Beyond the Limits of Love: Building the Religious Counterculture

A homeless man named Roger lives on my block in the entryway to an abandoned building. He sleeps there every night, and every day he wanders around the neighborhood. We always greet each other; sometimes we stop to chat. He knows my kids and my dog, and they know him. He has never asked me for help of any kind. Most of our exchanges are absolutely ordinary—just small talk about the weather.

Except that it's not at all ordinary small talk. There's a forced breeziness on both of our parts. We're both pretending that it's normal for someone with a wealth of earthly possessions and social capital to be chatting about the weather with someone who has virtually none. We are radically Other to one another. We pretend that we're commiserating about the rain when, in fact, the stakes could not be more different for the two of us. There's no "co-miserating"; it's misery for him and not for me. When we talk about the upcoming thunderstorm, for me it's a question of whether to bring the kids to the park before or after the rain. For him it's whether his sleeping area will be flooded, whether he'll be safe from lightning, and whether he'll be able to sleep at all.

And when I'm home and dry and the storm is raging outside and we're counting the seconds between the lightning and the thunder, sometimes it hits me that Roger is still outside—right outside—not in the Sudan, not in Delhi, not even in East Harlem, but right outside, just a few doors down at this minute. He is sitting there alone in the pouring rain.

Liberal Religion's Flight From Obligation

It is a well-known fact that religious congregations, particularly liberal ones, have been hemorrhaging congregants for the last fifty years. Theological updates, long overdue, have done nothing to staunch the outflow. In fact, in a July New York Times op-ed column, Ross Douthat observed that the decline of liberal religious denominations maps perfectly to their efforts to adapt themselves to contemporary liberal values. In a stark illustration, he notes that at the very same time that the Episcopal Church's House of Bishops was finally approving a rite to bless same-gender unions, Episcopalian church attendance figures for the last ten years came out, showing that average Sunday attendance had dropped 23 percent and not a single diocese in the country saw churchgoing increase.

Of course, correlation does not imply causality, but at the very least we can say that the liberalization of religion (in its current form) has been ineffective at keeping moderns engaged in religious life. Bewildered congregational board presidents, clergy, and bespectacled Alban Institute consultants are tearing out their hair over the question of why. They sit around boardroom tables with cups of fair trade, organic, shade-grown coffee and ask each other, "What more do they want?"

Douthat named the defining feature of liberal religion as the idea that "faith should spur social reform as well as personal conversion." While a this-worldly concern for justice is certainly an important feature of liberal religion, I would offer that the signature orientation of liberal religion has rather been one toward increasing personal freedom from religious strictures. The joke is that the Ten Commandments have been demoted to "ten suggestions." By way of a few examples, according to the Barna Group, liberal Christians are far less likely to tithe than their conservative counterparts. Sabbath practice, prayer practices, and the observance of kashrut have fallen out of favor in mainstream and liberal Judaism. (In fact, Richard Levy, director of HUC/LA rabbinical school, scandalized the Reform Jewish community in 1999 by posing for the cover of Reform Judaism wearing tallit and kipa.) Liberals give less to charity, volunteer less, and give less blood. According to Arthur Brooks, author of Who Really Cares, if liberals gave blood as often as conservatives, the American blood supply would increase by 45 percent.