01: The November issue of First Things magazine features a survey that attempts to rate the strength of religion in U.S. colleges.
The survey’s ratings, based on informal surveys of students and such “objective” factors as whether religion majors are offered and religious associations are active on campus, are likely to be contested, yet they show some interesting patterns. The ratings include secular schools “least unfriendly to faith,” with the top five being the large research universities of Princeton, Duke, Virginia, Chicago and Stanford; while the most secular schools include the smaller teaching colleges of Reed, Vassar and Bard, along with the larger Brown University.
The survey also lists the “least” and “most” Catholic schools, with the more conservative newer Catholic colleges, such as Ave Maria University in Florida, making the “most” list, while the “least” tend to be colleges on the liberal end of the spectrum, usually Jesuit institutions.
For more information on this issue, write: First Things, 35 E. 21st St., Sixth Fl., New York, NY 10010.
02: The tri-annual journal Studies in World Christianity devotes its current issue (No. 3) to Eastern Orthodox diaspora communities around the world. The articles focus on less-known Orthodox diasporas—the Orthodox churches in Japan, Korea, South Africa and India, as well as the smaller bodies in the U.S. and Europe, such as the Coptic and Ethiopian churches.
The challenges of assimilation and immigration run through most of this issue. The Coptic Orthodox Church in the U.S. has shown steady growth, with second-generation members promoting and preserving Coptic art, music and spirituality, helped along by new Coptic studies programs in American universities. An interesting article by Stephen Hayes reports that the variety of Orthodox churches in South Africa—with origins in Greece and Cyprus, with smaller groups from Russia and Eastern Europe—have been in the country for close to 100 years.
But even up to the fourth generation, these churches have remained ethnic enclaves, with services still held in the their language of origin.
For more information on this issue, write: Studies in World Christianity, Edinburgh University Press, 22 George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9LF, Scotland.
03: In the new book Beyond the Congregation: The World of Christian Non-Profits (Oxford University Press, $24.95), Christopher P. Scheitle suggests that the many Christian para-church organizations in the U.S. represent a different and more vital “religious market” than that found among congregations.
Scheitle defines parachurches as organizations that are neither churches nor denominations, but fulfill many specialized religious services that congregations often cannot provide. The growth of parachurch groups has been steady, and the author finds that their expansion intensified (doubling in registrations) during the period of Protestant disaffiliation (1974–2006). This shift toward non-denominational Christianity has also diminished support for denominational benevolence.
He studies 2,000 parachurches and classifies them according to their various functions and purposes, such as publishing, relief and development, and evangelism, which is the largest sector of Christian non-profits. Scheitle provides a wealth of data on parachurch groups showing that they are more efficient and goal-oriented than congregations, yet they overlap in resource pools and activities (with, not unexpectedly, non-denominational Protestants most likely to rely on such outside resources). Those congregations claiming a strong theological identity that build strong ties among members are the most effective in competing with parachurches. Scheitle concludes with an examination of parachurch–state relations and how public funding affects these organizations.
Even most of the larger non-profit parachurches do not take public funding, yet many groups not focused on social activism lobby on issues such as gay rights and legislation relating to Sudan.
04: America’s Four Gods (Oxford University Press, 24.95), by Paul Froese and Christopher Bader, traces much of the disagreements and conflicts among Americans on moral values and other “culture war” issues to their conceptions of God.
These sociologists find that the degree to which Americans believe that God interacts with the world and stands in judgment of humanity shapes a person’s cultural and political worldview. From these responses—mainly drawn from the Baylor Religion Survey—Froese and Bader tease out four different conceptions of God—both judgmental and interactive; non-judgmental and loving; judgmental but disengaged; and distant. Believers in a judgmental and engaged God are more likely to be leery of academic scientists and tend to
divide the world into good and evil; while those who hold to a distant God see no conflict between religion and science.
Americans with lower incomes tend to believe in a judgmental God and agree that faith-based social services are the most holistic way to address injustice, while those with a more beneficial image of God believe government can best address economic inequality. The authors agree that people can change their images of God, although trying to coax a person to adopt one’s own conception of God can lead to as much conflict as the social positions with which it is associated.
05: Religion Crossing Boundaries (Brill), edited by Afe Adogame and James V. Spickard, looks at how African Christianity is not strictly a phenomenon of the Global South, but rather is shaped by global networks and transnational links among immigrants, reverse missionaries (those attempting to evangelize the West), religious trade between various parts of the Global South, and nationals.
All of these border crossings add up to what Adogame and Spickard call a “religious cacophony” on the congregational scenes both in Africa and in diaspora communities. Several of the chapters suggest that national identity is retained and translated during these migrations. An account of a woman leader in Nigeria shows how a symbolic Nigerian identity is used to build her church’s transnational presence as members adapt to residence in the U.S. and Canada.
A chapter by Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu shows how the expansion of ties between charismatic/Pentecostal leaders and members in
Africa and the diaspora has led to the appropriation of modern media technology. Fears of negative spiritual influences in many forms of African Pentecostalism travel along these paths of migration, and the media provide a space—through prayers over the Internet, for instance—where people can express and come to terms with these concerns, which are often intensified through the struggles of immigration. The practice of anointing material objects for blessings and prosperity is also carried over to the virtual worlds of webcast services and videos that are globally circulated.
This anthology shows how these transnational religious dynamics take place between African countries and between Africa and the diasporas. This can be seen in an examination of how transnational contacts by local Pentecostal leaders in Benin, Nigeria and Togo serve to increase the status and legitimacy of their ministries among other Africans.
Other chapters include a study of emerging women Pentecostal leaders in Kenya and how their transnational ties give them opportunities for global leadership, and an examination of the “Bonnke effect,” meaning the widely popular ministry of German evangelist Reinhard Bonnke, and how his crusades in Nigeria has strengthened the role of Pentecostal churches in this society and beyond.
06: Religion and Politics in Russia (M.E. Sharpe, 32.95) provides an informative and colorful portrait of diversity and change in Russian religious groups—from indigenous to recently imported. The political dimension in this anthology, as explained by editor Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, comes into play as the Russian political authorities attempt to manage this diversity and in some cases
manipulate it to their own ends. Such “over-management” tends to overlook the fact that each faith contains its own diversity, including
“folk,” hybrid, ethnic and “Europeanized” versions, that cannot easily be represented on the political level.
Another trend that is evident in most of the traditions profiled in the book is the growth of revivalism or “fundamentalism,” not only in Russian Orthodoxy and Islam, but also in such unexpected places as the shamanic and Buddhist communities of Eastern Russia. “Extremism becomes particularly potent when the idioms of nationalism and religious identity are joined in us/them hate language, including but not limited to anti-Semitism and its uneven, possibly increasing cultural acceptance among ethnic Russians, Balzer writes.
The book is unique as most of its contributors are Russian rather than Western scholars, and thus have unusually good access to their sources. This can be seen in an in-depth anthropological study of the remaining Old Believer communities, as well as Sergei Filatov’s and Aleksandra Stiopina’s chapter on Lutherans in Russia and how they occupy a unique niche between Westernizing evangelicals and the Russian Orthodox Church. Filatov and Stiopina argue that Lutheranism’s historic presence in Russia, which also maintains Western connections, and its moderate and liturgical nature have won it a following among young people and educated and influential Russians.
A chapter on Roman Catholicism chronicles the rise of the informal groups of converts that in one case grew into an organization known as Militia Dei, which models itself on knightly orders of the Middle Ages (such as the Knights Templar). The order works in religious education, but also criticizes official church authorities for liberal positions in their relations with other religious organizations and for weakening political conservatism. Several chapters on Judaism suggest that the religion has encountered continuing obstacles—from a shortage of rabbis to a lack of infrastructure—with non-Orthodox communities facing the
greatest struggle as they try to liberalize on such issues as sexuality and intermarriage in the face of an increasingly conservative culture.