Religion in 2048: Age of individual search and choice

AS THE MILLENNIUM approaches, it's a good time to predict what American religious life will be like in 50 years.

I predict that a half century from now the search for individual spirituality will be a hallmark of religion in the United States and formal membership in large churches and synagogues will be significantly weakened.

Instead, I see an enormous number of small, decentralized and intense pockets of spiritual energy honeycombed throughout the country. Groups of searchers, not necessarily believers, meeting in living rooms, schoolhouses and storefronts will proudly eschew the "edifice complex" (my house of worship is bigger than yours) that was so much a part of life in the 20th century.

Fifty years from now, seminaries will still be educating future rabbis, priests and pastors, but there will be large numbers of self-ordained, self-proclaimed spiritual leaders actively competing in the religious marketplace for followers, influence and, of course, money.

Television, the Internet and other forms of mass communication ensure that religion will be a huge retail enterprise rather than a wholesale operation a half century from now. Thanks to America's constitutional guarantee of separation of religion and state, there will be a proliferation of religions, a veritable smorgasbord for the soul.

Not too long ago, some predictors of the religious future confidently told us that "God is dead" and that we were living in a "post-religious age." But appealing as orthodox religions may be, in the 21st century the majority of Americans will choose a bumpy, frequently confusing spiritual quest. It will be the Age of Individual Search and Choice, not the Age of Certainty. *

Rabbi A. James Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee. This piece is taken from an article in The St. Petersburg Times.

Copyright The Human Quest Mar/Apr 1998
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