Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [6]
Religion Returns When the Afterlife Beckons
WHEN THE BABY BOOMERS began to return to religion and church membership in the eighties, their return dramatically corresponded to an upswing in the political action of conservative religious groups. As a result, no one today would question the importance of religion as an indicator of political and economic values in American life. The correlation is much higher in international affairs where Islam led the way into the political arena. After the Iranian revolution of 1979, we realized we had to factor religion into the our international political policies; after 9/11, we realized that we are no longer an island fortress. Being part of the globalization process means that we are deeply affected by extremist religious beliefs and movements brewing elsewhere in the world.
Because of all these reasons, our stated beliefs in the afterlife are increasing significantly, according to studies done by Andrew M. Greeley and Michael Hout.12 A significantly greater fraction of American adults believe in life after death in the 1990s than in the 1970s. According to data from the General Social Survey (hereafter GSS) there has been a marked change in some groups’ beliefs in life after death. Although Protestants who say that they believe in life after death have remained stable at about 85 percent (very high to begin with, anyway), Catholics, Jews, and people of no religious affiliation have become more likely to report beliefs in the afterlife. For instance, the percentage of Catholics believing in an afterlife rose from 67 percent to 85 percent for those born between 1900 and 1970. When the variables were analyzed, one important factor to Greely and Hout was their contact with Irish clergy, who communicated their commitment to the Catholic population in general.
Among Jews the percentage was even more interesting but puzzling. Jews who report important and stable notions of life after death have always been significantly fewer statistically than Christians, presumably due to the lower emphasis on afterlife in most varieties of American Judaism. Nevertheless, Jewish belief in the afterlife rose from 17 percent amongst the cohort born in 1900-1910 to 74 percent amongst the 1970 cohort, a very significant jump. Perhaps Jews have understood that our culture asks us to answer “yes” to that question but not to spend much time thinking about it. In any event, Jews are still twice as likely as Christians to say that they don’t know if there is life after death.
The reasons for this change are not as easy to discern. Contact with Protestants was not a measurable factor (among those Jews who did not later convert). Immigrant status seems to be an important factor in rejecting notions of the afterlife for both Catholics and Jews. Perhaps the experience of immigration is itself so disruptive that it seriously affects notions of afterlife felicity for the immigrant generation. Among Jews this may be because those most likely to leave Europe at the turn of the century were the ones least impressed with Rabbinic exhortations to stay within the European religious community and not go the United States, which they called “the treyfer (non-kosher) land.” Those who immigrated to the United States, and later Canada, called it “der goldener Land,” the Golden Land, showing that the Jews who came to the United States came more to better their economic opportunities than to gain religious freedom. Reform Jews are only about 10 percent less likely to report beliefs in life after death than Orthodox Jews. What differs is the kind of afterlife they envision. Mainline Jews are close to Protestants in their adoption of a spiritual afterlife; Orthodox Jews report a belief in bodily resurrection. In the second and third generation of immigrants, perhaps acculturation itself accounts for the higher correlation with Protestant views of heaven.
Greeley