modern culture. That is, religion and philosophy exist as ‘‘necessary problems’’ in three ways: as resources to draw upon; as ways of thinking to enable us to express those hopes and dreams that make modernity bearable; and as ways to critique that which makes modernity seem unbearable. However, we must be clear that to make modernity bearable is not the same as to make it enjoyable. Rather, in my understanding from Hebdige, ‘‘bearable’’ means making modernity meaningful—and meaningful in a way that is not just for me and my own pleasure. To draw upon Barth in the way a pure Tillichian never would, ‘‘bearable’’ means engaging with the crisis of modernity via expressions and thoughts of KRISIS. And what is the crisis of modernity? It is nothing more nor less than the secular turn of living ‘‘after God.’’ The crisis of modernity is realizing that ‘‘after God’’ we humans are responsible for the world and what happens in it. Ultimate concern is, therefore, our response today, to modernity after God. Here, we start to see the possibilities emerge for a secular Philosophy of Religion.

Towards a secular religious thought

Werner Schufler notes that when we understand via Tillich that theology is necessarily a theology of culture then everything becomes a theme for theology. (Schufler: p.15) I wish to expand this in two ways. Firstly, via Tillich we can understand that religion as ultimate concern is necessarily a religion of culture and, therefore, every cultural creation that deals with issues of ultimate concern becomes a theme for thinking about religion. It is here that the crisis and the KRISIS of religion and culture in modernity exist in creative tension. But then, I would argue further—via Gabriel Vahanian’s tracing of secular back to saeculum : the world of shared human experience (Vahanian: p.21)—that under-sitting all of this is what I would term secular theology; and culture is both wherein and whereby theology is created and also what theology is created in response to. Here, I acknowledge that cries of ‘‘crypto-theology’’ will be raised by those seeking a Philosophy of Religion (Continental or otherwise) after—and/or against theology. But I would argue that our thinking and understandings of religion are derived from theology and that there is no sui generis ‘‘religion’’ that exists in and by itself—even as a concept. Rather, religion is the forms our theological thinking takes: the forms in social organization, the forms in cultural and political expression. So, to think about religion is, at root, to think about theology and to think theologically. And what is the root, the radix of this theology? It is the noun ‘‘God’’, which I express and understand as the claim that holds within it both the excess and limit of possibility. Religion is the social and cultural response to this, expressed as ultimate concern. Theology is, therefore, a secular exercise and critique (arising out of and in response to the world of shared human experience) and is far more secular than the often sectarian and anti-secular expressions of religion. A Philosophy of Religion can, broadly speaking, proceed in two directions. It can be a Philosophy of Religion that, in its engagement with philosophy of culture, be a form of secular theology and, therefore, exist as continuing the ‘‘necessary problem’’ of modernity. Or it can retreat into sui generis , essentialist, idealist and romanticist notions of religion that privilege the self and become unproblematic for modernity. In short, in the second option, it stops trying to make modernity bearable and rather attempts to make postmodernity enjoyable—for me. The question of the future of Philosophy of Religion is, therefore, also a political one and situated in response to how we may wish to engage with modernity—and for whom? I would argue that this political question—who are we thinking for and why —is what enables us to make sense, today of the statement from Systematic Theology III (1964b) that “…religion cannot express itself even in a meaningful silence without culture, from which it takes all forms of meaningful expression. And we must restate that culture loses its depth and inexhaustibility without the ultimacy of the ultimate” (Tillich, 1964b : p.264). In this way, a Philosophy of Religion that engages with ultimate concern is never static and it finds its expression in continuous new ways. If we are unable to think this, if we are unable to engage with this from both sides of religion and culture then we find ourselves unable to properly engage in either Philosophy of Religion or Philosophy of Culture. In understanding this we need to think through Tillich’s statement in On the Boundary that “My philosophy of religion …consciously remains on the boundary between theology and philosophy, taking care not to lose the one in the other. It attempts to express the experience of the abyss in philosophical concepts and the idea of justification as the limitation of philosophy” (Tillich, 1967 : p.52). While on the one hand this can be seen as expressing the basis of continental philosophy and its creative tension between theology and philosophy, I wish to insert culture as the meeting point that holds theology and philosophy in tension and not opposition. That is, a Theology of Culture also engages with a Philosophy of Culture, just as a Philosophy of Religion must engage with a Philosophy of Culture. For it is culture that gives rise to both theology and philosophy, being the place where they both meet and distinguish themselves. Even more than this, culture is the central expression of the human spirit and occurs as language, artistic and intellectual creations, popular and elite expressions and manifestations of human identity. We also need to remember critic Raymond Williams’ comment that “culture” is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language (Williams, 1976 : p.87). Culture, for Williams, can take three broad forms: that of individual enlightenment; that of the particular way of life of a group; and as cultural activity, often expressed and organized though cultural productions and institutions. What is important to note is that these can and do compete against each other and in such competition we can see ‘‘culture’’ used in a polemical fashion. We should also note that those cultural expressions of religion, theology and philosophy can also take polemical forms. But we must remember that Culture is also ‘‘ordinary’’, for it encompasses all the diverse means by which people are shaped and in turn give shape to their lived experience. This ‘‘shaping and giving shape’’ is where theology, religion and philosophy arise—as does politics. That is, they arise as the means in which lived experience is shaped, whereby what we can call the second-tier expressions of philosophy and religion (and of course politics and theology) arise out the primary tier of culture. Here, we slightly part company with Tillich, remembering that for him ‘‘ultimate concern is manifest in all creative functions of the human spirit.’’ I would wish to ensure that ultimate concern is not given an essence or an agency for it is but short step from there to idealism and even to sui generis notions of ultimate concern. Rather than ultimate concern being manifest, I would argue that ultimate concern can be interpreted as being manifest, that is, ultimate concern is a hermeneutical category and activity. That is, ultimate concern is not a thing in itself, existing separate to or separate within human construction, expression, and creation. Therefore, what ultimate concern is interpreted as being and expressing is also a question of politics. Here, we can draw again on Barth and use his twin categories of crisis and KRISIS for it is via these, in a hermeneutical activity, drawn from the positions of philosophy and religion as ‘‘necessary problems’’ in modernity that the politics of ultimate concern can be articulated. That is, why do I wish to identify this as ultimate concern in these creative functions and what are the implications of my doing so? What is the crisis that this ultimate concern speaks to and what is the KRISIS judgment it articulates? And just as importantly, via Elliot, what traditions do I draw upon in order to make such an interpretation? Therefore, only by thinking seriously about culture (Philosophy of Culture) can we think seriously about religion (Philosophy of Religion)—and vice versa. It is only through this, I would argue, that we can hold in creative tension that identified by Tillich as “the experience of the abyss in philosophical concepts and the idea of justification as the limitation of philosophy” (Tillich, 1967 : p.52). Confronted the void, the abyss of existence, we respond by creative functions of the human spirit. Yet it is only via theology that we can understand these as expressing a justification of the human spirit that does not become idolatry. For I would argue that theology is a response to the void that seeks to make life meaningful for others . It draws on a tradition in which the individual is called upon to act for others in the name of love: love expressed as the excess and limit of possibility; Love that is expressed also as crisis and KRISIS. Footnote 5 It is this that makes religion a ‘‘necessary problem’’ for modernity. Conversely, a response to the void that only makes or only seeks to make life meaningful for me is theologically an act of idolatry and anti-human in intent.

What I arguing for, via Tillich, is therefore a re-thought Philosophy of Religion that exists in a creative, hermeneutical tension with a Philosophy of Culture that views religion as a ‘‘necessary problem’’ for modernity; it is from this position that a future for Philosophy of Religion can begin to be articulated. A re-thought Philosophy of Religion exists as the critical engagement with culture whereby what is created and presented as ultimate concern is held up to hermeneutical engagement in light of the tradition from which the culture and religion arise. In this, religion and theology exist as ‘‘necessary problems’’—unable to be dismissed or excised but neither able to singularly determine what occurs nor what is to possibly be. Culture likewise is rethought as that which gives rise—in various creative expressions—to that determined through hermeneutical engagement and KRISIS to be ultimate concern. In all of this therefore, the future of the Philosophy of Religion occurs as the politics of what I term a radical secular theology: seeking to ask questions of and critique ultimate concern in and for this world of shared human experience in the name of the excess and limit of possibility arising from an emancipatory hermeneutics of tradition and culture. How we might approach this via Tillich proceeds from some insights from his Systematic Theology 1 . Firstly: “…in and through every preliminary concern the ultimate concern can actualize itself” (Tillich, 1964a : p.16). Or, as I would secularize this: in and through every preliminary concern the ultimate concern is able to be possibly interpreted and responded to . Secondly, we must also hear Tillich’s caution of culture in that “idolatry is the elevation of a preliminary concern to ultimacy”. (Tillich, 1964a : p.126). Thirdly, the basis for a secular theology (a theology from and of the word of shared human experience) is made clear: “…on every page of every religious or theological text these concepts appear: time, space, cause, thing, subject, nature, movement, freedom, necessity, life, value, knowledge, experience, being and non-being”.(Tillich, 1964a : p.24).

A secular theology is how these concepts are interpreted and expressed, critiqued and engaged within ways via theology and religion that express them as part of the ‘‘necessary problems’’ for modernity and also, most crucially, in ways that can make modernity bearable for others . What makes such a secular theology radical is that such a theology occurs as hermeneutical event out of the tradition yet also after the abyss of the void of the death of God that institutes modernity. That is, what can the name God mean as hermeneutical critique, event and thought in the world of shared human experience to act as crisis and KRISIS to make modernity bearable for others ? Tillich becomes our guide because as he remarks: “Since the split between a faith unacceptable to culture and culture unacceptable to faith was not possible for me, the only alternative was the attempt to interpret the symbols of faith through expressions of our own culture”. (Tillich, 1964b : p.5). It is this that provides the first half of a re-thought Philosophy of Religion, acknowledging religion’s unacceptability as the ‘‘necessary problem’’ of modernity. Similarly, we remember—via Eliot—that culture arises from the traditions formed by faith and now secularized. Drawing on Tillich, both are ways to express those responses to the ‘‘necessary problem’’, which can be labeled ultimate concern. Yet neither religion or culture nor the thinking about them can be properly engaged with from a Tillichian-derived perspective unless we engage with the other; otherwise neither faith/religion nor culture are secular, becoming instead sectarian idolatry and concerned with the self and not for others.

In considering how to proceed, it is useful to draw upon contemporary radical theology. Here I consider one of central statements to be that made by Robbins and Crockett regarding the role of theology in the work of Charles Winquist: “Theology was a discourse formulation that functioned to fissure other discourses by pushing them to their limits and interrogating them as to their sense and practicality” (in Winquist: p.10). We can also note similarities with Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School that Tillich found much in common with. The Frankfurt School, even though a neo-Marxist movement, recognized the value of theology because, as expressed by Eduardo Mendieta: “…critical theory…is reason criticizing itself” (Mendeita: p.7). In contemporary Modernity, theology, once vanquished, and religion, once segregated by the Enlightenment, are both being reemployed by critical theory because of their value as self-reflexive, critical tools. In particular theology, in its critique of existence itself, as “reason in search of itself” (Mendeita: p.10) acts as the self-critical reflexion on both society and religion. It is here that Tillich’s position as theologian of the boundary readily enables such a critique. The future for such a Philosophy of Religion as I am outlining also occurs because, as critical theorist Helmet Peukert declares, both Enlightenment and theology are unfinished projects in that both are continually to having to self-reflexively prove themselves anew as critical endeavors. (Peukert: p.353) As such, modernity occurs as a series of on-going ‘‘necessary problems’’ that seeks to make life bearable— for others . Therefore, how we think critically in modernity is the basis of how we choose to act for others . This is the future for the Philosophy of Religion and, as discussed, it occurs in a critical hermeneutics with Philosophy of Culture; that is, philosophy undertaken for others to make modernity bearable.

It is important to clarify that theology, as expressed by the Frankfurt School, is “inverse, or negative theology [that] must reject and refute God, for the sake of God, and it must also reject and refute religion for the sake of what the religion prefigures and recalls” (Mendeita: pp.10–11). Therefore the radical secular theology I am arguing for is not theology as commonly understood, but rather a self-reflexive, critical, secular theology that stands as “argumentative discourse” (Peukert: p.368) in critique of both institutional, orthodox theology and those forms of Philosophy of Religion that seek to shy away from its role as argumentative discourse within modernity.

Carl Raschke, like Robbins and Crockett engaging with the legacy of Winquist, in tracing a lineage back to Kant argues, “To think intensely what remains concealed in the depths of thought is to think theologically”, and yet, because of the Enlightenment, such theological thinking has become “a very difficult, if not impossible, peculiar labor” (in Winquist: xiii). Here, we also hear a challenge from situating theology in dialectic with deconstruction, whereby in Modernity, theology is now “a thought that has learned to think what is unthought within the thought of itself” (in Winquist: xv). The challenge from this for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophy of Culture is clear. If religion and culture wish to be meaningful within an ongoing Modernity and so engage with that which is—as of yet—unthought within religion and culture they too must engage with the ‘‘necessary problem’’ of theology. For theology in modernity had to become a problem unto itself and for everything else: a crisis and KRISIS of its own thinking and articulation to ensure it retained its necessity and could not be consigned to irrelevance. Or, as I would state, in Modernity, theology, if not sectarian, is the self-reflexivity of modern thought that thinks the unthought of both secularity and ‘‘religion.’’ I realize that this may be a difficult concept and even more difficult expression to comprehend. So, let me try and put it this way. Theology, if it seeks a meaningful engagement with the world of shared human experience (the saeculum ), is where and whereby we become aware of and critique what secularity and religion prefer not to think. As such, it is theology from which we stand—with Tillich—on the boundary between secularity and religion, between religion and culture. The crisis and KRISIS for both Philosophy of Culture and Philosophy of Religion is actually their desire not to engage with theologizing, that is ‘‘thinking studying thinking’’; for the challenge of theology is that of a self-reflexivity regarding that which we designate ‘‘religion’’, ‘‘the sacred and the profane’’ and ‘‘the secular’’ and ‘‘culture.’’ The centrality of theology occurs because theology is self-reflexivity about being human and what, in Tillichian terms we designate ‘‘ultimate concern.’’ Here, we can also draw upon what Charles Winquist notes regarding the self-reflexivity of theology—that is thinking about thinking—in that theology demands that then “we have to decide why we are calling any particular datum ‘‘religious’’” (Winquist: p.182). To this I would add that theology demands further decisions regarding the designations ‘‘sacred’’, ‘‘profane’’, ‘‘secular’’, and ‘‘culture’’—and of course ‘‘ultimate concern.’’

Radical secular theology is, therefore, done in modernity ‘‘after God’’, as a self-reflexive human activity of ‘‘thinking studying thinking’’ as to what is to be done for others , undertaken on the boundary between religion and culture. It is secular because we remember Vahanian’s maxim that, “in a pluralistic world, it is not religion we have in common. What we have in common is the secular” (Winquist: p.96). As to what this might mean and entail, a way to ‘‘think the future’’ is to consider another option from the past. In 1970, the theologian Van A Harvey reflecting on his own “zig-zag career—from department of religion (4 years) to seminary (10 years) back to department of religion” (Harvey: p.17) raised the issue of “the possibility and even the relevance of traditional systematic theology in our pluralistic and secular culture.” At that time, Harvey saw a new home and possibility for theology in Religious Studies, that included the possibility of “a new and probably non-Christian theology of some sort” being developed that is “ more strictly philosophical and does not at all understand itself as a servant of a church or a tradition.”[emphasis added] (Harvey: p.21). Referencing Victor Preller of Princeton, Harvey termed this a “meta-theology” (Harvey: p.28) or “a genuinely secular theology” (Harvey: p.28).

The future for Philosophy of Religion as I envisage it via Tillich is also in line with this option arising from Harvey. Yet both secular theology and a radically secular Philosophy of Religion are yet to find homes in either religious studies or philosophy. Rather, in a very Tillichian fashion, they exist ‘‘on the boundary’’ between such disciplines: too theological for philosophy and too secular for many in religious studies. Instead, such thinking tends to arise from those who find themselves ‘‘on the boundary’’ between disciplines which means there a critical tension between such thinking being written and such thinking being taught. This is not to say that there are not religious studies departments and philosophy programmes where such thinking is both taught and written. But they are few in number. What is interesting is how much of such thinking occurs from individuals located in various disciplines and departments neither labeled religious studies nor philosophy and who yet manage to write—and surprisingly often (if somewhat subversively) teach such thinking. Usually such departments are engaged in the critical study of culture in some way and these thinkers—often without even knowing they are doing so—are engaging in the critical hermeneutic of religion and culture argued for in this paper. Therefore, in many ways the future of Philosophy of Religion is already being undertaken, but we have to increasingly look outside of the expected places and voices to find it. Drawing on such places and voices, in finding a way beyond the split of religion and culture unacceptable to each other, we seek a rethinking of religion and culture each as ‘‘necessary problems’’ for modernity, necessary problems that articulate ultimate concern for others . Tillich’s thought can, therefore, be a basis of emancipatory potential for a secular radical theology of religion and culture as hermeneutics, in the name of that noun and its tradition used to express the limit and excess of possibility in the name of love for others.

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Perhaps still the best introduction to these debates regarding the challenges of theology in modernity is that set out in AN Prior’s “Can Religion Be Discussed?”. Written in 1942, Prior was a theologian, who at this time was in transition to becoming a philosopher and in particular, a noted logician. See AN Prior, “Can Religion Be Discussed?”, in A Flew and A MacIntyre New Essays in Philosophical Theology (London: SCM Press Ltd, 1963) [orig. 1955].

Eliot’s inclusive definition of culture “includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby day, Henley regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar. The reader can make his own list.” TS Eliot, Notes towards a Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1948), 31. As Eliot goes on to note “bishops are part of English culture and horses and dogs are part of English religion.” Op.cit.32.

This ‘‘turn to Paul/Romans’’ includes: Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains. A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans , (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Alain Badiou, Saint Paul. The Foundation of Universalism , trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Ward Blanton, A Materialism for the Masses. Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew. Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul. On Justice . (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul , ed. Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann with Horst Folkers, Wolf-Daniel Hartwich and Christoph Schulte (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute—or, why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for? (London/ New York: Verso, 2000), Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The perverse core of Christianity , (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2003). It is noted that the re-turn to Paul extends beyond Romans and that this re-turn has become an ever-expanding sub-field in both Continental thought and political theology. For an interesting overview, see Matthew Bullamore, ‘‘The Political Resurrection of Saint Paul’’ TELOS 134, Spring, 2006: pp.173–182.

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I expand on what I view as the meeting place and challenge of love in Philosophy and Theology in my essay “Weak Love? 17 Propositions” (Grimshaw, 2017 ).

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Grimshaw, M. The future of the philosophy of religion is the philosophy of culture—and vice versa . Palgrave Commun 4 , 72 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-018-0129-1

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Religion in Quarantine: The Future of Religion in a Post-Pandemic World

In the last six months, scholars have learned important lessons about the challenges that religious groups in the United States face, the ways they adapt, and the ways that they respond to new constraints created during the Covid-19 pandemic. Religious leaders who had been resistant to technology just months ago are now readily embracing the internet.

Since the middle of March 2020, churches and temples have moved their services online, as Facebook, YouTube, and Zoom play host to dozens of religious experiments each weekend. Jews preparing for Passover created virtual Seder meals with socially distanced family members. Christian priests and pastors rethought traditional Easter celebrations and how to enact core rituals online. Muslims wrestled with the implications of forced physical distancing during Ramadan and how the upcoming Haj would need to be online, mediated events. As someone who has studied how religious communities respond to technology for two and a half decades, I quickly realized these innovations marked a unique and important moment for contemporary religion.

What would religiosity look like if social distancing became the “new normal”? Would expressions of faith need to become increasingly technologically mediated to protect the vulnerable? Would religious leaders accept this shift and willingly adapt?

The result of these questions and conversations with other scholars of religion online is now published as an eBook called Religion in Quarantine: The Future of Religion in a Post-Pandemic World .

To create this book, Texas A&M University Religious Studies faculty and students explored the shifts in religious practice within Jewish, Muslim, and Christian contexts, primarily within the first three and a half months of the pandemic. By combining reflections from our spiritual journeys in our respective religious communities, along with research on how the pandemic affected the way we investigate religion both in current times and how we will in the future, a number of common themes emerged. This eBook reports eight lessons drawn from this research.

Visit https://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/handle/1969.1/188004 to check out the new eBook.

Heidi Campbell

Heidi A. Campbell is professor of communication and Presidential Impact Fellow at Texas A&M University. She is also director of the Network for New Media, Religion and Digital Culture Studies. Her research focuses on technology, religion and digital culture, with emphasis on Jewish, Muslim and Christian media negotiations. She is coeditor of Routledge’s Religion and Digital Culture book series the Journal of Religion, Media & Digital Culture , and author of over 100 articles and books including When Religion Meets New Media (2010), Networked Theology (2016) and Digital Creatives and the Rethinking Religious Authority in Digital Culture (2020).

Why You Can’t Predict the Future of Religion

By Ross Douthat

Opinion Columnist

In an 1822 letter to the physician Benjamin Waterhouse, Thomas Jefferson expressed his confidence that traditional Christianity in the young United States was giving way to a more enlightened faith, much like Jefferson’s own in its rejection of the divinity of Jesus Christ. “I trust,” he wrote, “that there is not a young man now living in the U.S. who will not die an Unitarian.”

Less than a year earlier, on “a Sabbath evening in the autumn of 1821” in upstate New York, a young man named Charles Grandison Finney began a multiday interplay of prayer and mystical experience that ‌‌led to a moment when, he wrote later , “it seemed as if I met the Lord Jesus Christ face to face … He stood before me, and I fell down at his feet and poured out my soul to Him. I wept aloud like a child, and made such confessions as I could with my choked utterance.”

This experience set Finney on a path that would help bury Jefferson’s confident hypothesis — toward leadership in an age of revivalism, the Second Great Awakening, that forged the form of evangelical Christianity that would bestride 19th-century America and also encouraged a proliferation of novel sects with supernatural beliefs entirely distant from Jefferson’s Enlightenment religion.

That history is worth mentioning for a specific reason and a general one. The specific reason is that a Christian college in rural Kentucky, Asbury University, has just experienced an old-school revival — a multiweek outpouring that has kept students praying and singing in the school chapel from morning to night, drawn tens of thousands of pilgrims from around the country, captured the imagination of the internet and even drawn the attention of The New York Times .

The general reason is that whatever the Asbury Revival’s long-term impact, the history of Finney and Jefferson is a reminder that religious history is shaped as much by sudden irruptions as long trajectories, as much by the mystical and personal as by the institutional and sociological.

Secular experts writing about religion tend to emphasize the deep structural forces shaping practice and belief — the effects of industrialization or the scientific revolution, suburbanization or the birth control pill. Religious intellectuals tend to emphasize theological debates and evangelization strategies. (Should Christians be winsome or combative? Should churches adapt to liberal modernity or resist its blandishments?)

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The Future of the Study of Religion

Harvard PhD candidates discuss the future of their field

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Austin Lee Campbell thinks a lot about dying.

No, Campbell doesn’t plan to shuffle off his mortal coil any time soon. A hospital chaplain, Campbell is on emergency call to comfort grieving families and to pray at the bedsides of dying patients as they succumb to terminal illnesses.

A PhD candidate in religion, Campbell believes dying in hospitals is hard, not just because mortality can be tough to face; medical institutions use language that makes dying a win or lose proposition. “We fight a ‘war on cancer’ or a ‘battle against heart disease’,” he says. In our final moments, our focus is on the lost struggle, and we fail to acknowledge the value of a life well-lived. Campbell argues that we need new ways to comfort patients in their final moments.

“What on earth do you tell somebody who is facing death,” Campbell asks, “and, ultimately,  help them to live all the way up to an end that feels meaningful?”

Campbell’s academic research focuses on what makes dying in hospitals and other medical institutions emotionally painful, and suggests that classical and medieval consolation literature contains insight into better ways to console cancer and other terminally ill patients at the end of their lives.

This interdisciplinary approach reflects one direction scholarship in religion is taking, combining the study of faith with research in other disciplines—the classics, economics, environment, gender studies, international relations, literature, and political science—to tackle contemporary issues.

A Changing Focus

As scholars of religion increasingly pursue work outside the typical confines of the field, there’s been an equal surge of interest in the subject from researchers in other disciplines. Since 9/11, students studying business, economics, and politics are keenly interested in learning about world faiths, believing they hold the key to understanding global events. In response, religion departments have to develop courses to meet these needs, experts say.

This interest from inside and outside the discipline is driving the conversation about the future of religious study. “I think one of the things the study of religion has to do is increasingly pay attention to interdisciplinary approaches,” says Anne E. Monius, a professor of South Asian religions and a faculty member of the Committee on the Study of Religion. Religious studies must continue to concentrate on the present world.

Religion doesn’t operate independent of social, cultural, economic, and political concerns, Monius explains, and neither should the discipline that studies it. “Religious studies has to think about the ways in which, in the contemporary world and in history, religion has not operated in a hermetically closed or isolated sphere that is untouched by politics or economy or broader issues of society.”

The connectivity is apparent in her classroom, where Monius teaches “Contemporary Conversations in the Study of Religion.” The spring seminar’s main purpose is to get “students to think about their work and its broader contribution to the study of religion,” Monius says.

Because religious study has already become so interdisciplinary, it’s a challenge to find common topics for her students. “What is popular in ethics might be old hat to someone working in South Asian religion or Muslim studies,” Monius says. As a solution, she focuses on recent award-winning books.

A Greater Role

Monius is not alone in her conviction that the study of religion must embody an interdisciplinary approach in order to maintain relevance. Mara Block, a PhD candidate in religion, agrees.

“I think there’s dawning recognition that religion continues to play a role in social and political contexts,” Block says. “That is what I think is exciting and important about the future of the study of religion. There’s this fundamental point that religion shapes social, political, military, and  ethical worlds.”

Block’s research combines the fields of religion and medicine, and delves into the work of psychiatrists and Christian pastoral counselors, who deal with issues of sexuality, including homosexuality, in mid-20th century America, addressing core questions about how medicine, science, and religion shape people’s lives.

Block describes her scholarship as a departure from traditional religious studies, due in part to her use of historical documents and case histories that include those of Presbyterian minister Anton Boisen, the father of clinical pastoral education. Block examines the evolution of therapy’s purpose from the 1950s and 1960s, which ranged from helping homosexuals cope with emotional distress to asking if they could change their sexual orientation.

“What’s really interesting is that Christian pastors take up questions that many people are still interested in today,” Block says. “Many writing in the 1950s and the 1960s asked questions like: What is homosexuality and what causes it? What does it mean to ‘treat’ it? How does it impact religious lives and the religious and sexual identities that they entail?”

Campbell also believes religious studies must continue to be part of the search for answers to modern-day questions.

“I think interdisciplinarity is a valuable part of the study of religion right now, and I think it is only growing,” says Campbell, who plans on teaching after receiving his doctorate.

While a chaplain intern at a Boston hospital in 2009, Campbell noticed the frequent use of military metaphors—such as, the “battle with cancer”—by the medical establishment. He also recalls reading of a pharmaceutical CEO referring to death as a series of preventable diseases. This kind of talk, Campbell contends, reduces life from a series of meaningful experiences to death as an experience without meaning.

Instead of reaching for contemporary counseling guides, Campbell first turned to the early Christian theologian Augustine for answers. Just as battles have winners and losers, Augustine confronted advocates of dualism—the Manichaeans, a religious group who stressed the presence of good and evil, light and dark. Now, Campbell is turning to classical and medieval authors who wrote about facing imminent death. He’s reading Boethius, the sixth-century prisoner condemned to death for treason and author of “The Consolation of Philosophy.”

“I want to know, how can we really live up to an end that we can foresee and is inevitable,” Campbell says. “How do you not throw up your hands in despair? Is it possible, is it desirable?”

It’s not just about hospitals, medicine, and death. Campbell’s research may apply to environmental crisis, too. “It’s a good thing that people prevent unnecessary death,” Campbell says. “But the flip side is, what do you do when it becomes clear the end is near, whether it’s pancreatic cancer or melting ice sheets?”

The Way of the Future

Both Campbell and Block helped organize this year’s “Ways of Knowing” conference, an annual student-run event that promotes interdisciplinary discussion of prevailing assumptions (both within and outside the academy) about the differentiation, organization, authorization, and reproduction of various modes of knowing and acting in relation to religion.

One panel discussion, titled “The Future of the Study of Religion,” addressed trajectories, trends, and challenges facing the academic study of religion, and reflected upon the discipline’s future. The three religion experts on the panel expressed concern about the independence of religion departments, cautioning that programs risk losing their distinctiveness and blending into other humanities departments.

Francis X. Clooney, the Parkman Professor of Divinity and professor of comparative theology, director of the Center for the Study of World Religions, and a Catholic priest, believes that people who teach religion must also practice some form of it. “A person who has no religious practice will probably end up in a humanities department, because in some way there has to be a tug of religious identity,” said Clooney. Melding, he argued, was as inevitable “as the melting of the icebergs.”

Janet Gyatso, Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies at Harvard Divinity School, praised the effects of other disciplines on religious studies. “We have an enormous amount we can learn from scholars—literature showing how to read religious text, anthropologists who tell us about human society,” Gyatso said. “It’s all to the good.”

But Gyatso, too, worried about religion departments losing their identity. “I think it would be a shame to lose the distinctive quality of religious studies,” she said.

Ahmed Ragab, the Richard T. Watson Assistant Professor of Science and Religion and faculty organizer of the event, wondered if religious studies programs at some universities are being folded into humanities departments as a cost-saving measure. “The idea that, in abstract, all of these scholars work together is very exciting,” Ragab said. “But the way it happens in many schools is cost-cutting.”

Continuing Evolution

Over the years, the study of religion has evolved. At one time, college and university divinity programs existed solely to prepare students to lead congregations. By the 1970s, however, divinity schools had shifted their focus away from training ministers to teaching religion as “an enduringly important global phenomenon in history and in the present day,” Monius explains.

By the time she began teaching in the 1990s, Monius says religious education was undergoing another dramatic overhaul, including a rethinking of categories and basic vocabulary. “Since then, there has been greater focus on revisiting classics in the field and colonial-era scholarship, to consider anew what they might have gotten right,” Monius says. “There is also increasing emphasis on the troubling ways in which the categories the field has tried so hard to question—from ‘religion’ to ‘Hinduism’ or ‘Buddhism’—are often heavily politicized.”

Monius suggests that global conflict is making religious studies at universities more important. “After 9/11, nobody—no college dean or chair of any department—thinks religion is not important in the world today,” she says. “Whether they’re thinking about ISIS or ISIL running through Syria or Iraq, there’s no doubt religion is something that’s important for students at any level of university or college life to have some understanding of to be thinking citizens of world.”

As a result, colleges and universities face a challenge when it comes to teaching religion. Students are increasingly taking up religious studies in hopes of gaining a better understanding of politics, economics, and international affairs. To keep up with demand, religious studies programs have to put more effort into developing courses for students in other disciplines.

“We have to shift away from teaching religion exclusively to students who are concentrating in the subject or who are doctoral students,” Monius says. “In fact, we have to think more and more—if a student at Harvard takes only one course in religious studies, what should that course be, what should it look like? Speaking to contemporary events and showing the way religion is deeply enmeshed in politics, economics, sociology, historical structures, that is something the field has to attend to more carefully moving forward.”

Bringing together students from different disciplines presents opportunities—and challenges. Just as each faith is different, so too is each discipline’s methodological language. The goal at Harvard is to transcend such differences and create a common understanding across the departments, Monius says. Politics, economics, and religion, for instance, use different research methodologies. Last year, in an attempt to bridge this gap, Monius leveraged her role as acting director of the Center for the Study of World Religions to convene an interdepartmental conference, a first step in cross-department collaboration.

“Those of us who devote our entire academic lives to the study of religion have to lead the way,” she says.

Photos by Ben Gebo

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The Reality and the Future of Religion in America Essay

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Introduction

The success and failure of american religion, trends in modern-day churches, presbyterians and congregationalists religious denominations, the 2007 and 2014 spiritual landscapes, works cited.

The United States is a liberal society, which means there is a legal separation of state from religious institutions. The fundamental notion of religious freedom emphasizes people’s right to worship any faith and not favor any religion. Nonetheless, there is a rising dispute on the nation’s future in religion as a crucial component of a healthy society. This report examines facts to identify which religious groups are expanding and which are shrinking. The purpose of this study is to identify the influence of the dynamics of the religious landscapes in 2007 and 2014 and to understand the disparities between the trends of different beliefs. The trends show that Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists have the most divergent viewpoints. Despite the arguments, there is a strong pluralist attitude that different religious factions should be permitted to keep and grow their religion and beliefs within the community.

In the contemporary religious landscape of the United States, the Methodists and Baptists have an increasing number of adherents. Methodists and Baptists are both Christian denominations with several overlapping beliefs and teachings. Methodists and Baptists share a faith in God, the Bible, and the deeds and teachings of Jesus, whom they recognize as the Christ and savior of humanity (Finke and Stark 82). In essence, both beliefs hold baptism and fellowship to be foundational sacraments.

Baptists and Methodists

Perspectives on methodist ideologies.

The United Methodist Church (UMC) is a prominent branch of Methodism that believes people must form personal relationships with God. Its primary progenitor, the Methodist Episcopal Church, took over as the leader in 19th-century evangelical Christianity (Leone 77). In 1968, the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren Church formed the current organization. By the 19th century, there were 450,000 followers of the Wesleyan Methodist Church (Leone 81). The church’s expansion was most significant in industrial districts, where the Methodist religion assisted male and female laborers in enduring financial pain and alleviating poverty. Since the Methodist faith pushed them to live frugally, believers’ economic standing tended to improve. As a result, Wesleyan Methodism became a middle-class religion that emphasizes the individual is making a connection with God.

Baptists Ideologies

From the Baptist’s perspective, adhering to the notion of the perseverance of saints predominates. Baptists believe that if a person is saved, one cannot fall from grace, which directly opposes Methodist beliefs (Leone 181). Methodists believe that salvation is a personal decision and that one might lose salvation by falling from grace by disobeying God. Observations indicate that Baptists are generally more stringent and fundamentalist. The Bible is the only source of faith in such beliefs, and Baptists regard it as infallible. The opinions of Methodists are broader and less rigid. Some individuals may be fundamentalists, while others view the world as liberal. Baptist churches regard the Bible’s reasoning, practice, and direct knowledge as their religion’s foundations.

Today, there is evidence of increased belief in God as a supreme being, which is mainly in line with the Methodist views. For instance, trends show that in 2015, eight in ten churches in the UCC had weekly devotional participation of 1–100, an uptick of 15.1% within a decade (The UCC Center for Analytics 8). However, there has been a change in worship emphasizing the personal connection with God rather than the priest. Trends show that the fraction of churches with more prominent weekly attendance figures continuously declines (The UCC Center for Analytics 8). The increased uptake of believers in a personal relationship with God opened the space for people from different personalities in the Methodist community.

The idea of a personal relationship with God was not popular among the Presbyterians and Congregationalists. In 1801, Presbyterians and Congregationalists attempted to build a solid foothold with their adherents by creating division along a north-south axis. These prominent religions limited the time other religions may utilize public speech domains. However, both faiths destabilized each other’s popularity and weakened their respective positions in their respective fields. The American Revolution involving the enormous regional followings diminished the Episcopalians and Presbyterians population due to organizational issues (Finke and Stark 75). The Presbyterian’s emphasis on scripture and the sovereignty of God gave in to the Methodist’s unique connection to believers.

Congregationalist Philosophy

In Congregationalism, the concept stresses the right and obligation of each community to choose its affairs. The philosophical premise is that adherents need not submit their judgments to a superior human authority, removing bishops and presbyteries. Each church is considered to be free and independent. Congregationalists have historically opposed the endorsement of religion and advocated for civil and religious freedom—the focus on congregational freedoms of conscience. Many adherents of Congregationalism have adopted doctrinal and societal liberalism and participated in the ecumenical movement (Finke and Stark 89). However, as seen by the 2007 and 2014 trends, most Christians drifted toward the Methodist and Baptist interpretations of Christianity, making Congregationalists’ extremes unpopular.

The changes in the religious landscapes of 2007 and 2014 may be attributed to the advent of female leadership in churches and the expansion of the Methodists’ and Baptists’ ideological foundations. Figure 2 demonstrates that the proportion of active female Ordained Ministers has climbed dramatically over the last decade, from 31.9 percent in 2005 to 49.0 percent in 2015 (The UCC Center for Analytics 8). The trends show that in 2015, almost 38.1% of all church pastors, including lead pastors, were women, compared to 30.2% ten years prior (The UCC Center for Analytics 8). In 2010, over fifty percent of co-pastors and temporary supply pastors were women, while two-thirds of associate pastors were female.

The trends show an increase in feministic ideologies that shaped the church. According to the research, roughly one-third of UCC members have a Baptist Christian worldview. Studies revealed a rise in the proportion of UCC followers who belonged to smaller churches, with 34,1% of all members attending (The UCC Center for Analytics 8). The analysis recognizes that the tendency will continue in the following years.

Today, the Methodist and Baptist religious perspectives have prevailed, with increasing followers. The winner’s philosophy has a growing membership because the beliefs make it much easier for talented clergy members to join the church. In most cases, the views of religion in these churches aligned with the open American mindset. In the American religious system, any leader supported by the local populace is encouraged to establish new ideas in free-market competition. In American today, accommodating regulations means that the local community can participate in religious activities opening up the space for thinkers.

Eskridge, Larry. “One Way: Billy Graham, the Jesus Generation, and the Idea of an Evangelical Youth Culture.” Church History , 1998, 83-106.

Finke, Roger, and Rodney Stark. The Churching of America, 1776-2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy . Rutgers University Press, 2011.

Leone, Mark P. “The Problem: Religion within the World of Slaves.” Current Anthropology , 2020, 76-288.

The UCC Center for Analytics. The United Church of Christ: A Statistical Profile with Reflection/Discussion Questions for Church Leaders Research from the UCC Center for Analytics. The UCC Center for Analytics , 2016.

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IvyPanda. (2023, August 19). The Reality and the Future of Religion in America. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-reality-and-the-future-of-religion-in-america/

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IvyPanda . 2023. "The Reality and the Future of Religion in America." August 19, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-reality-and-the-future-of-religion-in-america/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Reality and the Future of Religion in America." August 19, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-reality-and-the-future-of-religion-in-america/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Reality and the Future of Religion in America." August 19, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-reality-and-the-future-of-religion-in-america/.

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Religion and Spirituality in East Asian Societies

2. religion as a way of life, table of contents.

• Religious switching in the region
• Religious switching in East Asia compared with the rest of the world
• Common beliefs and practices
• How former Buddhists in East Asia compare with lifelong Buddhists
• Other key findings in this report
• Religious composition
• How religious identity differs by age
• Religious switching
• Which groups have the biggest shares of new entrants?
• Persuading others to switch
• Attending Christian and Buddhist schools
• Feeling connected to one or more religions or philosophies
• How many religions can be true?
• Personal importance of religion
• Importance of religion around the world
• What people say Buddhism is – and is not
• Belief in unseen beings
• Belief in god
• Belief in angels and demons
• Belief in spirits inhabiting the physical world
• Belief in fate
• Belief in karma
• Belief in miracles
• Venerating religious figures and deities
• Rates of prayer
• Daily prayer around the world
• Visiting spiritual and religious sites
• Home altars
• Reflecting on life and the universe
• Fortunetelling
• Ancestor veneration rituals
• Communicating with ancestors
• Family gravesites
• How important are traditional funerals?
• Cremation and burial
• Belief in rebirth and nirvana
• Belief in heaven and hell
• Religion's role in society
• Religious leaders in politics
• Free speech and social harmony
• Should societies be open to change?
• Acknowledgments
• Methodology
• Appendix A: Sources

Typically, East Asia is considered to encompass China, Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea and Taiwan. In geopolitical terms, Vietnam is often categorized as part of Southeast Asia. But we surveyed Vietnam along with East Asia for several reasons, including its historic ties to China and Confucian traditions . Moreover, Buddhists in Vietnam practice the same strain of Buddhism (Mahayana) found across East Asia.

Throughout this report, the term “East Asia” refers to Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

When discussing trends throughout the broader “region,” we include Vietnam.

For legal and logistical reasons, we did not survey several other places that are generally considered part of East Asia. At present, China does not allow non-Chinese organizations to conduct surveys on the mainland, and public opinion surveys are not possible in North Korea. Conducting nationally representative surveys in Mongolia is difficult due to the nomadic lifestyle of a large part of its people. We did not survey Macau because its population is relatively small.

While many people in East Asia and Vietnam do not formally identify with a religion , most say they feel a personal connection to the “way of life” of at least one religious tradition or spiritual philosophy.

Most commonly, people in the region – including the religiously unaffiliated – feel personal connections to Buddhism and local or Indigenous religions. In South Korea, a majority also feel connected to the Confucian way of life.

Moreover, adults in the region often express an affinity for multiple traditions. In Japan, for example, 55% of adults say they feel a personal connection to at least one religious or philosophical tradition besides their own .

To measure this, we posed a series of questions, asking separately about Buddhist, Christian, Confucian, Daoist (also spelled Taoist) and local/Indigenous religions’ ways of life. (In Japan, we also asked about the Shinto way of life.)

Except in the case of the local/Indigenous religions item, we avoided using words such as “religion” or “religious tradition,” in part because many people do not consider Confucianism to be a religion. Moreover, we chose phrases like “personal connection” and “way of life” to capture people who might not relate to the word “religion” or formally identify with an organized belief system but who, nonetheless, feel an affinity for the way of life that these traditions or philosophies represent.

This series of questions also helps to gauge the effect of religious switching, by showing the shares of people who have left their childhood religion but continue to feel a connection to it in adulthood .

In this chapter, we also discuss what adults in East Asia and Vietnam consider Buddhism to be – a culture, a set of ethical teachings, an ethnicity, a religion or a family tradition – as well as the behaviors and attitudes that Buddhists say would disqualify someone from being truly Buddhist .

Among the region’s large shares of religiously unaffiliated adults, a fair number express a personal connection to at least one religious or philosophical “way of life.”

At least a third of religiously unaffiliated adults in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan say they feel a personal connection to the Buddhist way of life, and roughly one-quarter or more feel connected to a local or Indigenous religion’s way of life.

In South Korea, 58% of the religiously unaffiliated express a personal connection to the Confucian way of life.

People who formally identify with a religion are even more likely to say they feel a personal connection to that tradition’s way of life.

Among Buddhists across the region, at least six-in-ten say they feel a personal connection to the Buddhist way of life, including 95% of Vietnamese Buddhists who say this. (The percentage of people inside a group who say they feel a personal connection to the group’s way of life may be an indicator of the intensity of their sense of belonging.)

Among Christians, about three-quarters or more feel a personal connection to the Christian way of life. (The attitudes of Christians in Japan are not broken out separately because the sample size is too small.)

Christians are less likely than Buddhists to feel a connection to local or Indigenous religions. In all places surveyed except Vietnam, at least four-in-ten Buddhists say they feel connected to an Indigenous or local religion’s way of life.

Affinity for traditions besides one’s own

Taiwanese and South Korean adults are somewhat more likely than people in other places to feel a personal connection to some other religion’s way of life. In Taiwan, 39% of Buddhists, 38% of the religiously unaffiliated and 25% of Christians say they feel connected to the Daoist way of life. In South Korea, majorities of Buddhists, Christians and the unaffiliated express a personal affinity for the Confucian way of life .

More broadly, over half of all adults in South Korea (70%), Taiwan (67%) and Japan (55%) say they feel connected to at least one tradition besides their own , compared with smaller shares in Hong Kong (39%) and Vietnam (31%) who express similar connections.

Respondents in Japan were also asked whether they feel a personal connection to the Shinto way of life. Shinto is a set of traditional Japanese beliefs that can include the worship of gods and spirits known as kami . Though only 4% of adults in Japan identify Shinto as their religion, fully 27% say they feel a personal connection to the Shinto way of life. (In answers to a separate question, 38% of Japanese adults say they pray or offer respects to kami. Read more on this in Chapter 4 .)

Connections to one’s former religion

Given the high rate of religious switching in East Asia and Vietnam , we explored what happens to religious connections after people leave a formal identity behind. Specifically, we compared responses about personal connections among:

• Those who currently identify with a tradition;
• Those who were raised in that tradition but have since left; and
• Those who were not raised in that tradition nor identify with it now.

We consistently find a spectrum of attachments: People who no longer identify with a religion are less likely than those who do so currently to say they feel a personal connection to it. Still, people who were raised in a religion and have since left it are more likely to express a connection to that religion than are people who were not raised in it and who don’t identify it as their religion today.

For example, 72% of South Koreans who currently identify as Buddhist say they feel a personal connection to the Buddhist way of life. Among South Koreans who were raised Buddhist but no longer identify that way, 50% feel such a connection. And among all other South Korean adults, only 35% say they have a personal connection to Buddhism.

We know from past research that the five places included in this survey are very religiously diverse compared with other countries and territories around the world.

Given this diversity – and the extent to which people feel connected to traditions outside their own – it is perhaps unsurprising that respondents in this survey are more likely to say that “many religions can be true” than to say that “there is only one true religion.”

Among both Buddhists and the religiously unaffiliated, majorities in nearly all five places say that many religions can be true. But Christians are less likely to take this position.

In Taiwan, for example, roughly eight-in-ten Buddhists and unaffiliated adults – but only half of Christians – say that many religions can be true.

In general, younger adults and people with more education are more likely to say that many religions can be true. For example, the vast majority of Japanese adults under the age of 35 say that many religions can be true, compared with a slim majority of older Japanese adults (86% vs. 59%).

When asked how important religion is in their lives, people in the region tend to say religion is either not very or not at all important to them.

In Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan, half or more say religion is notvery or not at all important.

Only in Vietnam are adults more likely to say religion is important in their lives than to say it is not important (53% vs. 46%).

In no place surveyed do more than about a quarter of adults say religion is very important in their lives.

Christians are the most likely to consider religion to be very important to them. About a third of Christians or more across the region say this, including two-thirds of Vietnamese Christians.

Far fewer Buddhists say religion is very important to them. However, many Buddhists surveyed say that religion is at least somewhat important in their lives.

The religiously unaffiliated are the group least likely in this analysis to say religion is very important in their lives. Still, between 11% and 30% of the unaffiliated in each place surveyed say religion is at least somewhat important to them.

In all four East Asian societies surveyed, fewer than two-in-ten adults say religion is very important in their lives.

Only in Europe do similarly small percentages say this, according to surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center in 102 countries and territories since 2008. 7 For instance, 11% of adults in Hong Kong and Taiwan say religion is very important in their lives – as do 11% of adults in Belgium, France and Germany.

Other parts of the world have much higher shares who say religion is very important. This includes majorities across Africa and much of Latin America .

In the United States , 42% of adults say religion is very important in their lives.

(For information on when we conducted surveys in various countries and territories, go to Appendix A .)

Given that large shares of East Asians and Vietnamese adults identify with Buddhism or feel connected to its way of life, we wanted to explore what people in the region understand Buddhism to be.

Do they view Buddhism as a set of ethical teachings to guide actions? A culture one is a part of? A religion one chooses to follow? A family tradition one must follow? An ethnicity one is born into?

Across the region, large shares of adults in all religious groups – including overwhelming majorities of Buddhists in Hong Kong and Vietnam – say that Buddhism is a set of ethical teachings, a culture and a religion.

Buddhists are more likely than people in other religious groups to say Buddhism fits each description on the list. For example, roughly four-in-ten Buddhists in South Korea say Buddhism is an ethnicity, compared with about a fifth of South Korean Christians who say this (43% vs. 18%).

In Vietnam, 48% of Buddhists say their religion can be described by all five statements – i.e., that Buddhism is a religion, a set of ethics, a culture, a family tradition and an ethnicity. Far fewer Buddhists in Taiwan (6%) and Japan (4%) say all five statements describe Buddhism; Taiwanese Buddhists are least likely to describe Buddhism as an ethnicity, and Japanese Buddhists are least likely to call it a family tradition.

What can a person do and still be ‘truly’ Buddhist?

In addition to asking all respondents what Buddhism is, the survey asked those who identify as Buddhist whether certain beliefs or practices would disqualify a person from being “truly” Buddhist.

There is general agreement among Buddhists that not respecting deities or spirits would disqualify one from being truly Buddhist. Majorities of Buddhists in every place surveyed, ranging from 59% in Japan to 80% in Taiwan, say this.

Buddhists in Vietnam and South Korea are more likely than those elsewhere to say that several other beliefs or practices are crucial to being Buddhist. For example, 64% of Buddhists in Vietnam and 56% of Buddhists in South Korea say a person cannot be truly Buddhist if they do not have a Buddhist funeral. Fewer Buddhists in Hong Kong (43%), Japan (40%) and Taiwan (27%) say the same.

Most Buddhists surveyed across the region say you cannot be truly Buddhist if you do not respect elders, including nearly nine-in-ten Vietnamese Buddhists who say this.

Fewer Buddhists say that you cannot be Buddhist if you drink alcohol. (Avoiding intoxicants such as alcohol is one of the Five Precepts , a set of Buddhist teachings on morality for laypeople.)

Buddhists in the region are more divided as to whether one must respect where one lives to be truly Buddhist. Majorities in Vietnam (85%) and South Korea (64%) say a person cannot be Buddhist if they do not respect Vietnam or South Korea, respectively. In Taiwan, far fewer Buddhists – 41% – say respecting Taiwan is necessary to be truly Buddhist.

By contrast, clear majorities of Buddhists in all of the South and Southeast Asian places we surveyed in 2022 said that respecting where one lives is key to being truly Buddhist.

Other than in South Korea, very few Buddhists in East Asia and Vietnam say that a person cannot be Buddhist if they make offerings to or worship ancestors. Even smaller shares of Cambodian and Thai Buddhists said this in our 2022 survey. (As discussed in Chapter 5 , ancestor veneration practices such as burning incense, offering flowers and lighting candles are very common among Buddhists in East Asia and Vietnam.)

Buddhists in the region are somewhat split about whether celebrating the Muslim festival of Eid is compatible with Buddhism. While six-in-ten Buddhists or more in Vietnam and South Korea say celebrating Eid would disqualify someone from being truly Buddhist, only about four-in-ten Taiwanese and Japanese Buddhists take that position.

Nowhere does a majority think Christmas celebrations stop someone from being truly Buddhist. However, Buddhists in South Korea – which has the largest share of Christians in its population among the places analyzed – are more likely than Buddhists elsewhere to say that celebrating Christmas would disqualify a person from being truly Buddhist.

• For the purposes of this analysis, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia are included in Asia. These three Caucasus countries are located between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea in a border area between Europe and Asia. ↩

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6 facts about religion and spirituality in East Asian societies

Buddhism, islam and religious pluralism in south and southeast asia, religion in india: tolerance and segregation, being christian in western europe, religious belief and national belonging in central and eastern europe, most popular, report materials.

• Questionnaire
• Japanese main findings: 東アジア社会における宗教と精神性
• Japanese overview: 東アジア社会における宗教と精神性
• Korean main findings: 동아시아 사회에서의 종교와 영성(靈性)
• Korean overview: 동아시아 사회에서의 종교와 영성(靈性)
• Simplified Chinese main findings: 东亚社会的宗教与精神信仰
• Simplified Chinese overview: 东亚社会的宗教与精神信仰
• Traditional Chinese main findings: 東亞社會的宗教與精神信仰
• Traditional Chinese overview: 東亞社會的宗教與精神信仰
• Vietnamese main findings: Tôn giáo và tâm linh trong các xã hội Đông Á
• Vietnamese overview: Tôn giáo và tâm linh trong các xã hội Đông Á
• East Asian Societies Survey Dataset

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Religion as Make-Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity

Neil Van Leeuwen, Religion as Make-Believe , Harvard University Press, 2023, 312pp., $45.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780674290334.

Reviewed by Eric Schwitzgebel, University of California, Riverside

In  Religion as Make-Believe, Neil Van Leeuwen argues that factual beliefs (for example, that there’s beer in the fridge) differ greatly from “religious credences” (for example, that God is a trinity). Although people commonly say they “believe” the central doctrines of their religion, their attitudes are often closer to pretense. Hence, religion as “make-believe”.

According to Van Leeuwen, if you factually believe that there is beer in the fridge, your attitude normally has four functional features:

(1)  It is involuntary . You can’t help but believe that there’s beer in the fridge upon looking there and seeing beer.

(2)  It is vulnerable to evidence. If you later look in the fridge and discover no beer, your belief will vanish.

(3)  It guides actions across the board. If the question of whether beer is in the fridge becomes relevant, you will tend to act in light of that belief.

(4)  It provides the informational background governing other attitudes. For example, if you imagine a beer-loving guest opening the fridge, you will imagine them noticing the beer.

Religious credences, as Van Leeuwen characterizes them, have none of these features. If you “religiously creed” that God is a trinity, that attitude is:

(1)  Voluntary . In some sense, you choose to have this religious credence.

(2)  Invulnerable to evidence . Factual evidence, for example, scientific evidence concerning the origin of the universe, will not normally cause the credence to disappear.

(3)  Guides actions only in limited contexts. Outside of specifically religious contexts, the credence has little influence on behavior.

(4)  Doesn’t reliably govern other attitudes. You will not, for example, alter your understanding of logic in light of the trinity paradox.

Although some people may factually believe some religious doctrines, Van Leeuwen holds that commonly what religious people say they believe they instead religiously creed.

Van Leeuwen describes his view as a “two map” view. Many religious people have one picture of the world – one map – concerning what they factually believe, and a different picture of the world – a different map – concerning what they religiously creed. These maps can conflict. Someone might factually believe that Earth is billions of years old and religiously creed that it is under a million years old. Such conflict needn’t be irrational, since the attitudes differ. Compare: You might believe that Earth is billions of years old but imagine, desire, or assume for the sake of argument that it is under a million years old. We draw different pictures for different purposes. On Van Leeuwen’s view, the same holds for religious credence.

Why do we have religious credences, if they are so tenuously connected to evidence? Van Leeuwen suggests that religious credences function to support group identities: They guide symbolic actions (for example, ritual behaviors) that signal group allegiance; and by professing “belief” in religious doctrines, people indicate and partly constitute their membership in a social group. Notably, the second function is best served if the religious credence is not well supported by factual evidence. If factual evidence compelled everyone to believe that God is a trinity, endorsement of that proposition would not distinguish group members from others. “Sacred” acts and values work similarly: Treating something as inviolable often works as a criterion of inclusion in a group identity. However, religious people typically factually recognize that sacred objects are ordinary mundane objects (an edible wafer, a simple doll) and can readily shift to conceptualizing them as unimportant outside of the context of the symbolic action.

Van Leeuwen also presents empirical evidence for a distinction between “think” and “believe” in ordinary usage, arguing that people more commonly use “think” for factual beliefs and “believe” for religious credences. It’s more natural to say I think there’s beer in the fridge and I believe that God is a trinity than the reverse. Such usage differences appear not only in Indo-European languages (for example, glauben in German and creer in Spanish being aligned with religious credence) but also in unrelated languages such as Thai and Mandarin (p. 136-139).

Plausibly, some people have religious attitudes that match the functional profile of Van Leeuwen’s religious credence. They voluntarily choose those attitudes. Counterevidence doesn’t budge them – not because they deny the counterevidence, but because they don’t regard their religious doctrines as factual, much as a child knows that their pretend telephone is not in fact a telephone but instead really a banana. And their attitudes are segregated from practical action and reasoning outside of religious contexts. At a Passover Seder, perhaps, they affirm their Jewish identity by choosing to say “God spared our firstborn sons” – but outside of temple they readily accept, perhaps even insist, that such stories are historically false. Van Leeuwen clearly articulates how such religious cognition differs from ordinary factual belief, neatly explaining several features of it, such as why factually unsupported propositions often play a central role. Belief theorists across a wide range of theoretical viewpoints can generally agree with Van Leeuwen that in such cases the affirmed religious proposition is not really “believed” (in the sense of “belief” standard in recent Anglophone philosophy).

However, also plausibly, as Van Leeuwen explicitly acknowledges, some people factually believe, and don’t just religiously creed, some of the doctrines of their religion. These “true believers”, as we might call them, are guided by religious doctrine whenever the content is relevant. They include those doctrines in the cognitive background governing their other attitudes. And they feel rationally compelled to reject any apparent counterevidence – for example, some young-Earth creationists who reject mainstream science. Their one map of the structure of the world builds God’s creation right into it, and anything that conflicts must be rejected. True believers’ religious doctrines are not a second, optional map, deployed when convenient in religious contexts and otherwise set aside.

The question then becomes: How typical is the first form of religious cognition? Van Leeuwen presents no systematic evidence concerning the proportion of religious make-believers to religious true believers. Still, Van Leeuwen invites the reader to regard make-believe as typical. For example, there’s the title: Religion as Make-Believe . This suggests a general account of religion as it typically occurs. He portrays evangelical Christians in the United States as typically having make-believe religious credence, not factual belief, in doctrines such as the effectiveness of petitionary prayer. We might accept religious make-believe in Van Leeuwen’s sense as a genuine phenomenon, which he has helpfully noticed and skillfully theorized, while wondering how common it is.

I conclude with three concerns.

(1) The distinction is too sharp.  While Van Leeuwen allows the possibility of intermediate attitudes with some characteristics of factual belief and some characteristics of religious credence, he appears to regard intermediate cases as atypical. However, on an alternative and potentially empirically attractive view, big-picture attitudes typically have functional profiles somewhere between those that Van Leeuwen associates with factual belief and those he associates with religious credence.

Consider contents like: My teenage daughter has a great eye for fashion , or dispositionalism is the best approach to the metaphysics of belief , or all the races are intellectually equal . On a wide range of secular topics we care about, we ignore some counterevidence, tolerate some inconsistency, half-choose to allow ourselves to be or not to be convinced, and sometimes permit ourselves to deploy different ideas in different contexts. If religious attitudes also often inhabit this in-between space, being somewhat but not entirely voluntary, evidence-resistant, and divorced from mundane thought and action, then we have a smear of intermediate cases rather than two sharply distinguished attitude types.

(2) Van Leeuwen insufficiently attends to weak belief. A member of the Vineyard Christian movement claimed in religious contexts that a shock they experienced from their coffeemaker was a demonic attack, but also repaired their coffeemaker and described the shock in a more mundane way in non-religious contexts (p. 78-80). People who engage in petitionary prayer for healing typically also see doctors (p. 86-88). And people often confess doubt about their religion (p. 93-95, 124-125). Van Leeuwen leans heavily on such facts in making the case that people often don’t factually believe what they religiously endorse. Such observations are excellent evidence that the people don’t believe with 100% confidence that the demon shocked them, that the prayer will heal them, and that the central tenets of their religion are all true.

But such observations are virtually no evidence against the possibility of ordinary factual belief of perhaps 75% confidence that a demon shocked them, that prayer will heal, and that the central tenets are true. Alternative explanations, backup plans, and expressions of anxious doubt can be entirely appropriate and rational manifestations of low-confidence factual belief. On page 226, Van Leeuwen acknowledges and partly rebuts this “weak belief” explanation of religious attitudes, but the possibility doesn’t receive the attention it deserves earlier in the book. Much (though I agree, not all) of the waffling, double-mindedness, and situational variability in many people’s religious attitudes could be an ordinary reaction to uncertainty rather than signaling an attitude type other than factual belief. This undercuts an important element of his case for the distinction.

(3) If credence and belief are different attitude types, why do we feel rational pressure to reconcile their contents? [1]   There is no rational conflict whatsoever between believing that Earth is billions of years old and imagining, desiring, or assuming for the sake of argument that Earth is under a million years old. We can construct conflicting maps for those different attitudes, feeling no rational pressure from their divergent contents. Believing P stands in no rational conflict with imagining not-P. But it doesn’t seem like most of us are, or should be, so easygoing about conflicts between religious attitudes and factual beliefs. Of course, some people are easygoing, such as the Passover Seder make-believer. However, I expect – and this is an empirical conjecture that could be tested with a careful application of Van Leeuwen’s framework – that most people, especially to the extent they say that they “believe” the doctrines of their religion, will reject conflicting factual content. They will say, for example, “Earth really is young. Mainstream science is wrong.” In other words, they feel the tension.

If so, most self-described believers don’t really have two attitudes types with conflicting content that needn’t be reconciled but instead one attitude type, representing Earth as either actually old or actually young. If they buy the science, they reinterpret the creation stories as myths or metaphors. If they insist that the creation stories are true, they reject the scientific consensus. What most people don’t appear to do is hold both the standard scientific view that Earth is literally old and simultaneously the religious view that Earth is literally young, with no felt tension. One or the other proposition will normally be treated as non-literal. Alternatively, someone might settle instead on a low-credence, intermediate, agnostic state. Note here the difference between modeling religious cognition through two factual beliefs with contents rendered non-conflicting (belief that P and belief that mythologically not-P) versus modeling it, as Van Leeuwen does, through different attitudes toward contradictory contents there is no rational pressure to reconcile (factual belief that P and religious credence that not-P). A one-attitude view nicely explains felt tension and the impulse to uncertainty or agnosticism. The tension is more difficult to explain on a two-attitude view.

Given its plausibility as an account of at least some religious cognition, Van Leeuwen’s Religion as Make-Believe constitutes a major achievement in the study of religious attitudes, which will and should shape discussion of religious belief for decades to come.

[1] I owe this objection in part to Thomas Kelly, who raised a version of it in a workshop discussion of Van Leeuwen’s work at Princeton in June 2022. See also my Splintered Mind blog post “The Overlapping Dispositional Profiles of Different Types of Belief” (Sep 12, 2022), Van Leeuwen’s guest post “The Rational Pressure Argument” (Oct 13, 2022), and my “Religious Believers Normally Do and Should Want Their Religious Credences to Align with Their Factual Beliefs” (Mar 14, 2024), all at https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com .

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Jared Taylor, American Renaissance, June 21, 2024

Will it help save white people?

Thumbnail credit: © Joe Giddens/PA Wire via ZUMA Press This video is available on Rumble , BitChute , and Odysee .

Christianity is dying in the West. The religion that, for centuries, defined Europeans is increasingly becoming a Third-World religion. What does this mean for white people?

This is the article got me wondering: “Hundreds of Scottish churches up for sale as UK turns away from Christianity.”

The Church of Scotland has to sell churches. In the last 20 years, it lost a million members – in a country of only 5.4 million – and lost 40 percent of its clergy. A majority of Scots now say they have no religion at all.

You can pick up this 2,800 square-foot church in Inverness-shire for just $44,000.

The price is about one fifth the average house price in the area, and the church is a good deal bigger. It’s already zoned to be a school or museum, but you could get permits to turn it into a disco or your own little castle.

If you go upmarket, there is the 14,500-square-foot St. Marks Church in the center of Aberdeen.

It will cost you nearly half a million dollars, but look at this gorgeous interior.

Even what may be the oldest church in Scotland, the 900-year-old Birnie Kirk in Moray, had to close its doors.

It was in continuous use since 1140, but now there aren’t enough Christians to keep it going.

This is happening everywhere. Last year, this art-deco church in Picardy, France, went on sale for $278,000.

This former church in Utrecht, the Netherlands, is a now a bar.

In Wisconsin, what was once a church has become a restaurant.

This American church is now a private home. The children ring the bells on New Year’s Eve.

We think of Italy as a deeply Catholic country, but in Naples, “only 79 out of the 203 churches [are] being used for legitimate worship.”

In 2018, young Neapolitans took over the 6th century church of San Gennaro for a Halloween party.

Baku, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

They dressed as priests and vampires, while DJs played deafening music.

The climax of the evening was a simulated hanging of a young woman.

This is part of a performance in the Church of Mercy in Leira, Portugal, with “dancers” on the main alter.

The church dates to 1498.

You don’t have to be a believer to be grieved by this indifference, even contempt, for Christianity.

There have been early non-white Christians – the Ethiopian Church is one of the oldest – but for perhaps 1,000 years, Christianity was at the heart of what it meant to be white.

Credit Image: © Carola Frentzen/DPA/ZUMAPRESS.com

As late as 1924, the Catholic writer and historian Hilaire Belloc wrote: “Europe is the faith and the faith is Europe.”

In Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 novel Treasure Island, when Jim Hawkins comes across a castaway in the Caribbean, the first words out of the man’s mouth are “I’m poor Ben Gunn, I am; and I haven’t spoke with a Christian these three years.” Jim immediately thinks, “I could now see that he was a white man like myself.”

To be Christian was to be white and to be white was to be Christian. Europeans didn’t “have” a religion. It was as inevitable as language or ethnicity.

There was no such thing as religious preference as if it were like taste in food or drink.

Missionaries closely followed explorers, and Columbus was just as much missionary as explorer.

Spreading salvation through Jesus was a joyous part of the white man’s burden.

As a missionary hymn from 1819, put it:

From many an ancient river, From many a palmy plain, They call us to deliver Their land from error’s chain!

In vain with lavish kindness The gifts of God are strown, The heathen in his blindness Bows down to wood and stone!

Credit Image: © Creative Touch Imaging Ltd/NurPhoto via ZUMA Press

Now, as Europeans leave the Church, the churches the missionaries founded have grown enormous. Wesleyan University describes the massive racial shift in believers. “A drastic decline in the number of Christians in Western Europe and, to a lesser degree, in North America has been offset by enormous gains in Asia (where Christianity has multiplied 15-fold since 1900) and Africa (where it has multiplied 42-fold). Whites now comprise only a minority of Christians worldwide.”

Here are the ten biggest populations of Christians.

The United States is still number one with about 247 million nominal Christians, but Brazil and Mexico are numbers two and three. The Philippines, Nigeria, China, Congo, and South Africa are all in the top ten.

Even in the United States, only about 44 percent of Christians are white.

As the top bar of this graph shows, only 34 percent of whites – the dark blue block – go to church every week. On the next row, Hispanics are more churchgoing than whites, with 39 percent in the pews each week. Blacks are the most ardent Christians, with 47 percent in church every week.

There are 236 cardinals in the Catholic Church and they come from all over the world.

Credit Image: © Evandro Inetti/ZUMA Press Wire

Here is a listing of cardinals by continent. As you can see, the 109 from Europe account for fewer than half.

Nor are the 27 from North America all white. One is from Haiti, two are Mexican, and one American cardinal is black. Only one of the three from Oceania is white. The others are from Tonga and Papua New Guinea. Roughly 70 percent of Catholics are now non-white, and some day there will be a BIPOC Pope.

So, whites are becoming less Christian and some are even anti-Christian. At the same time, a growing majority of Christians are not white. What does this mean for us?

First, whites have not just lost something that once defined them. They have also lost a spiritual bulwark. For most people, there is no greater comfort than to believe what everyone else believes. To be Christian was protection against despair, alienation, and rejection of tradition.

In earlier times and even now, Sunday services are an esthetic refuge from coarse music and soulless architecture.

And church congregations are healthy communities of people who care about every aspect of each other’s lives.

How can the decline of something so central to cultural and racial identity not have a devastating effect? We have surrendered to science and calculation, but calculation does not push an exalted people to greater heights. Men do not lay down their lives for their interests. They lay down their lives for their passions and they do not calculate their passions.

Religion is strongly associated with better mental and even physical health.

Religious whites have more children than non-believers, and church is the bedrock institution for those who honor marital vows and are determined to build strong families.

At the same time, though, many of the dwindling number of active churches openly oppose white consciousness and are far more likely to fly the gay flag than their national flag or even the Christian flag.

Credit Image: © Gina M Randazzo/ZUMA Press Wire

Credit Image: © Joe Giddens/PA Wire via ZUMA Press

Many Christians don’t even know there is a Christian flag.

As Christianity becomes non-white, it ceases to be a source of racial unity. Some Christians still take the traditional view that the faith is Europe, but most believe that the faith knows no boundaries. White Christians can, of course, set up separate communities that are explicitly white and Christian. The marvelously successful Afrikaners-only South African town of Orania is deeply religious.

All-white Christian communities could be built in the United States, and some might accept upright, racially aware non-believers. It may be that only Churchmen will have the commitment and discipline needed for separation.

In either case, a vigorous, traditional faith of our fathers will surely be part of any strong white identity and successful separation.

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The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Here’s the state of abortion rights now in the US

Judges, state lawmakers and voters are deciding the future of abortion in the U.S. two years after the Supreme Court jolted the legal status quo with a ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade

FILE - People march through downtown Amarillo to protest a lawsuit to ban the abortion drug mifepristone, Feb. 11, 2023, in Amarillo, Texas. Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court ended a nationwide right to abortion, travel and pills have become big parts of the issue.(AP Photo/Justin Rex, File)

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FILE - Paul Meacham holds high a sign that reads “Ohio is pro-life” as the crowd prays during the Ohio March for Life rally at the Ohio State House in Columbus, Ohio, Friday, Oct. 6, 2023. Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court ended a nationwide right to abortion, travel and pills have become big parts of the issue. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

Judges, state lawmakers and voters are deciding the future of abortion in the U.S. two years after the Supreme Court jolted the legal status quo with a ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade .

The June 24, 2022, ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization sparked legislative action, protest and numerous lawsuits — placing the issue at the center of politics across the country.

Abortion is now banned at all stages of pregnancy, with limited exceptions, in 14 Republican-controlled states. In three other states, it’s barred after about the first six weeks, which is before many know they are pregnant. Most Democratic-led states have taken actions to protect abortion rights, and become sanctuaries for out-of-state patients seeking care.

That’s changed the landscape of abortion access, making it more of a logistical and financial ordeal for many in conservative states. But it has not reduced the overall number of procedures done each month across the U.S.

Here’s what to know about the state of abortion rights in the U.S. now.

Limited abortion access prompts more out-of-state travel

Bans in Republican-led states have prompted many people seeking abortions to travel to get care.

That translates into higher costs for gas or plane tickets, hotels and meals; more logistics to figure out, including child care; and more days off work.

A new study by the Guttmacher Institute, which advocates for abortion access, found that out of just over a million abortions provided in clinics, hospitals and doctors’ offices, more than 161,000 — or 16% — were for people who crossed state lines to get them.

More than two-thirds of abortions done in Kansas and New Mexico were for out-of-staters, particularly Texans.

Since Florida’s six-week abortion ban kicked in in May, many people had to travel farther than before, since throughout the Southeast, most states have bans.

Low-income patients and those lacking legal permission to be in the country are more likely to be unable to travel. There can be lasting costs for those who do.

In Alabama, the Yellowhammer Fund, which previously helped residents pay for the procedure has paused doing so since facing threats of litigation from the state .

Jenice Fountain, Yellowhammer’s executive director, said she met a woman recently who traveled from Alabama to neighboring Georgia for an abortion but found she couldn’t get one there because she was slightly too far into her pregnancy. So she then went to Virginia. The journey wiped out her rent money and she needed help to remain housed.

“We’re having people use every dime that they have to get out of state, or use every dime they have to have another child,” Fountain said.

It’s usually provided with pills rather than procedures

FILE - People march through downtown Amarillo to protest a lawsuit to ban the abortion drug mifepristone, Feb. 11, 2023, in Amarillo, Texas. (AP Photo/Justin Rex, File)

Nearly two-thirds of known abortions last year were provided with pills rather than procedures .

One report found that pills are prescribed via telehealth and mailed to about 6,000 people a month who live in states with abortion bans. They’re sent by medical providers in states with laws intended to protect them from prosecution for those prescriptions. The laws in Colorado, Massachusetts, New York, Vermont and Washington specifically protect medical providers who prescribe the pills to patients in states with bans.

The growing prominence of pills, which were used in about half of all abortions just before the Dobbs ruling, is a frontier in the latest chapter of the legal fight.

The U.S. Supreme Court this month unanimously rejected an effort by abortion opponents who were seeking to overturn or roll back the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, one of two drugs usually used together for medication abortions. The issue is likely to return .

Abortion is on the 2024 ballot

In this presidential election year, abortion is a key issue.

Protecting access has emerged as a key theme in the campaigns of Democrats, including President Joe Biden in his reelection bid . Former President Donald Trump , the presumptive Republican nominee, has said states should decide whether to restrict abortions. He also suggested states could limit contraception use but changed his tune on that.

“We recognize this could be the last Dobbs anniversary we celebrate,” Kelsey Pritchard, a spokesperson for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America said in an interview, noting that if Democrats win the presidency and regain control of both chambers of Congress, a right to abortion could be enshrined in the law.

The issue will also be put directly before voters in at least four states. Colorado, Florida, Maryland and South Dakota have ballot measures this year asking voters to approve state constitutional amendments that would protect or expand access to abortion. A New York measure would bar discrimination against someone who has an abortion. There are attempts to put questions about abortion access on the ballots this year in Arkansas, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska and Nevada.

There’s also a push for a ballot measure in Arizona, where the state Supreme Court this year ruled that an 1864 abortion ban could be enforced. With the help of some Republicans — Democrats in the Legislature were able to repeal that law .

Generally, abortion rights expand when voters are deciding. In the seven statewide abortion policy-related votes since 2022, voters have sided with abortion rights advocates in every case.

It’s still up to the courts — including the Supreme Court

FILE - Paul Meacham holds high a sign that reads “Ohio is pro-life” as the crowd prays during the Ohio March for Life rally at the Ohio State House in Columbus, Ohio, Friday, Oct. 6, 2023. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

The Dobbs ruling and its aftermath gave rise to a bevy of legal questions and lawsuits challenging nearly every ban and restriction.

Many of those questions deal with how exceptions — which come into play far more often when abortion is barred earlier in pregnancy — should apply. The issue is often raised by those who wanted to be pregnant but who experienced life-threatening complications.

A group of women who had serious pregnancy complications but were denied abortions in Texas sued, claiming the state’s ban is vague about which exceptions are allowed. The all-Republican Texas Supreme Court disagreed in a May ruling.

The Supreme Court also heard arguments in April on the federal government’s lawsuit against Idaho, which says its ban on abortions at all stages of pregnancy can extend to women in medical emergencies. The Biden administration says that violates federal law. A ruling on that case could be issued at any time.

Meanwhile, bans have been put on hold by judges in Iowa, Montana, Utah and Wyoming.

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Review Essay: Roberto Mangabeira Unger, The Religion of the Future

2015, Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Related Papers

Richard Polt

Richard Polt, Review of The Religion of the Future, by Roberto Mangabeira Unger. Political Theory 43:5 (October 2015): 695-699.

Contemporary Pragmatism

Lenart Škof

In his insightful essay »Prophetic Religion and the Future of Capitalist Civilization« Cornel West fervently addressed a question of our abilities to imagine a more empathetic, more compassionate, and also more hospitable world, in which we could foresee, or perhaps already lay ground for a future community where the word religion would simply mean that we live our lives in the consciousness of our finitude and thus in an existential and cognitive humility. This kind of religion (not far from Dewey’s or Rorty’s ideals) would enable us to see beyond the margins of any narrow-minded religious ideology or any violent incarnation of religion. Based on these initial thoughts, we first wish to discuss two basic concepts of contemporary political theology – community and vulnerability. We shall argue that we need to offer in contemporary political theology a basic ethico-democratic response, infused with our imaginative capacity for remembrance (Benjamin, Metz) and future hope (West, Dewey...

Paolo Costa

A tricky question lies behind the whole secularization debate. What will be of “secularity” after the supposed demise of its opponent? Will it still make sense to speak of the “secular” in the absence of a “transcendent” alternative? At first sight, it would seem more sensible to ask this question against the backdrop of historical scenarios such as Gauchet’s “la sortie de la religion”. The issue could then be settled by resorting to Wittgenstein’s famous metaphor of the ladder: we employ religion to dispose of religion just as we employ philosophy to “throw away” the ladder after climbing up on it. But what will the world look like after that? Many observers of the contemporary world apparently think that the endpoint will be an atmosphere of “widespread indifference” (Bruce). Yet, if one is inclined, as I am, to give more credit to Taylor’s view that religion is likely to preserve an “independent motivating force” also in the future, it makes sense to try to formulate hypotheses on how human religiosity will look like in the context of the new secular conditions of belief. And, a fortiori, it makes sense, more generally, to ask how these new religious expressions will help to extend and refine our understanding of the religieux on the whole. Taking cue from the current flourishing of initiatives and theories on “walking”, I will argue in my paper that the human “désire d’éternité” is likely to appear in the guise of an oversignification of ordinary practices. I propose, then, to see in this need to force the limits of ordinary life a resilient disposition to establish an intentional relationship with the totality of experience, yet without embracing or confronting it from an external “view-from-nowhere” standpoint.

Igbokwe Justice

ServiciosKoinonía - 2

There is more talk about the decline of Christianity in the West every day. Both Catholicism and Protestantism are in a deep crisis, in Europe and in North America. But more observers are foreseeing that after the crisis of Christianity other religions will undergo a crisis. There is the suspicion that the present crisis is not due to a problem of Christianity itself, but more to the nature of “religions” as we know them, and the growing incapacity of these to accommodate to the deep cultural changes that are under way. The hypothesis of the advent of a so-called “post-religional paradigm” wishes to express the possibility of our facing a very deep socio-cultural transformation, in which “Neolithic religions” will stop being viable when the “society of knowledge”1 gets rooted, which will be a “post-religional”2 society, and in which religions that have been unable to free themselves from ancestral “religional” conditionings will be relegated to residual margins of the course of present history. It is obvious that this paradigm-hypothesis would coexist with very opposed phenomena of religious conservatism, spiritual revivals, charismatism and neo-pentecostalism. This new paradigm may be present mostly in some specific geographical sectors, but some observers state that the symptoms are growing in urban sectors that are educated, both young and adult, with access to culture and technology... it might be starting to appear also in Latin America (also in Africa and Asia?). Without taking into account quantitative field investigations, we want to concentrate on the theorising of a first reflexive and inquisitive presentation of what we want to call “post-religional paradigm,” which we present to be debated and contrasted by the community of students of theology and of the sciences of religion, as well as pastors and all people concerned about the present evolution of the religious.

Mendo Castro-Henriques

A New Humanism Conference at Sacred Heart University, Connecticut, Mass. 1997 Mendo Castro-Henriques Universidade Católica Portuguesa [email protected] The geopolitical situation we live in, at the beginning of the 21st century is unprecedented; we are travelling in unchartered territory. The fact is that humanity feels again the frailty of its situation in cosmos. This experience is aggravated by a variety of uncertainties about ourselves; we are self-threatened in our original nature and historical destiny by the forces we unleashed. Such existential uncertainty of contemporary humanity reproduces writ large, the same anxiety of survival of archaic man (Arnold Gehlen). There is a growing belief of a catastrophe of global proportions that requires, as in ancient societies, the practice of rituals of renewal (Mircea Eliade).We know that historical man is free to respond to the divine ground of being and to struggle against the mystery of iniquity. This is our ontological security. To admit that we accept and respond to the divine presence subverts the utopia of those who strive to transform the search for truth into a historical accomplishment of the “perfect society”.

International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society

Jose Casanova

Shortly after the turn of the century, Emile Durkheim announced that the old gods were dying while new ones had not yet been born and that "the cult of the individual" and the sacralization of humanity it entailed were bound to become the new religion of modern societies.1 Here Durkheim was simply following a long line of Enlightenment prophets, SaintSimon

Different Forms of Religiosity and the modern world

Milena Z . Škobo

Roland Ndille

¿HAcia un paradigma pos-religional?

EATWOT Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians

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Watch CBS News

Louisiana becomes first state to require that Ten Commandments be displayed in public classrooms

Updated on: June 19, 2024 / 9:18 PM EDT / CBS/AP

Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom, the latest move from a GOP-dominated Legislature pushing a conservative agenda under a new governor.

The legislation that Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law on Wednesday requires a poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments in "large, easily readable font" in all public classrooms, from kindergarten to state-funded universities.

Opponents questioned the law's constitutionality and vowed to challenge it in court. Proponents said the measure is not solely religious, but that it has historical significance. In the language of the law, the Ten Commandments are "foundational documents of our state and national government."

The posters, which will be paired with a four-paragraph "context statement" describing how the Ten Commandments "were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries," must be in place in classrooms by the start of 2025.

Under the law, state funds will not be used to implement the mandate. The posters would be paid for through donations.

The law also "authorizes" but does not require the display of other items in K-12 public schools, including: The Mayflower Compact, which was signed by religious pilgrims aboard the Mayflower in 1620 and is often referred to as America's "First Constitution"; the Declaration of Independence; and the Northwest Ordinance, which established a government in the Northwest Territory - in the present day Midwest - and created a pathway for admitting new states to the Union.

Not long after the governor signed the bill into law at Our Lady of Fatima Catholic School in Lafayette on Wednesday, civil rights groups and organizations that want to keep religion out of government promised to file a lawsuit challenging it.

The law prevents students from getting an equal education and will keep children who have different beliefs from feeling safe at school, the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom from Religion Foundation said in a joint statement Wednesday afternoon.

"The law violates the separation of church and state and is blatantly unconstitutional," the groups said in a joint statement. "The First Amendment promises that we all get to decide for ourselves what religious beliefs, if any, to hold and practice, without pressure from the government. Politicians have no business imposing their preferred religious doctrine on students and families in public schools. "

In April, State Senator Royce Duplessis told  CBS affiliate WWL-TV  that he opposed the legislation. 

"That's why we have a separation of church and state," said Duplessis, who is a Democrat. "We learned the 10 Commandments when we went to Sunday school. As I said on the Senate floor, if you want your kids to learn the Ten Commandments, you can take them to church."

The controversial law, in a state ensconced in the Bible Belt, comes during a new era of conservative leadership in Louisiana under Landry, who replaced two-term Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards in January. The GOP holds a supermajority in the Legislature, and Republicans hold every statewide elected position, paving the way for lawmakers to push through a conservative agenda.

State House Representative Dodie Horton is the author of the bill. In April, she defended it before the House, saying the Ten Commandments are the basis of all laws in Louisiana, WWL-TV reported.

"I hope and I pray that Louisiana is the first state to allow moral code to be placed back in the classrooms," Horton said. "Since I was in kindergarten [at a private school], it was always on the wall. I learned there was a God, and I knew to honor him and his laws."

Similar bills requiring the Ten Commandments be displayed in classrooms have been proposed in other states including Texas, Oklahoma and Utah. However, with threats of legal battles over the constitutionality of such measures, no state besides Louisiana has succeeded in making the bills law.

Legal battles over the display of the Ten Commandments in classrooms are not new.

In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a similar Kentucky law was unconstitutional and violated the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution, which says Congress can "make no law respecting an establishment of religion." The high court found that the law had no secular purpose but rather served a plainly religious purpose.

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