McNihilism goes to church (when if feels like it)

A new study finds religious affiliation in the U.S. to be “extremely fluid”

A couple weeks ago I was reflecting in this column about the American appetite for “facts” amidst our growing anxiety over how little we really seem to know and understand about our world. I suggested that this lust for the easy knowledge-chunk and the inside story was a symptom of cultural ill-health, that it could indeed be “the very dynamic that perpetuates and aggravates the McNihilism that is eating away the very core of our culture, and even our mental health.”

By ‘McNihilism’, I mean that ubiquitous, routine, and largely subconscious, brand of Joe-on-the-street nihilism lived by millions of Americans.[1] It broadly describes the situation of a person who feels quite incapable of bringing ‘transcendence’, ‘purpose’, or ‘meaning’ in life into sharp focus—and who is largely uninterested in doing so anyway. It means the more or less conscious acquiescence to the perception that there is no overarching ‘meaning’ or ‘truth’ out there; no one specific, ultimate reality that will fulfill us in life; no ultimate point of reference for explaining ‘right’ and ‘wrong’; no God, no great, unalterable truths. Only ourselves.

Americans of course, along with most human beings, want to live with their feet firmly planted on as many certainties (in addition to death and taxes) as possible. Uncertainty is naturally disconcerting. That sense of uncertainty however, is normally not alleviated by a steady diet of “facts” for one simple reason: a steady flow of information, bereft of an overarching sense of meaning in which to assemble our facts, is about as useful as bricks without mortar. Additionally, too many of our “facts” are nothing more than snippets of hearsay, conjecture, inaccuracy, or illogic. Lusting after factoids –whether it’s the latest gossip about Britney, or the latest numbers on Obama, or the latest theory of the universe—doesn’t help ease that sense of the ground endlessly shifting under one’s feet. One way of dealing with that unease, of course, is simply to get used to it, and get over it, and accept that all is in flux, all is relative, paradigmatic and what academicians like to call “perspectival.”

It comes then as no surprise that so many Americans—as a groundbreaking new study suggests—appear to be embracing sexier brands of McNihilism in the forms of “spirituality,” “scientism”, “secularism” and “agnosticism.”

Focused on the religious affiliation of the American public, with a survey sample of 35,000 American adults queried between May 8 and August 13, 2007, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life discovered the following:

• 44% of adults have switched religious affiliation, or moved from being unaffiliated to affiliated, or dropped any religious affiliation whatsoever;
• 28% of adult Americans have abandoned their religious affiliation of birth to move on to another religion or no religion at all;
• Of adults between ages 18-29, 25% (one in four) describe themselves as being unaffiliated with any particular religion;
• 12% of the entire adult population willingly describes its religious affiliation as “nothing in particular.”[2]

Of course, the meaning of these statistics will generate much debate for years to come. As was noted in a Washington Post article:

Some [scholars] think that secularism is underreported as people may check a box correlating to a faith group without actually believing its tenets or following its practices. Others think the growth of the unaffiliated (sometimes called "religious nones," because they check "none" when asked their faith on polls) disguises the number of people who consider themselves "spiritual but not religious."

Tom Smith, director of a major sociological survey at the University of Chicago, estimated that about 25 percent of U.S. adults think of themselves as spiritual but not religious. "Some trends show there is less support for organized religion but either a steady or, by some measures, rising support for personal religious beliefs," Smith said.

The idea of being “spiritual but not religious”, and the evident fluidity of American religious affiliation raise a serious concern about the shallowness of the religious experience of Americans. And it should. Yet, I think there is a deeper concern it should trigger. This shiftiness, the existential inability to persevere in a religious tradition, all the religious window-shopping that goes on in America, all the doctrinal cafeteria-style picking and choosing that goes on within Christian communions of late, is too often nothing but a further manifestation of the pervasiveness of McNihilism.

This is perhaps nowhere more evident than within Christianity. The last two centuries have seen Christianity ravaged by ideologies posing as theology which have proposed the steady regression from Ecclesial Christianity, to Christianity without Church, to Christianity without Christ, to Christianity without doctrine—a Christianity, that is, which can embrace all belief systems because it has been virtually emptied of any positive doctrinal content (save for the universal injunction that Christians should be “nice”). And last of all, today, we have “spirituality” without Christianity.

This emptying out of Christianity, its loss of form (and consequently the nihilism which it embodies) is not a recent phenomenon; it was already being decried in 19^th century Germany by that most famous victim of nihilism himself, Friedrich Nietzsche. Speaking of the theological tendencies of the Germany of his day (the following was penned in 1873), Nietzsche’s air of exasperation presages our own:

What are we to think if we find Christianity described by the “greatest theologians of the century” as the religion that claims to “find itself in all real religions and some other barely possible religions,” and if the “true Church” is to be a thing “which may become liquid mass with no fixed outline, with no fixed place for its different parts, but everything to be peacefully welded together” — what, I ask again, are we to think?[3]

Of course, we should not be led to think that all those who have bought into the neutering of Christianity or who engage in religion-shifting are nihilists. Many have been deeply disturbed by the prospect of the nihilist nightmare and are trying to evade it by searching out a “true” religion.

My fear, however, is that far more, if not most, have indeed succumbed to the nightmare. For them, shifting from one religion to another, then to no religion, then back again means merely to acquiesce to the deeper truth that there is no transcendent truth to which any religion could direct us anyway. And that is why the McNihilist relegates religion to the status of just one more personal preference.

In sum, my concern arises not because of religious change as such, but because of what I perceive to be one of the root causes of that change. If such change were rooted in a serious and widespread religious search motivated by a sense of one’s duty to seek the truth, this would not be a bad thing.

However, such fluidity is more clearly rooted in treating religion, as the late sociologist Philip Rieff described it, “therapeutically.”[4] For far too many Americans, emotional self-contentment—not truth—is the real factor behind religious affiliation. When one set of religious symbols, practices, and forms no longer “feel” good, the McNihilist moves on and tries on another set of religious accoutrements to see if they “fit” or “feel” better. Whether such symbols are true or not is a question that simply does not arise. After all, what is true for the McNihilist is simply whatever works wherever he or she is—not something that makes claims upon us regardless of our preferences. What is there, asks the McNihilist, beyond personal preference anyway?

Rev. Thomas V. Berg, L.C. is Executive Director of the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person.

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[1] The term is used in a manner loosely analogous to a term coined by political theorist Benjamin Barber in his 1996 best-seller Jihad vs. McWorld. ‘McWorld’ here becomes a shorthand term for western-style globalization.

[2] And then there’s the heartbreaker for Catholics:

Catholicism has experienced the greatest net losses as a result of affiliation changes. While nearly one in three Americans (31%) were raised in the Catholic faith, today fewer than one in four (24%) describe themselves as Catholic. These losses would have been even more pronounced were it not for the offsetting impact of immigration.

The study goes on to point out that it is immigration (along with a constant trickle of converts) that keeps the American Catholic population at about 25% in the U.S.

[3]Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, translated by Adrian Collins (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1957), 43.

[4]See Philip Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).