UNITED STATES
Salon
DONALD E. MILLER
From the recent attack on Planned Parenthood to the shooting in San Bernardino, extremists of all stripes are revealing the ugly side of religion. The confluence of these events and election season demagoguery is generating fear and outrage.
In the midst of these national struggles, many families are preparing for a more personal religious fight: going to church on Christmas. Americans increasingly don’t identify with a religion, with significant generational differences.
The Pew Research Center reported this year that 35% of millennials – those born between 1981 and 1996 – are religious “nones.” Many young people may darken a church door only to placate their parents on Christmas and Easter.
These disparate trends are related to the same phenomenon: cultural change. …
At the same time, both religious “nones” and members of existing religious institutions are experimenting with new forms of spiritual practice and intentional communities. They’re feeding the homeless, gathering in laundromats to offer free laundry service to the working poor and pushing the boundaries that traditionally define religious denominations. Through movements like #blacklivesmatter, they’re creating rituals that critique injustices and heal society and themselves.
This willingness to experiment with religious beliefs and forms previously birthed the Catholic Worker movement, contemporary monastic orders modeled after those in early modern Europe and renewal movements in all faith traditions. Religious institutions can seem unchanging during the span of a human life, but over centuries or millennia, they are evolving.
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