From the Tennessean
June 20, 2009

Lipscomb speaker enlightens as traditional faith fades

By RAY WADDLE

Those who equate religion with guilt and repression will welcome recent surveys that chart declines in traditional faith.

But religion's decline, if it happens, means other grand narratives must pick up the slack. What will emerge to infuse life and civilization with meaning if the old spirituality recedes?

Society flirts now with the removal of a whole set of ancient coordinates — belief in the soul, the power of blessing, the wisdom of the past, the mystery of an invisible God who oversees history, and a moral code that respects inwardness, practices courtesy and condemns cruelty.

If those fade, then what? The world scrambles to find replacements — conspiracy theories, anti-semitism, the dream of winning the lottery or becoming a high-maintenance celeb. Science becomes the new faith.

Writer Marilynne Robinson says that won't work.

"The modern fable is that science exposed religion as a delusion and more or less supplanted it," she writes in The Death of Adam.

"But science cannot serve in the place of religion because it cannot generate an ethics or a morality. It can give us no reason to prefer a child to a dog, or to choose honorable poverty over fraudulent wealth. It can give us no grounds for preferring what is excellent to what is sensationalistic. And this is more or less where we are now."

Next week, the "power of narrative" and its relation to religion, poetry, social values is the theme at David Lipscomb University, where Robinson will speak.

Most sessions of the annual Christian Scholars Conference are designed for academic experts, but Robinson will speak June 27 at one of four remarkable sessions free to the public. Other speakers include historian Hubert Locke (June 25), writer-minister Barbara Brown Taylor (June 25) and poet Billy Collins (June 26). See csc.lipscomb.edu for the schedule.

Storytelling is a stubbornly human trait. Nations and individuals all spin tales about themselves. But narrative has lately been a special preoccupation of theology, literature and social sciences. It seems that life's big narratives, the kind that give individuals purpose, are getting overwhelmed by the crazy pace of daily tasks and information. If people see no place for themselves in the cosmic drama, they lose self-confidence, self-respect, self-knowledge.

Robinson suggests a frantic media culture wants to suppress our own thinking and metaphysics. It's ruining civilization.

Snark and attitude — tricks of big-time talk show hosts — take the place of discussion and courage. "They instruct viewers as to what, within their affinity groups, it is safe to say and cool to think," she writes. They short-circuit the functions of individual judgment and conscience.

Bravo to Lipscomb for lifting up the need of narratives, the right narratives.