November 2013 (Vol. 29, No. 1)

While recent research shows that the Chinese are demonstrating high rates of religious practice, a recent Gallup poll finds that almost half of China’s people—47 percent—are “convinced atheists.”

In the blog The Imminent Frame (posted October 10), sociologist Richard Madsen notes that surveys have found that as much as 85 percent of China’s population carry out such rituals as venerating their ancestors, seeking healing, and accumulating merit for a good afterlife. In explaining the conundrum of Chinese atheism and increasing religious practice, Madsen argues that Chinese religion is more about community and “belonging than believing.”

Despite Communist Party misgivings, these folk religious practices have long existed among peasants, but what is happening now is that more Chinese have become mobile workers spending their time in cities doing industrial labor. At the same time, under the restrictive household registry system, these workers cannot become urban residents and have to maintain connections to their local communities and natal families.

Madsen writes that in this situation, practicing elaborate rituals during weddings and funerals becomes a way of families competing and trying “to outdo one another…It is the same with the rebuilding of local temples. As the Party has lost control over much of local life, the public spaces in front of the local Party headquarters no longer mean as much. Deity temples once provided public spaces for community discussion, commerce, and entertainment and they are doing so once again. With increasing affluence, communities are now vying with one another to build bigger and better temples,” which also serve as a means for those with disposable incomes to honor their ancestors, Madsen concludes.

(http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2013/10/10/secular-belief-religious-belonging/)

Religious diversification is also taking place in countries with a majority Muslim background, such as Turkey, where a variety of new religious movements are active, reported several researchers at a workshop held in Istanbul on October 25-26, which RW attended. This was the third workshop of the research project “The Yogi and the Dervish: New Religious Movements in Turkey.” Led by Alexandre Toumarkine of the Orient-Institut Istanbul, the project brings together 26 scholars who look at the historical and contemporary aspects of “alternative” religious scenes in Turkey. The original impulse for the project was set in 2007, with plans to cover both Turkey and Iran, eventually settling on the latter country. Both Christian and non-Christian religious movements are considered, as well as groups on the fringe of Islam. While research has primarily been conducted in Istanbul, the largest city in the country, there are possible plans to include other places across Turkey in the future.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a wave of translated Western books in Turkey dealing with alternative beliefs and theories, Toumarkine observed. From the 1980s, there has been a growing popularity of Eastern philosophies and practices in Turkey, explained Till Luge. But it is not only a matter of reading books: Aysuda Kölemen reported on the spread of yoga in Istanbul, which she associates with a wider trend of developing ties between Turkey and India. Yoga has exploded over the past ten years. There are today over 70 yoga schools and several hundred yoga teachers in Istanbul, some of them with a biography in experiences with various spiritual movements. Among people attending yoga courses, practicing Muslims and headscarf-wearing women can be found too. But such practitioners tend not to place Islam above other religions and believe that all religions lead to the same goal, in contrast with most of their fellow believers.

An interesting development is the success of self-help books in Turkey, such as those written by Mohammed Bozdağ (b. 1967), analyzed by Martin Reixinger. With a personal background in Muslim groups, Bozdağ adapts self-help literature to a Muslim context. He believes in the unimaginable potential of individuals and advocates a holistic view (“the universe is one big all”), supposedly supported by modern physics, but rejecting any pantheism. He refers to concept such as chakras and aura, but warns readers against indulging in such practices and tells them that (Muslim) prayer can help one to get relief from stress. His books are selling very well: one of them has already been reprinted 140 times.

Not only Muslims are attracted to new movements, but members of minorities as well. A paper presented by Yoann Morvan presented the activities of the Kabbalah Centre (founded by Philip Berg, 1927-2013) in Turkey. It is a small group in Istanbul, but its existence in itself is worth noticing. More than 60 percent of the participants in Istanbul have a Jewish background, with about half of them attending services at local synagogues. The teachings of the Kabbalah Centre is said to bring to them answers to a spiritual thirst that is not satisfied at local mainstream Jewish institutions. Berg’s Kabbalah benefits from the lack of other spiritual offers in the local Jewish milieu.

Evangelical churches are also present in Istanbul. Some of them have developed work among migrants in Turkey, according to Fabio Salomoni. Even preachers of African background can be encountered in Istanbul, such as Nigerian Joe Nwokoye (Zion Praise Centre), who has also recently traveled to Germany in order to preach to Turkish audiences there. However, according to Dorothea Nold, Turkish converts to Christianity seem currently rather belong to more classical church groups, while some modern evangelical congregations mostly attract expats: she expects nevertheless the impact of evangelical charismatic groups among Turks to increase in the coming years. Moreover, several evangelical movements consider Istanbul as a strategic location for further expansion, which means more are likely to be arriving there.

(Orient-Institut Istanbul, http://www.oiist.org)

The interest in witchcraft among teenage girls in the 1990s, was reflected in such shows and movies as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Craft. Now it seems to have carried over to a new generation of youths, reports The Guardian (Oct. 26).

“In the young-adult section of bookshops, shelves that recently groaned under the weight of tales of tormented vampires and lovelorn werewolves, are now stuffed with stories of witchcraft and magic, from Ruth Warburton’s much-praised Winter Trilogy to Jessica Spotswood’s Cahill Witch Chronicles,” writes Sarah Hughes. The interest is even evident among the younger age set; last month the most recent in Jill Murphy’s long-running Worst Witch series was published, while “among the predictions for this Christmas’s bestselling toys are the Bratz spinoff, House of Witchez.”

For adults, next year will mark the climax of Deborah Harkness’s All Souls Trilogy, centering on the relationship between a vampire and an American witch.

The trend is clearly once again present on television with the FX channel’s American Horror Story featuring a tale of voodoo queens and teenage witches this season, while Lifetime is showing The Witches of East End, adapted from a novel by Melissa de la Cruz and featuring a family of spellcasters led by Julia Ormond. Vampire Diaries spinoff The Originals (on the Syfy channel) has a central storyline about witchcraft and in Universal’s Sleepy Hollow, Ichabod Crane deals with feuding covens in present-day America.

The sharp rise of non-affiliated Americans (or “nones”) in the past two decades has become a key concern of church leaders, and the tendency to mix conservative politics and religion may be a significant factor in this trend, according to a new study by political scientists David Campbell, Geoffrey Layman, and John Green. In a lecture at New York’s Columbia University in mid-October, which RW attended, Campbell presented findings from the Secular American Survey suggesting that the rise in non-affiliation began at the same period that the religious right was at its height of influence. This association has been made by other scholars, but Campbell and his colleagues say they have new evidence that even the perception of mixing faith and politics may actually cause people to veer toward identification with the “nones.” The telephone survey was conducted between 2010 and 2012, among 2,635 (first wave) and 1412 (second wave) respondents.

Campbell reported that an exposure to religious politics in campaigns made respondents, especially Democrats, more likely to say they were “nones” embracing as truth “secular beliefs,” such as science and facts about the natural. The researchers created an experiment to see if such exposure actually has a causative effect in moving people toward non-affiliation or secularism. When the respondents were shown (fictitious) articles on candidates, one of which included references to a candidate’s evangelical beliefs and how it influences their politics, the researchers observed the subjects, again particularly the Democrats, shifting from a religious to a non-affiliated label in describing their faith. Campbell said while this exposure moved respondents toward identification with the “nones,” it did not lead them to a secular identity to espouse secular beliefs.

Campbell said that the study should serve to warn church leaders to be cautious in engaging in religious politics.

Religious leaders appear to be taking Campbell’s advice, with some of the most fervent culture warriors reconsidering the role of political activism in their ministries. The Wall Street Journal (Oct. 22) reports that the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is one such major player in conservative-religious politics now rethinking its public role in the face of significant membership loss. Russell Moore, who heads the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, says “it’s time to tone down the rhetoric and pull back from the political fray, given what he calls a ‘visceral recoil’ among younger evangelicals to the culture wars,” reports Neil King Jr. Baptists are reported to be leaving the church of their childhood faster than any other Protestant group, according to data gathered by Pew Research.

While still voting Republican, younger evangelicals are leaving the SBC and “other big denominational churches for more loosely organized assemblies that oppose abortion but are less likely to hew to other Republican causes,” King writes. The commission, under the previous leadership of Richard Land, was among the most outspoken and activist denominational agencies on religious right issues, especially pro-abortion to anti-gay rights concerns. But today the SBC and much of the rest of the religious right are “undergoing a generational shift as Moore and his allies are recalibrating their methods and aims.” In his e-newsletter Sightings (October 26), Martin Marty reports that similar rethinking is taking place across the evangelical blogosphere. But Marty notes that this is not so much a “secularization” of the Christian right as much as a “de-churchification.”

While churches are “pulling back from the extreme right wing connections, religious rhetoric and appeals do remain strong on the right.”