Some more stuff on religion for your Sunday evening:
If you are worried about the PRC's suppression of religion, you can be a little cheered that Taiwan is moving in another direction:
Just as China embraces restrictions on practice of religion, Taiwan is stepping up as a supporter of democratic freedoms and religious, as if to prove that democracy, liberal economics, and religion freedom can thrive amid Chinese culture. In spring this year, Taiwan hosted a relatively under-reported event on “Securing Religious Freedom in the Indo-Pacific Region.”
The meeting in Taipei was a regional follow up after the first United States Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom held in Washington, D.C. last year. It resulted in the Taipei Declaration on Religious Freedom, which re-emphasizes Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
That article recognizes everyone’s “right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”
Taiwan included atheists and humanists in its assembly of believers, overcoming the difficulty people of faith have had in applying the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to people of another religion or to humanists and atheists. The Taipei Declaration pledges religious freedom activists to advocate for both, followers of one’s own religion as well as other communities suffering restrictions on religious freedom or outright persecution.
Not sure what I'm thinking about this story, about a Presbyterian church which seems to be more about the flowers of religion than its roots. (You may disagree, but let's see how many people stick with this church over more than a few years--it's a serious question.) It's great to have churches host this convening function--they really, really should, as we have barely any non-commercial "public spaces" where such events can happen--but I don't think it's wise to have churches base themselves on their civic value. And yes, I realize that calling what they're doing a "civic value" is debatable. I would be happy to debate it. If your activism does not flow out of deep religious wells, it is not religious activism. It is political activism. And that is something different.
As an example of real religious activism, check this out. Note that the contrast is with the religious right, which has weaponized a religious ideology for fundamentally this-worldly aims. That's pretty much my point in the previous paragraph, if you didn't realize it.
"Mayor Pete" seems to be the latest flavor of the month on the religious left. I think my friend (and old Cvillian) Dahlia Lithwick's piece in Slate is still the best account of what he's after. As she says, "whatever its pitfalls, the Buttigieg approach is a marked improvement on a progressivism that finds itself both unable to talk about religion on its own terms and also unable to counter religious arguments and controversies on the right." I note the quick shift in that sentence from talkign about religion on its own terms to countering a rival partisan narrative. I'm all for countering rival partisan narratives. But I'm also interested in tarrying a bit on the "talking about religion on its own terms" moment. That still seems to me a major thing we need to do. Need, need, need. And I don't speak initially as a progressive here, I speak as a Christian, albeit a particular kind of Christian, with many adjectives: say, as a rough approximation, an Broad-church-but-Augustinian-Episcopalian-Mainline Protestant Christian. (This is a shout-out to Orwell's "lower upper middle class.") Are the adjectives important? Maybe to me in a narcissistic way, sure. Not so much to God, who just sees me, I suspect, as a beloved yet deeply misbegotten and misdirected sinner. I'm trying to shift from my bucket of adjective's to what I take to be God's. That's one of the things that churches should make central.
Finally, this nice piece bespeaks a less apocalyptic, or perhaps a more nuanced apocalyptic, account of religion's role in America today than I have recently heard, and currently hold:
Americans hold more positive views of religion’s role overall and concerns about it declining. Fifty-five percent say churches and religious organizations do more good than harm in society (compared with 20 percent of people who think it does more harm than good). Similar majorities say religious organizations strengthen morality in society (53 percent), and 50 percent say they bring people together.
It's a sad day when effectively only half of the people say, when asked, that religion is a good force. For it means that about half of the people believe that religion is a pernicious presence. Given the other "fragilizing factors" (to borrow from Charles Taylor) that religion faces in contemporary society, that's not a context which is super-hospitable to cultivating a serious life of faith. Anthea Butler is quoted at the end of the piece connecting this opinion of religion to reconsiderations of America. I think that is right, too. And it's a sobering puzzle.
Have a quiet, peaceful, Sunday night. Another week awaits us all, in the morning.