Kenneth L Woodward writes of the socio-religious landscape in the USA:

On the wall of my Newsweek office, I kept a large map, in a mosaic of colors, of the United States. When you are a writer working in New York City, you need something to remind you of what the rest of the country is like: This was mine. There are no place names on the map, only the boundaries of the states, and within them the spidery outlines of each county. It’s a relief map of sorts: Any county in which 25 percent or more of the citizens identify with a single religious denomination is shaded in a color representing that tradition. Counties where more than half the people are of one persuasion—more than half the map—are colored more deeply.

At a glance, the map yields a rough religious geography of America. Across the South, where it sometimes seems there are more Baptists than there are people, the counties are awash in deep red. Utah and Idaho are solidly grey: the Mormon Zion. There are swaths of Lutheran green in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Belt high from Delaware to central Kansas, especially in rural areas, the map shows streaks and potholes of blue where the Methodists and their nineteenth-century circuit riders planted churches. Catholic purple blankets the Northeast, the Great Lakes region, the Gulf Coast, and nearly all of California.

When colleagues stopped by my office they’d often stare over my head at the map. “Where are my people?” was the usual question. Some Episcopalians, thinking of all their co-religionists elected to Congress and the White House, assumed the nation’s capitol to be theirs. But the District of Columbia is heavily African-American and so it is dyed a deep Baptist red. According to the map, Episcopalians do dominate a half-dozen counties—all of them tribal reservations in North Dakota where the church made converts of the Native American inhabitants. Most Jewish colleagues thought New York City and its environs (home to half the nation’s Jews) was surely theirs to claim, but the whole metropolitan area is deep Catholic purple. Jews do own a plurality in one Florida county, Dade, which encompasses Miami.

For me, the map was a visual reminder that religion in America has never been just a matter of personal choice. It has also been about community and connection—to places, to people, and to what religiously convicted Americans have made of the places where they chose to live. Which is to say that religion, as a way of belonging as well as of believing and behaving, is always embedded—in institutions, yes, but also in the landscape. Habitations foster habits.

To see his map, and maps of individual denominations based on census information go here.

It’s long been known that the UK had its Methodist and Baptist strongholds, stronger and weaker catholic areas, and so on. I daresay a UK map similar to this one would be interesting and informative. Is there one anywhere? If so haven’t found it yet.

Concerning the why and how and what and who of ministry,
One image keeps surfacing: A table that is round.

It will take some sawing
To be roundtabled.
Some redefining
And redesigning,
Some redoing and rebirthing
Of narrow long Churching
Can painful be
For people and tables.
It would mean no daising
And throning,
For but one king is there
And he is a foot washer,
At table no less.

And what of narrow long ministers
When they confront
A round table people,
After years of working up the table
To finally sit at its head,
Only to discover
That the table has been turned round?

They must be loved into roundness,
For God has called a People
Not “them and us”.
“them and us” are unable
to gather round; for at a round table
there are no sides
and ALL are invited
to wholeness and to food.

At one time
Our narrowing churches
Were built to resemble the Cross
But it does no good
For building to do so,
If lives do not.

Round tabling means
No preferred seating,
No first and last,
No better, and no corners
For the “least of these”.
Roundtableing means
Being with,
A part of,
Together and one.
It means room for the Spirit
And gifts
And disturbing profound peace for all.

We can no longer prepare for the past.
We will and must and are called
To be Church,
And if He calls for other than a round table
We are bound to follow.

Leaving the sawdust
And chips, designs and redesigns
Behind, in search of and in presence of
The Kingdom
That is His and not ours.

It makes sense, doesn’t it? At least, it makes sense until you read history, or anthropology. Because history shows that whenever religion is distinctly un-sexy it still grows, and the degree of commitment to it is far more intense, but it doesn’t appear on census forms. Go back to pre-Constantinian times and you’ll find that Christianity (which was of course the religious new-kid-on-the-block at the time) was growing at a healthy rate, but saying so in public was to put your life – and that of your family and friends – in danger. There was a great deal of secrecy about meetings, to the extent of having code-words and sign-language. If there was a 2011-style census in the 3rd century Christianity wouldn’t have figured on it; it wasn’t recognised as a religion. But that didn’t stop it growing. Fast forward through the centuries and you find similar patterns wherever a new or forbidden religion spreads: religion that is threatened with extinction often finds urgent strength, and its growth beggars belief.

Christianity as we know it in the UK has declined massively since the two world wars, and only in the last year or so has it (apparently) stayed the same/risen slightly. The signs are not optimistic – but does that really mean it’s dying? Other research seems robustly to suggest that many of those who leave church are not leaving their faith, only leaving the institutions.

There were nine women in my house last night celebrating holy communion, a practice that is multiplied all over the place. When they count church attendance, we wouldn’t have figured. Over the last ten years in Cambridge I have led little groups like this all over the city for people who have faith but don’t like church. What would they tick on the census form? Some would tick “christian” but some of them, I guarantee, would say “no religion”, despite the fact they have faith. They wear their “spiritual but not religious” like a badge of pride.

It’s practically impossible to tell just how prevalent this pattern is. Is it unique to Cambridge? I think not. But whether it’s statistically significant I honestly don’t know. I’d love to see a mathematical model to track the spread of new, forbidden or unrecognised religions – the trouble is, how would you get any data? I expect someone on Dr Abby Day, or on Dr Fraser Watts’ teams, would know for sure, but I have a hunch it’s only possible to measure state religions, public religions and dying religions. Forbidden ones remain largely in secret, and as for the emerging and experimental ones, no-one asks the right questions to find out until after the event. Maths is great for looking at the present and the future. But to interpret such studies well you also need to look at patterns of human behaviour – history, anthropology and so on. But don’t even get me started on funding the humanities funded alongside the sciences…

In case you missed the story, in a nutshell it ran like this: in 2009 an Italian mother, Soile Lautsi, took a case to the European Court of Human Rights. She wanted to give her children a secular education, and believed that the presence of religious symbols in schools interfered with that wish. In 2009 the Court ruled in her favour, saying that displaying religious symbols violated he child’s right to freedom of religion and the right of parents to educate their children as they saw fit. This week, however, the Court overturned that ruling, saying that crucifixes displayed in schools doesn’t not breach the rights of non-Catholic families after all, and that there is no evidence that they influence the pupils.

Is it a non-story, a storm in a teacup? Well in a way, I suppose it is. But the underlying issue is pretty important. To ban all religious symbols in schools is, in effect, to approve a secular “symbol” (i.e. a ban on religious symbols). Surely the best decision is to moderate symbolism in such a way that schools demonstrate tolerance? Our society isn’t really “secular”, it’s pluralist. That means that we need to learn genuine tolerance of those with different belief systems from our own. We do need to establish agreed norms – it’s not as if anything goes – but there should be room for people to hold religious beliefs that are not anti-social or anti-intellectual. Surely we should learn to tolerate religious symbols if they are not displayed with pressure to believe, but as a note that our world includes some people who do believe in God.

If we ban all religious symbols from schools, the next step would be a ban on chaplains too – not only in schools but in prisons and hospitals too. If we want to ban religious symbolism altogether we’ll need to cut out half of all English Literature and most philosophy from the curriculum, and re-write our history and classics.

But there’s a more frightening prospect than that: for banning religion and driving it underground is one of the fastest ways to promote fundamentalism. We need the next generation of people to be informed about religion, and to have the capacity to engage critically and rationally with belief systems. The call to cut out religion on the basis that it’s the source of all evil is a popular way for those who hate religion to dismiss it. But to avoid the evils that twisted religion can produce what is required is tolerance and intelligent engagement, not pushing it out of sight.

Crucifixes on Italian schoolroom walls might sound like a storm in a teacup, but there is a much more serious undercurrent to this debate, and it should be approached with careful consideration by people of all beliefs – religious and secular.

Ayala, a former monk, believes there is no contradiction between science and religion. He says, “…I hope the recognition [the prize] bestows will help propagate the notion that science and religion are not in opposition and that, in fact, they may often be complementary. …I have been arguing for years, and I continue to argue in all possible ways that are accessible to me, that there need not be contradiction between science and religion. Properly they cannot be in contradiction because they deal in different subjects. They are like two windows through which we look at the world; the world is one and the same, but what we see is different.”

Ayala was born in Madrid in 1934, and in 1960 was ordained as a Dominican priest but left the order the same year and moved to the US. His discoveries have led to research into various diseases including Chagas disease and malaria. He has publicly criticised US restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. He is also critical of creationism and intelligent design theories, and argues that belief in evolution does not rule out belief in God.

Sad to say, my experience over the last sixteen years includes arriving at theological college to find a piece of paper under my door with extremely unpleasant and unprintable comments about how women were not welcome “here”; being treated as invisible by some male priests at nearly every large Church festival I’ve attended since being ordained; and offering consecrated wafers to people at Communion rail only to have them stand up and walk away instead of receiving communion from me. I survived one co-ordinated campaign to remove me from office, and another incident when a male priest spread malicious lies about me in an attempt to discredit me. Nasty, and undeserved, but true.

So it rang plenty of bells in my head when I read this quote this morning, written by another priest:

“We are actually hated within our own family, who have no real desire to help us, but will seek to hurt us if we stay and hurt us if we go. Pray God that this fear is entirely unfounded.”

These words, though, were not written by a woman priest, but by Fr Ed, an Anglo Catholic priest writing in response to the news that another male priest who is contemplating taking up a Catholic Ordinariate hs had the very unpleasant experience of a threatening phone call and some graffiti posted on his church notice board.

I think Fr Ed’s comments put the spotlight neatly on the most important issue: that regardless of which wing of the Church you live in, or which strand of Christian belief you subscribe to, this is reprehensible behaviour, every bit as bad as the bullying that women priests have had to encounter. The point isn’t really whether this or that opinion is right or wrong. There are some Anglo Catholics who cannot accept women bishops under any circumstances; there are many more Anglicans (including catholic Anglicans) who feel that refusing women bishops undermines their integrity. It’s easy enough for everyone to think that their understanding of orthodoxy is more orthodox than someone else’s. But it’s a foundation of Christian theology that Christians should love their friends and their enemies.  Treating people as if they are invisible, spreading lies, threatening phone calls – these are not the actions of love, and whatever the provocation, they are unacceptable.

Here’s a clip from the latest one, by Rev’d Canon Jackson:

“Can we stand back a moment and remember: What is the fundamental question? The Church is trying to resolve one of the most fundamental questions of all – What is the nature of a human being? and, more specifically:

(a)Which human-beings can be regarded as normative, or representative, of humanity as a whole and thereby are capable of receiving the grace of ordination, for sacramental ministry?
(b)Which human beings, in God’s determined order of creation, may be assigned authority to lead human society and human institutions and thereby are capable of fulfilling a role of headship?
(c) In relation to both of these, can women do so, or not? i.e. has God assigned these roles in the created order differentially among human beings according to their gender, or not?These are fundamental ‘first order’ issues, because neither women nor men can control what gender is assigned to them at birth, nor can they in any sense be held responsible for it.  As Maude Royden summed it up, “I was born a woman and I can’t get over it”.

Read the rest here

She lists the current regular contributors to Thought for the day, which break down something like this:

Anglican – 9,   Christian (non specific denomination) 6,  Jewish 3,  Roman Catholic 3,  Christian Evangelical 3,  Methodist 2,  Muslim 2,  hindu    1,  Church of Scotland 1,  Baptist 1,  Sikh 1,  Buddhist 1

Or, you could read the figures as Christian – 25, other religions 8

Obviously this doesn’t include one-off presentations such as the one by the Atheist Bus promoter.

Among the under-represented groups, one of the smartest Baptists in the country is Dr Simon Perry. He should get an invitation.

My own thought is this: whenever I hear thought for the day (which isn’t every day by any means)  I am less interested in what religion the person represents, and more interested in whether their thought is interesting. My favourites are Lionel Blue, Jonathan Sacks, David Wilkinson and John Bell (two of whom have a different religion to mine, and the other two a different Christian denomination).  They consistently come up with something that I remember several hours later – or even the next day.

What do you think,  readers? Is it reasonable to have more Anglicans on the basis that more people who claim to be religious are Anglicans? Should speakers simply be chosen on the basis of how interesting they are to listen to, or on a representation of the prominence of their religion? SHould Thought for the Day remain religious/theistic, or should it branch out to include non-religious thought systems such as Atheism or secular humanism?