Easter Sunday Face the
Nation with Bob Schieffer hosted an interfaith panel comprised of Catholic
Archbishop Timothy Dolan, Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde, Imam Suhaib Webb,
Evangelical Bishop Harry Jackson, and Rabbi David Wolpe. The topic was
contemporary American spirituality.
After allowing the Archbishop to gush about how cool it was
to pick a pope, Bob Schieffer asked the panel to comment on the recent Pew
Survey suggesting that Americans under forty were leaving organized religion in
droves. Their conclusion: the problem isn’t the message but the way it is
marketed. Wrong.
The reason people are leaving organized religion is that the
message is filled with irrationality, arrogance, ignorance, hatred, tribalism,
and an inability to see outside the official boxes into which religion seeks to
cram God.
After refusing to take the shift in American spirituality
seriously, the panel did their best to avoid saying anything interesting, and
worked hard to not ruffle each other’s feathers. They almost made it, too.
Late in the discussion (such as it was) Bishop Jackson
attributed the freedom of religion in the United States to the fact “we believe
this to be a Christian nation. We feel
like we've been persecuted in the places we came from, and we are going to
intentionally let this nation be founded in a way that if you come here and
you're Islamic, and you come here and you're Jewish, we're not going to
persecute you.”
Are you kidding me?
The only reason we have religious freedom in this country is because it became
clear to people that without it we would have endless war as different sects of
Christianity battled to control the nation.
To his credit Imam
Webb challenged Bishop Jackson’s false history of America, but no one came to
his defense. No one! At one point the Bishop said testily, “We have got a
strong disagreement,” to which the Imam said, “But we still love each other.”
What? We do? And
even if we do love one another, what does that have to do with the Bishop’s false
sense of American history?
And then Rabbi
Wolpe tossed out this non sequitur: “All I can say is dig the roots deep
enough, you’ll find us.” Who’s “us”? The Jews? Or did he mean the faux
Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition that Face
the Nation was promoting?
Not to be out done,
Bishop Budde added, “That’s right. And it’s—and who was there—who was here
before us…”
Who? The Native
Americans that’s who. You know, the people who gave us corn so we could make
syrup and ethanol?
If you want to know
why younger Americans are abandoning organized religion—listen to this panel.
3 comments:
I've always been interested in the effect that the internet has on people staying or losing their religion. The younger generation has access to more information than ever before, and much conflicts factually with the world views of many religions and likely their own.
I'm so glad I didn't tune in.
Religions are nothing more than another type of institution bent on self-perpetuation.
My connection to our Source is deeply personal and won't be forced into some sort of religious dogma - ever.
I agree with all of the above.
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