Give Me That Old Time Religion

Religion is a strange and scary thing especially for those who have none. Many secular people in my country regard religious folks as bizarre and dangerous. Fundamentalism was once a theological self-designation of certain Protestant Christians in the early 1900’s. Today it is a lump-them-all-together term used for anyone and everyone who actually believes in any God, god, or gods. All these fundamentalists are suspect by the fact that they actually hold religiously-inspired convictions. Such people are not to be trusted. You just never know when a Buddhist or a Baptist is going to fly an airplane into a tall building. Secularists do not do nuance, needless to say.

It has to be frustrating to live in the United States as a committed anti-religionist. My motherland has the largest church attendance rate of any developed nation. It is home to the greatest variety of denominations and religious groups on the planet. The United States has more houses of worship, more pastors, priests, rabbis and spiritual leaders than any country in the world. Apparently a vast majority of Americans still pray daily, many claim to read their Bibles regularly and, horror of horrors, almost three fourths of the population still identify themselves as Christians. The American South, where I have lived much of my life, is even worse. Here, in the dark woods of the Bible belt, religion is so prevalent that it is creepy, unless of course you enjoy living in a Flannery O’ Conner novel.

This is not the way it was supposed to happen. Technological and economic progress were supposed to lead to the disappearance of faith. “We do not need God anymore, we have electricity.” This is not the norm. The norm is Europe; polite, cultured, civilized, secular Europe. There state education and other varieties of social control have efficiently emasculated the masses from all those perilous primeval drives. Normal is a spiritually-neutered, faith-neutral society. In religion (and reproduction), sensible people are sterile.
And yet, despite every effort to the contrary by her wise all-knowing leaders, America bitterly persists in clinging to her religion (and unfortunately for those same leaders, also to her guns). Sociologist Peter Berger rightly quipped, “India is the most religious nation on earth. Sweden is the most secular. The United States is India ruled by Sweden.” That about sums it up.

More worrisome than the American anomaly is the growing realization that vast segments of the human race take their faith seriously. A terrifying truth is slowing dawning on Westerners. Most of the world has not passed through the purifying process of secularization and indeed may never follow that route. (This realization must be akin to going to sleep in Manhattan and waking up in the Amazon jungle.) Suddenly the savages are everywhere. They have always been there. It was just that our ethnocentrism and imagined superiority allowed us to ignore them. As the rest catch up to the West technologically and economically we are finding ourselves face to face not with pygmies but with peers. We are shocked to look into the eyes of men and women who cling to their myths, beliefs, doctrine, deities, ceremonies, sacred books, sacred songs, gurus, priests, preachers and powers from the Great Beyond. They really do take all that stuff seriously.

Ironically it is often the educated western elite who stare back blinking incomprehensibly. American intellectuals are notorious for underestimating religious motivation in geopolitics. “It is the economy, stupid” has not proven to be the single greatest rationalization of all human activity. Naturalistic explanations are rather bankrupt towards helping us grasp a great deal of our existence.

Secular orthodoxy leads to a vast tone-deafness to much of the music of human experience. Like it or not, for most of history most men and women have been profoundly religious creatures. Most societies in the world today and a majority of individuals within those societies continue to be deeply influenced by their faith. Refusal to recognize this leads to a terrible impoverishment not only of our understanding but also our own souls. The believer simply lives in a bigger world than the unbeliever.

I believe that a pious person is much better positioned than the non-religious to appreciate and understand this thriving religious world we live in. Even where he disagrees, and of course he will disagree on much, the man of faith can at least begin to comprehend men of other faiths. For he, like they, takes seriously the sacred; on this both agree.

Peru is one of those outposts of paganism and primitive religious sentiment that was never tamed by the modern era. (Perhaps because the modern era just skipped Peru.) People here are unashamedly open about their spirituality. Roman Catholics perform enormous public processions, reenacting the crucifixion to the point of shedding blood. Pagans still sacrifice animals to ancient mountain gods. Pentecostals whip themselves into ecstatic frenzies every night in mass meetings that continue for hours. Tribal shamans have out-of-body-experiences and commune with jungle spirits. Cathedrals, churches, temples and sects flourish on virtually every street corner. Peruvians proselytize, pray in public, play loud praise music in the market, name their liquor stores after the Virgin Mary, mix church and state, church and business, church and party, church and just about everything else. What would be considered fringe elsewhere is mainstream in Peru.

If possible, I would like this update to serve as an introduction to a short series of articles in the days ahead on the topic of religion in Peru. It has to be a series because there is no way to summarize the entirety of Andean spirituality in a single writing. It has to be an introduction, for the subject is so rich and dense that I can do nothing more than give the general contours at best. Obviously as a pastor and missionary, religious concerns are a big part of my life. However, those concerns are also a big part of the lives of a great many of the people among whom I live and work every day in Peru. It makes for a fascinating environment, albeit I will grant one that is often quite strange. Bizarre though it may be, life here is never boring.

Since I know that most of you are a people of faith, I ask you to remember my family and I in your prayers.

May the Grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.

CSA