A New York Times Op-Ed piece today offers a teaser with big impications for the future of religion in America, though the powers that be haven't found a way to wrap thier minds around it yet. Why, exactly, do a majority of American's surveyed (including churchgoing Christians) believe that those belonging to other religions are going to heaven--including atheists? The answer is greener than you think.
In a New York Times Op-Ed piece today, Heaven for the Godless, Charles Blow quotes the findings of a June 2008 Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life study, claiming that a full 70% of Americans surveyed felt that even those belonging to other religions would go to heaven. As Blow reports (unfortunate name, but don't hold it against him), evangelical Christians challenged the survey, claiming that respondents had't understood the question. To clear up any confusion, Pew repeated the survey in August, asking respondents to specifically name who would be saved, and well, the answer was pretty much everyone--Buddhists; Hindus; Muslims; religious cruisers, trolls, and dilletants (whew!); even agnostics and atheists. But as much as this flies in the face of what we're seeing re: Prop 8, it makes a lot of sense.
The new paradigm for religion actually has little to do with creed or doctrine. The inclusive trend that is on the rise in American religion is, in fact, working off the template of an environmetal parardigm in which everything has to be included in order to make sense of the whole--as opposed to the old tribal model, which could make only limited sense of the world since it was based on excluding big chunks of reality (i.e., other tribes, beliefs, languages, countries, political systems, hairdos, you name it).
These new religious attitudes (again, sadly belied at the moment by Prop 8) are, I believe, largely a response to issues like gobal climate change, issues which must be addressed collectively by the whole of humanity if they are to be addressed at all. If I had to sum it up in a single sentence, I'd say that global issues are forcing humanity to new levels of global awareness, and the backwash from this naturally affects people's religious views. Religion is hardly at the forefront of green culture. But it is hardly immune to it either. In fact, it may make its influence known there before we begin to see tangible benefits to the environment. But this makes sense, when you think about it, because we have to change the way we think, and probably what we believe, before we can see changes in our behavior.