Dogma Aversion Syndrome

On the one hand, the higher levels of religiosity present in America (compared to Europe) are often attributed to the lack of an established state-sponsored church in the US. Religions compete in an open marketplace for followers and this competition improves the products and services available, or so the capitalist thinking goes.

However, as with my recent post on economic dynamism driving us towards cultural individualism, there seems to be an inherent conflict of interest at work here. If religions are competing for *customers* then the power of the moral injunctions (thou shall nots) religions are supposed to be instilling in believers runs counter to the customer-is-always-right ethos that pervades all other kinds of *consumer* interaction we participate in.

Burger King doesn't tell me what to do, they let me have it my way. It's hard to see the Pope embracing quite the same attitude on things. But maybe he just needs to hire some better PR staff.

From USA Today:

For the past two years, I have asked students in my introductory religion courses at Boston University to get together in groups and invent their own religions. They present their religious creations to their classmates, and then everyone votes (with fake money in a makeshift offering plate) for the new religions they like best.

This assignment encourages students to reflect on what separates "winners" and "losers" in America's freewheeling spiritual marketplace. It also yields intriguing data regarding what sort of religious beliefs and practices young people love and hate.

[snip]

What strikes me most about my students' religions, however, is how similar they are. Almost invariably, they mix fun with faith. (Facebookismianity anyone?) But they do not mix faith with dogma. My students are careful — exceedingly careful — not to tell one another what to believe, or even what to do. Above all, they want to be tolerant and non-judgmental.

[snip]

During the 1930s, the neoorthodox theologian H. Richard Niebuhr skewered liberal Protestants for preaching "a God without wrath (who) brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross."

But my students' "dogma aversion" (as one put it) goes liberal Protestantism one further. These young people aren't just allergic to dogma. They are allergic to divinity and even heaven. In the religions of their imagining, God is an afterthought at best. And the afterlife is, as one of my students told me, "on the back burner."

[snip]

In their final exam this past semester, I asked my students to reflect on whether young Americans are the canaries in the mines of more traditional religions. Study after study has shown that American college students are fleeing from organized religion to mix-and-match spirituality.

So what will happen to what one of my students referred to as the "religions of discipline" when this millennial generation (born in the late 1970s through the 1990s) grows up? What will today's youth do with religions whose ethical injunctions arrive as strict commandments rather than friendly suggestions? Will they be able to abide religions that divide the human family into the saved and the damned, that present as absolute truth what they suspect is mere speculation?

My students' projects suggest that traditional religions are in trouble.

[snip]

One of my students, Carrie-Anne Solana, told me that the religions her colleagues presented in class amounted to nothing more than "organized atheism." "They took normal human impulses," such as eating, drinking, sleeping, having sex and socializing, she said, "and justified them under the title of religion while not offering any form of explanation into why we are here, where we came from or where we go when we die."

I am not saying this is a good thing. Clearly any faith so thoroughly vacated of its moral strictures isn't much of one. But it seems that the cultivation of moral virtue needs to be presented as having more value to young people in the here and now. Adhering to doctrine needs to lead to a *good life* in this life.

Now *good* can be defined in many different ways, not merely as simple hedonistic happiness. But if all the benefit to following dogma accrues only in the after-life, well that's a recipe for declining market share.

And I'm not quite sure this type of thing is going to make up for that: