[Buddha-l] The Churching of America

[Joy Vriens]

Richard,

>The book, written by Roger Finke and Rodney Stark (a team named Finke and  
>Stark HAD to go into either sociology or Vaudeville), is entitled "The  
>Churching of America 1776-2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy."  
>Its main argument (bolstered, of course, with heaps of statistical analysis,  
>bar graphs, pie graphs and other pseudo-scientific legerdemain) is that the  
>religious institutions that have survived and thrived in America have been  
>those that make the most demands on their members.

This is also exactly the point of Régis Debray's essay Le Feu sacré - Fonctions du religieus, Gallimard 2003. Except that you won't find any bar graphs and pie graphs and only very light statistical material. French intellectuals like to opine opiniately, like I do myself (although unlike them preferrably in aphorisms). Because after all, isn't that what it all boils down to, regardless of bar graphs and pie graphs?

>If their findings are valid, what are the implications for the survival of  
>Buddhist institutions in the West? Will only those that require new members  
>to pay substantial membership fees and do thousands of prostrations and go on  
>intensive retreats and neglect their spouses (or is it spice) and children  
>live to see the next century? Will only those who routinely ridicule  
>Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Jews live to write the history of Western  
>Buddhism, while all the ecumenists amongst us abandon the three jewels and  
>drift off to join AA, the YMCA and the local Jungian Society? Cripes. I'm  
>glad I'm getting old. With any luck, I'll die before all that happens. 

A successful religion is like a sort of virus created to survive. If it has a "religious" message at all it is tiny and vehicled with lots of packaging and a very heavy DNA structure. I found this theory pretty disturbing too, yet at the same time I intuited it because after my adventure in Tibetan Buddhism, I find it impossible to get involved in any religion for those very reasons and continue my desperate quest for a religious essence in everyday life.

Joy