This week's issue of Newsweek magazine features an extensive series of reports on American spirituality. Taken together, these articles demonstrate something of the eclecticism, superficiality, and diversity of the American spiritual scene. For evangelical Christians, the article should serve an important purpose by helping us to understand the current contours of our mission field right at home.
Newsweek sets its cover story in contrast to a now famous April 8, 1966 cover story in TIME. Dated for Good Friday that year, TIME's cover story asks the question "Is God Dead?" TIME's iconic cover story represented something of a high watermark for atheism and secularism as emerging movements. The magazine's focus was on a new generation of technocrats and scientists who saw any truth claim that could not be tested by the scientific method as "uninteresting, unreal."
Newsweek understands that the times have changed. "Nobody would write such an article now, in an era of round-the-clock televangelism and official presidential displays of Christian piety." But Newsweek sees something else behind TIME's article. The 1966 TIME cover story didn't even consider what was going on beyond the liberal Protestant denominations. Henry Luce's TIME was, in Newsweek's analysis, obsessed "with the experience of a handful of the most prestigious Protestant denominations." Accordingly, "no one looked for God in the Pentecostal churches of East Los Angeles or among the backwoods Baptists of Arkansas." Furthermore, the magazine was not concerned with Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists.
Newsweek now documents the fact that the "angst-ridden intellectuals in TIME, struggling to imagine God as a cloud of gas in the far reaches of the galaxy, never did sweep the nation." Instead, the years after 1966 saw the nation involved in various waves of religious and spiritual fervor. This era saw the rise to prominence of groups such as Pentecostals and the development of a vast evangelical network of schools, churches, and ministries. The Southern Baptist Convention grew dramatically in terms of both numbers and influence. All this after TIME's intellectuals declared that God was slipping from the scene.
Nevertheless, Newsweek documents the fact that the religiosity and search for spirituality that currently marks American culture does not represent a return to orthodox forms of Christian belief. "Whatever is going on here, it's not an explosion of people going to church," Newsweek reports. Even as megachurches gather thousands to their services, attendance reports submitted by churches reflect the same basic percentage of Americans attending services from 1966 to the present. A falloff in attendance has actually been noted among African-American churches, "for whom the church is no longer the only respectable avenue of social advancement."
Instead of a return to orthodox patterns of belief and discipleship, Americans have found their way into a playground of various "spiritualities." Newsweek's cover story, "In Search of the Spiritual," documents the fluid and eclectic nature of the current quest for spirituality. Increasing numbers of Americans are turning to forms of Buddhism, Paganism, eco-religion, and Jewish mysticism. The magazine reports that the Web site Beliefnet sends more than eight million daily e-mails, each containing a spiritual message, to more than five million subscribers. These five million subscribers include 460,000 who receive a Buddhist message, 313,000 who prefer the Torah, 268,000 subscribers to "Daily Muslim Wisdom," and 236,000 who receive a "Spiritual Weight Loss" message.
