{"id":7683,"date":"2004-03-18T10:17:45","date_gmt":"2004-03-18T10:17:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/the_next_great_awakening.html"},"modified":"2004-03-18T10:17:45","modified_gmt":"2004-03-18T10:17:45","slug":"the_next_great_awakening","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/the_next_great_awakening.html","title":{"rendered":"The Next Great Awakening?"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Cathleen Falsani at the Sun-Times<\/a><\/p>\n

\nIn the 1960s, scholars argued that religion was growing increasingly irrelevant and that sooner rather than later the United States would become a completely secular nation. What has happened in the intervening years has proved that secularization theory only partly correct. <\/p>\n

The authority of religious institutions has dwindled, and not just for Christians. American Jewish and Muslim communities are dealing with similar phenomena.<\/p>\n

At the same time as the influence of traditional religious institutions over their constituents has waned, individual religious quests and personalized spirituality are flourishing.<\/p>\n

Thumma calls this an “era of seekership.” Many Americans — and not just the young ones — are perusing the religious landscape and trying to pick and choose on an individual level what they to believe, like chemists mixing and matching compounds in a spiritual experiment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\nReligious labels are growing increasingly relative. While many people will still give a sectarian answer when asked what religion they are, often they attach a caveat to their answer.<\/p>\n

Something like, “I’m an Episcopalian, but I’m really into yoga and I just read the Tibetan Book of the Dead.”<\/p>\n

Or, “I’m Roman Catholic but I believe priests should be allowed to marry and I’ve been going to this nondenominational coffeehouse on Sunday nights for small-group Bible study.”<\/p>\n

Or, “I was raised Baptist, but my husband is Jewish and we don’t attend church or synagogue, but we just saw ‘The Passion.’ What did you think about it?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Cathleen Falsani at the Sun-Times In the 1960s, scholars argued that religion was growing increasingly irrelevant and that sooner rather than later the United States would become a completely secular nation. What has happened in the intervening years has proved that secularization theory only partly correct. The authority of religious institutions has dwindled, and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Next Great Awakening? - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/the_next_great_awakening.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Next Great Awakening? - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"From Cathleen Falsani at the Sun-Times In the 1960s, scholars argued that religion was growing increasingly irrelevant and that sooner rather than later the United States would become a completely secular nation. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7683"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7683\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}