All roads lead to Heaven

June 28, 2008

Guest Post by Morbo

The Talking Heads once asserted that Heaven “is a place where nothing ever happens.” They may be right, but that doesn’t keep people from aspiring to spend eternity behind the Pearly Gates.

Heaven may also be a crowded place, if the American people are right about what it takes to get there. A new report from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life finds that 70 percent of Americans believe in multiple paths to salvation. In other words, “my-way-or-the-highway” religion may be losing its appeal.

Thank God or goodness! I’m not a religious person, but I concede that I live in a very religious country. The Pew data bears that out. Ninety-two percent say they believe in God (although a substantial minority — 25 percent — perceives God as an impersonal force, not the traditional Big Man Upstairs). What I don’t want is to live in a country of religious fanatics.

And maybe, just maybe, the fanatics are losing their grip. According to this poll, American faith isn’t terribly dogmatic. That surprised me. Perhaps I’ve spent too much time listening to the Religious Right, but I’ve been worried for years about the pull of fundamentalist religions. Yet in this survey, even 60 percent of all Southern Baptists endorsed the idea that “many religions can lead to eternal life.”

Americans are also comfortable with dissent within their own faiths. Sixty-eight percent agree with the statement, “There is more than one true way to interpret the teachings of my religion.” A whopping 77 percent of Catholics endorse this view. When I was a kid in Catholic school, saying something like that would have led the nuns to rap your knuckles with a ruler.

Reading over the survey, I came to this conclusion: Americans want more spirituality, less dogma. I can’t help but think this is a good thing.

The pro-science part of me continues to feel dismay that so many Americans accept miracles, faith healing and other things that lay beyond the evidence of the senses. But the more practical side of me realizes that I’m the odd man out: Religion will continue to be important to most Americans. Fiery atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are fun to read, but they will never persuade many Americans. I have no beef with people being religious. It’s fundamentalist dogma I want them to move away from.

Is that happening? Perhaps. Some scholars speculate that America is moving toward a “post-denominational” period where rigid boundaries between denominations break down and non-denominational houses of worship grow in popularity. I’m for that if it leads people away from pulpits where preachers promote hate and push right-wing politics.

We’ve heard a lot of talk lately about the so-called death of the Religious Right. I’m not convinced that movement is on the ropes, and I think America will always have a fundamentalist political force that anchors its narrow vision of faith to far-right politics. These people will always be with us, but perhaps we can hope — and pray — that their numbers are finally starting to shrink.

Maybe someone pointed out that if you retain this dogmatic belief that only close adherents to your religious beliefs get into heaven, that God would be getting maybe 1% of the world’s population, while Satan would be getting 99%.

Or maybe someone pointed out that if you are dogmatic and WRONG, you’re in the 99%.

I think South Park expressed this just right with their vision of heaven.

  • I suppose I shouldn’t judge him, only having read “The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution,” (which I recommend highly), but the reason that I find Mr. Hitchens’ effort fun to read, and suspect that Mr. Dawkins’ would be less fun, is that “God is not Great” basically outlines what it is that the so-called people of faith are supposed to believe. Often these people themselves are unaware of the dogma that their own churches espouse (not that the bits they substitute are more rational). The question of the truth of their beliefs then begs itself: how can a group insist that they have truth when they can’t even agree amongst themselves what it is that they believe, and those ostensibly with the responsibility of preserving the “faiths” decide to teach their flocks truths which differ from the official line? We needn’t go into the Dawinsian arguments using the illogical nature of the various claims.

    All of this is basically a way to say that, although your arguments are basically sound here, I can’t see the fact that such large majorities in our country insist on perpetuating these bankrupt beliefs.

  • Lance,
    lots of fundies seem to really identify with Revelation; it states that heaven has a maximum occupancy of 144,000.
    So 1% of the population is clearly far too high.

  • There is one True God and He doesn’t depent on any person’s imagination.
    God accepts everyone, but those people who apply special efforts to come to Him, by following God’s Law, always praying Him are especially dear to God and God Is also especially Dear to them.
    It is wrong to think that God hates first people mentioned above and likes only the second mentioned.

  • Gotta wonder about the relevance of a study in which 21% of self-identified atheists “belive in God”.

  • Some scholars speculate that America is moving toward a “post-denominational” period where rigid boundaries between denominations break down and non-denominational houses of worship grow in popularity

    For 50 years that I am aware of, “non-denominational” has meant “fundamentalist Southern Baptist for those afraid to use the real name of this garbage.” Almost all the big fundie megachurches are “non-denominational.” It’s how they rope in the mouthbreathing rubes.

  • Tom: The problem with your more recent comments is that the accuracy of your information is rapidly approaching the polite elegance of your means of expression.

    No, Tom, ‘non-denominational’ and, in fact, most of the type of religious ideas you dislike, do not come from Southern Baptist roots. In fact, while they have recently been ‘steeplejacked’ Southern Baptists come from a tradition of political tolerance because Baptists are, or at least were, aware of the amount of intolerance they had been subject to. They were strong proponents, traditionally of Church-State separation.

    Many of the truly scary religious ideas have Calvinist, not Baptist, roots. The true ‘reconstructionists’ — the group who wants to replace the Constitution with laws based on Biblical sanctions — are Calvinist, as was their founder, Rushdoony. The ‘prosperity gospellers’ — the ugly conmen who get their poor congregants — many of whom already ‘tithe’ — to send them more money so that the ministers can ‘join in their prayers’ prayers which are usually for wealth — also come from Calvinism. It was Calvin and his followers who claimed that wealth was one sign of ‘the elect’ that had been predestined by God for Heaven.

    And the most coercive groups, the ones that it takes years to break away from — and sometimes leaves you, as it did ‘dogemperor,’ with medically diagnosed PTSD — are usually United Church of Christ types.

    Oh, and the whole concept of the Rapture, which was almost unheard of in most of American Christianity until the LeHaye books comes from one half verse in one epistle, and was invented by the renegade — for political reasons since he was Irish — Anglican George Darby, who founded the Plymouth Brethren. (Fans of the detective story writer Sara Woods wil be aware of the Brethren, since she uses this extremely dour and unpleasant group in several of her books.)

    In fact, I can’t think of any megachurches that are Southern Baptist off the top of my head, though I hope someone will correct me on that. (Correction, I think Hagee is technically Baptist, though his own ideas and services are far from standard.) Certainly Haggard and Parsley aren’t.

  • Interesting regarding the survey about whether different religions can lead to heaven. This was, in fact, the beginning of the end for my personal religion, as I was told that basically everybody else was going to hell. I refused to believe that, and everything else unraveled.

  • Shrinking indeed…at least in the last half century in my community. It is now more of a minority to run into a fanatic my way or the highway person than those who are more liberal and open to the many paths to heaven crowd. It seems that in my life time spirituality has become personalized and has replaced to a great extent the dogmatized standards of when I was a child. Spirituality does not negate religion but religion can negate spirituality.

    I like to think of it as people becoming more human, understanding, accepting and tolerant. Something the hard religious right has never been. They are more demanding, critical, judgmental, condemning and intolerant pushing their beliefs off on the rest of us without compromise.

    I welcome this spiritual awakening because even an atheistic moral stand can be considered spiritual.

  • John Nelson Darby, not George Darby.

    As for premillennial dispensationalism (Darbyism), there was another popularizer of that doctrine before Tim LaHaye. He was Hal Lindsey, author of The Late Great Planet Earth–remember him?

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