Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [5]
Asking about an afterlife still defines a crucial and very conflicted battlefield in American life, one that challenges our political as well as religious convictions. It separates liberal from conservative, Republican from Democrat, northerner from southerner, rich from poor, educated from uneducated, and pious from impious. But it is more fundamental than any of these. It cuts to the very quick of what we Americans think is important in life. Americans still answer “yes” to the question: “Do you believe in God?” far more often and more enthusiastically than most other western countries, upwards to a level of 94 percent in one poll,9 on a level equal to Ireland and India and far higher than Scandinavia, England, France, Spain, or Italy.
Competition in the Religious Marketplace
ONE INTERESTING result of that history is enshrined in the First Amendment, absolutely forbidding the establishment of any state religion, and arguably guaranteeing the separation of church and state. Not only does every other country previously named sponsor a religion as an instrument of the state, but by doing so, they also provide a protected market for one religion to live. Our society, on the contrary, encourages competition among religions within the marketplace of ideas, though fundamentalist Christianity continues to lobby the government for more support while criticizing Jews and Catholics for trying to subvert the government. Although we accuse ourselves of being unfair to religious organizations and superficial in our beliefs,10 we have also inadvertently created a competitive environment for healthy religious life. Competition in the marketplace of religious ideas has produced a very important set of religious organizations in our society. Like anything else that has been massmarketed, our religion comes to us in sound-bites and slogans, making it seem trivial and superficial by comparison to religious discussions in the past. But it is designed to be marketed.
Our religious vibrancy, then, is a double-edged sword. Whatever we think of religion, we must admit that religion is still an important part of our lives, in spite of the once-touted, enormous secularization of American society after the Vietnam War. By the seventies, the opinion polls indicated that we were growing more secular. By the early nineties these numbers had decisively turned around. We forgot that when the baby boomers all entered young adulthood together, their numbers would skew our statistics toward the secular, unless we also controlled for age. Adolescents and young adults are very much less likely to take doctrines of religion or fear of mortality seriously in American life. Questions of career and family predominate in the early adult years. But, as we age, we Americans apparently still return to these more perennial and more ultimate human questions.
The effect of age on interest in the afterlife is easy enough to see. I once had the experience of giving a series of classes on the Bible to a group made up of adolescents and retirees exclusively, a classic “bimodal distribution.” When it came time to study the Bible’s doctrines of the afterlife, I asked them if they believed in one. All the retirees in the audience answered affirmatively-no surprise given their age and that the course was being held in front of children in a Conservative synagogue. (What they would have said more privately is anyone’s guess.) But even in that context none of the twenty or so teenagers would answer “yes” to the question. Age is an important factor in the articulation and interest in beliefs in an afterlife. Older people characteristically show more recognition of mortality and, at the same time, lower anxiety about death. Church membership and high commitment also