News of the Fail

Um. An entire article on Christians and Jews adapting yoga to their spiritual practice, an article that actually admits, for once, that yoga has a spiritual component, and not one quote from someone using it as a Hindu spiritual practice? Fail, LA Times.

Not like I have an answer or anything.

This weekend the news was all full of the story of an eleven-year-old Wisconsin girl who died of diabetes, untreated by traditional medicine because her parents were Christian Scientists and believed in healing through prayer. They were discussing it on NPR the other morning -- with a pediatrician as a guest, possibly not the best choice there guys -- making this the second NPR show in a month I've had to turn off to make the stupid go away.

Stories like this make me hugely uncomfortable, and it's hard to explain why without people assuming that I think parents have the right to abuse their children in the name of religious freedom, which I don't. By the gods, who would?; children don't get to pick their parents' religion, and there are some things that just cannot be condoned under any circumstances.

But not taking a child to a medical doctor isn't abuse. It is neglect, although it's also worth noting that it's entirely legal in the state of Wisconsin to rely on prayer instead of medical attention. Mostly what this is is a violation of social norms: our society places an extremely high value on medical science and a relatively low one on the efficacy of prayer, and when presented with people who not only feel otherwise but act as if their beliefs are really true, there's a bit of an outcry.

I'm not saying the values of our society holds about healing are arbitrary; they're supported by a good deal of experience and trial-and-error. They're also values I agree with and support myself. It's not so much that I'm on the side of the Christian Scientists as that I'm put off by the people who are against them. The NPR callers were going on about how irrational this decision was, how it showed a lack of common sense. Look, people. Their daughter died. I doubt that they didn't consider the possibility. Maybe they have a different definition of common sense.

I don't want to dismiss the fact that this isn't just a theological dispute but one that has -- had -- very real consequences, but that's part of what gets under my skin. Why is it that so few theological disputes do have consequences? And I definitely don't want to make it a noble-sounding thing to let your child die of diabetes; there's an air of martyrdom that can creep into the discussion there. I just don't find the parents' decision particularly irrational.

All it is, is here's a minority religious group with some fringe beliefs (and some very mainstream ones; they are Christian Scientists after all) that a lot of people, myself included, believe ought to be legally prevented from following all the tenets of their religion. And that makes me uncomfortable.

Pretty Important .3%

I saw similar stories in both of the daily papers today (alas, not a statement I'll be able to make for much longer), reporting the Pew Forum's new U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. And I gotta say, at least they managed to escape sounding panicked about the results.

Researchers also found such a sharp decline in American Protestantism that "the United States is on the verge of becoming a minority Protestant country."

Barely.

As Jason at Wild Hunt points out, the survey is good news -- or at least interesting news? -- for Pagans in that it's the first formal survey to estimate our population at over a million in the United States. Maybe next time around, if we're lucky, we'll have demographic results of our own, instead of just as a chunk of the "other" category. (Although I have to say, the demographic breakdown of the "other" category is pretty interesting.)

My social sciences training was in anthropology, where we sneer at surveys as tools of the weak -- after all, people lie on surveys. Admittedly, religion is a hugely personal thing and I'm not going to accuse anyone in particular of lying on the survey because as far as religion goes, what you say you are is pretty much what you are. But anthropologists like to study how what people do conflicts with what they say they do, so from an anthropological standpoint -- How many of those people who marked themselves affiliated with a particular church really spend a lot of time with that institution, and how many of them are what my grandma used to call Christmas & Easter Christians? Does that break down differently over denomination? And does that have any impact on the way people live their lives? Anthropologically I'd be willing to bet America is already a minority Protestant nation. (I wish there was a good way to study that, but ethnography requires spending time with a particular group of people, and it'd be hard to find a group of Christmas & Easter Christians. Unless...no, I could get very insulting there, and I won't.)

I hate to get into a debate over who's a Real True Christian and who isn't (especially as I no longer have a vested interest in the argument) but surveys always raise these questions in my mind, even though I know there's no good way to answer them and it's not like the answers would prove anything anyway. Maybe it's because I feel guilty. My therapist asked me how important religion was in my life, and I said "pretty important" -- what does that mean, that I meditate every day, that I turn to magic and the gods to help me with myself, that I celebrate the quarter days and give little offerings every once in a while and always say hello to the crows in case Macha is watching her children today? Is that what other people mean when they say their religion is "pretty important," or do they mean something else? That's a question that a survey can't answer, but without that answer, how do those numbers mean anything beyond the broadest possible strokes?

This is why I tend not to take surveys, myself. I think about them too much.