Future of Religion
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Presently the dominant percentage of Americans are Christian. Christianity has shaped the foundations of Western civilization for two millennia. While Christianity is the dominant spiritual guiding force of America, it now, as it has been for two millennia, is also a social and political tool. While its values are embedded firmly in our society, these collective values are difficult to define in an increasingly fragmented reality. As the world becomes more global in nature, with its boundaries less defined by religion, culture or social ideology and more tolerant of diversity, the usefulness of a homogenized, spiritually oriented, socially constructed value system becomes suspect. This is not to predict the death of Christianity as a social force in America. Rather, it is to say that the social environment which has been conducive to separatist religious institutions and the survival of their values seems to be changing. Likewise, religion has been used on an individual level to assuage the psychological confrontation of man’s mortality. Therefore, when predicting the future of Christianity in America one must look at two crucial questions: In a world that is becoming more individualistic, will a holistic but separatist value system be imbrued?; and, Will individuals ever achieve a conscious acceptance of being alone in the universe without needing some externally composed coping mechanism? This analysis predicts that,
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s Christianity proposes to support—the poor and needy. Since the rich and powerful Christians create society’s laws and norms, they also control a nation’s morality. Any one who promotes true Christian values in modern day America is often someone viewed as disruptive to current American socio-political institutions—the majority of which in modern society favor the rich and powerful not the poor and needy. Litonjua points out this was similar to Christ in his own socio-political environment, “In the hands of Jesus and the prophets, theology was not only a religious instrument, but also a social and political instrument which disturbed the socio-political establishment as they announced the Good News of salvation to the disenfranchised and the outcast,” (38).
In other words, morality, governments and societies do not exist in a vacuum. They are a creation of humans, used by humans, and interpreted by humans. All too often Christianity has been used as a non-liberating force by those in power who wish to subvert the popularity of its core values into a justification of their own self-enrichment. In the Information Age this may still be possible, however it may be possible that the spread of communication and the availabilit
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Approximate Word count = 1826
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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