April 17, 2000
'Stop whining,' Martin Marty
advises religion communicators
___By Mark Wingfield
___Managing Editor
___CHICAGO--Religion today operates in a highly public context, and the faithful who feel threatened by this environment ought to stop whining, Martin Marty told a gathering of religious communicators.
___Marty, an author, social researcher and former history professor at the University of Chicago, was a keynote speaker at Religion Communicators Congress 2000, a convention held every 10 years for professional communicators in the world's religions.
___Marty began his speech by noting he hears "a lot of whining in religion" today--whining about the increasing secularity of the world and the indifference shown to religious belief.
MARTIN MARTY
___While the times may be changing, whining won't change anything, he advised. "No one ever changes because somebody's whining. The world doesn't grind to a halt and say, 'Well, we didn't pay enough attention to you, and you've whined enough now, and we're going to pay attention to you.'"
___One of the primary sources of whining today is heard in despair because the "good old days" are gone, he noted.
___"When people whine about religion's place in the public world today because there were 'good old days' when they had it easier, I would say there were different old days," Marty countered. "Our predecessors of 1970 and 1950 ... who also complained about the old days being gone, discovered how to talk about the time gone by."
___The threat of secularism is overblown, Marty suggested.
___"As to secularity, depending on how we define it, there's a lot of it out there," he admitted. But the root word, "seculum," simply means "of this age" and "got into dictionary at time when people tried to make a distinction between the sacred and the profane."
___"The secular world is a good reminder that there's another side," he said. "But in many respects, we are all secular in many of our doings. ... There is no single thing out there called the secular."
___Opportunities for whining also are increased today because most people are more distracted and specialized in their interests than ever before, Marty said. "People are distracted, however urgent their attempts to come to grips with life and death."
___This isn't just true of religion, but of most vocations, Marty said, confessing even historians discover reason to whine frequently because they don't find each other relevant.
___To illustrate, he cited a faculty symposium among historians where one of his peers presented a paper on "The Middle Years of Michael the Drunkard." Marty wondered why he never had heard of this historical figure, and then he discovered the character only lived 29 years and "his middle years were three."
___Whining also results from sensing the world's indifference to religion, Marty added.
___"Religion takes shape in the face of the world's indifference," he reported. "But we fight the world's indifference by being different."
___Those who successfully overcome this indifference and do things right may be those considered least likely to be so discerning, he added. "The more likely you are positioned and equipped to notice the power of religion in the world, the more likely you are to miss it. ... We have to bridge between those places where by specialization you can become blinded to other kinds of reality."
___Increasing pluralism in the culture also leads to whining, Marty said.
___But this situation is only going to intensify, he predicted. "Pluralism is the context in which we work, and it's not going to go away."
___In such a context, "we don't get to set the whole agenda, but they don't either," he said.
___Rather than whining about what they can't do to express their faith, Christians ought to take advantage of all the ways they can express faith, Marty said, giving an illustration from the ever-raging battles over separation of church and state.
___"We fight all the time about a creche on the 30-square-yards of a courthouse lawn when there are 300,000 lawns within a few miles where (creches) would be celebrated. Or we fight over the Ten Commandments on an Alabama courthouse wall, when there are plenty of options to teach the First Commandment, which is problematic, and the other nine, which are not, in our schools."
___In a pluralistic and secular culture, "you can't expect everyone in the political order to agree with the sources of your faith," he cautioned.
___But in the end, faith will prevail, he predicted. "On the really vital things, secular reasoning gives out."
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