In the spirit of connecting our group readings to my personal life, I started to take note on how religion affects my day-to-day life, under the same guidelines as the author’s instructions to her subjects. The author asks her subjects to take photos and connected them to their faith or beliefs. What I found myself doing is taking photos of trees, people, and buildings, the main notes that were repetitive were the ones about feeling connected by more than just being human or man-made. It was mostly people interacting, people under trees or people talking, but just places and people interacting. This makes sense because a core belief of mine is that we are all connected and we should all understand this and try to strive for helping one another. Now this isn’t necessarily religious but it connects to one of the key aspects of religion and that is community. A lot of the people who took part in this study also felt that community was most important and prevalent because it’s what affects us in our day-to-day life. She also wanted her subject to just take notes on habits and things so most of my notes were made up of songs I have been listening too and questions I would ask God if I believed he was real. What I noticed was most of what I was listening too was more poetry than music and most of the lyrics were made up of call to actions to start working together and were are all individuals together. Most of my questions were me asking if this is how God wanted this to be or if we got lost somewhere along the way. The funny thing about this is I don’t find myself to be a religious or spiritual person and answering these questions just had me shift my mindset to that of a religious person. 

Last week in class we began presenting our group projects. My group presented on Miller’s book, “Reinventing American Protestantism”. I thought the book was an interesting read that gave a lot of insight into the changing aspects of many churches. The main focus of the book was to point out the ways that Calvary, Vineyard, and Hope Chapel are now appealing to many people who are no longer interested in strictly structured religion. Many of the individuals that are joining these movements want to feel freer and have a more personal interaction within the service. They no longer want to feel that they have to go through a hierarchy in order to make a relationship with God. Moving away from structured religion has a lot to do with the hippie movement and the freedom that was found during that time. This led me to wonder: what may have happened with structured religion, had the hippie movement never occurred? Would there have been a surge of movements such as Calvary, to make religion less structured? Maybe not immediately, but I do believe there would have come a time in society to branch out from structured religion to allow more people to have religious freedom. However, there are still plenty of people practicing structured religion, which was brought up by another group presentation. This group discussed a Catholic Church, Our Lady of Assumption, and contrasted it to another Catholic Church, Saint Brigitta. It was interesting going from Miller’s book which took the stance that in order for churches to survive, they would need to be more relaxed, and the other book which contrasted two popular structured Catholic churches. Although Our Lady of Assumption was much stricter in their views, both Catholic churches showed that many people still prefer the more structured aspects of religion and may not want it to become more relaxed.

This week I came across an online article entitled, “When Religion Leads to Trauma”. The article discusses the impact of condemnation by one’s own congregation for example, “Gay, lesbian and trans people are told that God condemns them, unwed mothers that they are living in sin, and many natural human desires are deemed evil”(Schiffman 2019). According to the article, the psychological impact of negative religious experiences is becoming more recognized by a variety of religious organizations, and groups like Dr. Harold G. Koenig and his team at Duke University, and Dr. Marlene Winells organization, are seeking ways to combat the symptoms of such experiences. What I found most interesting about the article is that people are coming together and recognizing that people can be hurt by something that is supposed to be good, and attempting to find ways to combat this type of trauma. It seems like many organized religious groups are condemning groups that weaponize religious teachings but I had not seen any long term solutions being instituted to attempt to solve the problem. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that specialized therapeutic techniques are being developed to best help people experiencing religious trauma, and I think it’s so important because reflecting on the group discussion of religious experience at the beginning of the semester it appeared that a significant portion of the class had experienced some sort of religious trauma that soured them towards a religious group.

This information makes me wonder, What really must change to reduce the number of people who feel victimized by religion? Is it going to be a congregation by congregation change? Is it even possible to prevent people from being hurt by religion? What do you think of the new awareness and medical treatment for people with religious trauma?

As I was reading chapter 4 of McGuire’s book, I was drawing a few parallels to the book my group has been reading, “Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes”. The participants in Ammerman’s study vary from religious to nonreligious, religious but not spiritual, spiritual but not religious, both, or neither. I think that overall, Ammerman’s research showed that religion has become more and more individualistic in American society, which may be the reason for the rise in those who consider themselves “spiritual but not religious”. Sure, those who are religious may feel a strong sense of connection to their congregation/community, but even among the most religious, each individual expresses his/her religiosity in different ways outside of the congregation. It is also apparent that of those who are affiliated with a certain religious group, they have become increasingly likely to disagree with certain teachings, and they are increasingly likely to admit to it. McGuire discusses how the religious institution will hold a model of the individual and the socialization the person must be exposed to in order to be considered a part of the organization. Conformity to this model has been changing; it seems that, overall, people have been conforming less. It would make sense that the less a person conforms to this model of his/her religion, the more he/she may wish to identify as “spiritual but not religious”.

I believe that this is exactly what happened in my own life. I used to be religious and attend church regularly. I also read the Bible, prayed daily, and pretty much accepted all the rules and beliefs of the church. However, as I got older, I stopped going to church, prayed and read the Bible less, and questioned the teachings of the church more. Since I did this, I thought of myself as no longer being able to call myself a Christian because I no longer conformed to the model of what it means to be one. I really enjoyed reading this chapter because I feel like McGuire described my own experience to me in a way which I haven’t been able to. It now makes perfect sense as to why I have become one of the many Americans who claim to be “spiritual but not religious”.

Religion as a form of community is a tie that can be made in the texts, lectures, and presentations. Religion was never a component of my personal life and this last month of the class had made me feel as though it is something that I may have missed out on. It has been expressed time after time that attending church can and does create a sense of community and a feeling of belonging. It makes me curious about the thoughts formed by children. While listening to the case studies it was presented how different churches preach different interpretations of the bible. This makes me wonder how the children growing up in these churches view the same topic. I wonder if they tend to only understand the side that the church presents or a multifaceted view of the topic. Throughout my readings, I have also wondered the amount of commitment to the church that is felt through its members.

While reading “A Mosaic of Believers” by Gerardo Marti, it was expressed that the pastor did not favor people who he viewed as shopping for a church. He expressed that a church was something that required time and dedication and felt that people should feel that pull to the church. It is interesting to me that this is a belief and I wonder if this is a commonly held belief. All in all, religious life, service, and routine is one that keeps me wondering.

Our reading from the past week, chapter four of McGuire’s Religion: The Social Context, talked about the ins and outs of official and nonofficial religion, and the different ways that religion, spirituality, and belief could be classified. One thing that really stood out to me from this reading was the assertion that, “No single quality could be used to describe the individual as ‘religious’ or relatively ‘more religious’ than another individual” and the following five dimensions of religiosity. These dimensions were listed as experiential, ritualistic, ideological, intellectual, and consequential. I loved the idea that religion and spirituality influence and are influenced by such different factors, and that there are the different kinds of “levels” or “areas” of religiosity. I think that religion impacts every person in very different ways, which can all be found through the consequential dimension, but I think that each dimension informs the others. I believe that people who identify more with spirituality than religiosity may state that they think more about the experiential or ideological dimensions, while some others who may attend services and bible study every week identify most with the ritualistic and intellectual dimensions.   I feel that most, if not all, people have had some sort of brief experience with each dimension, whether it be through observation or direct lived experience. People who have never had an experience with ritual or intellectual religion may go out into nature or hear a choir sing and experience a bliss and connection with the world that could only be described as holy, which opens up to them the experiential dimension of religion. I appreciated the look into religion through this lens, and having a breakdown of where and how religion can be practiced, felt, thought of, and informed.

According to an article from Local12.com, officials in 6 different states, including Virginia and Florida, are reviewing bills that will allow Bible study within the classrooms of public schools, permitting that these are taught not as religious classes but teaching the literary, cultural, and historical significance of the Bible. President Trump tweeted his support of this.

A little bit of background on this topic is that in 1869 the Cincinnati School Board ended scripture reading because of the Catholic opposition, as the schools were reading the Protestant version of the Bible. This was an attempt to regain the Catholic children back into the public schools they had left. In 1963 the Supreme Court ruled Bible study in public school unconstitutional, yet today, many prominent conservative Christian leaders are attempting to undo this and continue pushing Bible literacy in schools.

This is an interesting discussion, as the Bible, whether one is a believer or not, has had an undeniable trend on American literature and society. Hundreds of thousands of works of art have allusions to the Bible within, especially literature and American classic works that many high schoolers will be exposed to. Teaching it as a strict piece of literature could be beneficial to developing critical analysis and insight among students, within English class. However, the strong support from so many conservative leaders leads me to believe that the emphasis would be less on literary significance and more on teaching it as truth, which is against the nature of the bill. Our country has always had freedom of religion, but how can we say that we uphold this value if our public schools push specific religion?

In a U.S. News article by Alexa Lardieri, they discuss and analyze the statistics of actively religious people reporting higher levels of happiness than people who are not religious.

Lardieri mentions:

“A Pew Research Center study of people in 26 countries published on Thursday found that participating members of religious congregations report higher levels of happiness than people who are not part of a congregation, with people in Mexico reporting the highest levels of happiness.”

They go on to explain how there is a trend of 71 percent of actively religious members saying the are very happy, compared to the 61 percent who are not affiliated across the 26 countries researched. This is an interesting finding to me because the question comes to mind is that does religious beliefs and followings make people happier or is it the community and people that make people happier? To what part of religion exactly does religion contribute to one’s happiness? Furthermore, the article discusses the possible relation of the percentage of people who drink and smoke frequently to those who do not and see similar patterns between the two that you would see with people who are religious  and people who are not. Does this mean the religion and drug and alcohol have to juxtapose or is there a middle ground and coming together of the two?

Below is the link to the article:

https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2019-01-31/pew-actively-religious-people-are-happier-and-more-likely-to-vote

This past week my group and I were the first group to present our case study on Miller’s book “Reinventing American Protestantism”.  Throughout this book the author touches on three paradigm churches: Calvary Chapel, Vineyard Christian Fellowship, and Hope Chapel. After our presentation of the book, a few of our fellow classmates asked us some interesting questions that we were unable to answer due to the year that the book was published.  So I did some extra research after class and was able to find the answers.

A question that came up was if there are other Calvary Chapel’s worldwide or are they only in the United States. It turns out that there are tons of Calvary Chapel’s in each continent.  In the book, Miller only talked about the ones in the United States (Downey, Riverside, New York, etc.). I am not sure if Miller already knew that there were other Calvary Chapel’s worldwide or if he simply just didn’t state it in his book.  Nevertheless, it was crazy to me to see how many different Calvary Chapel’s there are worldwide.

Another question that came up was about how different the churches are from the book compared to today.  I also did some research on this and found the names of the current staff members who are at that church.  For the Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, Brian Brodersen is the senior pastor. Unfortunately, Chuck Smith died on October 3, 2013.  For the Vineyard Christian Fellowship in Anaheim, it seems that they have different people speaking every week. I also found that John Wimbers died on November 17, 1997.  Last but not least for the Hope Chapel in Hermosa Beach, Zac Nazarian is still the current pastor.

These are just a few questions that I was able to finally find the answers to.  Miller’s book was very interesting to read and it was fascinating to see how these churches are currently doing today.