
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, July 16, 1995                   TAG: 9507150018
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: F-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: CLAYTON BRADDOCK
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

A PATCHWORK QUILT

MOST OF THE public clamor about religion seems to be about some kind of majority American religion. That of course means Christianity, perhaps for good historic reasons, yet perhaps not.

Such a perception is sadly out of focus.

In truth, our beliefs about matters of human spirit in this nation is more like a quilt than a religion: many patterns, many colors, many textures. Yet some of what has been patched together is confusing. You have to look closely at the finished product to see where the patches are, and whether the stitching is strong.

We are prone to declare our religious beliefs and standards the way we describe ourselves and others - based on very individual perceptions: The boss is a leader or a jerk; the president is the commander in chief or a bait-and-switch charlatan; the minister is a saint or a free-floating sinner. I am a God-loving conservative; he is a tax-and-spend Democrat. We often don't make honest judgments about our spiritual life because we don't understand them in the first place.

"We are - as usual in this country - in the middle of religious tumult", Lawrence Wright wrote in "Saints and Sinners," his 1993 book exploring the lives of six people, including Jimmy Swaggart, Madalyn Murray O'Hair and Will Campbell, a Mississippi Baptist preacher who ministers to "the poor, the dispossessed and the unknown."

In the Western world, religion is an especially American phenomenon, Wright said. While 42 percent of Americans say they attend church, about 12 percent of the French population attend church. Just across the English Channel, only 34 percent of the British knew why Easter is celebrated, according to a survey by the London Sunday Express.

Still, Wright said, the broader spiritual terrain of America is a "patchwork of mysticism, hypocrisy, hucksterism and violence, with an occasional dash of sexual perversity. He quoted Lonnie Kliever, a religious scholar, as saying religion is a "frontier between human creativity and lunacy."

In "The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation," Harold Bloom, Yale professor and religious scholar, said we don't look closely enough at what one reviewer said was "America's national soul."

Bloom's book, among other things, examines the religions grown up on American soil: Christian Science, Seventh Day Adventism, Jehovah's Witnesses, Pentecostalism, and the varieties of New Age and African-American beliefs.

"We think we are a Christian nation, but we are not," Bloom wrote. He said the dominant American religious view is a variation on Gnosticism: belief in a pre-Christian tradition of individual identity.

"To live in a country where the vast majority so enjoys God's affection is deeply moving, and perhaps an entire society can sustain being the object of so sublime a regard, which after all was granted only to King David in the whole of the Hebrew Bible," Bloom wrote.

This should be enough for all of us in this angry, fractured and tormented world, much of it in a search for spiritual peace.

Clayton Braddock is retired from the faculty of Radford University.

by CNB