Religious Pluralism: Problems and Prospects

I. INTRODUCTION I have spent much of the last thirty years mapping the religious life of the United States. This unique occupation began in graduate school with a dissertation problem-to discern the important structures in the American religious life. At the time (the 1960s) there was much talk of a post-denominational era, of ecumenism. The great ecumenical hope was fueled by mergers in the mission field. Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregational, and even Anglican churches were joining together to create a new wave of "united Protestant" churches, gathering participation from churches in South Korea, Pakistan, Japan, and India. While most of these new united churches were Asian, one was close at hand-the United Church of Canada. Founded in 1925, this merger of Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Methodists seemed to be working well after fifty years. Two factors separated American churches from the possibility of such ecumenical unions. In almost every case where such a united church had been formed, the merging churches were a distinct minority. First, in the United States, Protestantism was the majority religious factor. Second, while the Canadians were experiencing a union, the United States had gone through an intense religious controversy that split its major churches into warring theological camps. Such a split continues to this day and goes under various names-fundamentalist/modernist, conservative/liberal, evangelical/ecumenical. The dynamic still fuels major religious controversies in the United States, as neither side has been able to claim a clear majority. Moreover, this major barrier to older groups coming together also led to a regular set of new groups being formed. At the time I began mapping the religious landscape, the popular observation was that some 250 denominations existed in America. An initial survey of the scene in the 1960s produced a list of some 750 groups. By the mid 1970s, when we first published, around 1000 denominations, including a growing number of non-Christian groups, had become visible. In the process, we-and I use the plural because by this time other researchers on the same issues and phenomena had arisen-were able to identify and describe the continuing structures shaping contemporary religious life: denominations, or basic religious groupings that focus the week-to-week religious life of people and express their primary religious commitment; and family groups, sets of closely related denominations. While at times it appears that there is simply chaos on the religious scene, such is not the case. There are only so many ways to be religious, and so many religious myths that spiritually animate people. Genuinely new religious myths are exceedingly rare, and almost all newer religious groups develop a variation on one of the fairly small number of old religious myths and adopt one of the even smaller number of ways to organize a religious community. We can see this clearly, for example, in Scientology. Often condemned as a shallow new religion with a science-fiction theology, when we actually analyze the theology, we see that founder L. Ron Hubbard made a forceful restatement of the old Gnostic myth. Understanding that relationship to be one of the oldest and most powerful traditional religious myths helps from a religious perspective to understand why people can find Scientology so appealing as a religious community (though the price is depriving Scientology of at least one of its claims to uniqueness). However, no sooner had we solved the first problem, than a second rose to the top. It had been posed earlier by a few sociologists like H. Richard Neibuhr, but in the 1970s took on a new level of concern. As originally stated, the problem was something like this: Why are so many young people abandoning the older religious groups for newer ones? At that point, a spectrum of new religions was becoming visible in America. Of course, the new question was a restatement of the older ecumenical problem. …