News


By the staff of The Lutheran, ELCA News Service and Religion News Service


For many, ‘Losing My Religion’ isn’t a song, it’s life W


hen Ben Helton signed up for an online dating service, under “reli- gion” he called himself “spiritually apathetic.” On Sunday mornings, when Bill Dohm turns his eyes toward heaven, he’s just checking the weather so he can fly his 1946 Aeronca Champ two-seater plane.


Helton, 28, and Dohm, 54, aren’t


atheists. They simply shrug off God, religion, heaven or the ever-trendy search-for-meaning and/or purpose. Their attitude could be summed up as “So what?”


“The real dirty little secret of religiosity in America is that there are so many people for whom spiri- tual interest, thinking about ultimate questions, is minimal,” said Mark Silk, professor of religion and public life at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. Clergy and religion experts are


dismayed, fearing for souls’ salva- tion and for the common threads of faith breaking in society. Others see no dire consequences to a more openly secular America as people not only fess up to being faithless but admit they’re skipping out on spiritu- ality altogether. Only now, however, are they


turning up in the statistical stream. Researchers have begun asking the kind of nuanced questions that reveal just how big the “So What” set might be: • 44 percent told the 2011 Baylor University (Waco, Texas) Religion Survey that they spend no time seek- ing “eternal wisdom,” and 19 per- cent said “it’s useless to search for meaning.” • 46 percent told a 2011 survey by Nashville, Tenn.-based LifeWay Research of the Southern Baptist Convention that they never wonder


8 The Lutheran • www.thelutheran.org


whether they will go to heaven. • 28 percent told LifeWay “it’s not a major priority in my life to find my deeper purpose.” And 18 percent scoffed at the idea that God has a pur- pose or plan for everyone. • 6.3 percent of Americans turned up on Pew Forum’s 2007 Religious Landscape Survey as totally secu- lar—unconnected to God or a higher power or any religious identity and willing to say religion is not impor- tant in their lives.


Hemant Mehta, who blogs as the Friendly Atheist, calls them the “apatheists,” while Episcopal Church Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of Washington, D.C., calls them honest. “We live in a society today where it is acceptable now to say that they have no spiritual curiosity. At almost any other time in history, that would have been unacceptable,” Budde said.


She finds this “very sad, because the whole purpose of faith is to be a source of guidance, strength and perspective in difficult times. To be human is to have a sense of purpose, an awareness that our life is an utterly unique expression of creation and we want to live it with meaning, grace and beauty.” Ashley Gerst, 27, a 3-D animator and filmmaker in New York, shifts between “leaning to the atheist and leaning toward apathy.” “I would just like to see more


people admit they don’t believe. The only thing I’m pushy about is I don’t want to be pushed. I don’t want to change others, and I don’t want to debate my view,” she said. The hot religion statistical trend


of recent decades was the rise of the Nones—the people who checked “no religious identity” on the American Religious Identification Survey—


who leapt from 8 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2008.


When church historian Diana But- ler Bass researched her upcoming book, Christianity After Religion, she found the “So Whats” are “a growing category.” “We can’t underestimate the power of the collapse of institutional religion in the first 10 years of this century,” she said. “It’s freed so many people to say they don’t really care. They don’t miss rituals or traditions they may never have had anyway.” M


Cathy Lynn Grossman


Grossman writes for USA Today. Distributed by Religion News Service.


Social justice magazine done One of the nation’s oldest social justice magazines, The Progressive Christian, suspended publication at the beginning of 2012 after a failed winter fundraising campaign. Before 2007, the magazine was named Zion’s Herald (founded in 1823 by Methodist laity). It folded in content from The Other Side, which stopped publication in 2008. Over the years the magazine advocated for an end to slavery, civil rights for women and people of color, workers’ rights, nonviolent solutions to conflict, civil rights for gay and lesbian people, and care for creation.


Here she comes …. Miss America 2012 Laura Kaeppeler graduated from Carthage College, an ELCA school in Kenosha, Wis., in 2010 with a degree in vocal per- formance. She won a $2,000 schol- arship for singing Il Bacio, and the $50,000 top scholarship. Kaeppeler will spend her Miss America year helping to increase mentoring for


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