Does Religion Have a Future?

A few years ago, a spin-off television show from the much earlier Star Trek series aired. The spin-off was called Star Trek: The Next Generation. It got a lot of press attention, and became a very popular show. I saw an early episode, and noticed with interest the make-up of the crew and the starship Enterprise. There was the usual captain, information officer, doctor, and others who paralleled the crew on the original USS Enterprise. But there were also new crew positions and attributes of the ship.

There was a bar/restaurant, called 10 Forward, and a holodeck, a space which could be programmed to represent, three-dimensionally, any place and people from history, the cosmos and the imagination. To help crew with issues and stresses of the mind there was even a ship's counselor with the handy ability to read thoughts and emotions. There were trauma, death, miracles, transformation, celebration, loss and renewal. What there wasn't was any ship's chaplain to help with any of this, no minister, rabbi, imam or priest. And I remember my surprise and interest when that lack was mentioned and explained, by the captain if I remember rightly, that in recent centuries (the show is set in the 23rd century) humanity had outgrown religion. We had evolved beyond it.

Until then I had never considered the possibility that we would or even could evolve beyond religion. It has been a part of human experience, in one form or another, for as long as anyone seems to have been cognizant of themselves and the world. Can we exist without religion? Without spirituality? Without a sense of sacredness or caring about awe or prayer or meditation?

I don't buy it. Whatever the nature of the soul, whether it endures beyond death, wherever it exists in our brains, shaped by our lives, we each have a character, an essence, a spirit that requires, and inspires, attention beyond psychology and recreation. And if there's a circumstance guaranteed to raise the fundamentally religious questions of morality, ethics, existence, justice, life, death, hope, despair, and redemption more than traveling through unexplored space encountering near-death experiences, constant danger, strange beings of every conceivable faculty and form, and all their religious and cultural traditions and understandings, well, I'd like to know what that would be. I admit I'm biased, but still I think that the USS Enterprise needed a ship's chaplain in almost every episode I saw.

But I was grateful for the premise making me think about why I thought chaplains were helpful, what they offered, and especially about religion, what it offers, whether I believe it has a future. And the short answer to that large question is that absolutely religion has a future. It is a part of humanity, as much as our skin or hair or heart or appendix. We may wonder why we have this thing as part of us, this impulse to revere, this drive to question the reasons for everything, to consider what is right in and beyond the ordinary circumstances of our world, to believe in things we cannot see or measure or prove, to trust love, to risk hope, to wonder and strive and perceive right and wrong, rightly or wrongly, in the world and in ourselves.

But if religion does have a future, what does that mean? Do we let it just unfold as time passes or do we need to plan for that future? Antoine de Saint Exupery, the author of The Little Prince, once wrote that: "As for the future, your task is not to foresee, but to enable it." That's an interesting and humbling idea--that to expect that things will unfold as we anticipate is not the way to go, rather we ought to work to make the future possible. If he is right, that is an interesting charge for religion, particularly liberal religion.

The age-old division persists between religions that are oriented more toward tradition and heritage, and others that are focused more on change and contemporary issues. Liberal religion has historically had an easier time dealing with the nature of the future, with change, with innovation, with the development of technology and science. Liberal religionists are usually oriented anyway toward change, toward openness, and eager to embrace the ideas of science and technology and adapt our theology and spirituality so as to integrate what we learn.

If anything, we often have an easier time with the future than with the past. We have difficulty with many aspects of history and tradition that may be connected to abuses of authority or oppression or cruelty or violence. On the one hand, this strengthens our capacity to judge religious values and practices for their adherence to compassionate and thoughtful systems of faith and action. Among the more liberal of the western religions, many congregations and denominations are implementing many programs and initiatives to make congregants and polity more sensitive, inclusive and just.

But is our growing sensitivity and concern inclining us to edit the religion out of religion? Increasingly liberal religion eschews words like divinity, god, epiphany, moral, salvation, redemption, sin and even religion. We speak instead of spirit, realization, ethics, understanding, social justice, imperatives, and spirituality. In trying to be more open-minded, sensitive and fair, is liberal religion becoming mundane, superficial and political at the expense of a sense of connection to beliefs, history, transcendence and the sacred?

If we grow only by becoming broader, more global, but not deeper, if we renounce our theological and cultural history as a denomination in order to embrace our present, we may diminish our faith by making it isolated and narcissistic. Just as people grow partly through struggling with experiences of sadness and adversity, so too does philosophy and theology grow by struggling with the difficult as well as the attractive aspects of faith and history. If we renounce our history, because of beliefs and traditions we have grown beyond, we may ironically jeopardize, rather than enable the future, at least for liberal religion. Both on the individual level, and the denominational level, we may weaken our belief system, attending only to the wings of our aspiration and not to the roots from which we spring. If we only broaden, and do not deepen our faith tradition, we may make it less likely to endure to offer its blessings to future generations.

This is one of main issues confronting liberal religion in the 21st century. Different religious leaders perceive different challenges. There are two others which concern me for liberal religion's future. Along with the question of how to integrate our past, there is the issue of how to handle pluralism, the multiculturalism which we find around us more every day, in our families, our work, our food, our faith. We celebrate pluralism in Unitarian Universalism, but it is also a deep challenge to honor different religious, cultural, and ethnic ways accurately and respectfully, across boundaries of language, history, societal norms and belief systems. It is easy to make mistakes--to have a potluck gathering following a service which focuses on a holiday for which fasting is part of the observance. It is easy to misunderstand or confuse or oversimplify themes of religious beliefs or holidays and present them in a way that can be upsetting or offensive to someone who knows the beliefs and holidays as their own. It is easy to take time to learn a tradition that speaks to your heart, so that you can honor it accurately, and find that though you make no mistakes, those to whom the tradition is native resent its adoption by others who are not born to it. We may feel that a faith system, like love, only grows when it is shared, but others feel quite differently, that faith can be stolen, something to be treasured, rather than shared. We may feel that faith, like knowledge, ought to be shared and explored, but others feel that it is like a child, and needs to be protected and cherished by those who know and love it.

These are problems and concerns that are real, positions and occurrences that are the source of conflict among people wrestling with issues of religious pluralism, articulated and debated between individuals and in families and in congregations, at our denomination's General Assembly.

Third, there is the challenge of technology. Many of us remember Alvin Toffler's book Future Shock which defined future shock as the premature arrival of the future. More and more, religion, which necessarily moves slowly in its self-realization and evolution, is hard-pressed to keep up with the pace of technology as it changes the nature of fundamental realities. Our capacities to manipulate life, death, personality, plants, animals, organs, information, and machinery have already outstripped our religious and ethical understandings of the world, how it has always worked, how it ought to work, and are beginning to outstrip even the imagination. We can influence matter on levels we never knew existed, from the most minute to the leviathan, and from the most singular and unique to the most numerous and planetary.

We are already capable of cloning a sheep, and cloning organs or growing them in other animals--we are growing a human ear on the back of a mouse. The capacity for human cloning is not far away and we still have not assembled a final policy on this--is human cloning alright? What about the experiments and alternatives explored along the way that don't work out? How do we contend with these while living wills and organ donations are still complicated religious issues, and most people have not made provision for either in their lives or deaths. What can liberal religion do to rise to the challenges society is beginning to encounter as we strive to deal responsibly with our new capacities and the decisions they entail at the onset of the 21st century?

There is a book by Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines, which predicts many more profoundly complicated issues in the next 50 years--implants that will not only help with hearing or sight or limb regeneration, but memory, sensation, even religious experiences like prayer and meditation. He predicts that as we make computers more like us, in order to interact with them more easily, this will eventually result in computers that are so much like people that they will claim to have consciousness, emotion, spiritual longing, faith, in effect souls. People will be able to dictate and direct religious experiences with the aid of implants that stimulate the centers of the brain that are most active in people having spiritual experiences.

Whether or not Dr. Kurzweil's predictions actually come true to the degree that they did for his first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, two things seem evident. One is that technology is currently outstripping our ethical and religious systems for dealing with the human experience of life. Another is that liberal religion, which has a history of embracing scientific and technological advances, must work now with intentionality and energy to get in step with the ever-faster pace of developments in medical and computer science which are increasingly pervading the realm of religion. Otherwise we are ignoring our responsibilities. Or perhaps we will take Luddite positions simply because we have not responded to opportunities and taken the time necessary to make informed and thoughtful decisions about the options and challenges that will soon confront us.

Market forces and litigation must not be the forces that drive and determine the role and purview of technology in the expansion of our lives, bodies, minds or souls. Religions have influenced and informed each other for millennia and they will continue to do so. We cannot change that, but we can establish what we believe about how we do our own work to learn from and honor the traditions within and beyond our own backgrounds. Really we must do that, if we are going to continue trying to increase our sensitivity and respect for issues of multiculturalism and justice in the world. We can move beyond the values and traditions of our past, but we cannot escape them. As liberal religious people, we do not need to escape or deny our religious roots, even if, as in Star Trek, we have outgrown them. We are rooted, not defined, by our heritage, and the firmer our roots, the larger we can become, the stronger our wings that we depend on to attain our highest aspirations.

History, multiculturalism, technological capacities are resources and responsibilities, ours in so far as they are different to we who are religious liberals, who have always heralded the future with positions we have taken. Living out what we profess is ever engaging and not always easy, but endlessly fascinating and worthwhile. We have a precedent to live up to, and a future to enable, and exciting work to do that we must not shirk and should not fear. To the future, which cannot do without us.

Happy New Year.

Amen.