A transcendental new religious paradigm!

Ivan Petrella proposes a new religious paradigm, which supersedes all the current ideas and conflicts of the current religious paradigms. Let's take a look. First, the header:

Everyone has it wrong regarding politics and religion: the Christian Right, Atheists, and even the Progressive Religious community. The author proposes a daring alternative.

It's been my experience that in general, any "third-way" ideas that say everyone else is wrong and we need to go off in a completely different direction are bad ideas. They usually fail to solve most of the problems about the issue, and aren't even useful as compromises. However, while I've found this is a strong connection, it is not sufficient to reject this alternative (and besides, the author probably didn't even write that header; that could very easily be some editor misrepresenting stuff to generate more interest). Let's continue on.

A month after Barack Obama’s presidential win, I found myself at a table with progressive Christian leaders; including figures from Obama’s religious outreach and transition teams, as well as some of the East Coast’s most important theologians, seminary presidents, and faith consultants. Our task: To determine how religion could continue to best serve progressive politics.

I'm even more leery. He's at a meeting with Christians, where no other religions are mentioned, implying he is also Christian (a quick google search tells me he's a liberation theologian, which is a subset of Christianity). I'm suspicious that he's going to have a strong bias towards religion in general, and Christianity in specific.

Also, note that in this meeting of progressive religious leaders, important theologians, seminary presidents, and faith consultants that everyone is Christian. This will be important later.

I’ve come to believe that progressive religion isn’t good enough for our nation. Instead, we need a shift in paradigm. We need to become progressive about religion. But what does that mean? It doesn’t mean atheism or secularization. It doesn’t mean progressive Christianity or progressive religion of any one tradition. None of these options are progressive enough.

"Progressive about religion"--what does that mean, besides being a rhetorical trick? "We should make progress about religion"? This is a meaningless statement unless we define what we mean by progress here. He doesn't mean the secularization of society (which is how I would define progress in this instance) and he's not referring to any one "progressive" religion. What is he talking about?

Being progressive about religion means moving from a multi-religious nation toward a nation of multi-religious individuals. Let me explain.

Explaining would be good.

The United States lives two religious realities: In our makeup as a people, we’re at the forefront of religious development. But we’re at the tail end when it comes to how our politics handles religion.

We’re at the forefront because we’re the most religious people among the rich industrial nations. We’re also the world’s most religiously diverse nation, with a dizzying array of Christianities, more Muslims than Episcopalians or Presbyterians, more Jews than Israel, and thriving communities of Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Wiccans, Santeros, and others.

Remember earlier where told you to remember that the meeting of religious leaders that sparked this article was exclusively Christian? We're a religiously diverse nation but... all the important religious leaders are Christian. True diversity is not only the existence of a variety of different groups (religions here), but also there being no monopoly on power or influence by one group. There has to be a diversity in authority as well.

If a bunch of (only) white political leaders got together to pat each other on the back and tell each other how racially diverse we are as a nation, it'd be right to point out that the fact their group was all white is indicative that we're not as diverse as they're claiming. It doesn't matter what percentage or number of people are not white, if only white people have influence or authority, we're not a racially diverse nation. Even having completely equal civil rights for people of all races is not sufficient to be a racially diverse nation.

This undermines Petrella's point that the USA is "at the forefront of religious development". In addition, except for a diversity of different sects of Christianity, the USA does not have even the existence of large diverse religions. Wikipedia tells me about 78% of Americans are Christian. Of the remaining 22%, 16% are nonreligious--that leaves about 6% of the population belonging to a non-Christian religion. Some diversity.

We’re at the tail end, however, because our religious diversity vanishes when it comes in contact with our political culture and process. We’ve become a country that actually requires its politicians to take openly Christian positions if they are to be successful, a country that sets up what I call “Christian litmus tests” for candidates running for office, a country that is unwilling to accept an agnostic, atheist, or non-Christian president.

Despite his previous point being completely wrong, Petrella is right about this. Not only is America predominantly Christian, but it is nearly required to be a Christian to have any sort of (secular) political power.

We need to find, in the chasm between our makeup and our politics, a different way to think about religion, as well as a different way of being religious—for us and for the world.

There is no chasm; the supermajority of the USA is Christian, our politics and policy are dominated by Christianity. This is not contradictory.

The Christian Right is an obvious obstacle to the emergence of a new way of thinking about religion and being religious. Less obvious is the fact that both progressive Christianity and the new atheism are obstacles as well. They too contribute to the ruling fundamentalism.

How? The Christian right develops religious arguments against gay rights, reproductive rights, social security, and other topics. In response, progressive Christians develop opposing religious arguments. The end result is to make our political culture even more religious, and to legitimize a preeminent role for argument from Christian principles. Now both the Republican and the Democratic Parties stress religion; now both the right and the left speak in Christian terms.

I agree with this. If our goal is the separation of politics and religion (which, despite earlier saying that secularization was not progressive enough, this appears to be Petrella's goal), then countering religion in politics with more religion is hurting us. There's a cliche about fighting fire with fire that's appropriate here. For most progressive issues, progressive Christians are better than fundamental Christians, but for the issue of separation of church and state, both are bad.

Atheism is no help either. In a world that’s becoming more religious rather than less, atheism can’t be the answer. Advocates of atheism remain tied to the discredited secularization thesis, making them a minority condemned to insignificance except within circles ever more out of touch with global reality. In addition, their strident tone feeds the culture wars and strengthens the right’s belief that Christianity is under siege.

I see Petrella has been reading Mooney and Kirshenbaum. The thesis that atheists, especially "militant" atheists, are to blame for the conflict between fundamental Christianity and secularism has been debunked all over the blogosphere, so I'll dispense with arguing why atheists' "strident tone" is not a legitimate criticism.

I want to see a citation for the claim the world's getting more religious, because everything I've seen, both statistical and anecdotal, says otherwise. Again, Petrella criticizes secularization, despite apparently arguing for its goals. He says it has been "discredited", but there's no evidence of this. Looking at long term trends, the world and the USA have gotten more secular (religion's stranglehold on politics and society has weakened over time). Yes, if we look at only the last few years, it would appear as if secularization has failed (only in the US and a few other countries (e.g. Iran); much of Europe, for example, has become more secular), but that is as stupid and fallacious as arguing there is no global warming as it's hotter now than it was exactly one year ago.

From progressive Christians, I’d rescue the commitment to progressive understandings of faith and politics. But I’d reject their reliance on the Bible and Jesus. Here they are no different from the religious right, picking and choosing what suits them while ignoring what doesn’t.

I'm just quoting this to point out when the author does this himself later.

Instead, being progressive about religion should mean taking the logic of religious diversity to its ultimate conclusion and fostering the conditions to create multi-religious individuals.

What’s involved? The United States is currently a multi-religious nation, and a nation that individuals of a variety of religions peacefully co-exist within. But we’re rarely multi-religious individuals: individuals who belong to more than one religion.

There's an obvious reason for this: most religions are necessarily exclusive. You can't simultaneously believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ and not. You can't believe in the Abrahamic religions' view of the afterlife while also believing in reincarnation. If we're looking at metaphysical claims, religions have a hard enough time stayng internally consistant on this, opening Pandora's box and mixing and matching metaphysical claims from multiple religions is going to lead to a massive tangle of nonsense.

You could mix and match morals that different religions espouse without running into contradictions, but morality is not necessarily part of religion, even though religion likes to claim to have a monopoly on it. Morality, though often closely connected to religion, is distinct.

Moreover, if everyone from the right to the left of the religious-political spectrum is picking and choosing some parts of Christianity while ignoring and rejecting others, why stay within one religion in the process?

See above about picking and choosing. What Petrella proposes is simply a more extreme form of it. Contrary to what he claims, I don't think this proposed paradigm is novel in any way. We already pick and choose from different religions, we've done it for centuries. For example, early Christianity adopted a lot of pagan holidaysand ideologies. The only difference between that and Petrella's proposal is that Petrella is focused slightly more on individuals; however, people have chosen their religions on their own since the beginnings of religiously plural societies.

To practice more than one religion (or better yet, to build a religious life with elements from different religions) is to tear down the walls between faiths that makes fundamentalism possible.

I agree that individuals who get their religious views from multiple sources, who tear down the walls between faiths, will be drastically less likely to be fundamentalists. However, some people doing this will not cause all people to do this; others will still be fundamentalists, despite some being multi-religious.

This idea fails all around. As it's not actually a new idea, merely an extension of the current norms, and is based on multiple flawed premises, this is unsurprising. It fails to reduce the power and influence of fundamentalism. The target audience to become multi-religious are those who are currently progressive religionists. The fundamentalists are going to continue to be fundamentalists.

It fails to stop or reverse the growing influence of religion in American politics and society. Petrella criticizes progressive Christianity as responding to religious arguments for political/social issues with more religious arguments. Multi-religiousness does the same thing, except, at best, that its religious arguments will be slightly less based on Christianity. This wouldn't do anything about the "fundamentalist takeover of our political process". It will perform no better in that regard than progressive Christianity.

This, if it was widespread, would probably reduce the impact of "Christian litmus tests" for public office. However, as the people who would adopt multi-religiousness are the generally the types who are already willing to vote for non-Christians, the impact here is limited.

The only way this paradigm would have a significant impact is if it were widespread. If enough people were multi-religious, then, yeah, fundamentalism would be weaker. This would require a movement from fundamental Christianity to multi-religion, not just progressive Christianity to multi-religion. However, this is just saying "if fewer people were fundamentalists, then there'd be less fundamentalism", which is trivial.

Even at it's most optimal, this paradigm still fails on the issue of rights for nonreligious and atheistic people. It doesn't matter how accepting we are of religions and how protected our freedom of religion is, if we don't also accept those not of any religion and have freedom from religion, we're still discriminating, just to a smaller group.

It also fails to do anything about the major criticism of "progressive" religion by atheists: that all religions put faith as a virtue, which acts as a smokescreen and protects and supports fundamentalist (and other dangerous forms of) religion. Arguably, it even makes it worse. As long as we accept "I have faith X is true, and I don't have to provide any support for this, even in the face of opposing evidence, no matter how strong" as valid, fundamentalism will still exist and thrive--expanding what we allow this argument from faith to cover does nothing to help. If we want to remove fundamentalism, we have to attack its root. We won't do anything by pussyfooting about the issue, dealing with irrelevant elements of religion while ignoring the source of the problem. We have to attack the virtufication of faith (which necessarily includes attacking most religion, including Petrella's proposed multi-religion), to drive out fundamentalism. Anything else is, to borrow the words of Stephen Colbert, rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg.