TruthBook Religious News Blog

Andrew Brown
Wednesday 21 January 2009

Watching Obama's inauguration with its repeated invocations of the deity, both formal and informal, it struck me how astonishingly prolific America has been in religious inventions. A short list of religious ideas invented in America would include at the very least religious toleration (from Rhode Island) from the 17th century, the open-air revival meeting (from the Great Awakening) from the 18th, Adventism, and Mormonism, from the 19th century and Pentecostalism and Alcoholics Anonymous from the 20th.

Then there are all the American innovations which are either questionably religious, like worshipping your own constitution or the "free market", or were in some sense pioneered in Europe, like theocratic model settlements. This last also falls into the third category: American religious innovations that were ultimately unsuccessful, along with Christian Science, utopian communes, and, let us hope, scientology.

But the successful American religious innovations have all spread round the world. They have not just become ideas, but transnational cultures bound up with ritual and strengthened by myths about their own history. There has been nothing at any other period of history like that fountain of social invention emerging from one country or civilisation.

Their success is often taken to be an endorsement of the free market in religions: more precisely, it is argued that this is the outcome of consumer choice, as opposed to some nationalised model of religious provision. But to see these belief systems as choices made by rational and autonomous adults is to misunderstand what made them successful and what distinguishes them from the failures.

In the shopping model of religion, nothing much hangs upon your choice. If it doesn't fit, you can give it back, or go to another church. And of course a lot of American religion runs like this, but when it does, it doesn't last. The ones which have lasted and spread are those whose adherents feel that they don't have a choice. They are not deciding what to believe. They are recognising what is true.

This is most obvious in the case of AA, where it is also explicit. The convert is told that unless they understand the world in a certain way, they will die; and so far as anyone can tell, that's actually true. But of course this isn't and doesn't have to be denominational. As it happens, the three AA members I know best are all Christians, but that, I think, is because they are all journalists more or less specialising in religious affairs. But they are none of them proselytisers and I know slightly a couple of alcoholics who were distressed to have to invoke a higher power to stay alive. It went against all their principles. I want to get some of them to write about this experience, but that's for later.

If you don't convert, as to Pentecostalism or AA, then the inevitable quality of the religion has to arise from childhood. I think this is much less effective than conversion as an adult. If it were really the case that childhood indoctrination is impossible to break, the Catholic church in Ireland would never have collapsed: what happened there was broadly speaking that an entire generation which had been brought up as Catholic children stopped as adults believing and performing the rituals of belief and then failed to pass on either to their children. If these ideas about indoctrination were true, this could not have happened at all. But it did happen, for reasons which aren't entirely clear, but which seem to go back to the generation before the one that lost its faith: it's not enough to bring children up in certain beliefs, or rituals. What's needed is that life should continue to reinforce the message that these rituals work, and that the beliefs are true even if you can't see why.

Incidentally, there is of course nothing uniquely religious about a belief that is true because it just is. I have absolutely no idea why Australians don't fall off the bottom of the planet. I know there is a force called gravity, and that it works and accelerates things at 32ft per second per second. But I have absolutely no idea why this should be the case; it's just a given fact about the universe. Actual religious faith can work that way too. It doesn't appear to the believer as a willed belief, but as a recognition of brute truth.

This is of course extremely frightening. It's not much fun from from the inside, but it's even worse from outside and that's why I think that the greatest American innovation is the first: religious tolerance. It demands the ability to marry an experience of inner compulsion with the terrifying understanding that other people may have inner compulsions which are just as real and compelling, but entirely different from yours. This is horribly unnerving when you understand it applies even to of members of your own tribe. But it now seems to most Americans a simple brute fact about human nature, which they understand their constitution to say with its talk about the separation of church and state. Of course, that means they can't understand people who don't think the American constitution is a vehicle of universal truths, but then no tolerance is perfect and this one has just been proved a little wider than anyone thought possible a year ago.

Labels: America, Andrew Brown, innovation, President Obama, religion, tolerance