Religious evolution

Ross Douthat's latest column, which I will gift link, is an interesting one, entitled "Why you can't predict the future of religion".  It starts with this observation, from history:

In an 1822 letter to the physician Benjamin Waterhouse, Thomas Jefferson expressed his confidence that traditional Christianity in the young United States was giving way to a more enlightened faith, much like Jefferson’s own in its rejection of the divinity of Jesus Christ. “I trust,” he wrote, “that there is not a young man now living in the U.S. who will not die an Unitarian.”

Less than a year earlier, on “a Sabbath evening in the autumn of 1821” in upstate New York, a young man named Charles Grandison Finney began a multiday interplay of prayer and mystical experience that ‌‌led to a moment when, he wrote later, “it seemed as if I met the Lord Jesus Christ face to face … He stood before me, and I fell down at his feet and poured out my soul to Him. I wept aloud like a child, and made such confessions as I could with my choked utterance.”

This experience set Finney on a path that would help bury Jefferson’s confident hypothesis — toward leadership in an age of revivalism, the Second Great Awakening, that forged the form of evangelical Christianity that would bestride 19th-century America and also encouraged a proliferation of novel sects with supernatural beliefs entirely distant from Jefferson’s Enlightenment religion.

That history is worth mentioning for a specific reason and a general one. The specific reason is that a Christian college in rural Kentucky, Asbury University, has just experienced an old-school revival — a multiweek outpouring that has kept students praying and singing in the school chapel from morning to night, drawn tens of thousands of pilgrims from around the country, captured the imagination of the internet and even drawn the attention of The New York Times.

Yes, I have long been aware of Thomas Jefferson's belief in a de-deified Christ, as I think it is mentioned at his old home Monticello, which I visited around 1989.   He went to the effort of making his own de-miracle-ised version of the Gospels:

The 86-page book, now held in the collections of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, is bound in red Morocco leather and ornamented with gilt tooling. It was crafted in the fall and winter months of 1819 and 1820 when the 77-year-old Jefferson used a razor to cut passages from six copies of the New Testament—two in Greek and Latin, two in French and two in English—and rearranged and pasted together the selected verses, shorn of any sign of the miraculous or supernatural in order to leave just the life and teachings of Jesus behind. Jefferson, who had suffered great criticism for his religious beliefs, once said that the care he had taken to reduce the Gospels to their core message should prove that he was in fact, a “real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.”

It is a little surprising that the Unitarian movement was well underway even before Darwin, evolution and a radical change in understanding the age and size of the universe would come to shake up things.  And a Unitarian of the early 19th century who could foresee those knowledge changes would surely expect that his or her approach to religion was destined to be widespread and successful.

But Unitarianism as a movement is so small now that it is almost like a footnote to mainstream Christianity.

Douthat concludes, in a somewhat surprisingly open fashion, given his own allegiance to traditional Catholicism:

When it comes to the religious future, you should follow the social trends, but also always expect the unexpected — recognizing that every organized faith could disappear tomorrow and some spiritual encounter would resurrect religion soon enough.

If you’re trying to discern what a post-Christian spirituality might become, then what post-Christian seekers are experiencing and what (or whom) they claim to be encountering matters as much as any specific religious label they might claim.

And if you’re imagining a renewal for American Christianity, all the best laid plans — the pastoral strategies, theological debates and long-term trendlines — may matter less than something happening in some obscure place or to some obscure individual, in whose visions an entirely unexpected future might be taking shape.