Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [4]
American Afterlife: Resurrection Versus Immortality of the Soul
WE WILL HAVE to take a very hard look at some cherished aspects of Judaism and Christianity. The church father Tertullian equated Christianity with a belief in the resurrection: “By believing in resurrection, we are what we claim to be.”4 By “resurrection,” he opined, “orthodox” Christians should believe in literal, fleshly resurrection, with its attendant end-of-time and judgment of sinners. Even though Tertullian was a churchman, his opinion was not unchallenged. Many Christians of his day believed with the Platonists that the soul was immortal but the body perished forever. It will become clear to us later that Tertullian’s view of this phenomenon is itself governed by his personal dispositions and the historical context in which he lived. For now, it should be important for us to know that in the Christianity that Tertullian prescribed, bodily resurrection was something he devoutly wished for, nay prayed for, preached, and held other Christians heretical because they did not believe it literally.
Today, most American Christians of all denominations continue to assent to a belief in resurrection. But closer scrutiny shows that many do not believe that the physical body will be resurrected, as Tertullian preached, but that the soul will dwell in heaven after death. What they call “resurrection of the body” actually refers technically to “immortality of the soul.” The notion of resurrection is only strongly characteristic of a sizeable minority of Americans. A traditional, strong, and literal view in a resurrection of the body is, in fact, a very strong indicator that the person is on the evangelical, fundamentalist, or Orthodox Jewish side of the line.5
Religious belief is a gradient. But that distinct line three-quarters of the way toward the right of the religious spectrum is the big story in American religion at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Americans on the left of that line-let us call them the liberal, mainline religions for lack of a better term-have more in common with each other than they do with their coreligionists across the line. Liberal Jews, Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, and the great Asian faiths actually have more in common with each other, in terms of attitudes towards politics and economic and moral questions, than they do with their own coreligionists in the fundamentalist camp. Fundamentalists of all religions in the United States also have more in common with each other in terms of moral, political, and economic views, than they do with their coreligionists in the liberal camp.6
Gallup Poll Findings
IN THEIR EXTREMELY interesting and provocative book, George Gallup Jr. and James Castelli note that there is a fundamental difference between the liberal and mainline churches in the United States on the one hand and the fundamentalist and evangelical churches on the other. Asking people whether they believe in immortality of the soul or resurrection of the body (when the terms have been clarified) is probably the simplest way to discover this basic rift in American life, even in our secular society.
We already know that religion is much more significant on average to Americans than it is to Europeans or even to Canadians, our closest neighbors. Since the time of De Tocqueville, Europeans have noted American’s special interest in religion.7 More recently, Gerhard Lenski showed that our religious choices are statistically as important for predicting our other attitudes as is anything else that can be measured or named in our lives.8 We know a great deal about what a person is likely to think politically, how she will spend money or vote, what kind of occupations she will seek, what kind of recipes he will bake, what kind of organizations she will join, what kind of child-rearing