The Religion Story in Four Parts

Background

Open Source Religion

Bravely Exploring Our Spiritual Stars:

An Adventure in Opening the Ultimate Source

Open. Source. Religion.

They're timeless spiritual terms, but somehow, as a three-word phrase, it doesn't trip off the tongue as easily as those prayers we've known since childhood, hmmm?

But, for six weeks, 40 brave volunteers from across the U.S. met in a special online forum on "Open Source Religion" to talk about their deepest beliefs and, along the way, their respectful curiosity wound up defying the old warning about never discussing religion with strangers.

The volunteers ranged from atheists to evangelicals, Methodists to Muslims, young students to aging scholars. As their emails crisscrossed the continent, the forum members moved from exploring their own spiritual yearnings to talking honestly about their anxieties over religious conflict in the world.

“As the emails started coming from all these different participants, it was so exciting to see all the different viewpoints. I had never been involved in anything like this forum and I really appreciated it,” Gail Katz, a vice president of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Metropolitan Detroit, said as the online forum wrapped up.

Katz now is so convinced of the value of this kind of online discussion that she plans to extend a similar opportunity to women in Michigan. In July, Katz and a number of her Christian, Muslim and Jewish friends from across southeast Michigan are hosting a four-hour informational meeting for women who want to form international email networks of religious women promoting peace.

“My Jewish faith is very important to me, but what gives me the most spiritual energy these days is connecting people across religious and cultural boundaries,” Katz said.

That’s the nearly universal motive that drew the 40 volunteers to the national forum that wrapped up this week, so forum members took pains to point out that they’re hardly a random cross section of the U.S. popultion.

However, the curious, yet respectful, six-week forum that unfolded among these 40 strangers is strong evidence that there’s real energy behind Open Source Religion – the idea that the people are eager to express their most sacred insights within emerging grassroots crowds that are forming around the world.

And, that’s not just wistful journalism.

There’s solid sociological data behind this observation. It comes from multiple waves of World Values Surveys, analyzed by University of Michigan sociologist Wayne E. Baker, who also joined our Open Source Religion forum. Baker wrote about this in his 2006 book, “America’s Crisis of Values: Reality and Perception.” As Baker sorted out the data, he showed that religious values are very strong and widespread across America. (Americans rank with traditionalist countries around the world, places like Pakistan, in the strength of our religious values.) But Americans also are almost off the chart in another powerful value – our desire for individual self-expression. (We rank with Scandinavia on that scale.)

So, faith matters deeply to us – but the reality of Open Source Religion is that we, as Americans, expect to be able to crack open the doors of religion and chart our own most meaningful journeys through the resources and traditions we find there.

And, what we discover is sometimes spiritually surprising.

That’s the creative inspiration that led an agnostic grad student from New York City to suddenly spot spiritual parallels between his own religious training, years before, and a graduation ceremony he was attending recently.

“The calling of names, one by one, so people can be applauded by friends and family, receive a certificate and walk off the stage again. Oh my gosh! It was my Bar Mitzvah all over again, I realized,” wrote New Yorker David Cohn.

Dozens of participants reported that, as they began to think about Open Source Religion over the past six weeks, they began to spot a host of spiritual possibilities right in front of them.

That’s what led Mel Bricker, a retired United Methodist minister in San Francisco, to look up one day at the faces of his fellow subway passengers and discover, “There were moments of delight and joy in their eyes.” That insight was more inspirational to him, he reported, than an art exhibit he’d just attended, expecting to file a report from the museum for the forum.

Florida participant Cait Ramshaw said she picked up more helpful spiritual lessons from a one-day visit to Disney World, where she took notes for the Open Source Religion team, than she ever expected when she rolled into the parking lot that morning.

It’s all there in dozens of emails accumulated by the team since mid-April.

Team members did point out real dangers in throwing open the doors of religious tradition. For instance, more than a few people asked: If our Ultimate Source is open to everyone’s interpretation, then how can we trust that the timeless tradition won’t change?

The forum never fully grasped that heavenly hot potato, but the group did end on a fairly high note. No, nobody was eager to lay the cornerstone of the First Church of Open Source Religion -- but the basic idea that drew these 40 out of the grassroots for this six-week cosmic adventure seemed to leave many participants with inspirational fuel.

On balance, the Open Source Religion team agreed with Katz, who said as the project wrapped up: “Now, we’ve just got to convince more people to expand their connections.”

This is the Third and Final report on what this nationwide forum (co-sponsored by Wired Magazine and NYU) calls
"Open Source Religion:"

SCROLL DOWN on this page, or Click here to read Part 1.

SCROLL DOWN on this page, or Click here to read Part 2.

Ultimately, how Open is our Source?
Or, to put our final query another way: How open are we to Ultimate Sources?
Over the past five weeks, our team first explored the cultural shift toward Open Source Religion in all its self-expressive diversity. Then, we pondered the nature of the friction that accompanies such a deep-seated, cultural transformation.
But, in this era of open-source religion, we finally must come to terms with the Three Most Important Spiritual Questions of Our Age: Why should I get out of bed in the morning? How will I make it through another stressful day? And, at the end of the day, where is the evidence that anything I did today mattered?
These are echoes of the timeless religious questions: Why are we here? How shall we live? And, in the end, where is the resonance of good and evil in the universe?
Want to see those questions played out in an individual life? Team Member Stephanie Birch’s short essay in this final phase of our work is a strikingly clear snapshot of these daily reflections. In her piece, this young journalist moves through a typical day, starting with reflections on home and family, through work at her office, to final thoughts about her experiences. At one point during her day, a coffee-break conversation at her office about cutthroat management styles prompts her to wonder: “What is success and how far is too far in achieving it?”
If we’re honest with ourselves, this is the kind of open-source reflection that most of us pursue on a daily basis without even pausing to identify it as spiritual.
These basic, daily, universal questions are woven into the DNA of religion: a long double helix spanning and twisting through the millennia –- one outer strand of religion offering “revelation to be accepted;” the other outer strand offering “quest to be pursued.”
The world’s most enduring religious traditions include both strands.
Islam, for instance, is both submission to a religious revelation, but also a call to pursue daily spiritual challenges and, even, the global quest of the Hajj. To see these principles reflected in an individual life, read team member Sarah Alfaham’s essay in response to our third inquiry, which she calls: “Staying Fit Through Muslim-Colored Lenses.” Watch the way she relates to relatives, to the traditions they are expressing, to her community and to her own aspirations. This is a beautiful snapshot of a well-integrated, eyes-wide-open, open-source religious life.
.

Spiritually Exploring "A Day Outside the Walls"
In many cultural settings down through the ages, one strand of the religious DNA seems to dominate. And, our group overwhelmingly agrees that -– for better or worse -– we’re in the midst of a cultural setting in the U.S. where the “quest” strand (the strand of individual self expression or “open source”) has turned squarely toward us until it dominates our vision of faith.
So, how open is our source? How clearly do we see? And what do we perceive?
After two decades of covering religion’s impact on American life for the Detroit Free Press, as the group's editor in this project, I can report that the ground, indeed, is shifting beneath our feet. Most of the exciting spiritual news these days unfolds outside the walls of organized religion. It echoes from books, music, movies, television, Web sites, grassroots organizations and the under-the-radar choices of ordinary people that build until they suddenly seem to surface.
So, to explore this final question, most of our team members spent what our team described as A Day Outside the Walls, trying to discern spiritual meaning in American life from a wide variety of perspectives. Then, they produced brief essays.
As in our first two waves of queries -– strong patterns emerged (even though our team members are well aware that we’re not a random sampling of Americans).
When people set out to record a day’s reflections outside the walls of organized religion, the first thing many people noticed was the exterior of those walls. “You can’t help but see the walls,” wrote team member Wayne Baker, recording a whole array of houses of worship that he passes in his daily commute to the office. “You pass them everyday, a continuous reminder of the presence of religion in our lives.”
From noting such physical walls, it’s just a little leap to perceiving the cultural walls of religious tradition in other forms.
Team member Beckie Supiano noticed the prayer candles and incense for sale at a grocery store in Chicago—tangible evidence of widespread religious practice. Then, she also spotted a personal shrine maintained by the shop’s Indian owners--evidence that such religious artifacts are put to use in the neighborhood.
Leaping even further, team member David Cohn suddenly perceived the ritual of a graduation ceremony in a new way: “The calling of names, one by one, so people can be applauded by friends and family, receive a certificate and walk off the stage again. Oh my gosh! It was my Bar Mitzvah all over again, I realized. Granted there was no chanting. But Dean Lemman, dean of Columbia’s journalism school, was essentially acting as the rabbi—head of the ceremony, who as the head of this institution was granting people their masters degree—and pushing them into ‘adulthood.’”
Once one’s vision expands, spiritual walls are everywhere.
On his Day Outside the Walls, team member Tim Moran, a freelance journalist, covered a press conference at a venerable Michigan landmark, the stately Detroit Athletic Club. Arriving that day, he noted that the DAC is “another form of temple, this one to the world of business and success.” And, even the press conference with automobile-industry experts took on spiritual forms. “In the upper room, there’s communion of sorts among those dedicated to the religion of cars. Apostles of design are being quizzed mildly by the Pharisees of the press.”
.

The Challenge of Perception in a Concrete World
At this point, are we sounding silly?
Hardly.
This question of perception lies at the core of religious tradition. It’s pointedly explored in Eastern traditions, especially Buddhism. But it also lies at the core of the Abrahamic traditions. For instance, Psalm 96 is a hymn that celebrates unfolding spiritual perception until, near the end of this ancient song, “the trees of the forest sing for joy.” And, the young Rabbi Jesus once was warned by local authorities that his followers were becoming too boisterous with their religious expressions in the city’s streets—to which Jesus acidly replied from a whole new level of perception (in Luke 19): “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.”
The question then becomes: Once we’re floating out here in this open-source cosmos of spiritual reflection -– how do we tell a singing forest from a looming hurricane and how do we tell a shouting stone from an Improvised Explosive Device?
Team Member Joe Carson, an evangelical Christian, zeroed in on this point in his response, describing his own “mental eyeglasses.” And, what’s striking about his response is that he actually provided Three Daily Answers in his response -– without having seen the specific Three Daily Questions as detailed in this final report.
His essay is brief, but diamond sharp: Carson wrote, “I assent to all of the following theological contentions as a basis of a hopefully reasonable faith, but a faith nonetheless, not something empirically and logically provable.”
Remember our 3 Questions? Why get out of bed? How do I survive a stressful day? And where is a sign that my life matters? Without the Questions in front of him, Joe wrote these Answers:
“1.) God exists.
“2.) God cares about me, personally.
“3.) It is important for me to try to ascertain and advance God’s will in and through my life on planet earth with my fellow earthlings and other parts of created order.”
Pretty strong answers to all 3 questions.
.

The Quest for Clarity Among Rolling Stones
As it turns out, clarity is a challenge even larger than conflict in an age of Open Source Religion.
That’s not merely your editor preaching. Pick up the May 3-17, Fortieth Anniversary edition of Rolling Stone magazine and read the spiritual voices of the nationwide forum chosen by that magazine’s editors. They didn't pick any spiritual softies for their reflections on the past four decades.
Nevertheless, our question of CLARITY rings like a bell throughout the Rolling Stone interviews.
From the Rolling Stone Editors themselves: “The future seems unknowable, the past some distant land that bears no relevance to the instantly revisable clicks and playlists of our lives right now.”
From novelist Tom Wolfe (described as "a non-believer” himself): “Anyone who thinks that religion is bad for society is out of his mind. We are now beginning to see what happens when we don’t have it.”
From cultural titan Norman Mailer: “When you know too much information and you acquire it too easily, you tend either to use it in disagreeable ways, out of vanity, or you tend to be indiscriminate about it.”
And, from rocker Patti Smith: “Maybe the kids on MySpace will have an anthem that will get them out in the streets. I don’t know what they’re gonna do.”
Here at Assignment Zero, our own team member Marcy Jeffree Corneil put it this way in a quote worthy of that chorus from Rolling Stone: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there. But how will I know when I’m ‘there’?”
Our spiritual vision keeps playing tricks on us, doesn’t it?
Team member Mel Bricker set out nobly on his Day Outside the Walls, expecting to find his profound spiritual reflections at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco in “an exhibit of Picasso’s influence on American artists.” And, primed for this venue, he did note a few nice perspectives.
But it’s the final line that’s the achingly beautiful note in his brief essay. Riding home with a somewhat disappointing mixed bag of reactions to the art show, he looks up at his fellow passengers on Bay Area Rapid Transit (the subway out there) and –- pop! -– “There were moments of delight and joy in their eyes.”
A vision better than Picasso -- glimpsed in the eyes of the people sitting next to him on a subway.
Bricker’s certainly not alone in this element of spiritual surprise.
Team member Rabbi Robert Alper expected to find his spiritual insights in the visually exotic “Pan’s Labyrinth,” but wound up leaving the theater early, exhausted by the ponderous film. Then, almost by accident, in the theater lobby he witnessed a 12-year-old girl summoning the moral courage to confess to the theater manager that she had cheated on her ticket price.
The theater manager was so touched by this spontaneous confession that he refused to accept the “two wrinkled dollar bills” she offered to repent of her sin. It was a moment of spiritual clarity and reconciliation that unexpectedly touched the weary rabbi as he headed home.
Alper wrote: “That’s how I encountered The Good—the very Good—outside the walls.”
.

Threatening Tribalism in these Strange Days, Indeed
We're not naive. There are ominous--even deadly--forces rumbling through this surprising era of spiritual change.
Team member Chris Warner-Carey scratched his head at the “tribalism” that’s a constant temptation in communities of vigorous self-expression. And, pushed even further, religious tribalism can explode into violence aimed at innocent outsiders.
Team member Victoria Hart Gaskell asked: “When everyone’s ‘opinion’ becomes ‘gospel,’ what happens to an actual faith tradition? Does it finally become open-sourced into something unrecognizable or entirely new, or does it disappear altogether?”
John Lennon prophetically described the problem this way:
“Everybody’s talking and no one says a word
“Everybody’s making love and no one really cares
“There’s Nazis in the bathroom, just below the stairs. …
“Nobody told me there’d be days like these!
“Strange days, indeed!”
But, we’re a hopeful lot. Our forum of 40 from an enormous range of religious perspectives spent more than a month wrestling with these historic questions—and, that alone, is a testament of spiritual aspiration.
“Even with the troubling aspects, I welcome the open-sourcing of religion much more than I am troubled by it,” Gaskell ultimately decided.
.

Finally, Walt Disney, a Fat Cat and 2 Spiritual Daughters
To leave this journey on a threatening note would not be true to the tone of our team.
Everyone who is worried about the future should read Team Member Cait Ramshaw’s marvelous essay on the spirituality of Disney World. Cait, who goes by “DefSufi” in our group, narrates her day at Disney as a delightful movement from cynicism about the cult of Disney (“Entering Disney is very much like going to a mega-church. You give your first donation at the parking gate and … you get a little Disney sermon on the way in.”)—to a surprising affirmation of spiritual lessons we all can learn, even at Disney World!
There’s an amazingly pragmatic affirmation of life in the world-famous park, she writes, as if surprised by what she wound up concluding.
The overall spiritual lesson is: “Once you accept your circumstances, you can work with them, even if you can’t change them,” she writes, adding later, “And when I look at life in the ‘real world’ -– which several religions teach is just as much a Fantasy Land as is a section of Disney World -– it’s very much the same. I can’t make my mandatory work week shorter than 40 hours, but I can choose a job that I like, associate mostly with people I like, peacefully tolerate those I don’t and make my day pleasant.”
And, it's impossible to read team member Gail Katz's final essay without wanting to brew a comforting cup of tea and ponder a bright future dawning. After charting a typical day of her own open-source, religious activism, Katz settles back for the night, confident (without even saying it in so many words) that she's got life-affirming answers to all the day's Three Questions. She writes, "As I curled up under the warmth of the blankets against the chill of the night with my fat cat beside me, just before I turned out the light, I pondered how much spirituality had heightened my day."
Finally, there’s not a more eloquent affirmation in our whole stack of our team's third-wave essays than the closing of Marcy Jeffree Corneil’s piece: “My daughters are among the most spiritual people I know. During her undergraduate years, one of them wanted to go into full-time ministry. But now neither of them -– in their late 20s, one married, one engaged, no children on the horizon -- is comfortable with organized religion. Their lives exemplify my understanding of open source religion.”
Then--and don't miss this--then, Corneil writes this final line as a mother addressing her daughters' future: “It is my fervent prayer that they will both be seekers and deliverers of spirituality with those around them, and that they will raise their children in relationship with the Creator.”
What a benediction, hmmm?
Open. Source. And, Religion.

A REPORT BY ...
Sarah Alfaham, Robert Alper, Sarah Arthur, Wayne E. Baker, Craig Bamsey, Shelley Bates, Jeff Beamsley, Sofia Begg, J. Brent Bill, Stephanie Birch, John Melvin Bricker, Joe Carson, David Cohn, Marcy Jeffree Corneil, David Crumm, John Emmert, Victoria Hart Gaskell, Cynthia Hernandez, John Hile, Geri Larkin, Lisa Gray Lion, Gail Katz, Kathy Macdonald, Gregg Mann, Karen Masters, Torrey Meeks, L.A. Millinger, Tim Moran, David Myers, Joseph Naujokas, Michelle Poblette, Cait Ramshaw, L.E. Rayburn, Beckie Supiano, Chris Warner-Carey, Anna Wood.

LONG VERSION of "Our Story Thus Far" WRITTEN by David Crumm (dcrumm@freepress.com)

(Creative Commons License allows team-members to repost and write their own versions as well)

Our Story Thus Far, Part 2 ...

.

Whether We’re Standing at a Well or a Sewer -–

We Couldn’t Be More Timely!

We’ve gotten to know each other in recent weeks, so let’s be frank about one of the Biggest Questions we’re facing: Is Open Source Religion a refreshing wellspring of spiritual resources –- or is it an open sewer?

Does that question sound too extreme? To be accurate in our reporting, no one in our Assignment Zero team has laid out the range of possibilities in such stark terms. But then, as many of us have pointed out, we tend to be a self-selected group with a respectful fascination of religion.

In fact, beyond our friendly forum, a far broader range of voices is echoing across American and global landscapes.

The urgency of our team’s open-source inquiry into emerging religious movements is underlined in almost daily headlines. In fact, this weekend, it was highlighted in a cultural icon no less influential than Sunday’s cover story in the New York Times Book Review, written by Time columnist Michael Kinsley. In a lengthy piece (which wound up saying more about Kinsley himself and the nature of New York literary society than anything else), Kinsley lavishly praised Christopher Hitchens’ new book, “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.” Kinsley never got around to explaining exactly why Hitchens believes that religion is an open sewer, but Kinsley paraphrased Hitchens as indicating that people who “continue to believe in the unbelievable, or say they do … are morons or lunatics or liars.” Overall, Kinsley told the world in his Book Review essay that Hitchens’ axe-to-the-forehead approach to religion is an “impressive and enjoyable attack on everything so many people hold dear.”

Of course, Hitchens’ critique of faith is only the latest in a rolling wave of popular new books over the past year by critics of religion. So far, this work sells sufficiently well that each major publishing house seems to be offering at least one atheist title in this season’s catalogs of new books. AND, before our theistic majority in our team too casually dismisses these voices as self-absorbed, mistaken or irrelevant, the truth is that these voices are urgently trying to grapple with agonizing problems in our world just like we are. In fact, just beyond the periphery of our current forum, team member David Myers, a nationally known author himself and a person of deep evangelical faith, already is engaging in an intriguing, respectful dialogue with these voices through an open-source book he is circulating online called, "Letter to a Secular Nation" (that's Myers' take on Sam Harris' popular title, "Letter to a Christian Nation").

This is not a call to arms among people of faith. That has not been the tone of the comments from our team. Rather, it's a sign of how urgently these issues need to be addressed. Myers isn't alone in his approach to the issue. The rising evangelical star and best-selling author, the Rev. Rob Bell, wrote the preface to the hot new atheist book, "I Sold My Soul on eBay: Viewing Faith through an Atheist's Eyes," urging Christians to thoughtfully read Hemant Mehta's new book. So far, there is little data to suggest that these new atheist voices alone are moving the needle on Americans’ overall religious assumptions. However, it’s obvious now that the question of the potentially explosive friction generated by the rise of open-source religious self-expression has become a red-hot topic in the public square. The spectrum of the larger American conversation is vast.

.

Anxious Creativity

or a Recipe for Disaster?

In Phase One of our team’s reflections we demonstrated that this open-source movement in religion is the product of an ongoing American fascination with faith –- combined with a powerful desire for self expression and a widespread sense that our own personal religious insights are probably just as valid as those offered to us by traditional religious authorities.

To Hitchens, and apparently to Kinsley, this is a recipe for disaster.

Or, perhaps, this actually is an era of anxious creativity in religious life.

Anxiety definitely seems to be a factor. In the second wave of our reflections over the past week or so, our team members overwhelmingly attributed the basic problem of religious conflict to fear in an age of cultural collision and change.

We’re not casually dismissing this anxiety as childish fretfulness. There really are things to fear in our modern age!

Team Member David Cohn, in discussing his family’s attitudes toward religious outsiders, pointed to crucial generational differences in experience. “I know … the older members of my family, which is very tolerant, still have adverse reactions to people of other faiths. I don’t have that same fear—but the Holocaust is just a story to me. I never lived through fearing for my life because I was Jewish.”

Although revisionist historians with agendas against religion sometimes claim that “religion has prompted more wars and killings than any other force in history” –- the 20^th Century was a rude rebuke to that claim.

Estimates of 20^th-century death tolls vary widely among scholars, but the jaw-dropping triumvirate of mass killers in the past century are Nazi Germany (with more than 11 million dead, including the Jewish Holocaust), the Soviet Union (with more than 20 million dead under Stalin) and China (20-to-30-million dead under Mao). And, in each case, these were powerful political forces that aimed themselves, among other things, at crushing religious opposition.

Whoever may be doing the killing in any particular historical era, it’s a well-established fact that Earth is a dangerous neighborhood -– so, some fear is justified.

Add to that recipe the very nature of religious faith as a contemplation of the universe’s ultimate truths.

Team member L.A. Millinger put it this way, “Religion deals with absolutes: truth, holiness. It’s easy for people to feel threatened when their paradigm is questioned by someone who has a different paradigm.”

Couple that with a general coarsening of culture and the Wild West culture of the online world and there’s a perfect recipe for anxiety.

Millinger continued, “I have witnessed some very ugly exchanges in blogs and in comments in news stories on Web sites. Could it be easier to flame an opponent when they are faceless and you are looking into a computer screen? Would those hateful words be so easily spoken if that same opponent were facing us across a table? I think the Internet dehumanizes the exchange of ideas to some extent, and we forget that there are real people on the receiving end of our words.”

.

Do We Really Fear Conflict?

Not everyone decries conflict and some voices in our team remind us that conflict can play an important role in religious reflection.

Team member Geri Larkin, a Buddhist monk, points out, “Conflict is conflict. I don’t see anything inherently wrong with it until someone needs to be the only one who is right.” Larkin comes from the Zen tradition that prizes the value of “dharma combat,” which we hasten to explain is not some exotic form of martial arts. The phrase is used to describe the clash of figures, perhaps a master and student, or two monks, seeking to hone their approaches to tough spiritual issues in sharp dialogues that can wind up appearing like crazy, colorful, rhetorical fireworks.

This idea isn’t foreign to other religious traditions. Students’ debates over Talmud are supposed to be vigorous clashes. Some of the best seminaries in the world are known for their rigorous, clashing voices.

The concept of jihad as articulated in most Muslim centers is not a call to “holy war,” contrary to what’s frequently repeated in American media. Rather, it’s an appeal to internal spiritual struggle. Many young Muslim men are named Jihad as a reminder by loving parents that life, at its core, is a religious challenge.

In fact, one team member after another, when asked to list examples of open-source religion that they’ve seen springing up in recent years, wound up citing dialogue groups either in personal or online forms.

The ranges in these dialogues vary widely.

Team member Joe Carson is a co-founder of one of the thousands of informally organized open-source religious groups that have formed outside the walls of specific houses of worship in recent years. But to be spiritually effective in the lives of its members, the group “is limited to engineers who can profess to the Nicene Creed, which includes all major traditional Christian sects-denominations,” Carson writes.

That’s a different circle, obviously, than team member Mel Bricker’s open-source group, Creation Spirituality Communities that draws its circle around “individuals who have been awakening to a spirituality rooted in an organic relationship to the human community, Earth and all creatures.”

That’s different than team member Tim Moran’s Habitat for Humanity, which now is world famous for its eclectic circles of volunteers -– welcoming even non-religious people to grab hammers and saws and join the work.

And the Jimmy Carter aura of the Habitat circles is in an entirely different orbit of circles from the media-structured, spiritual circles described by team member Craig Bamsey, a marketing consultant and futurist. In his ongoing research, Bamsey wrote, he “frequently ran across mostly white teens, male and female, who would fill their iPod playlists with both Gangsta Rap and Gospel music.” This virtual circle of spiritual sound seemed jarring to researchers, but clearly made sense to the teens who welcomed the collision of rhythms and cultures.

Read through the individual responses of our team members –- which should be archived somewhere and perhaps posted as a seedbed for others to follow with news of other emerging open-source groups –- and the idea of conflicting religious voices turns out to be something that we welcome, rather than fear.

We realize that not everyone will agree on everything in any of the circles that we draw.

The key seems to be whether that natural conflict takes the form of fascinating new colors, tastes and inflections we enjoy exploring in religious life – or boils over into scalding attacks.

.

Hey, Stuff a Sock in It! … Uhhh, Please?

Nothing frustrates our team members more than self-proclaimed, angry authorities on religion. More than that, we all seem to blame the media for showcasing the extreme voices more prominently than the experiences of ordinary Americans.

Team member Tim Moran, a member of the media himself as a long-time freelance reporter, wrote that the resonance of extreme religious voices has risen to the point that “every story becomes black-and-white conflict and every quote and explanation becomes banal and predictable -– a ‘Does so!’ vs. ‘Does not!’ opposition that rarely moves the discussion along. In the process, many good and thoughtful people are figuratively thrown under the wheels of Juggernaut.”

It doesn’t take a veteran to recognize the problem. Team member Beckie Supiano is at the opposite end of the journalism profession. She’s still in school and she understands the problem we’re all facing. “Conflict is a big part of what drives news, so there will always be pressure to find conflicts to report on. That said, there are things that will help. One is talking to more people who are not on the polar opposites of any given debate. This often means not calling the usual suspects for the canned quote.”

We know that our team isn’t a randomly selected sample of American adults; and we’re all are aware that we can skew our results based on our several dozen shared assumptions. Nevertheless, this point about the disproportionate impact of extreme voices is firmly rooted in data.

Team member Wayne Baker’s book on American culture argues, based on World Values Survey data, that there is far less religious conflict among everyday Americans than we may perceive from the sharp rhetoric of elites, echoed in our media.

Team member Robert Alper, a rabbi who regularly crisscrosses the United States as a full-time professional stand-up comic and author, underscored Baker’s conclusion based on his own wide-ranging observations. Alper wrote: “People DO talk about religion in a curious and respectful way. Most neighbor-to-neighbor discussions are terribly civil, because people know their neighbors personally, and they have a vested interest in maintaining good relationships. Heck, they might even just like their neighbors!”

.

There’s a Firestorm Out There

-– So, Let’s Build Something Practical

Clearly discerning what’s happening in the midst of this firestorm of viewpoints –- from Christopher Hitchens’ razor-sharp screed to Pople Benedict XVI’s scolding tour of Brazil –- is extremely difficult these days.

Even the emerging concepts we’re trying to understand are fuzzy to us -– and we’ve been immersed in a high-level national forum on these issues for several weeks now!

Case in point: In his initial response to this second questionnaire, Alper said he wasn’t aware of any open-source religious projects – then he proceeded to demonstrate that he’s a living embodiment of the principle.

Researching a bit more about Alper’s work than he shared in his questionnaire, it turns out that, while he is ordained as a rabbi, he doesn’t have any particular hierarchical claim in the way he has interwoven his voice in American culture in a whole range of self-assertive ways. His humorous-and-inspirational book, “Life Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This,” is especially popular among Catholic readers. And, long before Muslim, Arab-American comic Ahmed Ahmed joined the popular “Axis of of Evil Comedy Tour,” Alper regularly appeared on stage in joint shows with Ahmed to encourage Americans to laugh about their religious biases.

This sort of Abe Lincoln approach to rebuilding American culture is evident throughout the best open-source religious efforts.

Team member David Myers, a professor of psychology, and his wife Carol, who built the world’s biggest St. Nicholas Web site from their modest home in Holland, Michigan, are living examples of this pragmatic American approach.

David Myers, who lives with a hearing disability, has become a leading promoter of technology that can transform houses of worship and public places for millions of hearing-challenged people. But here’s the key, open-source distinction in his activism: He wants technology that’s easily accessible to the masses, so Myers actually does not promote the newest and thus the most expensive technology. He promotes the best value for ordinary institutions.

Overall, the Myers are involved in so many open-source efforts and dialogues that it’s impossible to describe them all in our overview here, so we’ve added a stand-alone article on the Myers’ projects and parked it -– along with a couple of new articles that Myers is open-sourcing online for people to read in draft form -– over at the Spirit Scholars site.

To read more about the Myers’ open-source efforts, or to read his open-source drafts of his own upcoming articles, go to: http://www.spiritscholars.org/my_weblog/2007/05/hope_colleges_j.html

.

As For Me and My Household …

We Can Get Along Even With Differences

There’s a sneaking suspicion emerging that, if the elites would only quiet down, the rest of us might get along just fine, thank you.

In this era of open-source religion, when everyone is a spiritual authority, we don’t need to hammer our lives into a false tableaux of unity, many of our team members are saying. In fact, in the end, no one seems to want a tableaux of simplistic piety.

Team member Chris Warner-Carey is part of a Pacific-coast interfaith group that celebrates open-source principles, but does not “try to cobble together a broad, theologically warm-and-fuzzy statement of shared metaphysical beliefs as the basis for our conversations. In other words, we reject that we should all ‘get along because in the end all religions believe the same things.’ We reject this because it is disrespectful of everybody’s unique faith tradition and it’s simply not true.”

Finally, this week, there’s not a more eloquent personal story in our couple of dozen responses than the one shared by team member David Cohn:

“In college, UC Berkeley, I worked at the student library. It’s a great student gig. … I worked there for 2.5 years roughly. I made a lot of friends –- we were staffed completely by students –- so you can imagine we all hung out after work, or saw each other on campus.

“The person who I became closest with was a girl named Arefa. She was a devout Muslim. I was a reform Jew. I dated girls for carnal reasons -– Arefa was waiting to begin a traditional courtship. I almost never went to temple, although I had a connection-history to the Jewish culture. Arefa lived and breathed Islam and was very active in the Berkeley Islamic community. …

“We couldn’t have been more different. But, without a doubt – we grew to enjoy each other’s company. She attended my graduation and met my parents. I have since visited her in D.C. … and met her future husband—a very nice and traditional Muslim man. I have gone to mosque with her during Ramadan, when she visited me in Brooklyn.

“I have learned more about spirituality from her than my own religious background in the last four years. That’s not to say I’m thinking of becoming a Muslim, but I do find it to be a good story. We have an interesting relationship of mutual respect and admiration. I truly do believe of all the people I met at the library, she is the only one I will be friends with for life.”

.

(And so we end Phase 2 of our 3-Phase Project.)

THEN, Here's the Original Part 1 of ... Our Story Thus Far …

The biggest story in Open Source Religion can’t be found in any single program, congregation or Web site. The Big Story lies in ourselves as Americans.

This basic truth already has been demonstrated by our team at Assignment Zero, 31 of whom have filled out our first Questionnaire, a brief personal inventory of our spiritual experiences. As a group, we don’t pretend to be a random sample of all Americans. Among other things: We’re too small a group to represent the whole country’s attitudes. We’re heavily weighted toward the Midwest. And it’s clear we’re more “up scale” in various ways than the population at large. BUT – we do represent a fascinating diversity of American religious experiences. We’ve got a nice mix of ages in our team and a broad array of religious faiths, including those of no faith.

What’s most valuable about our insights as a group is that collectively we represent a highly sought-after range of people from the viewpoint of religious recruiters. We’re motivated, articulate, up-scale, reflective, compassionate. In short, we’re the kind of people, overall, that religious groups would love to recruit and engage as members. Of course, some of us already are leaders in congregations and – beyond that – some of us already are teaches and writers about religion.

That leads to the second, striking observation about our group: Given how attractive we are from the point of view of religious groups (and how some of us already are highly committed within religious groups) – it’s stunning how ambivalent we are, as a group overall, about what organized religion is offering us and how many religious leaders are focusing their attention and resources.

Just read our voices in our Questionnaires and you’ll see this basic point reflected in dozens of ways.

Consider Team Member Marcy Jeffree Corneil’s experience, which is so common across the U.S. that it’s a powerful example to highlight.
Read her personal inventory and you’ll want to meet this woman. She’s 62 and lives in small, up-scale town near Albany, New York. She’s fascinating, compassionate and enjoys good cinema. Who could resist that combination in a friend?
Yet here’s how she describes her religious experience at the moment –- stuck between her own open-source instincts toward faith and a local leadership that seems to her to be slamming doors in her face:
“I continued at the same level of religious involvement for the first 61 years of my life, teaching Sunday school, holding church offices, being deeply involved. The church I am a member of has gone through three very trying periods of pastoral problems; we are currently served by a weak and ineffective – but not offensive – senior pastor and an annoying – to me – uber-evangelical junior pastor. I can’t seem to relate to either of them and am personally frustrated with more right-wing lay leaders. I have pulled back from my level of involvement and from my attendance – my husband refuses to attend now.”
And then – then – Corneil writes this line: “But I find myself reading and thinking more about religion than I have in the past.” And she pointedly underlined the word “more” in her response – an almost achingly heartfelt plea for a new approach to religion from a 60-something American who’s far from any of the obvious communities of change like college campuses or big cosmopolitan cities.

That, in short, is a great snapshot of this fascinating mosaic of the cultural shift toward Open Source Religion that we are forming in our Team here.

The Larger Forces at Work ...

And these observations aren’t a matter of casual observation by your Editor here.
Consider this: The data from multiple waves of World Values Surveys, analyzed by University of Michigan sociologist Wayne E. Baker in his 2006 book, “America’s Crisis of Values: Reality and Perception,” demonstrates that a cluster of values concerning religious faith are very strong and widespread across America. (Americans rank with traditionalist countries around the world, places like Pakistan, in the strength of our religious values.) But Americans also are almost off the chart in another powerful value – our desire for individual self-expression. (We rank with Scandinavia on that scale.)
(And – yes, that Wayne Baker who I’m citing here is a member of our Team.)

So, faith matters deeply to us – but the reality of Open Source Religion is that we, as Americans, expect to be able to crack open the doors of religion and chart our own most meaningful journeys through the resources and traditions we find there. The problem is that religious gatekeepers aren’t as willing or as inviting as we are.

There’s not a more striking example of this than in the responses of our Team Member who calls himself Mani. He’s a 30-year-old Hindu from New Jersey, who has a wonderful spirit of inclusion and spiritual exploration. And yet, as you read his responses, he hit a snag when he tried to visit a Zoroastrian temple – “and was told it was forbidden for people of outside faiths.”
Now, restrictions on access are common across religious groups – but Mani’s responses suggest that there are some barriers he’s had a little trouble crossing. “I wish to go to a synagogue and a mosque,” he writes. Yet, somehow that hasn’t happened yet.
He seems to be an ideal potential visitor. He reveres sacred spaces so much that he takes off his shoes when he enters a house of worship! Why wouldn’t religious groups want to throw open their doors and welcome such a visitor?

Old Definitions Disintegrating ...

Even our definitions of God, as we describe them in this public forum, indicate that the decades-old Gallup Poll protocol for categorizing Americans’ theistic attitudes is beginning to disintegrate. For decades, Gallup has reported that about 9 out of 10 Americans believe God exists (with about 2 in 10 in the most recent survey wave last year saying “probably exists” -- with some level of “doubt”).
However, do you see the flaw in the traditional question? Gallup assumes that Americans agree on what the term “God” means.

Surely many evangelical Protestants who say “yes” to belief in God are thinking of a significantly different God than the one affirmed by Team Member Mel Bricker from California, who writes, “I believe in the Divine as a loving, creative, life-giving, transformative, evolutionary river running through all the universe both within it and the universe within the Divine.”

Beyond what the actual data say, our growing diversity calls into question the whole implication that’s often drawn -- unfairly -- by observers of the Gallup data. You’ll find this sort of reference showing up sometimes in media reports, political speeches or TV talk shows – a casual reference to that 9-out-of-10-belief-in-God data as a good measure of spiritual life in America.

Well, among the flaws in that casual assumption? For example, most Americans don’t have a clue that Buddhism, one of the world’s most important spiritual traditions, is non-theistic. To put it in stark terms: Belief in God isn’t a part of that spiritual system.
Our own Team Members Geri Larkin from Seattle, Washington, and Joseph Naujokas from California are Buddhist – and Naujokas pointed out this growing disconnect with the Gallup-style questions right away. He immediately spotted the traditional questions at the top of Questionnaire No. 1 and prefaced his responses with this note: “Interesting questions, but not exactly unbiased - indicative of an overall pro-theist attitude in American culture.”

Impatience With Old Walls ...

Overall, as a group, we’re saying to the array of figures who have been “religious leaders” among us: Most of us don’t want to throw away religion – far from it! We’re powerfully drawn to the traditions you represent. But, don’t try to own us. Don’t try to count our heads as your own and don’t try to build walled-in fiefdoms with our offerings. Many of our spiritual journeys don’t conform to your neat labels and barriers.

Team Member Shelley Ketcham-Bates, a high-school teacher in Michigan –- like many Americans –- was stopped in her tracks by the Gallup-standard question “What is your religious preference,” which for decades has generated a neat list of frequently cited religious labels.
“I guess I’m an agnostic Protestant who meditates. Is that one of the categories?” she wrote. She continued: “I don’t feel a church is required in order to pursue a spiritual path, but I do believe that each religion possesses tools and wisdom gathered over the ages, and it’s a lot harder to study and access this amassed wisdom all by yourself. It’s easier to work out when you have a partner at the gym, and the same goes for spiritual work.”
Frankly, we should take our Team on the road to provide regional “listening sessions” for religious leaders to hear things like this. Ketcham-Bates isn’t a religious scholar or clergyperson -– yet, she “gets” the potential power of religious groups -- that is, if they only open up the doors and windows.
She’s probably going to find a home in a Protestant congregation, she writes –- but don’t fence her in. “My spiritual journey has been most enriched, over the last 10 years, by readings in the Buddhist tradition.”

We're Not Anti-religious, so Give Us a Little Spiritual Elbow Room ...

That's right -- Overall, we are not anti-religious. Even the personally non-religious among us are fascinated by religion.
Team Member Anna Wood from New York City, 18 and starting her undergraduate work, is a self-described Atheist. Yet, she’s part of our group here and says, “I am very much interested in religions’ evolutions and roles in society, and I am considering being a religions major.”

Most of us go even further than that -- and we care deeply about our faith in a personal way.

There’s not a Team Member more committed to faith than Sarah Alfaham, 21, of Sylvania, Ohio, who wrote, “I strive to insert Islam into every aspect of my life. Sometimes, I’m not so good at doing so, but I keep trying.” In fact, she doesn’t want to change anything about the pure core of Islam, she writes.

Nevertheless, she’s well aware of the frictions and changing attitudes toward faith that are unfolding all around us. The film with the biggest spiritual impact in her life over the past year was Ismael Ferroukhi’s superb 2004 film, “Le Grand Voyage,” which was just recently released on DVD in the U.S.
Alfaham writes that she appreciates this film because it “depicts a Moroccan immigrant who takes his French-born son with him to the annual pilgrimage to Makkah, or the Hajj, and shows the immense generation gap between them. It is very obvious how many people don’t know how to integrate their cultures together and thus this generation gap occurs.”

Alfraham’s affirmations about her life and the life of faith around her are an eloquent illustration of a faith-filled person (herself) realizing that she’s in the midst of world of enormous cultural change and friction. At age 21 as a Muslim American woman in the heart of the American Rust Belt, she wants to be an influential part of that reconnection of people with the purity of faith.

Those powerful affirmations she has made in our forum here –- coupled with her ability, along the way, to pick up a DVD copy of an otherwise obscure foreign film and bring that spiritual insight into the context of an American life in the Midwest –- this whole process she is describing is Open Source Religion in its purest form.

Weighing Annoyance, Irrelevance -- and Hope ...

Now, Alfaham is not critical of her religious leaders. So, we don’t want to miss the fact that we’re a mosaic, not a unison choir in this team. However -- Overall, our group is saying loudly and clearly to current religious leaders: You are often as much of a source of friction and division as you are a source of spiritual solace and connection. And, if you continue down this path of hierarchical ownership of religion, building barriers between people –- then, you’re risking not just annoyance but an even worse fate: irrelevance.

The poignancy in this era of cultural change is underlined in Baker’s book about cultural change – and shows up over and over again in our inventories: These cultural forces do not necessarily need to be in conflict. There’s a powerful fascination and desire for spiritual resources – and much of the friction and disconnection seems unnecessary and distracting to us.

Team Member Cynthia Hernandez, 24, of Lawrence, Kansas, underlined that “unnecessary and distracting” theme in her questionnaire.

She’s intrigued by some values and principles linked to the spiritual realm. She enjoys some passages from ancient scriptures, appreciates the value of “community” and her biggest spiritual question over the past year has been about the nature of death -– one of the timeless, human spiritual questions. Even the music she enjoys reflects on themes of loss. Broadly speaking, there are suggestions of some timeless spiritual reflections percolating in Hernandez’s life.

But, she doesn’t want anyone intruding unbidden into her private spiritual reflections – certainly not preaching to her about barriers that should be erected in her life. And, she wants full freedom to explore a whole range of culture and media. She enjoys science-fiction and is intrigued by the conversations among an email group of agnostics and atheists.

What’s her advice to religious leaders? “It kind of seems like a lot of religions – and values for those who don’t claim a religion – can be boiled down to the same general theme, but everyone gets so caught up in the details that make them different. It seems like there could be a lot more peace and understanding if less attention was given to differences and more attention was given to similarities.”

And, lest anyone think that this is a voice skewed by Hernandez’s youth, read her questionnaire against that of the Rev. John Emmert, a retired Episcopal priest living in Manheim, Pennsylvania.

After a lifetime as a religious leader himself, what’s his message to organized religion? “I would wish we could have a greater sense of being on the same ‘team,’ or emphasizing a common purpose, of respecting each others’ viewpoints and strengths.” And specifically to religious leaders, he writes: “I would ask them to focus more of their efforts on teaching and mission, less on maintaining the institution. I would also encourage them to speak with more courage and less arrogance.”

And yet – yet – there’s not a more eloquent reflection of a life interwoven with spiritual resources than Emmert’s personal inventory. In another pure reflection of Open Source Religion, Emmert has found in recent years an ecumenical group of clergy who meet bi-weekly “to support one anoher in facing the challenges of parish leadership in the community.”

Yes, the members of that group are religious leaders in their parish contexts -- but they’re meeting across religious boundaries and they’re sharing their lives in an Open Source way in this network. And, of that fellowship, Emmert writes, it has become “one of the most important professional-personal groups I have ever been part of.”

Well – that’s a whole LOT from Wave No. 1 of our work.

If you read this piece before Questionnaire No. 2 –- please, click on “Assignment No. 4” at the right side of our site –- or consult your Email version of Questionnaire 2 -– and get busy adding to our mosaic here.

And – yes, there is a Question in this wave that asks for your viewpoint on “Our Story Thus Far …”

Hey, how could we not ask what you think about Our Story? This is Open Source Central, after all.

Report here

Join this team to file reporting.

Filed Reporting

The Final Religion Piece

David Crumm

Assignment: