U.S. pluralism demands new approach to religion, Miles says

Americans are increasingly religious, according to surveys and other studies, but what does it mean to be religious in a society in which one’s own religious beliefs and practices are not broadly shared?

Margaret Miles, dean and vice president for academic affairs at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, asked Stanford graduates and their families to search with her for answers to that question during baccalaureate ceremonies Saturday, June 12.

Miles, the John Dillenberger Professor of Historical Theology, said Americans no longer can assume that their neighbors belong to one of just three religious traditions. Her remarks were part of a ceremony on the Quad that deeply reflected the religious diversity of which she spoke. Senior Class President Erica Straus gave a Jewish invocation, then three other students read from the Bhagavad Gita, al-Ghazali and the New Testament of the Bible. The Stanford Talisman a cappella group sang two religious prayers in Zulu. Stanford Taiko performed a drumming blessing named for Amaterasu, the Shinto sun goddess, while a more traditional baccalaureate processional was played by the Whole Noyse instrumental group.

As if more evidence of the diversity were needed, Miles quoted from a recent book and CD, The Pluralism Project, by Harvard Professor Diana Eck, which tracks the sprouting of Hindu, Buddhist, Baha’i and Jain temples, Islamic and Zoroastrian centers and Sikh gurdwaras in American cities, suburbs and small towns. The religious meeting places of newer immigrants are just down or across the street from Protestant and Catholic churches and Jewish synagogues built by earlier groups of immigrants and their descendants, Eck wrote.

“Religious loyalties also are increasingly shaped by ethnic identities,” Miles said. The United States has Hispanic Baptist congregations, Chinese Catholics, and Thai, Vietnamese and Cambodian Buddhists. In Los Angeles alone, according to Eck’s book, 200 Buddhist temples serve religious communities from all over the world.

Non-religious spiritualists

Miles noted another component of religious diversity, which two Stanford graduate students also reflected upon later. That is the individuals, often numerous in universities, who claim they are spiritual but not religious because they are critical of some features of religious institutions and people.

Jennifer Evers, who received a master’s degree in East Asian studies the following day, spoke after Miles about the “confusion and skepticism” with which many of her university friends greeted her decision to be baptized in the Lutheran church last Easter. She joined the congregation, she said, because it helped her “accept who I am, faults and all,” and proved to her that “intellectual and spiritual spheres are not mutually exclusive.”

Quintus Jett, who received his doctorate in industrial engineering, spoke of the advice he received from many at the university to be “selfish.” Graduate students are frequently advised, he said, not to have children while in school and not to become too involved as junior faculty in teaching students, lest they not publish enough to make tenure. Jett said he was grateful for the counter-balancing effect of the “What Matters to Me and Why” lecture series begun by students several years ago. In the series, students select faculty and staff members to speak in a side chapel of Memorial Church about matters of the heart as well as the intellect. As he begins an assistant professorship at Rice University, Jett said, those speakers’ words will help him remember to continue to pray, as his African American ancestors did during times of injustice and joy, and to make relationships with other people his top priority.

America’s pluralist situation demands that people make changes in at least four “old ways” of understanding religion, Miles suggested. First, “doctrinal truth is no longer quite at the center of what it means to be a religious person today.” Religious communities are composed of people who “come together to encourage each other ­ to ‘egg each other on’ ­ to live out … their commitments to [their] worldviews and values,” she said. “Religion is about how we care for one another, for life in its many forms and for the earth’s precious and vulnerable resources.”

Second, she said, religious chauvinism must go. “It is time to notice that people of different religious convictions have more in common with one another than they do with people who claim no religious conviction,” she said. “It is possible to believe strongly in the divine revelation of one’s own religion while recognizing that its beliefs and practices emerged in history as human efforts to give form and substance to that revelation.”

Third, Miles said, in the context of American life, a religious commitment to the common good requires individuals to challenge cultural values rather than assume they will confirm their own.

Finally, she said, some traditional as well as contemporary views of spirituality as “disembodied” should be challenged. “No spirituality should help us to transcend the needy world in which we live, a world that requires our attention, our affection and, most of all, our work.”

Pilgrim’s Progress

Miles said she grew up the daughter of “immigrant fundamentalist parents” and inherited some religious attitudes that she now considers “dangerous.” As a child, she read John Bunyan’s 17th-century The Pilgrim’s Progress, a devotional manual that her parents placed on her bedside table.

In the book, “when the protagonist, Christian, receives training in how to conduct the Christian life, he is taught to be on the alert for, and fight against, adversaries of all sorts,” she said. “When Christiana, Christian’s wife, is given parallel instructions, she is taken to a shed where a sheep is being slaughtered. Her instructor says to her, ‘You must learn of this sheep to suffer, and to put up with wrongs without murmurings or complaints. Behold how quietly she takes her death, and, without objecting, she suffers her skin to be pulled over her ears.’

“These devotional instructions obviously supported and reinforced, rather than challenged, both of the main characters’ gender socialization,” she said. “Then as now, a deliberately chosen and cultivated religious life should instead provide an alternative perspective from which to look critically at one’s socialization.”

Miles emphasized the difficulty of “standing for something” in a culture that is “organized by consumption and pacified by entertainment. ” But she added that humans have never found it easy to “distinguish between our religious commitments and our socialized assumptions and attitudes.”

She also critiqued the way in which some Americans use the word spirituality “as an antonym to ‘religious.’ People say, for example, ‘I’m not religious, but I’m a very spiritual person,'” she said.

The statement “could mean that the person rejects religious organizations but acknowledges some of the values ordinarily associated with religious world views. Or, the person who claims to be ‘spiritual but not religious’ may avoid religious community and practices, thinking of spirituality as disembodied, a transcendence of body and community by mind. It could, and often has, meant disconnecting one’s spirituality from political and social responsibility.”

Traditional Christianity has warned people about the danger of attachments to power and possessions, she said, but less frequently and forcefully warned them of “the equal dangers of resignation, passivity, cynicism and indifference to the suffering and struggling of other living beings.” Some Christian theologies compound the problem by stressing “humans’ child-like dependence” on God, and therefore “fail to challenge Christians to mature acceptance of activity and accountability,” she said.

“The feminist philosopher Dorothy Dinnerstein once wrote, ‘We never feel as grown-up as we expected to feel when we were children.’ Because we do not always ­ or, perhaps, often ­ feel confident and capable, we evade responsibility. Yet we are the grown-ups.”

Miles urged the new graduates and their families to “resist disembodied spiritualities and accept the grown-up responsibility for working together to address the urgent needs of our unjust world.”