In his USA Today essay (Monday, February 4, 2008, 15A) “Is religion losing the millennial generation?” Boston University professor Stephen Prothero tells us about the assignment he gives his students every year in their introductory religion courses.
He puts them in groups and tells them to invent a new religion. After all, according to J. Gordon Melton of the Institute for the Study of American Religion, Americans are generating about 50 new religions every year.
This is news to me.
Fifty new weight-loss plans, maybe. Fifty new schemes about how to be happy. Fifty new ways to go into debt. Fifty new ways to rewire your home theatre system. Fifty new ways to say “I love you.” Fifty new ways for Democrats to lose the White House.
But fifty new ways to re-imagine our relationship to God and the universe?
Of course, Prothero doesn’t tell us what “religion” is. I’ll admit right off the bat that explaining religion is a lot harder than explaining good parenting to Britney Spears, for example. Not that people haven’t tried--both. Tillich came up with his idea of “faith as ultimate concern,” and argued that when we can identify our “ultimate concern,” whatever that is — even if framed by secularism — is our god. Marx famously noted that those who are religious are smoking something, probably opium. Most denotative explanations, however simplistic, at the very least involve a discussion of a belief system, worship, deity or deities, a code of ethical behavior, a worldview, a philosophy of life, rituals and symbols. This leaves considerable wiggle room, as William James has already noted, for varieties of religious experience.
Prothero doesn’t tell us whether he’s even had this discussion with his students when they were given this assignment. So it’s no wonder that that “religions” they come up with are Dessertism which “insists that the stomach is the way to the soul,” or “Zen Boozism” which seeks “self-discovery through alcohol,” and so on.
Move over Marx; these kids are smoking, too. And their professor is doing a lot of the puffing.
He admits that one of his students saw through this stupidity. Carrie Anne Solana, he says, complained that the “religions” her peers came up with were nothing more than “organized atheism” and that they’d simply taken basic human drives and appetites and “justified them under the title of religion while not offering … any explanation into why we are here, where we came from or where we go when we die.”
I hope Prothero gave her an A. The others get a F. After quoting his student, Prothero lamely continues, “Even so, I can’t help but think that priests, rabbis, imam and ministers would do well to engage in interfaith dialogue not only with one another but also with this ‘spiritual but not religious’ generation.’”
This is hilarious. He describes his Zen Boozism students as “spiritual.” They must be laughing in their brews. They’ve got a straw in his milkshake, and he don’t know it.
Today’s university generation may be ‘spiritual.’ I’m not saying they aren’t. But that assessment can’t be made on the basis of this cute little assignment in his introductory religion class, the kind of assignment you might find in a middle school sociology class, but at Boston University?
Moreover, his suggestion that priests, rabbis, imam and ministers begin to dialogue with this generation assumes that they aren’t. He needs to get out more. I can’t speak to what is happening in the Muslim or Jewish communities, but the stuff that's going on with the Emergent church movement alone—and the ton of online chatter that’s generated every hour about truly spiritual and religious themes is staggering. It’s all good, man.
So I found Prothero’s essay a little irritating and his exercise a little silly. I’m not sure what illuminating insights the students gained in this project. Perhaps the professor got a few insights, but, in this case, they weren’t worth much.
I’m going to start a new religion.
Buffooneryism.
