Freddie at L’Hôte says he’s not religious in any way, but the New Atheism has no appeal to him:

The new atheism has made its challenge, then. And here is my answer. I don’t believe in God, in any meaningful way. I am not a Christian or a Muslim or a Hindu or a Buddhist or a Jew, or whatever else you will. In questions of public policy I feel religion has no place, and rational discourse has to rule. I don’t want religious artifacts in the public square, I don’t want creationism taught in public schools, and I don’t want any religion privileged in any way by government. I am, in most every way that matters, a natural ally of atheism.

But atheism has expelled me. It has expelled me because it has in its heart contempt and loathing and fear of the other. So I reject it. I don’t reject all atheists; many atheist are uninterested in ridiculing the religious– they simply want to be left in peace, and not have religion forced on them or on the law. That, to me, is a principled atheism, and one I am happy to coexist with. But this new atheism, this anti-theism, has only contempt at its heart, and I reject it as thoroughly as it has rejected me.

Very well put. I would express the point this way: Principled atheism is, in itself, noble. It is merely a rejection of all that is religious that is worth rejecting, not merely to negate, but to affirm the positive role of science, rationality, skepticism, secularism, and tolerance. I think you can tell more principled atheists from their less mature cousins by their degree of willingness to “coexist” with religionists without ridicule, contempt, or hatred.

I’m a catholic Christian in the sense of accepting truth wherever it is found. I share Freddie’s respect for the separation of church and state, even as I see a softer, more permeable barrier between the two. It seems to me that the discussion of religious or philosophical motives and rationales is a necessary and vital part of political discourse, yet I still want legislators and judges to serve all their diverse constituents and not govern or judge by narrow, sectarian concerns. So I don’t think I would agree with everything Freddie has to say about religion, but I appreciate that we seem to have some points of agreement with regard to atheism.

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the link.

Technorati Tags: atheism, religion

I’m not surprised by the results of an Internet quiz telling me that Buddhism is the right religion for me. Sigh.

But in my view, the most interesting result is how the quiz says I rank on a scale of all religions:

Of course, this quiz is completely silly (words like God are completely undefined), but it’s worth a few laughs. I think if I were taking the quiz over again I would probably answer more affirmatively the questions on Christian dogma. Statements such as “I believe God is the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost” seem rather infelicitous, but not untrue.

Hat tip to C4Chaos.

Technorati Tags: religion

A variety of studies have shown that religion is linked to positive mental health and reduced mortality rates, but a new study suggests that the type of congregation makes an important difference. Catholic, Mainline Protestant, and Evangelical congregations are positively associated with increases in longevity, but Fundamentalist and Pentecostal congregations are more problematic. The implications of the study, according to Science Daily:

Because religious congregations play such an important role in shaping community well-being, Blanchard and his co-authors believe that the orientation of Catholic, Mainline Protestant and Evangelical congregations have important lessons to teach us about what it takes to improve community health and longevity.

“Policymakers and citizens, whether religious or not, should realize that socially engaged faith communities can enhance the well-being of society,” said Blanchard. “In this era of faith-based initiatives, our findings highlight the critical importance of religious organizations to the social service infrastructure.”

It appears that the study only included Christian churches. What would be very interesting is how different world religions compared in terms of contribution to mental health. If the critical factor is the degree of other-worldliness, then one would expect many Islamic congregations to contribute negatively to health, but worldly religions such as Confucianism and Shintoism would probably make a positive impact.

Thanks to The Lead for the link.

Technorati Tags: Christianity, mental health, religion

Now, I know there are some who bristle at the notion that faith has a place in the public square. But the fact is, leaders in both parties have recognized the value of a partnership between the White House and faith-based groups…. Now, make no mistake, as someone who used to teach constitutional law, I believe deeply in the separation of church and state, but I don’t believe this partnership will endanger that idea – so long as we follow a few basic principles. First, if you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can’t discriminate against them – or against the people you hire – on the basis of their religion. Second, federal dollars that go directly to churches, temples, and mosques can only be used on secular programs. And we’ll also ensure that taxpayer dollars only go to those programs that actually work. — Barack Obama

Barack Obama’s recent speech on faith-based initiatives deserves more attention than I have time to write about just now (at a cybercafe), but I want to make a salient point. That point is: Obama’s defense of faith-based initiatives, particularly his intention to require that taxpayer dollars don’t go to groups that proselytize or discriminate, is a terrific example of an Integrally-minded political policy at work. Traditional religious institutions are supported, even strengthened, with government assistance, but only to the extent that they meet the minimal requirement that they are good citizens in a diverse country. In Obama country, amber wins, but only if it resists creating a “dominance holarchy” wherein its intolerance and exclusivism (proselytization and discrimination) trump the values of orange’s egalitarianism and green’s pluralism. Since amber obviously has lots of problems avoiding a “dominance holarchy”, government helps the country move along its evolutionary path, with the more flexible and responsive elements of religion (orange and green) benefiting disproportionately over the recalcitrant traditionalists. Progress happens.

Of course, this phenomenon is scary as hell to conservative religionists. Rod Dreher writes:

But here’s something worth considering. Obama has recently declared himself opposed to the attempt to amend California’s constitution, or the U.S. Constitution, to ban same-sex marriage. He says that each state should make up its own mind, but that’s entirely disingenuous, because what he really means is that each state Supreme Court should make up its mind. If he were really in favor of the state making up its mind, he wouldn’t oppose this ballot initiative. Anyway, here’s the thing. If gay marriage gets read by SCOTUS into the US Constitution as a fundamental civil right, as Obama no doubt wishes, I’m pretty sure that no religious organization that adheres to the traditional Christian/Jewish/Muslim teaching about same-sex marriage will be eligible to receive taxpayer funds as part of any faith-based initiative. So his proclamation today that he will support and expand federal funding for faith-based initiatives would, in that case, mean that he would in effect support federal funding for liberal faith-based groups only. The only churches, synagogues, etc., that would be eligible to receive federal funds would be those that have abandoned traditional teaching on homosexuality. Right?

Well, that’s a bit paranoid. But surely there’s a sound point here: traditionalists will not be big winners of faith-based initiative contracts if they insist on continuing to discriminate. Government should not be telling religious people what to believe, and it certainly wouldn’t under an Obama presidency. But as for special benefits, there’s no guaranteed right to those. And when government grants religious groups those benefits, it stands to reason that religions that don’t play well with others will need to let those opportunities pass them by. In an Integral politics, as I see it, religious groups which discriminate should be free to do as they will, but government should not become party to the evil that they do. Sorry, no government subsidies for hate.

Technorati Tags: Dreher, faith-based initiatives, Obama, politics, religion

The professor decided to pursue the link between the temporal lobes of the brain and religious experience, so he set up an experiment to compare the brains of people with and without temporal lobe epilelpsy… In a remote region of northern Canada, a scientist put this controverial new science of neurotheology theto the test. Doctor Michael Persinger claims that by stimulating the temporal lubes, he can artificially induce religious experience in almost anyone.

Technorati Tags: brain, mysticism, neurotheology, religion, theology

Remarkably good news on the religion front, says an AP article by Eric Gorsky: “Religious Americans: My faith isn’t the only way.” Here’s the point:

“Look, this shows the limits of a survey approach to religion,” said Peter Berger, a theology and sociology professor at Boston University. “What do people really mean when they say that many religions lead to eternal life? It might mean they don’t believe their particular truth at all. Others might be saying, ‘We believe a truth but respect other people, and they are not necessarily going to hell.’”

Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum, said that more research is planned to answer those kinds of questions, but that earlier, smaller surveys found similar results.

Nearly across the board, the majority of religious Americans believe many religions can lead to eternal life: mainline Protestants (83 percent), members of historic black Protestant churches (59 percent), Roman Catholics (79 percent), Jews (82 percent) and Muslims (56 percent).

By similar margins, people in those faith groups believe in multiple interpretations of their own traditions’ teachings. Yet 44 percent of the religiously affiliated also said their religion should preserve its traditional beliefs and practices.

The belief in exclusivity of one religion’s claim to truth and supremacy of its believers to all others is the biggest obstacle in the way of the greater adoption of more Integral theologies throughout all the world’s religions. Some religions are naturally more open to universalism than others: the progressive (largley green altitude) Unitarian Universalism, but also liberal Protestant denominations and the (largely amber-to-orange altitude) Roman Catholic Church.

Regardless of the religion’s doctrines, what do the believers in the pews actually think? According to this Pew study, nobody really knows for sure. If soteriologies are complex, so are the ways that people assimilate the religious doctrines into their idiosyncratic belief systems. But it seems clear that more than 6 in 10 Americans are predisposed to believe that there is one tree, but many branches.

Technorati Tags: Christianity, religion, universalism

Technorati Tags: Christ, Christianity, religion, universalism

Technorati Tags: afterlife, Andrew Sullivan, religion

Originally posted on April 13, 2007.

Thursday, April 12’s post by Scripps Howard columnist and religion professor Terry Mattingly “Is GetReligion a ‘Christian’ blog?” has inspired readers and fans of the GetReligion blog to ask pointed questions about the nature and quality of the media’s coverage of religion and theology. My own brief comment (see item #10) advised the bloggers (Mattingly, LeBlanc, Hemingway, etc.) to look not only to the type of religious faith professed by the blog’s authors, but also at their relative level of consciousness.

In my view, the blog team’s commitments to Christianity are also rivaled in importance by their common adherence to conservative theological impulses arising from the mythic-membership or essentialist worldspace. [For readers confused by my colorizing of this blog post, see "What do the colors mean?"] In other words, the GetReligion team could easily add, say, an orthodox Jew or moderate American Muslim to the mix of blogging heads, but the result would not really be a significant expansion of their own vantage point. On the other hand, my own integral Christian perspective really probably wouldn’t gel too well with Mattingly’s or Hemingway’s styles.

In a follow-up comment on GetReligion on April 13, Terry Mattingly responds that I “should do more media criticism on [my] own blog. Honest.” I will take his suggestion under advisement! (However, my own blog is a rather idiosynchratic and experimental blend of usually personal posts. It’s probably not the best place for serious media criticism, I’m afraid.) Although unlike Mattingly I may not teach future practitioners of journalism their craft, I nevertheless could and probably should comment more about the successes and failures of the media in covering religion than I do.

Looking for Ghosts in the Story

But before returning to my view of the media and religion, let’s look a little closer at the fascinating GetReligion blog project. In February 1, 2004’s “What we do, why we do it,” the blogging team gets spooked out on ghosts.

One minute they are there. The next they are gone. There are ghosts in there, hiding in the ink and the pixels. Something is missing in the basic facts or perhaps most of the key facts are there, yet some are twisted. Perhaps there are sins of omission, rather than commission.

A lot of these ghosts are, well, holy ghosts. They are facts and stories and faces linked to the power of religious faith. Now you see them. Now you don’t. In fact, a whole lot of the time you don’t get to see them. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

And so the GetReligion team scans as many newsworthy items in the mainstream media as they can find, picks out the best and worst religion coverage, and shares their opinions on what the journalist did well or poorly. The various blog team members come from around the US or Canada, but they share a common outlook: they are all relatively conservative religionists whose radar screens are especially spooked by any effort by the so-called mainstream media to misrepresent evangelical or traditionalist Christianity. And so they use the tools and lingo of traditional, objectivity-seeking journalism to question bias, demand balanced coverage for Christians, and advocate for greater representation of “doctrinally informed” religion reporters in the newsroom.

Want to know why it’s unfair for the media to poke fun at conservative Mormon Mitt Romney’s holy underwear? Want to learn why it’s unfair for the media to portray gay couples raising children as “normal” parents instead of giving equal time to the view that they are narcissistic freaks who are raising a generation of confused youth? Want to learn why the media isn’t getting the tone of coverage right on totalitarian legal efforts to outlaw all abortion in Latin American countries? Look no further than GetReligion, where you are sure to find given expression the beliefs that “bias” always exists, it usually tilts to the left, and it very often shows up in unseemly places (especially the New York Times).

In Thursday April 12’s typical post “And [Pope] Benedict hates teddy bears, too” GetReligion blogger Mollie Hemingway calls a religion reporter an angry hack for snide remarks and superficial analysis of Pope Benedict’s upcoming trip to Brazil. She concludes, “I hope it felt good for [Joseph] Contreras to spew this piece, because it sure doesn’t serve any other purpose. I certainly don’t think Pope Benedict is above reproach, but this piece is just infantile.” She may or may not be right, but she’s boldly willing to call other reporters on their shit when she smells it stinking. I admire that. And I hope it felt good for her to spew that opinion on her blog.

From an AQAL-informed vantage point, I see most mainstream religion coverage in this country coming from somewhere between a mythic-membership and a postmodern pluralist vantage point (i.e., in the Integral Institute’s terminology of altitude [see "What is Altitude?"], amber to green). A few skilled writers also show the potential for existentially rich, multifaceted and holistic viewpoints and nuanced, evolutionary constructions of the various models of journalism (i.e., teal to turquoise).

However, most of the more advanced teal and turquoise writers are not covering religion news as beat reporters; they are writing as advocates, editorialists, and bloggers. As an aside, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald writes Unclaimed Territory from a yellow-to-teal perspective and is a daily read for me. He’s one of the most sensitive and intriguing blogger/commenters out there talking about the media’s shortcomings as he does recently in “Do national journalists agree with Gary Kamiya?”.

Some Ghosts Have Ghosts

Is there room for taking a more AQAL-informed approach to the mainstream religion beat? Of course! I feel the most urgent need for an integrally-informed religion journalism is for journalists to use (at least implicitly) multiple quadrants in forming their analysis and in identifying the comprehensiveness of their reportage. (See Ken Wilber’s A Theory of Everything or (free) “Introduction to Integral Theory and Practice” for a quick overview of the quadrants.) A Four Quadrant look at religion news would insist that individual subjective and social, cultural, and individual objective perspectives are all included. If there’s no room to include each of them in any given story, then the journalist should try to make explicit what is being left out.

From this perspective, most religion news today seems obsessed with the objective social angleQ/LR (what mainstream Christian or Jewish denominations are doing what, and whether they will divide in order to accomodate for disagreements within their communions, etc.). Such coverage usually seeks fairness and balance by quoting individual experts to give their “professional”Q/UR opinions regarding the social events happening in their midst. Reporters may interview, say, a religion professor who will offer that (a) US christian denominations are constantly multiplying and dividing and there is a historical precedent for mainstream denominations to schism when confronted with a controversial social issueQ/UR, but personally (b) she sure wishes everyone could just alongQ/UL. But then the reporter will ignore the “fluffy” opinions and just print the hard “professional” opinions.

There’s nothing wrong with focusing on the social angles on religion, of course. But this approach does have its shortcomings. GetReligion recognizes that unlike other types of news stories, religious stories are often influenced by doctrinal disputes–disputes with long and complex histories going back centuries. Would it kill journalists to occasionally treat religion news with the respect of acknowledging that religionists may be motivated by doctrine and faith/skepticismQ/LL, UL as well as by politics and objectivity/biasQ/LR, UR? When GetReligion makes this case, as they so often do, they are becoming unwitting advocates of a more integrally informed journalism. Include the Lower-Right Quadrant, they might say (if they were fans of AQAL theory), but please also look at the Lower-Left Quadrant and take it just as seriously.

Unfortunately, GetReligion falls short of a truly AQAL-based look at journalism, primarily because it neglects the roles of two of the four quadrants, types, states, lines, and (especially) stages. In terms of the STEAM acronym, they don’t look deeply or self-consciously at the Stages, Types, Experiences, or Modes (and their analysis of Angles falls short, too).

On types, for instance, GetReligion always speaks about good v. bad journalism and rarely seems to get that different personality types have an important role to play by shining through the supposed objectivity of the prose. Evidence of a particular type on display isn’t poor journalism; it adds color and nuance and relevance, thereby enhancing journalism. There is no appreciation for the contribution of both feminist (communal) and masculinist (agentic) types to journalism, for instance. Instead, there is is usually only GetReligion’s plea for “objectivity” and abandoning petty prejudices and agendas. In other words, their agenda is of the masculine type, not feminine (whether it’s being mouthed by a woman or a man). A more feminine approach is generally more comfortable in acknowledging the actual relationships between the reporter, the subject, and the audience.

On states, to take another example, GetReligion bloggers often insist that good journalists must do a certain sort of precise craft, generally impersonal and carefully-written, stodgy or breezy depending on the circumstances. But I say: Why not let journalists write in various modes of traditional prose, or light and lively personal reflections, using words and multimedia, with occasional forays into giving expression to alternative states of consciousness?

Give me Maureen Dowd. Then, once or twice a year, give me Maureen Dowd drunk or stoned (or strapped into a straightjacket). Let me see if I can tell the difference, and then float her actual state of consciousness into the column notes somewhere. Some alternative media outlets already do a fine job of this, and I’d like to see more of it. Perhaps the folks at GetReligion would also be okay with this, but I’ve never heard them mention it let alone recommend it as a technique for enhancing the media’s coverage of religion. I would love to see journalism that consciously gives expression to a variety of different states, including forays into prerational and transrational consciousness.

But GetReligion’s most significant shortcoming is its failure to acknowledge the existence of multiple stages of consciousness along various key developmental modes (e.g., the worldviews line or the spiritual line). Many of the problems they attribute to differences between “mainstream” v. “alternative” journalists, or between “good journalists” v. “bad journalists”, or “objectivity” versus “bias” are very good and usually healthy expressions of a mythic-membership journalist’s reading of how folks at other levels of consciousness are doing things. As such, it’s fairly predictable and can often be used to identify the mythic-membership or mythico-essentialist point of view on any problem involving religion and the media. However, it’s NOT truly being an advocate of objectivity. Real objectivity in journalism would be more like taking an integral approach.

Toward a More Integral Journalism

Make no mistake, GetReligion is NOT truly an advocate and friend of objectivity. Real concern for objectivity among journalists is expressed by self-consciously making itself aware of its particular location and contexts of expression AND, to the best of its ability, being aware of its own Kosmic Koordinates. With awareness of both cosmic and Kosmic coordinates, such journalists would formulate principles and theories for doing good, effective, integrally-informed communication. See the scholarly work done by contributors to the Integral Institute and other integrally-informed groups such as ARINA ’s Integral Review for more substantive critiques of contemporary communcation theories. Integrative theories would generally insist that the proper role of the newsroom is to offer stories that strive for fairness, inclusivity, comprehensiveness, sensitivity, accuracy, and trustworthiness … NOT merely a mythico-essentialist style of psuedo-objectivity.

Yes, reporters should generally present two or more sides to every issue in their news pieces. But they must not pick out what they hear as the two loudest voices in the dialogue, usually one a classic republican and a classic liberal, or a modern conservative and the other a modern socialist/liberal, allow those voices to speak at high volume, and then say that they’ve done their job. Instead, journalists should acknowledge their own situatedness in various contexts and personal commitments (just as the GetReligion bloggers often wisely do), but then strive to gain a broader, more expansive viewpoint that sensitively embraces the whole field. They should try to include as many quadrants and levels in the discussion as they can (with some attention to states, lines, and types insofar as it’s possible).

Good religion journalism won’t just stick to the big page-one stories, and then offer the top two conflicting sides of the issue equal time. As GetReligion rightfully insists, good journalism should penetrate the sociological conflicts of institution/politicsQ/LR to the cultural sources in theology/philosophyQ/LL. However, why stop there?

To survive and thrive, newsrooms must strive for diversity of gender, race, class, and point-of-view (including religionists of different stripes) so as to maximize the fertile fields of universal types that are allowed to be given expression. Whether there are more postmodern Wiccans or high-church Christian Orthodox in the newsroom isn’t nearly as important as whether there are personalities that take seriously both Descending and Ascending currents (i.e., types) of religion, because journalists who don’t “get types” or “get altitude” will often write in a way that always ridicules the contrasting perspective.

This is a somewhat technical way of making the common sense point that whites and blacks, men and women, gays and straights, etc., will often reflect their own tastes and styles in different and valuable ways (and even within those groups there are differences). Embracing diversity in the newsroom should enrich the stew of universal types (e.g., masculine v. feminine styles) of writing that are offered to the news audience. The result is good for everyone, especially newspapers, in building stories that accurately present the types of thinking done by readers of various types of persuasion.

But let’s not stop with increasing diversity to get more universal types flowing more freely into a wider context. Let’s also aspire to a journalism that is sensitive to the evolutionary dynamics at work in all human contexts. Objectivity must not be seen as the exclusive domain of the GetReligion-style journalism, lest we become confused about the ability for any human beings to truly “leap over” their own range of opinions, cultures, preferences, and modes of being into some sort of otherworldly (and delusional) “objective” truth. The alternative is not to abandon Truth. I advocate an integrally-informed style of journalism that seeks to coordinate and arrange the multifarious voices of the newsroom into an effective whole, suitable for its diverse audiences, and with demonstrated mastery of the evolving understanding of professional standards of excellence.

Of course, we must give the mythic-membership and rationalist/essentialist journalists a valued place at the table! Plus, let men and women, blacks and whites, yellows and browns, children and adults, rabbis and atheists, old age and new age, humorists and scientists, abled and disabled, overdeveloped and underdeveloped, shine their lights! In religion coverage, let the infirm, new age, totalitarians, mythic believers, essentialists, conservatives, greens/liberals, existentialist/naturalist, integralists, visionary, soulful, and mystical types speak.

The resulting chorus need not be a noisy cacophany; it could be a beautiful harmony attuned to a new and refreshingly familiar melody. At the very least, it will be more interesting than listening to the GetReligion echo chamber of “see the infantile ,liberal, antireligious bias!” and “please, please cover traditionalist dogma more accurately!” passed off again and again, interminably, as the summit of media criticism.

Technorati Tags: altitude, GetReligion, media, religion