Religious (Il)literacy

This past Sunday marked Peter Steinfels' last "Beliefs" column in the New York Times. It was one of the few place in the Times where religion wasn't treated as a curiosity, something for simplistic, naive, unsophisticated rubes. Read the last column here. Steinfels gives a glimpse into the endangered species that is religion writing for thoughtful religious people. Religion writing no longer has a place for general readership. Whole sections are dedicated to Business, Sports, the Arts, even Real Estate. But the newspaper can't even sustain a bi-monthly column on religion. This is not a good sign for the secular culture's ability to tolerate and sensibly engage religion--it's a further sign of an "us-them" rift.

I'm not going to lament the day when the papers on Monday covered the sermons by the "Avenue" preachers the day before. BUT, it's a damn shame when a journalist can't even use the phrase "Apostles Creed" without adding the descriptor “the ancient affirmation of basic Christian doctrines.” Steinfels notes that the religious illiteracy of younger Times readers was largely to blame.

There are chickens and eggs here. Does the decline of religious journalism perpetuate religious illiteracy, or does religious illiteracy lead to the decline of religious journalism? Either way, you'd be hard pressed to find educated adults in this city who have the same learned perspective on religion that came through in Steinfels' columns. In his second-to-last column, he summarized what he's learned in 20 years of writing about religion's many and diverse forms:

First, the great world religions are complex and multilayered; they are rich in inner tensions and ambiguities that allow beliefs and practices to evolve over time as the faith is tested by new circumstances and insights. The great religions cannot be equated with the diminished and frozen fundamentalisms that they periodically spawn...

Second, religions encompass claims about truth and rules of conduct but cannot be reduced to doctrinal propositions or ethics. Religions involve orientations toward reality handed on in stories, rituals and paradigmatic figures as well as in creeds. Religions are embodied in communities and shape distinct ways of life.

Third, intelligence and critical reasoning are essential to adult approaches to faith. In short, theology matters. It is curious that so many otherwise thoughtful people imagine that what they learned about religion by age 13, or perhaps 18, will suffice for the rest of their lives. They would never make the same assumption about science, economics, art, sex or love.

Fourth, at least partly because of that assumption, a contemporary abundance of serious thought and scholarship about religion is marginalized. Thinkers and scholars who should have a presence in the intellectual and cultural landscape — whose books, for example, might well be noted in the annual “holiday” listings — are instead known almost entirely in their own religious circles or academic specialties...

Fifth, ...this column... has not dodged the great challenge to faith — and to the systematic examination of faith that is theology — posed by the existence of evil. The response of religious thinkers and leaders has been a recurrent topic, whether after events like the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, where religion itself was a source of the evil, or the great tsunami of 2004, where nature, that great mother and serial killer, went on a murderous rampage.

Sixth, a major concern threading its way through these columns is protection of conscience. From its Protestant and Enlightenment origins, American society has tended to honor the personal conscience of the dissenting individual — at least in principle, although, as any atheist running for public office can testify, not necessarily in practice. But what is applauded in individuals can seem intolerable in groups. Faced with religious bodies that resist prevailing opinion and hold to beliefs that either the majority Christian population or influential cultural elites consider retrograde, the nation has often balked.

Such a balanced, thoughtful approach to religion is rare in the media. It's just as rare among educated New Yorkers. I'll miss Beliefs. But I'm not sure the vast majority of Times readers will.