House of Faith or Enchanted Forest?. Charles W. Hedrick, Jr.
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House of Faith or Enchanted Forest?
American Popular Belief in an Age of Reason
Charles W. Hedrick
HOUSE OF FAITH OR ENCHANTED FOREST?
American Popular Belief in an Age of Reason
Copyright © 2008 Charles W. Hedrick. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf & Stock, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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isbn 13: 978-1-60608-006-1
eisbn 13: 978-1-63087-431-5
Cataloging in Publication data:
Hedrick, Charles W.
House of faith or enchanted forest? : American popular belief in an age of reason / Charles W. Hedrick.
xviii + 98 p. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliography.
isbn 13: 978-1-60608-006-1
1. United States—Religion. 2. Religion and culture—United States. I. Title.
BL2525 H40 2008
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
In memory of *Peter Abelard (1079–1142), and, in particular, his Sic et Non (Yes and No), where he set before his students pros and cons of contradictory positions on Christian faith and encouraged his students to rely on their own reason in critically examining the sources.
“The first key of wisdom is called assiduous and frequent questioning . . .”
—Peter Abelard, Sic et Non1
1. Polka and Bernard, Readings in Western Civilization, vol. 1, 114.
Preface
This book, written by one who made his living as an academic, is for the general public not the Academy. It consists of brief essays challenging popularly held religious beliefs current in America at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Each essay is directly addressed to the reader and framed as one side of a public dialogue about private personal faith and values. Most were written over a twenty-year period (1986–2006) and published as Religion and Ethics editorials in the Springfield News-Leader (daily newspaper in Springfield, Missouri, owned by Gannett Co., Inc.). The circulation of this newspaper, Monday through Friday, is approximately 60,400 and Sunday 87,300; the Religion and Ethics editorial usually appeared weekly on Wednesday.
I was ordained to the ministry by the First Baptist Church of Green-ville, Mississippi, on July 8, 1956. I served as pastor of Baptist churches in Mississippi and California for seven years and a Congregationalist church in New York City for one year. I was commissioned as an Army Reserve chaplain on September 8, 1964, and retired on April 30, 1994, with the rank of Colonel after thirty-three years of service. After teaching in the Department of Religious studies for twenty-four years at Missouri State University, I retired as Distinguished Professor Emeritus.
The essays were written deliberately for a popular audience. I have always thought of the newspaper as a public forum, and the essays were a way of bringing the community at large into an academic classroom. My goal was provoking thought on issues a thoughtful person might inevitably ponder in private moments. We are most nearly honest with ourselves in the privacy of our own heads. In any case, persons educated in the American public school system, which for the most part is secular, can scarcely avoid the challenge reason presents to traditional religious faith.
There was also a subversive reason for choosing a public forum. I wanted to get around the religious professionals, who control thinking about religion and values in America from their “bully pulpits.” I chose a public venue to avoid using the technical jargon of an academic publication, which is not read by the public in any case. Academics write “scholar-speak,” meaning that they observe certain literary conventions expected in the academic study of religion. Sometimes it can be dry as a bone and at others absolutely scintillating—if the reader knows the dialect. Religious professionals, on the other hand, speak “religionese,” meaning that they are required to observe “the language of Zion,” as spoken and written in their communities of faith. Both idioms, for different reasons, are barriers to general readers hoping for plain-spoken candor. In writing this book I have aimed at candor in the vernacular, the language of the street.
The newspaper is the only inexpensive forum offering an opportunity for widespread engagement with a popular audience. I intended that each editorial raise public awareness about significant issues of faith and values in twentieth—and now twenty-first-century—America. The church and synagogue will not normally raise such issues because the very raising of them tends to undermine the institution of public religion—and also because the church and synagogue cannot satisfactorily resolve them. Such issues are raised in the academy as a matter of course, but the audience is miniscule.
Springfield, Missouri, might be described as a “buckle on the Bible belt” (one of many in the country, no doubt). Springfield is the third largest city in the state and is most accurately described as a religiously conservative “church town.” The International Headquarters of both the Assemblies of God and the Baptist Bible Fellowship are located here. The Assemblies have a theological seminary in the city, as well as two colleges (Central Bible College and Evangel University), and the Baptist Bible Fellowship has one college (Baptist Bible College). A Southern Baptist College can be found at nearby Bolivar, Missouri (Southwest Baptist University). Drury University, also located in Springfield, has distant connections with the Christian Church tradition. The payrolls of these institutions constitute a significant economic influence on the city and surrounding region.
To judge from responses to the editorials printed in the letters to the editor, the religious right found the essays challenging, since they were forced to consider inconsistencies in the traditional Judeo-Christian religious worldview. Even thoughtful people from the left had difficulty with them. One good friend, a minister at a progressive church in Springfield, once told me that I should write something “relevant” for the newspaper. And when the editorial page editor for the News-Leader changed in 2006 my columns were ruled “irrelevant” because they don’t “tie into any issue going on in the world.” I leave that for readers to decide.
My thanks are due to JoAnne Brown, James A. Kellett, and Morey McDaniel. They read the manuscript when it was nearly completed and suggested improvements. I am grateful for their suggestions, some accepted and others not, but in no way should the reader hold them responsible for the finished product.
Introduction
The House of Faith
Until the latter half of the twentieth century, the public face of religion in America was conceived as Judeo-Christian, represented by three religious groups. The largest were Roman Catholic and *Protestant. Judaism was much smaller. That these three religious bodies are institutionalized in the public psyche as “American religion” is due largely to our European roots. We inherited these religious groups from Europe in the various waves of immigration through our history. As a case in point, the United States military, since World War II and until recently, only endorsed chaplains for military services from these bodies.1
The Roman Catholic Church represents a single monarchical community with unified religious beliefs and practices, controlled