Moby was recently interviewed by RELEVANT magazine, and this particular question (well, the answer really) I found pretty interesting:
In an interview with RELEVANT a couple years ago, you talked about some negative views on the state of Christianity. Do you think anything has changed?
It’s hard, because I think that individual Christians are quietly doing amazing things; they’re ministering to the poor and sick. The quiet, humble Christians seem like the ones who are really trying to walk in the footsteps of Christ. It’s the loud, arrogant, judgmental, obnoxious Christians who seem to give the rest of Christianity a really bad name.
When I see religious leaders being judgmental and arrogant, I want to pull them aside and say, “You’re supposed to work out your faith in humility and fear and trembling.” You’re supposed to approach everything in a spirit of nonjudgmentalism and compassion and love and forgiveness, and I don’t see a lot of evidence of humility and love and faith on the part of leaders. I find that to be really dispiriting.
So… thoughts?
Zack Exley, author of Revolution in Jesusland has found some evidence suggesting that “Christians are the only radicals anymore with a mass audience”. His findings counter the mainstream media’s perception that Christians in America are the very opposite of radical revolutionaries, caring only about preserving their conservative values.
I have been thinking about what Zack is claiming, and a whole lot of questions have been running through my head, many of which I am still trying to process. I cannot help but to wonder though, that if this evidence is true, and Christians are the dominating force in the dialogue of revolution, why is it then that the main stream media is not picking this up? Why do they continue to promote a Christianity that is conservative rather than progressive?
Interesting article reposted via CNN
(AP) — The U.S. religious marketplace is extremely volatile, with nearly half of American adults leaving the faith tradition of their upbringing to either switch allegiances or abandon religious affiliation altogether, a new survey finds.
The survey found the Roman Catholic Church has lost more members than any faith tradition.
The study released Monday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life is unusual for it sheer scope, relying on interviews with more than 35,000 adults to document a diverse and dynamic U.S. religious population.
While much of the study confirms earlier findings — mainline Protestant churches are in decline, non-denominational churches are gaining and the ranks of the unaffiliated are growing — it also provides a deeper look behind those trends, and of smaller religious groups.
“The American religious economy is like a marketplace — very dynamic, very competitive,” said Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum. “Everyone is losing, everyone is gaining. There are net winners and losers, but no one can stand still. Those groups that are losing significant numbers have to recoup them to stay vibrant.”
The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey estimates the United States is 78 percent Christian and about to lose its status as a majority Protestant nation, at 51 percent and slipping.
More than one-quarter of American adults have left the faith of their childhood for another religion or no religion at all, the survey found. Factoring in moves from one stream or denomination of Protestantism to another, the number rises to 44 percent.
One in four adults ages 18 to 29 claim no affiliation with a religious institution.
“In the past, certain religions had a real holding power, where people from one generation to the next would stay,” said Penn State University sociologist Roger Finke, who consulted in the survey planning. “Right now, there is a dropping confidence in organized religion, especially in the traditional religious forms.”
Lugo said the 44 percent figure is “a very conservative estimate,” and more research is planned to determine the causes.
“It does seem in keeping with the high tolerance among Americans for change,” Lugo said. “People move a lot, people change jobs a lot. It’s a very fluid society.”
The religious demographic benefiting the most from this religious churn is those who claim no religious affiliation. People moving into that category outnumber those moving out of it by a three-to-one margin.
The majority of the unaffiliated — 12 percent of the overall population — describe their religion as “nothing in particular,” and about half of those say faith is at least somewhat important to them. Atheists or agnostics account for 4 percent of the total population.
The Roman Catholic Church has lost more members than any faith tradition because of affiliation swapping, the survey found. While nearly one in three Americans were raised Catholic, fewer than one in four say they’re Catholic today. That means roughly 10 percent of all Americans are ex-Catholics.
The share of the population that identifies as Catholic, however, has remained fairly stable in recent decades thanks to an influx of immigrant Catholics, mostly from Latin America. Nearly half of all Catholics under 30 are Hispanic, the survey found.
On the Protestant side, changes in affiliation are swelling the ranks of nondenominational churches, while Baptist and Methodist traditions are showing net losses.
Many Americans have vague denominational ties at best. People who call themselves “just a Protestant,” in fact, account for nearly 10 percent of all Protestants.
Although evangelical churches strive to win new Christian believers from the “unchurched,” the survey found most converts to evangelical churches were raised Protestant.
Hindus claimed the highest retention of childhood members, at 84 percent. The group with the worst retention is one of the fastest growing — Jehovah’s Witnesses. Only 37 percent of those raised in the sect known for door-to-door proselytizing said they remain members.
Among other findings involving smaller religious groups, more than half of American Buddhists surveyed were white, and most Buddhists were converts.
More people in the survey pool identified themselves as Buddhist than Muslim, although both populations were small — less than 1 percent of the total population. By contrast, Jews accounted for 1.7 percent of the overall population.
The self-identified Buddhists — 0.7 percent of those surveyed — illustrate a core challenge to estimating religious affiliation: What does affiliation mean?
It’s unclear whether people who called themselves Buddhists did so because they practice yoga or meditation, for instance, or claim affiliation with a Buddhist institution.
The report does not project membership figures for religious groups, in part because the survey is not as authoritative as a census and didn’t count children, Lugo said. The U.S. Census does not ask questions on religion.
Disenchanted with church like many North American college students, Curt spent his Sundays playing Halo on his roommate’s X-BOX. For two years he allowed that bitterness to fester and grow. Although, his love for the Head of that church never did quite fade away.At the tail end of his sophomore year (2nd year for the Canadian readers), Curt’s understanding of the Bible changed. As he read the familiar words, they took on a life of their own, and he began to distinguish that the safe Bible he had known and loved was actually a call for radical change. No longer did Jesus’ call to sell all you have and give it to the poor seem like an abstract concept. Rather it became a concrete call that Curt had to follow. And the next thing he knew, he had dropped out of college to embark on a journey in search of living out the not so comfortable parts of the Gospel.
Along this voyage, God began to restore and multiply his love; renewing it, not only for the paraplegic Church, but also for those that the Church struggles to love: the untouchables of our society. Today Curt is a writer, worship leader and homeless man, who is about to be ordained.
It was in the process of struggling to prepare for his ordination that Curt became homeless. Not because he lacked the financial means, but because he wanted to approach the position as Jesus would. Curt is a strong believer that Jesus would not let anybody in the Church live less comfortably than Himself. It is this idea that has driven Curt to do the same, giving up the certainty and comfort of a home, for uncertain couches and floors.
This experience has given him an unusual outlook on life, and what it means to follow God. The most striking to me was his words about being radical, “to be fair, at first, I thought it would be all spiritually hardcore and counter-cultural, but that’s only cause I was staring at the wrong culture. Heaven is not my eternal residence; it’s my current home and its culture is the only one to which I maintain any anthropological rights or ties.”
Let’s be honest. You’ve had this very thought cross your mind sometime in the past week: “Man, I wish I could help spread the word about The Ordinary Radicals!” (Okay, maybe it wasn’t exactly like that, but you do want to help… right?). Regardless of how that thought sounded in your head, the answer is the same:
You can!
We’ve put our minds together and after a couple weeks of some serious think-tanking, we came up with the following resources to better equip you to spread the word about this film. The banners below ready to be embedded on your websites, blogs, myspace pages, and any other place you see fit on the world wide web. Below them are a couple versions of the press kit that you can download.
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It is not hard to see that consumerism plagues our land. One of our countries biggest problems is obesity. And while we kill ourselves by eating too much, the other 80 percent of the world is literally dying from hunger.
It is not just food though, that is killing us. It is our addiction to buying things of all kinds. It is as if we find our worth in having the latest and greatest of all things. No matter what the cost to humanity. Sometimes it even seems that North Americans believe it is their divine right to consume more than their fair share, simply because they were born here.
There are some really cool movements out there, working to both raise awareness and combat consumerism. The Methodist Church of England is celebrating Lent with a Buy Less, Live More campaign. The USAntiheroes celebrate the real joy of Christmas, found in people not presents. And the Church of Stop Shopping is working in some outrageous ways to bring an end to overconsumption. So check them out, and let us know what you think, and what you are doing to reduce your consumption.
Becky Garrison came to visit a few days ago, and while she was here we set up a few cameras and asked her some questions. Her interview was insightful, thought provoking and full of hope. I am not going to lie; I got Goosebumps a few times.
Becky mentioned in passing the idea that another world is possible, and this thought has been rolling around in my head ever since. She went on to speak of how the desire for another world to come was the driving force behind the foundation of America. Today, across the country that need has awakened once again. American’s are tired of the war, of the poverty, of the pollution. They are sick of being a country that perpetuates terror, and they want a change. They want a new way of life.
It is this very yearning that is uniting conservative and liberals, Christians and non-Christians. People of all walks of life are coming together, as they always have in our nation, in order to proclaim and invoke a better world. A world where justice, freedom and liberty are for all.
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