THE TREND TO SPIRITUAL NARCISSISM

...It may well be that this human warmth of a personal kind is a more powerful force for conversion than is their set of simple religious beliefs...

...and they help to overcome the feeling of alienation that seems typical of modern urban life...

...They are relatively lenient about doctrinal orthodoxy...

...The religious fundamentalists long ago recognized this confusion, this uncertainty, this lack of theological authority, and they started a protest movement to defend the orthodoxy of the Christian faith...

...God is popular again...

...search for life's jut the centuries, ular interest in a m of religiosity...

...What gives rise to our sorrows and to what intent...

...Several years ago Dean Kelley gained wide attention for his explanation Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, but the return to religious fundamentals embraces more than the fringe sects, the conservatives and the Evangelicals...

...The shift from a theologically fuzzy and socially active version of Christianity to the prayerful, emotional and personal version is difficult to fit into a sociological or cultural category...

...The religious leaders who are now attracting an enormous following are also symbolic of protest...

...Our belief in a constantly perfectible society has come into question...

...Where lies the path to true happiness...

...Probably the least common denominator of religious belief among them is a vague reference to the "Beyond," as Thomas O'Dea names it, a trust in some kind of higher power, some transcendent force in the universe...

...He makes God stricter than most of us think He is (or ought to be...

...The nature worshipper seldom goes to the mountain alone...

...narcissists discussed in two excellent articles by Peter Marin in Harpers (October, 1975) and by Christopher Lasch in the New York Review of Books (September 30, 1976...

...Moon distributing literature, and I am regularly approached by a Sister of the Foundation Church...

...Billy Graham says with simplicity and without apology: "I believe in the inspiration of the Holy Bible, the Virgin Birth, the resurrection of the Christ from the grave, the atonement of His blood of the sins of mankind, and the return of Christ to establish a kingdom on earth...

...As Peter Berger says, "religion is the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as being humanly significant...

...Now we find some well-educated clergy among the Episcopalians, Lutherans and Presbyterians who are leaders in the new Pentecostal movement...

...The American businessman is ordinarily not typified as either religious or intellectual, but there is no question of the contemporary impact of the Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship International...

...But if we look closer, the Americans we are talking about in this modern spiritual revival are overwhelmingly Christian...

...It seems a reasonable hypothesis to suggest that a partial explanation of the current spiritual revival is a reaction to the fuzziness of the traditional Christian belief system...

...The newer Pentecostals have invaded, or have developed within, the mainline churches, including the Roman Catholic Church...

...Science and technology and rationality have not produced the promised Garden of Eden...

...Much has been written about the loneliness of modern man and about his quest for community...

...At the airport in Los Angeles, a Hare-Krishna person was handing out carnations, and another young man gave me a leaflet advertising Jews for Jesus...

...Part of their attractiveness is that they offer love and solace to the confused and alienated people of our society...

...curiosity and open-mindedness replaced scientific confidence and certainty...

...Perhaps the most dramatic instance of this shift from ignorance was the charismatic conversion of some faculty members and students at Duquesne University, followed by the emergence of the Catholic charismatic renewal at the University of Notre Dame, the University of Michigan and other centers of higher learning...

...The Campus Crusade for Christ has already reached out beyond the colleges...

...THE TREND TO SPIRITUAL NARCISSISM JOSEPH H. FICHTER What is going on now may well be called a qualitative revival At his last gigantic rally in Michigan Billy Graham declared that one-third of American adults claim that they have been born again...

...Perhaps they are haunted by the words of one of the classical founders of sociology, Emile Durkheim, who wrote that "there is something eternal in religion which is destined to survive all the particular symbols in which religious thought has successively enveloped itself...

...This dilution of beliefs among the professional clergy, the teachers and...

...It People who have i them happy are isecure...

...Even bourgeois can find the world heartless, oppressive and unspiritual...

...Even Karl an would be unstice has been reeciated religion as I assurance...

...Lasch says there is at best a superficial resemblance between the two, but that the cult of psychic self-improvement is therapeutic, not religious...

...Dean Kelley places great emphasis on what he calls the "Power of the Gate," and he thinks that the Anabaptists and the Wesleyans had the correct formula that should be imitated today, (a) Be in no haste to admit members, (b) Test the readiness and preparation of would-be members, (c) Require continuing faithfulness, (d) Bear one another up in small groups, (e) Do not yield control to outsiders, nor seek to accommodate to their expectations...

...They show a loving concern for their neighbor who is in trouble...

...At other airports I saw the followers of Reverend Mr...

...The churches would be irrelevant...

...Whatever remained of religion, organized or private, would simply be a quaint and curious anachronism...

...Who are these spiritual narcissists, and where are they coming from...

...College students, who are neither disinherited poor nor unchurched secularists, are putting their theological commitment into Bill Bright's Four Spiritual Laws of Christianity...

...These are old-fashioned dogmas, brief, unambiguous statements...

...Christians generally would maintain that it is necessary to believe in Jesus Christ in order to be saved from eternal damnation, that in the inscrutable providence of God, Jesus is in some manner the channel of redemption...

...The corporal works of mercy, feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, comforting the elderly, are manifestations of their service to the Lord through their service to His children...

...The same poll showed a surprising number of Americans interested in the inner life of the soul...

...Marx is seldom quoted as saying that "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of an unspiritual situation...

...The new Pentecostals have no intention of breaking away from their parent bodies...

...They do not subscribe to the triage ethic of the crowded lifeboat that identifies the secular narcissists...

...The charismatics are flourishing...

...There is no consensus as to what is believed, as to what is central and what is peripheral, nor is there any clear authority to resolve the uncertainty...

...Indeed, their internal mission is that the whole church will be renewed by the Holy Spirit...

...Our belief in ime into question, resources, technoving in the world, problems and nality have not pro. By this time in Led all these proy. We are disapthings come out :marks, "the gens 1960s and 1970s illy sure...

...The new breed of Pentecostals in the conventional churches are out to prove that they are wrong...

...Certainly we have to include the so-called fringe sects that Henry Van Dusen described as the "Third Force in American Christendom" alongside Catholicism and Protestantism...

...It was a i of the so-called i affluent families, ople can have too iningless life...

...The current trend to spiritual narcissism is a group grope...

...It was a commonplace observation that many of the so-called beat generation came from relatively affluent families...

...Everyone struggles in some way with the humanly inexplicable frustrations of life...

...As Professor David Harrell remarks, "the general American intellectual mood in the 1960s and 1970s was less dogmatic and less intellectually sure...

...One of the criticisms of the new bourgeois religiosity, and the main reason why I call it narcissistic, is its tendency to withdraw from the serious social crises of the larger world...

...Ref comfort and asitrated...

...What makes this a subject of curious interest to the behavioral scientist is that it appears to be in contradiction to the much advertised spread of secularism, materialism and scientism in the American society...

...The remarkable fact is that large numbers of people want them again, and want them in their stark and absolute originality...

...Southern Baptists exemplify this particularistic creed, and so do many of the neo-pentecostal charismatics in the mainline churches...

...They are strongly convinced that theirs is the road to eternal salvation...

...This is not as easy to describe and define...

...Many of these people are fairly well-educated and are not from the ranks of the disinherited or the unchurched...

...It had been traditional among the revivalists, fundamentalists and Pentecostals that higher education leads to theological confusion and a loss of pure religion, that divine inspiration suffices for the preacher, and the Bible is the sole guideline of life for the true believer...

...At the level of personal experience, and seen from the individual point of view, says Milton Yinger, the quality of being religious implies two things: "first, a belief that evil, pain, bewilderment and injustice are fundamental facts of existence...

...Theologians like Donald Gelpi, J. Massyngberde Ford and Kilian McDonnell, lend their weight of learning in support of the charismatics...

...Men look to the various religions for answers to those profound mysteries of the human condition which, today even as in olden times, deeply stir the human heart: What is man...

...The deep-dyed fundamentalists seem convinced that religious revival cannot be developed in the larger institutionalized churches...

...Ernest Troeltsch thought such people were in the lower socio-economic class and relegated them to the "church of the disinherited...

...The participants exhibit loyalty to each other...

...The delegates to the Second Vatican Council stated this perennial search for meaning and purpose as well as anybody else...

...Nevertheless, these universalistic churches are reputedly losing membership, or at least are not gaining new adherents...

...It is as though we were witnessing a vast counter-culture movement among people who are not hippies or dropouts or crazies...

...Indeed, theirs is Christ's lifeboat that is large enough to accommodate anyone who wants to climb aboard...

...The preachers who are attracting the largest audiences are those who propose relatively simple dogma and speak with authority about it...

...It is as though the Social Gospel of earlier years has lost its influence, and the social activists in the pulpits of the sixties have now been repudiated...

...Even though we possess enormous resources, technological skill, the highest standard of living in the world, we are continuously beset by social problems and national failures...

...Stark and Glock remark somewhat harshly that "Evangelical Protestantism tends to take a miraculous view of social justice, that if all men are brought to Christ social evils will disappear through divine intervention...

...This kind of vague description is consoling for many who are frustrated by theological arguments, and it may even have an ecumenical potential, but it is not satisfying to the new narcissists...

...Under the leadership of people like Oral Roberts, the late Kathryn Kuhlman and dozens of lesser lights, there has been a migration of the healing and deliverance ministry out of the rural revival tents into the Hollywood Bowl, Madison Square Garden, and especially onto the television channels...

...Religion is said also to be a source of comfort and assurance to the disillusioned and frustrated...

...and second, a set of practices and sanctified beliefs that express a conviction that man can ultimately be saved from these facts...

...In the decade of the 1970s the healers and the charismatics are front stage center of the American religious enterprise...

...Marx eligion is the sigh f a heartless world, al situation...

...curiosity fie confidence and ary American disto the victims of ers of society...

...When the ultimate questions are asked, even science and philosophy do not have satisfactory answers...

...The born-again person must put everything in the hands of Christ who alone can fashion the good society...

...If religion is perennial, and if the search for life's meaning has been persistent throughout the centuries, why do we now experience this popular interest in a basic conservative and personal form of religiosity...

...He cited a Gallup poll showing that the number of people who believe religion is becoming more important in life has tripled since 1970...

...The doors are open to all sinners, but not everybody is able or willing to meet the conditions of entering those doors...

...This signifies a personal conversion, a turning to the Lord, a strong and consoling conviction that one is a born-again Christian...

...The Full Gospel Business Men, the Campus Crusade for Christ, Christian athletes, Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses, Transcendental Meditators—all are involved in this new wave of religious enthusiasm...

...The contemporary revivalism challenges this neat deprivation hypothesis as well as the equally questionable theory of unilinear upward mobility according to which the socially deprived people who are unchurched move first into a fundamentalist sect, then into the less conservative middle-class denomination, then into the upper-class liberal church, and then finally out into godless worldliness...

...The acceptance of Christ as redeemer and savior must be accompanied by a series of other religious propositions, like a reliance on scriptural inspiration and the imminent second coming of Christ...

...Even among their better-educated clergy one recognizes a conviction that the world is an evil place, American society is incorrigible, a den of iniquity, the realm of the Devil and his fallen angels...

...Oral Roberts, too, appeals to the general American public, especially in the excellently staged television productions he sponsors...

...has been a loss 5. Our confidence ;d...

...At the risk of oversimplification, we can probably subsume the various explanations under the general theme of Victor FrankFs Search for Meaning...

...Even ss, oppressive and loneliness of modjommunity...

...Yet it seems to be all these things...

...It is not a new idea to say that people can have too much of a good thing...

...Everbody is talking about Jesus...

...The various kinds of Holiness Churches, the Assemblies of God, the Church of the Nazarene, have regularly been assigned by sociologists to the lower classes of poor and uneducated people...

...Theologians may worry about what religious beliefs these people share...

...Its slogan has become: "Today the campus, tomorrow the world...

...Privatized religion has probably been exaggerated...

...What looks like absurdity and futility to the non-believer becomes reasonable and purposeful to the believer...

...From the more profane perspective of the sociologist this is a remarkable culture phenomenon, indication of a switch in mores and folkways not quite fitting the stereotype of sophisticated, sensuous, morally corrupt Americans...

...These strict requirements help to constitute what Talcott Parsons would call a particularistic religion, that is, one in which the membership is socially exclusive and doctrinally elitist...

...Like the Adventists they put a special emphasis on belief in the imminent triumphant return of the Lord...

...But the contemporary revivalist goes further than this...

...Religion gives purpose to a meaningless life...

...It occurs also among the lucky ones...

...They are essentially ineffective because they rely solely on the intelligence and ingenuity of human beings...

...In other words, neither the Enlightenment, nor the Age of Reason, nor the contemporary Technological Age of universal problem-solving had witnessed the entombment of religion...

...People they need sources jectives seem diffiatized religion has nature worshipper The current trend grope...

...At the international convention of Alcoholics Anonymous in Denver I heard more talk about God than I ever hear at clergy conferences...

...In other words, the revivalist creed is precise and narrowly defined and allows for no theological variation or interpretation...

...Our confidence and self-assurance have been shattered...

...The "outreach" of Billy Graham's revivalist crusades is to a typically middle-class audience, as are the people he persuades to come forward to make a decision for Christ...

...Karl Rahner suggests that many good people are doing this even though they have never heard of Jesus, and he calls them "anonymous Christians...

...It would be completely unfair and untrue to suggest that these contemporary American revivalists are selfish and heartless people, unmoved by the pain and suffering of their fellowmen...

...Born-again believers feel that they have been tampered with, watered down, explained away, until they are almost meaningless...

...With this kind of attitude, the evangelical, the conservative, the Pentecostal, is eminently reasonable in his anticipation of the Second Coming...

...While the traditional baptism by water is still much a part of the rituals, there appears to be a greater contemporary emphasis on baptism in the Spirit...

...But there are a lot of other Americans who are being born again in one fashion or another and who seem to be renewing an emphasis on simple, basic Christian beliefs and practices...

...That person is alone a Christian," says Hans Kiing, "who tries to live his human, social and religious life in the light of Jesus Christ...

...One of its characteristics is that it provides a sense of community and develops an espirit de corps...

...It has been the clergy who are experiencing the "painful struggle to reinterpret the meaning of the Christian theological heritage...

...People seek meaning in their existence, and they need sources of reassurance, but both of these objectives seem difficult of attainment by oneself...

...What is goodness and what is sin...

...By this time in history we are supposed to have licked all these problems...

...The editors of the Christian Century recently proclaimed the "Year of the Evangelicals" and Martin Marty devoted a whole issue of Context to the Evangelicals and warned them against "Triumphalism...

...The devout believer may well see the hand of God in all these zealous, evangelizing activities, and speculate about the variety of ways in which God is manifesting Himself to His children on earth...

...The Reasons Aside from revelation and divine providence and supernatural grace—about which social scientists can make no empirical observations—why do people continue to believe in religion and practice it...

...Perhaps the cynic will say that there has been a loss of nerve among the American people...

...Simultaneously and paradoxically the sociologists have recognized the persistence of religion even among urbanized, sophisticated Westerners who are supposedly most affected by secularism...

...It is a broad cultural phenomenon that defies a strict definition of either theological or organized fundamentalism, evangelism, or conservatism...

...What is the meaning and purpose of our life...

...The worldly narcissists "hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling—even if it is only a momentary illusion—of personal well-being, health and psychic security...

...They suspect a "watering down" of doctrines even by clergy and theologians...

...Spiritual renewal is gaining conventional respectability— if not complete acceptance—in the mainline churches, Protestants and Catholic, in the shape of the charismatic movement...

...They expect members to contribute financial support, but they do not "clean" the membership rolls...

...By and large, the Baptists and the Churches of Christ are hardened opponents of the charismatic movement, but even in some of their congregations there have appeared small cells of Spirit-filled members...

...leaders of organized religion, was seen with foreboding by Jeffrey Haden, who remarked that "Christian theology has been shaken at the foundation...

...After his survey of the beliefs of 7,441 Protestant parish clergymen he saw the theological confusion and weakening of faith as the "dilemma" of contemporary Protestantism...

...The culmination of secularism was supposed to be the death of God and the ultimate disappearance of transcendent religion...

...We are disappointed by our inability to make all things come out right...

...By contrast, the large, mainline liberal churches have been universalistic...

...The basic requirement is a firm belief in the mysteries of religion, not their explanation...

...Mass movements for social reform, welfare schemes of the federal government, the programs of socialism, the organized protests of ethnic and racial and feminist groups, are all to no avail...

...The Pentecostals, however, do not -find favor with fundamentalist preachers like Carl Mclntyre and Billy Hargis...

...It should be made abundantly clear that these spiritual narcissists are not to be confused with the secular father Joseph H. fichter, s.J., teaches in the Sociology Department of Loyola University, New Orleans...

...To make a decision for Christ—as the revivalist preacher calls it— is to give an affirmative answer to the question: are Commonweal: 171 you saved...

...They see the larger denominations drifting toward modernism and liberalism, no longer holding tenaciously to the basics of the Apostles' Creed...

...Above all, they have no intention of breaking away from their mother church...

...Instead of the quantitative expansion of religion that we experienced in the 1950s what is now going on may well be called a qualitative revival...

...What is peculiar about contemporary American disillusionment is that it is not limited to the victims of social oppression, the down-and-outers of society...

...To say that the contemporary world is incorrigible is to pronounce a philosophy of despair, but only if one holds that the world can be reformed and saved by purely human means...

...One of its 17 March 1978: 170 Vhat is the meanoodness and what >ws and to what ppiness...

...In the long run nothing else makes much sense...

...People who have everything that is supposed to make them happy are still dissatisfied and alienated and insecure...

...The conservative theology of salvation religion blends with a conservative social philosophy which holds that there is only one way to solve the social problems of our 17 March 1978: 172 age, and that is by the spiritual conversion of individuals...

...Even Karl Marx, who was certain that religion would be unnecessary once exploitation and injustice has been removed in the classless society, appreciated religion as a temporary source of comfort and assurance...

...Thus they concentrate their energies on conversion and evangelism and largely ignore social issues...

...What seems to be happening now is a shifting of membership, an awakening of dormant Christians, and especially an attraction of middle-class Americans to an old-fashioned revivalistic brand of Christianity...

...They claim to be followers of Christ...

...Another characteristic of the zealous religious movements is that they also put down rigid requirements for membership...

...They speak with conviction and clarity and precision the truths they believe...

...Our timetable has gone awry...

...The earlier Protestant Pentecostals, most of whom were ejected, or broke away from, parent congregations to establish their own religious sects, found many of their recruits among the poor and underprivileged...

...almost anybody can join up and stay in...

...This cult of the Paraclete proclaims the magnificent objective of renewing the faith of the larger church, bringing its membership back to religious fundamentals, and of changing the whole world through the power of the Holy Spirit...