The Death of God in America??
Newsweek (April 13, 2009 issue) has just run a cover story about the decline and fall of Christianity in America. An interesting thing seems to be happening in American religions. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, more and more people seem to be declining any specific religious affiliation in favor of calling oneself spiritual, and the percentage of self-identified Christians fell 10% since 1990. Moreover, it seems that more Americans want to see religion removed from public life. Perhaps religion should really be a private matter, not part of anyone’s political campaign. What do you think, is Christianity declining in America? Is God dying in America?
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Beyond Christianity
Beyond Christianity
Beyond Christianity
African Americans in a New Thought Church
Beyond Christianity draws on rich ethnographic work in a Religious Science church in Oakland, California, to illuminate the ways a group of African Americans has adapted a religion typically thought of as white to fit their needs and circumstances.
This predominantly African American congregation is an anomalous phenomenon for both Religious Science and African American religious studies. It stands at the intersection of New Thought doctrine, characterized by personal empowerment teachings,and a culturally familiar liturgical style reminiscent of Black Pentecostals and Black Spiritualists. This group challenges oversimplified concepts of the Black church experience and broadens the concept of Black religion outside the boundaries of Christianity—raising questions about what it means to be an African American congregation, and about the nature of blackness itself. Beyond Christianity adds a new dimension to the scholarship on Black religion.
Cloth: $45.00
ISBN: 9780814756935
208 pages
Click here to order on Amazon.com
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So, What Is A New Thought Religion?
New Thought Religion is not really just one religion. It is an umbrella term, as we might use the word Protestant to lump together some of the non-Catholic Christian religions. There are many individual religions that fit into the New Thought category that are independent but share certain core beliefs.
Three of these distinguishing Core Beliefs in New Thought Religion are:
Monistic understanding of God
God is a unified deity, who is the source and substance of all creation. God is not thought of as trinity for example. New Thought also affirms a pantheistic universe in which all of creation is God in manifestation, created out of God stuff, if you will…
Secondly, New Thought religions teach that the nature of reality is idealism – underlying all matter is creative thought (everything begins in mind)
These various teachings explain the nature of reality as a type of metaphysical idealism, in other words, that thoughts are things, thoughts or ideas are the underlying basis of matter, much like what quantum physics is confirming with sub-atomic wave/particle theories. What seems like solid matter is actually energy in motion and these wave/particles respond differently according to the thoughts and expectations of the observer. Reality is malleable and subject to our thought.
Finally, New Thought religion teaches that human beings have the power to create their own circumstances through thought.
Not only do these religions believe in the power of thought to affect outer experiences, these religions ask followers to ask themselves if they believe the world to be a hostile or a friendly place, and then to take responsibility for their own experiences as reflections of their own thoughts. You may be familiar with this as the power of positive thinking.
Founder and History
Started as a healing movement in 19th century New England, as Mind Science by Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, and later became known as New Thought around 1895. The environment of liberal Christianity forged by the Unitarians and Transcendentalists, for example, paved the way for the movement to develop.
Quimby’s own interests centered on mental healing and were further piqued after he was himself miraculously cured of tuberculosis, a disease which had already taken the lives of many of his family members. His own healing led him on a quest to understand the relationship between illness and health.
Quimby came to the basis of his theory of mental healing stating that, “I say there is no principle in disease. It is an error that truth can correct.” While his method of healing could be perceived as strictly secular, Quimby defined his method as that embodied by Jesus. Making a distinction between Jesus and the Christ, he believed the Christ to be the Wisdom or Truth of God about which Jesus taught and used himself. In fact Quimby felt that he had rediscovered the healing technique of Jesus in the sense that he had tapped into the same source that Jesus had and therefore manifested the same effect.
While he is considered the founder of the whole New Thought movement in America, he was not a systematic theologian or an organizer of a new religion. His followers came to the forefront as systematizers and organizers. Many in this initial group went on to become prominent leaders in New Thought as well, including Julius Dresser and his wife Annetta Seabury Dresser, Warren Felt Evans and Mary Baker Patterson (later Eddy). Each of these students had initially come to Quimby for personal healing and consequently became interested in learning his techniques themselves.
Find out more about New Thought Religion history and current denominations
Religious Science United Federation for Better Living Unity School of Christianity Divine Science
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Do You Feel Like You are Losing Your Religion?
Somewhere along the way, the religion or faith you once held dear slipped away. So, what happened? What do I mean by losing my religion? I am referring to the phenomena where many people are leaving their traditional forms of religious teachings and practices, and not knowing where to turn, turn away from religion and spirituality altogether, becoming agnostic, atheist or a nota (none of the above on the survey option). Although I have rarely met a true atheist, more likely people become agnostic or just plain fed up with what they’ve been taught. Does this sound familiar?
So what characterizes the person who has lost his or her religion? Several things really:
Traditional practices and teachings don’t serve your needs or growth
You don’t feel fulfilled
You are actively questioning, seeking a spiritual connection
Your questions are not taken seriously by your religious leaders, leaving you feeling frustrated and unfulfilled
Let’s just look at one of these:
The first one I mentioned: Traditional practices and teachings that don’t serve your needs or growth. In this case these traditions have actually become obstacles to faith and religion. One of the strongest obstacles can be one’s conception of God.
So here, let us distinguish between God, our God image and our God concept. Sometimes this exercise helps to free us up enough to find our faith and religion again.
First, there is God, in God’s own essence, being, totality, and that is something that most of us don’t really have access to in our human form. Although perhaps it is attainable along the mystic path as enlightenment or Christ consciousness. But for the most part, the vast majority of us are not experiencing God in this most pure form. What I like to call God straight, no chaser.
That leads us to the second point, our God image. This is us creating God in our image. It is the God formed by the characteristics of parents, authority figures and religious teachings. This might mean that the image we have of God is harsh, critical, judgmental, punitive, hard to please, & constantly needing to be appeased. Well, when this kind of God image does not mature and get replaced by a healthier image, we continue to think of God in these terms, just like when we formed the image as a child. The Freudians say this happens between the ages of 2-3 and because it is so clearly a reflection of parents, it leads them to the conclusion that this is all that God is – a projection. Obviously, as people of faith that is not our conclusion, but we can learn about our God image from Freudian psychology, yet believing that there is some reality beyond that image.
Lastly, is our God concept. The God concept is the relationship we form with the God image, not with God straight up, but God through the lens we created. This is the stuff that creates religious baggage. If this relationship is not a positive one, then typically we either suffer our religion with dread, fear and guilt or we walk away from it all together. We lose our religion.
The good news is that we can regain our religion and spirituality by realizing that our God image is something we created out of the characteristics of parents and authority figures. We can reshape our God image. We must reshape our God image, because we really only work with an image. We are hard pressed to get to God itself within institutional religion. So, how do you regain your religion and spirituality? Look within for the God presence, meditate. Follow the paths of mystics who experienced God and wrote about what it was like to meet God, “face to face.” One thing they have in common, they teach that God is within, and one never finds God outside of oneself.
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