It is a pleasure to be back here in the church I served as minister. The subject of this series, the future shape of religion, should be daunting to anyone of any sense, but I will plunge on, dauntless and full of chutzpah. It should be obvious, though, that much of what I will say this evening will be speculative, to be redeemed only by our awareness that if we care about the future, we have to speculate.

So that you will be able to know the personal history from which I speak, so that you can then give weight to what I might say in certain areas and be guarded against what I might say in other areas, I will first tell you just a little about my background.

I was raised in the Midwest by a fallen-away Presbyterian father and a fallen-away Roman Catholic mother. Despite growing up without any religious background, I did get interested in religion in high school, and went through a progression (or at least I like to believe it was a progression) from liberal Congregationalism to Unitarianism. Eventually I went "whole hog" and became a Unitarian Universalist minister after serving my penitential education (which I enjoyed, actually) at one of our seminaries. I retired here as minister after ten years of service. Before coming here, I served Unitarian Universalist congregations in Davis, California, and Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts; then I served in Boston as Executive Vice President of our denomination, the Unitarian Universalist Association, and I left that position to accept this congregation’s invitation to be minister here; I left Boston to avoid becoming more of an ecclesiastical bureaucrat. During that service at denominational headquarters I did travel considerably in Europe, visiting liberal religious groups in Great Britain, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania.

When I was practicing law in San Francisco before deciding to become a minister, I was exposed to the influence of Far Eastern religion, particularly Zen Buddhism, and for many years I remained what we call a "library Buddhist"–that is, I read about Buddhism but did not practice it–which is like reading about riding a bicycle without actually riding a bike. Finally in 1982 I connected with the Zen Mountain Monastery in the Catskills in New York, and I have been a practicing Zen Buddhist since then. I have visited Japan and the co-headquarters’ temples of Soto Zen at Eiheiji and Sojiji. I am a senior student of the abbot at Zen Mountain Monastery, John Daido Loori. I need to add that I am still also committed to Unitarian Universalism. That combination of being both a UU and a Zen Buddhist is not difficult at all, since as most of you may know, neither Buddhism nor Unitarian Universalism is a creedal religion. One does not have to accept a creed to be either a Buddhist or a UU. And like many other UUs, I do not identify myself as a Christian.

Now to get at last to our subject, the future shape of religion. In order not to be naïve about the future of religion we must be aware of the past of religion and the present of religion. I will not go into detail about the past or the present except in the ways I believe they may affect the future. I must also say that anyone who studies the history of religions in the world is aware that religions have been a great contributor to our civilizations in stimulating, nourishing, and expanding the religious experience and the morality and the ability to cope with life of millions of human beings. At the same time anyone who studies the history of religions is also aware that religions, especially organized religions and their leaders has been a major contributor to the terror, misery, cruelty, intolerance, and anti-scientism of our human ancestors and indeed of many men and woman today. We have the history of the massacres supposedly divinely approved in the Hebrew Bible, the torture and killing of heretics by Christians, the inquisitions, the suppression of scientific discoveries such as those of Copernicus and Galileo, the religious wars among Christians, the abuses of the Christian Crusades against Islam, the spread of Islam by the sword, and the opposition to the teaching of evolution today.

We need to begin by confronting the problem of what I mean here tonight by the word "religion." In order to consider what "the future shape of religion" may be, I have to let you know what I mean our subject to be. I don’t know what the other speakers in this series who are yet to come will mean when they use the word "religion"–that is something for them and for you to deal with. There is no need for us to be consistent here outside of our individual presentations. My goal is communication, not insistence on any personal catechism in response to a question "what is religion?"

The great Protestant theologian Paul Tillich has said that for each one of us our religion is whatever our "ultimate concern" may be. If our ultimate concern is making money or acquiring property, then that is our religion. That may be useful for us to use to attack the materialism of our age, but it is not helpful here. For our purposes tonight I am going to talk about two aspects of religion. You may not agree with the assumptions I make in using this structure, but I don’t think that has to get in the way, and if you do disagree it may help you clarify your own beliefs and experiences.

I am going to address two aspects of religion and what the shape of their future may be. The first aspect I want to talk about is the experience of religion: that is, the individual, subjective experience a person may have with his or her "ground of being," to borrow the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich’s phrase. I use the experience of the ground of being rather than the experience of God–Tillich regards them as being the same thing–because there are many who do not regard that experience as being that of God. "God" in the Christian tradition, for example, has both an external element–the divine "Other", the so-called transcendent God–and an internal element in each of us, the divine element in each human being, made in God’s image, the God that has appealed to the great Christian, Jewish, and Muslim mystics, the so-called immanent God. Buddhists, in contrast, would say that the experience of the "ground of being" is indeed accessible to each one of us, but that there is no transcendent element in it, no external, transcendent God, and so Buddhists prefer not to use the word "God." So I will use for my first aspect of religion the personal experience of the ground of being, whether that is understood by the person experiencing it as "God" or not. For those of you who may be familiar with theology, I am speaking of what the 20^th century Protestant theologian Rudolf Otto described as the "numinous" or in Latin the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, that is, the awesome and fascinating mystery.

The second aspect of religion I will be addressing is institutional religion. Many today, in fact, who are critical of the place and the history of institutions of religion make the word "religion" a negative term and make it to mean only institutions of religion. They often substitute the word "spirituality" for what I have already described as the experience of the ground of being. I have already mentioned that some of the greatest crimes against humanity have been perpetrated under the banner of institutional religions, but I will say here that I do not have a negative reaction automatically to the presence of religious institutions. In fact, no religion of any depth has survived more than a few generations beyond the life of its founder. Hundreds–probably thousands–of religions have disappeared in the sands of time because they were not effectively institutionalized. The point here is that a person who refuses to explore any institutional religion in depth loses the opportunity to utilize the insights of thousands of perceptive and intelligent minds, and those minds have worked out within their religions techniques for confronting the weaknesses of their own personal beliefs and practices as well as techniques for confronting the weaknesses of the beliefs and practices of their own institution of religion. To ignore the study of any particular religious tradition at all, including its institutions, is to impoverish ourselves from the resources that are available to us in working out what we want our personal religion to be.

In trying to estimate what the future shape of religion may be, I have to acknowledge that there are several wild cards which make such speculation risky. The first obvious wild card is the political instability of populations throughout the world and the volatility of those populations. Other wild cards: will the Wahhabi Muslim fundamentalism of Saudi Arabia and elsewhere spread, or will it be succeeded by some other form of Islam that may be more tolerant? Will our own country go through the cycles similar to those in our own history, with a pendulum swinging between conservative or Fundamentalist Christianity toward a more liberal Christianity or a more secular period? What will the effect of the mushrooming world population be on religion, or a shift in the economic center from Europe and North America to China and possibly later to India? We don’t know the answers to those questions, of course. I don’t know the answers to those questions, of course. What I want to do, then, is not to predict what will happen, but to identify strands now present that will affect what will happen, and then to tell you briefly my own hopes.

Now to turn to the first aspect of religion, the experience of the ground of being, the subjective experience of being connected within ourselves to something ultimate. Here we cannot ignore the experience recorded in human history from its beginnings, and indeed before history began to be recorded. From early cave paintings to pre-Columbian American artifacts to accounts in our own time there is immense evidence that members of the human race in all races and places have known the religious experience personally. There are, it must be acknowledged, many today who claim that any experience of what they call "religious" is actually self-delusion or evidence of psychological imbalance–even perhaps psychosis. And indeed there is some basis for wariness about claims of religious experience. There have been many who have been deluded or even psychotic in attributing their experience to that of God or some divine source. Nevertheless, there have been and are thousands–probably millions–over the years who have been and are of sound mind who have testified to their personal experience of the religious. Also, there are many who describe themselves as humanists who acknowledge a personal experience of the ground of being, although they would reject that as being the experience of God.

The experience of the religious is too widespread in our history and too demonstrated that it cannot be denied. We can see it in the shamanism in native North Americans and in the Tibetan Bön religion which preceded Buddhism there. We can see it in the mystics who spoke of it eloquently, including Augustine, St. Francis of Assisi, St. John of the Cross, the Jewish Kabbalists, Taoists in China, Meister Eckhart, Jacob Boehme, Martin Luther, the Quaker George Fox, our own Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson and the other American Transcendentalists. And besides those mystic leaders there are the poets and writers who have not announced themselves as "mystics," but whose writings speak clearly of their personal experience of the religious, such as Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau denounced institutional religion in his book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (read his chapter there entitled "Sunday"), but he recorded his own experience in his book Walden. And beyond the great mystics of history and the poets and writers, there are the so-called "ordinary" people who have spoken more privately of their religious experience.

Many of the rituals of ancient and modern Greece, of India, of Christianity in the communion service, are based upon what was and may still be a religious experience of its participants. It may be true that for many today who attend those rituals there is no longer a fundamental experience, but it must be said that for many participants today there is indeed the recurrence of that experience from time to time. Indeed, that is at the heart of the continuation of the rituals that do survive.

What that means for the future shape of religion is that whatever that shape may be, it will contain a way of maintaining, encouraging, and transmitting a tradition, a way, of being open to the religious experience. Now one of the critical issues presented by that realistic projection is that it is morally, ethically neutral. That is, there is nothing in the religious experience as such which makes it good, or compassionate, or humanitarian. It is a subjective experience. It may be accompanied by elements which encourage goodness, compassion, and humanitarian work; it may be accompanied by elements which are morally or ethically neutral; or it may be accompanied by elements which are cruel and inhumane. For example, the communion service of Christianity is based upon the agape or love feast which celebrates the love of one’s neighbor as oneself; that communion service is not ethically neutral. But also for example, the sacrifice of a human victim on an Aztec altar by having his or her heart cut out of the living flesh may have been the occasion for a religious experience among the priests and laity who witnessed it (whatever the victim may have been feeling), but it violated one of the fundamental moral precepts of most religions and societies. Likewise, in our own time, Adolf Hitler’s Naziism urged a neopagan nature religion of "strength through joy" (or was it "joy through strength"–I forget which). That was an appeal to a personal experience of a kind of mystic intuition, but that religion was being promulgated by those who mandated the killings in the death camps.

So I think it is realistic to predict that there will continue to be religious practices whatever their shape which appeal for the participants to be open to the personal experience of the religious. The challenge for all of us wherever we may live is to be sure that whatever shape that encouragement of the religious experience may take, that the religious practices do not encourage or condone cruelty, apathy; and inhumanity.

That point–that a proportion of the human race will continue to accept the importance of the religious experience in their lives in some way--has important implications. It means, for example, that any proponents or opponents of political issues must have a basis which neither ignores nor is perceived to undermine the religious experience of the supporting population. Let me repeat that. If we are to assure future populations that religion will not be used by political leaders to justify immoral or inhumane practices or to encourage passivity or apathy, we must be prepared to include in our personal political involvement an appeal based upon some common religious experience. I do not mean that we should have a Christian or a Judeo-Christian agenda in our political involvement; that, in my mind, would lead to intolerance and its abuses, as history amply demonstrates. I do mean that we must appeal somehow to fundamental personal experiences of those we seek to motivate and to persuade. If we do not have a base which includes such a religious appeal, we abandon the field to those who do have such a base.

Let me give here a practical example of what I am talking about. We are all aware of the unfortunate drama that is taking place over the removal of the feeding tube from Terri Schiavo, who has been essentially brain-dead for fifteen years. The other night I watched the TV news reports on this drama. The opponents of the removal of the feeding tubes included some leading politicians who were obviously grandstanding, and who had expressed no interest in this issue in the last seven years when it was being litigated in the Florida courts. I think most Americans, whether we happen to be Unitarian Universalists, liberal Protestants, Catholics, or Fundamentalist Christians, can see through the grandstanding. More important, though, was that many of the opponents to the removal of the feeding tube expressed their opinions and feelings in accordance with their religious beliefs; this included both clergy and laity. BUT on the other side of the issue the news media quoted supporters of the removal of the feeding tube who based that support on legal grounds, on the grounds that the issue had been litigated thoroughly and should therefore be left alone. From those who are supporting the removal of the tube I did not see any statements–that is, from clergy or active religious laity–that removal of the tube is in accord with their religious belief or is a compassionate application of their religion. Such clergy and laity certainly abound, but need to be much more vocal and visible if they do not wish to leave the initiative to the others, including the grandstanding politicians. One news broadcast showed poll results that indicated an overwhelming support by those polled for the principle that they personally, if they were in Terri Schaivo’s situation, would not want to be kept alive by the feeding tube. That support for removing a feeding tube in such a situation was across the board, including among Fundamentalist Christians. There is a basis for common cause among religious liberals and religious conservatives on many issues, and we need to speak out and to reach out. The future shape of religion depends upon what we do.

Now I want to turn to the other aspect of religion, that is, religious institutions. Religious institutions are, of course, related to the experience of religion in the human race. What they do, of course, is to institutionalize that experience, to create teachings and teaching authorities, creeds, catechisms, clergy, hierarchies, ownership of valuable properties, alliances with monarchies and political leaders, claims to exclusive possession of truth, establishment of educational institutions which further their cause, structures for approving or disapproving of statements of belief, control over who can become or continue as a member of their religious tradition, and so on. That there have abuses and that there continue to be abuses in religious institutions is evident, not only in the Inquisition’s trials of faith and burning of heretics alive in the autos-da-fé but in the recent sexual abuses of clergy unfortunately found in Catholicism, in Protestantism, and in our own Unitarian Universalism. The history of those abuses has turned many away from all institutions of religion and created cynicism and anti-clericalism. Yet as I said earlier. I am not automatically anti religious institutions. Without religious institutions we do not have social structures for the teaching of morality, for the encouragement of openness to the religious experience, for the teaching that we must examine our own personal lives to become better men and women–more caring, more compassionate, more moral, Without religious institutions each generation and each person would have to reinvent those guides to a better life and those means to evaluate themselves and their society. Many of the important social agencies for human relief have religious roots such as hospitals and care for orphans and homeless. In our country it has been religious institutions which have led in the struggle to eliminate slavery and recently in the civil rights movement. And as I said earlier, no major religion has ever survived beyond a few generations of its founder without being institutionalized, regardless of the charisma and greatness of its founder. I became a Unitarian Universalist because there was a Unitarian church and congregation and a Unitarian minister at that congregation in San Francisco to welcome me. This congregation is here because it was formed in 1810 from earlier institutional roots that go back to primitive Christianity and before that to the institutions of Judaism. I became a Zen Buddhist because there was a Zen Buddhist monastery and a sangha and a teacher there to receive me and to teach me, with roots that go directly back to the sangha of Shakyamuni Buddha in the sixth century before the Christian Era and before that to prehistoric Indian religion.

There still remains, though, a great need to avoid the abuses of religious institutions, a need for us to stand in judgment of our religious institutions and our religious leaders when they commit abuses. That does not, however, imply that we must destroy or attack religious institutions simply because they exist. The human race needs those institutions, but we need caring, self-judging, non-exploiting, compassionate institutions that are compatible with humane political structures and scientific progress. If all present religious institutions were to be destroyed, then because of the ever-arising experience of the religious in human beings there would shortly be born anew ones with dubious leadership and dubious teachings, without the internal and external safeguards that exist. There is an analogy to this in the political realm. The history of the human race shows terrible abuses by many political institutions, but that does not mean that we must have no political institutions. The answer to political abuse is not anarchy, but reform. After our own American Revolution we instituted a system that was based upon British common law. The answer to abuses of religious institutions is reform from within from the members of those institutions, oversight from the public at large and the legal system, and for individuals the choice of another religious institution or no institution.

The question that faces us about the future shape of religious institutions, then, is not whether there will be such institutions; there will be such institutions, whether they are the ones we have today or their descendants, or new institutions beyond our ability to predict. So–let us look in a general way at our institutions. Because of the uncertainties in the Moslem world and elsewhere and because of the severe limitations to my own power of prophecy, I will limit what I say here to the religious institutions I see in our own country, and I will speak in rather general terms without specifying much about Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, or other religions.

The answer as to whether the present forms of religion in our country will continue to grow, to be maintained at present levels, or to decline depends upon several factors. As sociologists of religion have noted, the heart of any religious tradition is its narratives, not its theology. The heart of Judaism is not the Levitical and Deuteronomic codes, but in the story of the Patriarchs, the Exodus, the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the Babylonian Captivity, the return from that captivity, the restoration of the Temple, and so on. The heart of Christianity is not in Christian theology, but in the narratives in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, in the stories of the birth and life of Jesus and the Crucifixion and Resurrection. The heart of Buddhism is in the stories of the life of Shakyamuni Buddha and his encounters with his congregations, the Sangha, not in the thousands of words in the Buddhist sutras beside those narratives. The theologies, the teachings, the creeds fill out the religious tradition, but the heart of the traditions are in their narratives.

That is not to ignore the importance of liturgy in the life blood of institutional religion. The word "liturgy" means "work of the people," leitourgia in Greek. The power of liturgy is that the adherents of the religion through the facilitation of their institutional leaders recreate parts of the narrative of their tradition. The Jewish Passover Seder recreates the Exodus; the Christian sacrament of Communion or the Lord’s Supper recreates the Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples and is a reminder of the forthcoming sacrifice of the body and blood of Jesus on the Cross. Those liturgies are centered around the narratives that are the foundation of their religions.

Now it may indeed be true, as commentators have pointed out, that the generations of clergy who succeeded their charismatic founder may have typically become bureaucrats and administrators of institutional wealth and power rather than mystics or spiritual persons, but that clerical leadership was effective because among the popular adherents of their religion they were able to teach the basic narratives and the liturgies that celebrate those narratives.

And so, one of the major factors which will determine whether an institutional religion of our day will survive is whether the narratives at the base of that religion will continue to be relevant to its adherents or potential adherents. If the narratives cease to inspire, the religion will cease to inspire. It will evolve into a ceremonial shell–as has happened to Christianity in much of Europe, where one goes to services mostly to be Christened or baptized, married, or buried, or to attend a relative or friend being Christened, married, or buried.

What we are facing in this country in Protestantism is a crisis. In the more liberal Protestant churches, many of the members no longer believe in the literal truth of the narratives. If they are taking communion, they no longer believe that they are taking the body and blood in their wafers and grape juice, but are participating in a memorial service. In the Catholic church, despite the fact that total numbers of adherents do not seem to be actually decreasing, attendance is falling off, and the regular presence at communion is lessening. The sacrament of confession is less and less used, beyond what has become an obligatory minimum. A majority of Jews no longer practice Judaism. At the same time, those elements in Protestantism and Catholicism and Judaism who believe they are directly participating through liturgy in their narratives are strong. The effect is that Christianity and Judaism are becoming weaker in numbers of committed adherents while at the same time becoming stronger in the smaller number of committed adherents. We are seeing American institutional religion becoming bipolar, with the uncommitted number growing and the committed number strengthening. Unless there is a sea change, it is reasonable to expect that the uncommitted will eventually drop away, except nominally; their religion will no longer be tied to what has been their religious institution, but will depend on their personal religious experience and how they deal with it.

What is keeping American religious institutions together? For those in Protestantism and Catholicism who maintain literal belief in their narratives, there is the continuing inspiration of their religious experience. For those who no longer find those narratives reaching the core of their being, no longer serving to inspire their religious experience, the glue that is still keeping them aboard is their membership in the religious community of their institution. That communal glue, of course, also holds the literalists, but for the non-literalists it is essential for their continuation in the institution. For my Zen Buddhism, the narratives remain central, but there is also the communal glue of our community, that is, our sangha and our zen meditation together.

Right now the Catholic archdiocese in Boston is going through a difficult time. It is trying to maintain its financial health, while the number of its priests declines. It is significant to observe that the hierarchy’s decisions to close and to combine parishes have met with intense opposition and dismay. Now it is quite practical for most of the parishioners who are or who would be affected by the closings and mergers to be able to attend church services and communions and to receive the ministry of priests elsewhere than in their closing congregations. But what the closings and mergers do is to fracture, to destroy, the community in which most of them has been raised, the community in which they have seen their children receive their First Communion, the community in which most of their family and friends have been married and buried. The narratives and the liturgy have not changed, but one of the important elements in their religious life has changed. What that exposes is that the personal religious experience of many has taken place and been fortified in a particular location, in a particular congregation of fellow believers. When that location is abruptly changed, the conditions which have facilitated their religious experience have disappeared, even though the liturgy may be same in the church in the next town.

In other words, what has been helping to keep many congregations going today–Protestant and Catholic–is not the theology or the liturgy, but the community. That is not to disparage the importance of liturgy for many, but it is to say that for many today, it is the community of a particular congregation which keeps many of its members loyal to it.

When I was a practicing parish minister, I would often see couples who were not in my congregation who wanted me to marry them. Many of them had no interest in any institutional religion, including mine. They wanted me to "wave the wand," as we ministers say, to give them a spiritual frosting to a secular event, often to satisfy their parents. Many couples now go to justices of the peace. I also remember one occasion when an older woman I knew and I were discussing religion. She told me that she was still a member of what we call a main-street Protestant church, but that she didn’t, as she put it, "believe in all that stuff–I’m really a Unitarian." When I asked her, then, why she continued to attend her church, she said, "Well, the services are so beautiful!" But aesthetic experience will not be enough over time to hold church members, in her church or in mine. The church as an aesthetic institution must compete with symphony orchestras, art museums, and compact discs with first-rate performers.

What does this mean for the future shape of American religion? I think it means, whether we like it or not—and I am not sure at all that I like it–that our main-street religious institutions will continue to decline in number while they increase in a smaller number of deeply committed adherents, although they will continue to be cultural institutions for the celebration of births, marriages, and deaths. I think it means that those religions which are based upon a personal experience of the religious–the Fundamentalists, the charismatics, certain varieties of orthodox Judaism, Catholics for whom communion is central–will continue to grow. I think my own relatively small denomination will continue to grow as long as it encourages personal religious experience, the sharing of that experience among its members, the facilitating of that sharing by our clergy and lay leadership, our compatibility with the new narratives of our time, new narratives of our time like the Big Bang, the description of our being described in DNA and RNA which tell us that all human beings are related, the expanding universe, and the stories of our struggles against the scourges of humanity like AIDS.

In other word, the experience of the religious will continue to be with us as we know it has been with us for thousands of years, but it will be celebrated on the one hand in accord with older, narrower ways and on the other hand in newer institutional ways yet to be clarified. The implications are that political issues that involve moral questions will become increasingly polarized, with results that are hard to predict. How those issues are resolved will depend upon the good will of all participants and how much the participants demonize those who disagree with their position, whether that position is based upon tenets of an institutional religion or upon secular standards.

Now at the end tonight I will express my hopes. Our country has been through many bitterly divided religious struggles. The Civil War is the most evident, when both North and South claimed Biblical support for their cause. But there have been many others over the centuries of our history. We had the theocracies of the Puritans in the 17^th century. We had what has been called the Great Awakening just before our Revolution, which was a great revival of outward emotional expression of the experience of religion. We have the Christian Fundamentalism of today, which began immediately after the First World War–much more recent a development than many realize. Related to that we have the ebb and flow of the arguments over evolution based upon some forms of religion versus science. The struggles continue, and they will continue, especially as our country becomes more polarized. On the one hand there will be those who are attached to the more doctrinaire institutions of religion and the politicians who attempt to co-opt their positions, and on the other hand there will be more and more who do not identify emotionally with a particular religious institution or who are completely secularized.

Finally, let me express my hopes. My hope is in the basic good will and common sense of our American people. My hope is that although the pendulum may swing back and forth on these issues, that most of us will maintain our basic respect for those who do not agree with us. My hope is that the pendulum will swing back once again from those who say, "My way or the highway to Hell." My hope is that more and more Americans will be open to the experience of the ground of being. My hope is that we will not associate that openness with a requirement that all Americans should be of a particular institution, even when their own institutions may preach otherwise. I do not believe I am naïve when I say this. I say this with an awareness of our religious history, and that is the history of the common sense of our people, although it sometimes has taken a while for us to come to our senses.

What keeps us together as Americans is our deeply felt sense of community, community which embraces all Americans, community which is wider than any one religion or color or gender or sexual orientation or ethnicity. That is the spirit of our nation.

And in whatever lies ahead, we must be clearheaded and open-minded to confront any intolerant abuses when they occur. As Jesus is reported to have said in the seventh chapter of Matthew, "By their fruits ye shall know them." I like what the philosopher William James added. James said, "By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots."

What will happen is up to us, and to those who follow us, and we shall prevail.