Note: The complete version of this article can be found my "Dispatches from the Beltway" column at ReligionDispatches.org.

The release of the massive American Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life this week provides a new window into an old question that has preoccupied sociologists for more than a century: Can religious traditions, with their particularity and ancient roots, survive amidst the pluralism of the modern world?


The Pew Forum findings clearly cast an affirmative vote; Pew found that American religion is increasingly diverse, that most Americans have a non-exclusivist understanding of their religion (70% of the religiously-affiliated agree that many religions may lead to eternal life)—and that religion is alive and well under these conditions, with more than half of Americans continuing to say that religion is very important in their lives.

These findings cut against the grain of some of the dominant streams of sociological theory and recent public discourse. Sociologists have often tried to predict not whether, but how quickly religion might succumb to the alleged corrosive power of modern pluralism. More than a century ago, Karl Marx famously declared that religion’s last refuge was to be found in the sighs of oppressed workers as they toiled in the twilight years of a doomed capitalist system. And Max Weber lamented that amidst the tempest of competing value systems in the modern pluralistic world, trying to imitate the life of a religious exemplar like Moses, Jesus, or the Buddha was doomed for purely practical reasons.

More recently, secularization theorists believed the tumultuous atmosphere of the 1960s would finally kill off traditional religions. They too were convinced that the coexistence of so many competing belief systems in the same social space would ultimately prove destabilizing to all of them.

But despite the predictions, religion would not go quietly into that good night. By the 1980s, most of the world experienced not the decline but the resurgence of public religion, especially in literalist/fundamentalist forms that were explicitly anti-modern (and importantly, in many parts of the world, anti-colonial). Religious extremists across traditions hit the headlines so forcefully and often violently that they became the public face of religion through the 1990s.

Faced with insurmountable data, chastened theorists now allowed two tracks for modern religion: secularization/decline on the one hand or anti-modern retrenchment on the other. These basic assumptions have driven much of the contemporary public discourse about religion, from Samuel Huntington’s vision of a future marked by a “clash of civilizations” organized around monolithic religious identities to the more recent declarations by Christopher Hitchens and other neo-atheists that “religion poisons everything.”

But the recent Pew data, and my own research among progressive American religious leaders in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism, demonstrate that decline and retrenchment are not the only options. A new public face of religion is emerging....
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Read the rest of the article in my "Dispatches from the Beltway" column at ReligionDispatches.org.

You can read more about the emerging progressive religious movement in my forthcoming book, Progressive & Religious: How Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist Leaders are Moving Beyond the Culture Wars and Transforming American Public Life. The book is available for pre-order from Amazon.com and will be in bookstores nationwide in August 2008.

Labels: diana eck, dispatches from the beltway, eboo patel, pew forum, pluralism, secularization

Dr. Eboo Patel talks about Islam, pluralism, and building the interfaith youth movement.

In this third episode of Progressive Religious Voices, Dr. Eboo Patel talks about how his Muslim faith grounds his deep commitment to pluralism and his work with youth around the world at Interfaith Youth Core.

Eboo compellingly describes what he calls the significance of the emerging “Faith Line.” The Faith Line, as Eboo describes it, does not separate people of different religions but separates religious pluralists on the one hand and religious totalitarians on the other. Eboo’s work is focused on broadening the space for religious pluralism. Drawing on his Islamic faith, he summarizes it as follows: “My hope is to articulate what I love about your tradition, and to teach you what you might love about mine, and to point to a space where we might work together to serve others. And in my mind, that’s the example of the Prophet Muhammad.”

Eboo is an important emerging progressive religious leader, and articulates eloquently the way his Muslim faith interfaces with the best of the American ideals of democracy and pluralism:

In my mind, I’m part of the story of America, I’m part of the story of India, and I’m part of the story of Islam. It was in the Holy Qur’an, which is the book that animated my ancestors, that I found the fullest description of that and that I found language that I considered home…. I love America because it gives me, the child of immigrant Muslim parents from India, the chance to participate in its progress and to carve a place in its promise. And I believe that this country was founded in large part on the idea of religious freedom and its relationship with religious pluralism…. We have managed to have a relatively thick religious pluralism in this country that has respect for identity, that nurtures community, that focuses people on the common good. What I think we need to do in America is realize that this in the early twenty-first century, in the century of the faith line, is in fact, our most precious internal resource and our most important gift to the rest of the world.

Click here to listen to the podcast.

About Eboo Patel
Eboo Patel is founder and executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based international nonprofit that is building the interfaith movement through service and dialogue. His blog, The Faith Divide, explores what drives faiths apart and what brings them together. Eboo is the author of Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the soul of a Generation.

About the Podcasts
This podcast is the third episode of Progressive Religious Voices, a bi-monthly podcast of interviews gleaned from nearly 100 interviews with progressive religious leaders. You can subscribe to the podcast feed directly or on iTunes to get all 24 exciting interviews that we will feature throughout 2008.

You can also read more about the growing progressive religious movement in my forthcoming book, Progressive & Religious: How Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist Leaders are Moving Beyond the Culture Wars and Transforming American Public Life. The book is available for pre-order from Amazon.com and will be in bookstores nationwide in August 2008.

Labels: islam, muslim, pluralism, podcast, progressive religious voices, youth