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By MARTIN E. MARTY

Religion is doing well in America, thank you. The status of organized religion, however, is a more complex matter.

Consistently in recent years, more than 90 out of 100 citizens tell the polltaker they believe in God, whatever they mean by God. In 1989, for example, 94 percent responded in this way on a Gallup poll. That is one signal of their being somehow religious. Even some who disbelieve in God or gods will identify themselves as religious, if they get to redefine "religion." Many will call it "spirituality" and themselves "spiritual."

As for organized religion, 55.1 percent of the respondents entered this decade as "adherents" of churches and synagogues alone, to say nothing of others who worship in the mosques or temples of non-Judeo-Christian faiths, according to Churches and Church Membership in the United States 1990 (Atlanta 1992). That meant 137,064,509 adherents in 255,173 Jewish and Christian congregations. If one counts bodies, then, organized religion in America looks healthy, certainly healthier than in many other industrialized nations and even comparatively robust in relation to previous rates of religious adherence in the United States, which rose steadily from the 1860s to the 1960s before leveling off.

Money talks, and organized religion — like anything else organized — needs money. These "adherents" put their money where their identifications and their souls are. A mere 38 reporting denominations out of the couple of hundred listed in the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches 1993 (Nashville 1993) said that last year members had donated more than $17 billion, $14 billion of that for local congregational needs and programs plus $3 billion for benevolences. That means $425 per person, another sign of relative institutional health and individual commitment. Americans give far more money to and through religious causes than any other kind. Organized religion looks financially fit, too.

Despite such encouraging signals, however, few religious leaders would describe the institutions they serve as being in good shape fiscally. For all their holdings in property — much of it in the St. White Elephant category — virtually every denomination is chronically short of funds and could credibly file for bankruptcy tomorrow. Some of the parachurch ministries, like televangelism, do well — Chicago's WCFC Channel 38, for example. A few megachurches near megahighway interchanges or megamalls, like Willow Creek Community

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Illustration by William Crook Jr.

Church near Chicago, a national flagship of this sort of congregation, boast big crowds and thriving programs. But these are exceptions.

Scholars like sociologist Robert Wuthnow from Princeton or historian Peter Berger of Boston University, seldom given to faith in the "good old days, "demonstrate that as recently as two generations ago in the belittleable 1950s, organized religion at least enjoyed "easier old days." Depression babies, weathered and worn by World War II, spurred by the GI Bill and supported by FHA loans, moved to the suburbs. There they built churches and temples that they attended along with their sizable broods of children. Weekend activity centered around home and church. Today the very concept of the weekend as a time for staying near home has dissolved. Families are smaller. Housing styles are not always of the single-family sort that encourage participation in community and, hence, church life.

If post-war suburbanization was largely practiced by white folks in the 1950s, those years also saw African-American and other racial/ethnic minority groups migrate into northern cities and fill the abandoned sanctuaries of white churchgoers. The inner city was more congenial to congregational life then than it is today, and such churches burgeoned and boomed. Many of them remain strong beacons in the bleakness of the ghetto, but there has been a falling away from the inner city church by the growing underclass and mounting secular competition for the allegiance of the young especially. These are not "easier new days" in the African-American world. The Latino/a populations have experienced shifts from inherited Catholicism to vibrant and competitive Protestant pentecostalisms, but overall their religious allegiance seems limited as well. Muslims claim from two to five million American adherents; they and the Mormons are part of the organized religion growth factor, bucking the national trend of overall diminution.

The truly spiritual and the deeply religious would find this approach to defining the current state of organized religion in

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America irrelevant or abhorrent because it views such commitments the way the secular world does. Instead of asking how many patrons there are and how supportive and generous they are to and through organized religion, for the ardent the better question is: What is the state of the soul of organized religion? How inventive are its leaders, how creative its thinkers?

Wait a minute, says another voice from between or beyond those of polltakers and historians on the one hand, and believers or, at least, adherents on the other. What is organized religion, and why should anyone care about it? Whoever pages through the relevant atlases, catalogs or directories will find chaos. Will Rogers used to say, "I do not belong to any organized political party; I am a Democrat." Similarly, many Americans can say they do not belong to organized religion, because they are Jews and Christians.

Their division by itself signals disorganization. Between "Chiropractors" and "Cigars" in the Chicago telephone book Yellow Pages you will find "Churches." Take but one letter of the alphabet, "U," for example, under this heading. What do the following have in common beyond the letter "U" in their initial: Ukrainian Catholic, Ukrainian Orthodox, Unification Church, Unitarian Universalist, United Church of Christ, United Holy Church of America, United Methodist, United Pentecostal, United Protestant, Unity School of Christianity and Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches? Those 11 listings include bodies that are dominantly humanist (one), liberal Protestant (two), largely gay (one), avowedly "new" (two) and intensely ethnic (two). The "U" in Unity and United seems ironic, even oxymoronic, when one understands the schisms and factions among each of them. Family quarrels, the most intense sort, split these churchly families and increase their disorganization.

Scholars like anthropologist Clifford Geertz say that people become religious in order to find meaning and ward off chaos. They must be determined if they find order within the disorder and organization within the disorganization of religion. And where they do not, the creative among them might praise the chaos of competition and diversity, in the spirit of Friedrich Nietzsche: You must still have chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.

It may well be that citizens as believers find in their faiths and their churches just enough slackness to be satisfying, to help them fend off the encroachments of overorganized government, business and media. They signal this when they resist the bureaucracies that try to give order to denominations and orders to believers. Things are not happy these days at churchly headquarters, where funds are few, staffs are shrinking and potshots from congregations are aimed at the windows. The Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago chronically experiences drastic financial and personnel problems, for instance, and the recently merged headquarters of the giant Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, located near O'Hare Airport, also seems beleaguered. People see more health in their local organizations, which, for all their disorder or weariness, seem more flexible and malleable to the members' own goals and impulses.

The question persists: Why should anyone care about organized religion? Individual spirituality certainly allows for dancing stars — for chaos, inventiveness and improvisation. In effect, "I" then get to make it up as I go along, so there are no inhibitions of the sort that contribute to the boredom of much organized worship, or the staleness and limitations, to say nothing of the repression and authoritarianism, of many religions. The spirituality of the lonely "I" exemplifies a spirit of liberty, of individualism that is not easily captured.

Such spirituality can also present problems, however: Narcissism, illusion and smugness can be the unintended byproducts if not the direct products of unorganized religion. They inspire one to qualify the praise religion deserves for presenting options and alternatives in an otherwise drearily secular world. But this is not the moment to praise or fault unorganized individual spirituality. This is the place to assess the state of its sometime partner, sometime rival, the organized version.

Let me serve for a moment as an unsolicited, unpaid apologist for organized religion, since it usually gets a bad rap. If I could scoop up the church bulletins of the churches nearest downtown Rockford, Peoria, Decatur or Springfield and point to their scheduled programs as well as activities for the coming week, these would show how much the volunteer life and social uplift of each city depends upon them. A city like East St. Louis may have all the signs of terminal illness, but if a pulse remains, it lies in the African- American congregations there; the same can be said for the Apostolic Church of God in Christ in Woodlawn in Chicago. Inspired by such hopeful signs, let us for a moment give equal time to this vulnerable creation, organized religion.

First, the shaky reputation of organized religion is inevitable for historic reasons. It used to be "run by the state." American founders changed that constitutionally, separating church and state while leaving competition and chaos — as well as vitality — in its wake. Compared to, say, Europe whence many American churches derived, and where the taxing power granted their European counterparts funds and status and privilege, the variety of American faiths assured a better "fit" for everybody. If one faith did not serve, another beckoned. If none satisfied, new ones emerged. That is not a neat arrangement, but it is inevitable and it has a positive side.

In the contemporary world, for practical reasons, institutionalization is a natural experience. Thus, paradoxically, the first thing unorganized religion becomes is organized. Diffuse and individualized spirituality soon gets marketed in retreats, through book sales, by means of celebrity-spiritualizers who

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develop followings. Followers want to be in touch with each other; soon there are newsletters and magazines. Before one can say "chaos," there is order: The individualists start holding conventions, electing officers, assessing dues, fighting for tax exemption. The College of Cardinals or the Ayatollahs of Iran are often more flexible than these new organizations. One nice thing about the old inherited institutions is that they grow a bit sloppy and casual, thus allowing some space for their own new "dancing stars."

As apologists like me clear our throats and try to make our case, we must analyze the peculiar situation of religious institutions in contemporary life and the extent to which this situation suggests the possible as well as the inevitable. This essay series in Illinois Issues is premised on the belief that the leaders of our major institutions and the general public "have an inadequate understanding of the past as well as the present, and that this fact cripples their ability to think creatively about the future." Among these institutions, organized religion, especially, must try to respond to a dynamic culture and changing human needs while maintaining continuity within its traditions and teachings.

Most religions, by their very nature, are rooted in the past, and can be crippled easily by that heritage. One thinks of how almost all of them derive from ancient scriptures out of remote pasts. Once upon a time, most authors of these scriptures infer or preach, women and men talked to God or the gods. The divine was miraculously revealed to them, and the sacred words, in turn, were preserved and cared for by priestly or scribal custodians who would not allow anyone to tamper with them. Say something sacrilegious about these divinely inspired texts, and you may have to run and hide for your life. Ask Salman Rushdie. Reform the custodial tradition, and you can get excommunicated and hounded: Ask Martin Luther or Anne Hutchinson or Roger Williams. Push the edges of the tradition, and you can get slapped down: Ask those who advocate the ordination of women in Roman Catholicism.

Of course, much of the most creative religious expression comes from the people on the run or in prison; one thinks of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" or theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer's stirring writings from a Nazi prison. Yet, imprisonment is not a desirable condition for 137,064,509 adherent-citizens.

With their roots in divine revelation and sacred tradition, religions are usually by nature conservative, and thus not especially malleable and adaptive about meeting new circumstances. They appeal to the side of human existence that welcomes tradition, a word that implies what is "handed down." The wisdom of the past, the eloquence of the saints and martyrs and prophets, inspires and guides in a world of turbulence and change. But it can also become congealed, suffocating the soul. Let it prevail in organized religion, and you have either the militancy of fundamentalist groups who would force others to "shape up or ship out" from their culture or the hardening of spiritual arteries in the hollow sanctuaries.

Can organized religion renew its health and face the future creatively? Yes, because the same texts that can limit creativity also were born of it and still can inspire it. One thinks again about those originative texts, those high moments of history — the Francis of Assisi times of centuries ago, or the times of Dorothy Day, who invented and inspired "Catholic Worker" houses in various cities in more recent times — to see why innovation can occur. Most faiths were born from misfit situations and out-of-step souls. Prophets, Messiahs, critics, dreamers and saints started them and pushed them along. Every one of these had to be an innovator, a maker of new things, a witness to the impulse to change. A great day was ahead: a day of the Lord, the coming of Messiah or the founding of Utopia. And the world was not ready. Hence the way things were, including the way organized religion was, had to be attacked while new visions were projected.

I can think of no better recent example than that of Martin Luther King Jr. Sociologist Max Weber said there were two ways to change the world in the light of religion. One could be charismatic — listen to the Sermon on the Mount of Matthew's Jesus — and say of the old scriptures, "It is written — but I say unto you. ..." Or one could be the virtuoso and say, "It is written — and I insist." King the virtuoso carried around two sets of scriptures. In one pocket were the originating documents of the Republic. There were the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, words about freedom and equality, of which King said, "and I insist we live up to them!" In his other pocket were the originating documents of Judaism and Christianity, the words of prophets who preached righteousness and of rabbi Jesus who proclaimed the impending arrival of justice, the Kingdom of God. In these documents "it is written" and people could then "insist" that such righteousness and justice now appear among us. And many responded, even in the circles of organized religion that King so often had to chide and goad.

Where does one see signs of vitality in organized religion today? One has to look beneath the surface, because Americans have decided, often prudentially, that religion is a private affair. Under that surface one can see many stirrings of creativity, in the ministry to people in doubt and despair, enslaved by addiction or victimized and abused by those near them. For every minute spent fund-raising or aggrandizing the institution, organized religion's agents probably spend an hour at bedside, in study, doing counseling, holding the candle when lights go out, keeping hope alive when despair threatens. They may seem invisible not because they are engaged in Operation Stealth but because the really important things people put into and get out of organized religion occur at hidden places, at odd hours and in confidential circumstances.

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Moving beyond privacy into congregating can also be creative. The congregation is often the first sphere of public encounter. No doubt Americans who make a speech, voluntarily teach and guide the young, set agendas and keep minutes, do so more through organized religion than anywhere else. In the process, they offer praise, a fact that may not look culturally productive, but that has its place. People at best mumble or lip-sync the national anthem at ball games. Almost 50 million of them sing, many of them out loud, at weekly worship. One Catholic scholar described worship as "pointless but significant." In the act of praising, significant things can happen.

Volunteering is where creativity most often occurs in organized religion. Its extent is the great untold story of the nation's beleaguered and often demoralized churches and synagogues. According to Wuthnow, over half the public volunteers for some activity or other each week — an astonishingly high figure. And far beyond the mere majority of hours — some say up to 80 percent — of volunteering goes on through organized religion. The same impulse that has people doing volunteer work for the church impels them into the general, secular, pluralist culture, where they are also leaders. A Yellow Pages of church and synagogue volunteering would show inventiveness in action. Find a new need — for care of Alzheimer's patients, the abandoned aged, recently released prisoners, or whatever — and one is likely to find organized religion achieving what unorganized, individualist spirituality cannot touch. One thinks, for example, of chaplains and volunteers at Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, which invented a system of parish nursing and congregation-based holistic health centers. Similarly, wherever there are major prisons in Illinois, count on Charles Colson's Prison Fellowship to be there, correcting and counseling, encouraging and training.

These may not be the best days for theology, formal interpreting of faith. There may not be giants in the earth as there have been at other moments, including a half century ago in the Western world. In the postmodern scene many theologians create pastiches of preachments, collages of creeds, montages of memories, assemblages of affirmations, and, one confesses, tapestries of trivia. But more serious things also go on.

I'll refer to one world to which I am drawn: medical ethics. Modem medical ethics, bioethics, was born in the seminaries during the midst of technical advances around mid-century. Soon theological ethics moved to universities and clinics, where the language of specific faiths or of faith itself was seen as alien or irrelevant. Many of the ethicists quickly converted to the "mere" (rationalist, prudential) secular ethics that is there at home. Well and good. But when families were in anguish about organ transplanting or, most crudely, whether or not "to pull the plug on grandma," they seldom turned to the philosophy department for well-honed Aristotelian discussions of beneficence, Hippocratic arguments about nonmaleficence, or Kantian, Millsian and Deweyan debates over autonomy or justice.

In crises of moral decision, instead, they wanted to know what their "good" doctor, rabbi, counselor, priest or minister thought, and more often than not they encountered traditions and stories that had been kept alive and made present through organized religion. Today, for all the halting and stumbling, the embarrassment and laggardry, there are evidences that people again explore what organized religion tends to, in the crises of life: memory, tradition, intuition, community, hope, experience, many kinds of reason and affection. And formal theological thought, practical wisdom of the organized religious language, helps prompt these. One watches for increasing vitalities on this front.

The creativity still goes on now even as the organizedly religious try to make sense of politics and the public order, after the collapse of the Iron Curtain and Berlin Wall abroad and in a time of polarization and "culture wars" at home. Some of the creativity on this political front is uncongenial to folks like me, but it has stimulated responses that might reinvigorate sectors of the public that had been apathetic about what went on at the school board and library board, hospital board and zoning board. If organized forces among aggressive religious minorities use their version of creativity to win their case, they will do so only because of a lack of imagination and energy by majorities who could coalesce against them and bring to being better forms of cultural and social life than we now know.

That third illustration takes me to the borders of analysis and my adopted role of apologist, reflecting as it does the ambiguities of organized religion when it is expressive. One hopes that its double-sided character prevails. Joseph Pulitzer gave a mandate to newspapers that matches the prophetic commands of old: familiarly, "comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable." One hopes that organized religion will be repentant, in the words of another newspaper character, Pogo, that greet all who pass my door to come to my studies: "We have faults which we have hardly used yet." Organized religion is not strong enough to give anyone bragging rights, which would be out of place, in any case, in the realm of the soul. When its leaders and visionaries have an eye on the future, a trace of chaos in the soul and a regard for the innovative impulse in venerable scriptures and traditions, organized religion can be an agent of change, rich in potential too seldom now realized. 

Martin E. Marty is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, senior editor of The Christian Century and George B. Caldwell Senior Scholar-in-Residence al the Park Ridge Center for the Study of Health, Faith and Ethics.

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