Bow Down Before "The None Zone"

Froma Harrop / Syndicated columnist

The Unchurched Northwest

The Bush administration's dance with religion doesn't have much of a partner in the Pacific Northwest. This is the least-religious part of the country.

Ask people here, "What's your religion?" and 25 percent say, "I don't have one." Almost 63 percent don't belong to a religious community. Nationally, only 14 percent claim no religion and 41 percent join no church.

The Supreme Court is now considering Oregon's right to apply its assisted-suicide law, and the religious "right-to-life" spokesmen are out in force. But most Oregonians think they can distinguish between right and wrong without guidance from the Bible Belt. Oregon is the least-churched state in the nation, and its murder rate is one-quarter that of Georgia's.

So it is with some concern that many individualistic inhabitants of this region regard a relatively new phenomenon: the rise of conservative evangelical churches in their midst. Who are these churchgoers, with their constraining ideology?

Many are recent arrivals from other parts of the country, according to Patricia O'Connell Killen, professor of religion at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma. Dislocated from family and old friends, the newcomers find community in the new mega-churches. These post-denominational, post-modern evangelical churches make savvy use of modern communications to attract and keep members. They can summon the troops to close down strip clubs or oppose gay rights. In Seattle, Earth Day is kind of a public holiday. But one conservative denomination put on a counter-Earth Day service, contending that the celebration is pagan.

A political tension seems to be developing, but it's a mistake to see the contest as between the believers and the heathens. While most people in the Northwest do without church, they are rarely atheists or agnostics. Even among those who said they have no religion, 67 percent believe that God exists, according to surveys.

The region's casual ties to organized religion are a product of its history, explains Professor Killen, who co-edited the book "Religion & Public Life in the Pacific Northwest: The None Zone." As settlers arrived, no religion grew dominant, "so there was no religious group to be like or to work against being like."

This is also, of course, the American West, where people believe in the individual's power to design one's own world. As a result, there's a great deal of experimentation, including with the Eastern traditions. One of Killen's students refers to herself as a BuLu, a Lutheran who does Buddhist meditation.

The awe-inspiring scenery has also fostered a strong environment-based spirituality. For many, watching the sunlit clouds over the Olympic Mountains provides their connection to the divine.

If the Northwest is a spiritual marketplace, then Seattle's Roosevelt Way is its Wall Street. Stores here sell prayer beads, statues of saints, plant essences and every manner of spiritual aid. The East West Bookshop devotes shelves to, among other things, Qi Gong, Sufism, Vedic teachings, St. Francis, Jewish mysticism and several kinds of Buddhism.

Unlike the historical evangelical denominations, such as Southern Baptists, the new evangelicals are not much into this mixing and matching. "While American Baptist churches would also do Zen meditation," Killen says, "the post-denominational churches do not."

How this plays out politically remains an open question. Killen sees two growing centers of religious gravity: the new evangelical churches and the secular-but-spiritual groups with moderate Catholic, Protestant and Jewish allies.

So far, the liberal culture seems to be holding its own. Conservative churches actively campaigned for Bush in the last election, but Washington state still went solidly for John Kerry.

Meanwhile, the percentage of Pacific Northwesterners outside organized religion has stayed steady. The entrepreneurial evangelicals account for only 5 percent of the population. (Their increased numbers offset declines among mainstream Protestants.)

What should ultimately stymie a religious takeover is the region's mulish independent streak. People around here have always had real problems with authority, and religious authority would be no exception. Nor do they tiptoe around sensitivities of moralists who would give orders. Defenders of Oregon's assisted-suicide law, for example, named their group Don't Let Them Shove Their Religion Down Your Throat.

Politics in the Pacific Northwest may go left or right in the years to come. But don't expect preachers to be leading the way.

Providence Journal columnist Froma Harrop's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is fharrop@projo.com

2005, The Providence Journal Co.

Urbane Analysis: I was struck by the statement Harrop made about an unnamed evangelical (presumably) Christian denomination: "In Seattle, Earth Day is kind of a public holiday. But one conservative denomination put on a counter-Earth Day service, contending that the celebration is pagan."

I went looking to find this denomination, but could only find a few ministries like this one (from a small non-denominational church in California) reporting on efforts to integrate Earth Day into the Easter tradition, for example.

I call on Harrop to provide the name of this denomination - as well as her sources backing up this claim. In the era of "Plame" journalism - thanks to the New York Times - there is no more confidential sourcing - so she should provide that information. If it is but a single congregation, to not issue a correction and apologize for the error would be unethical. Because there is a huge difference between one church building and an entire denomination - as we shall see below.

If she got this observation from Pacific Lutheran University Religion Professor Patricia O'Connell Killen, then that should have been made clear. If she researched this off of a news digest (as I tried to in attempting to confirm her assertion), then she should have identified the denomination. And in fairness, she should have set it in context with the extraordinary levels of political activism by those on the religious left that is denominationally-based. Like the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. as well as the Episcopal Church lurching toward a selective disinvestment policy against corporations doing business in Israel, for example (a dichotomy so shocking that even liberal columnist Joel Connelly of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer had to comment here). Or the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA - the predominant Lutheran denomination) with a policy on "peace" that reads like an interview with Jimmy Carter. Who needs diversity of opinion anyway when the Bible tells them they are right and I'm wrong?

Or isn't that the point Harrop was trying to make exclusively about conservative Christians?

It is ironic that Harrop chooses to focus on this narrow sliver of an argument when the typical perspective offered on religion by environmentalists, as typified in this essay, tends toward scrutiny and criticism (to put it mildly). Or this article from the Journal of Lutheran Ethics (by ethics professor - and my former classmate at Pacific Lutheran - James Martin-Schramm) that reminds Lutherans of their commitment to left-leaning social justice policies, and sets up the logic pattern which clearly implicates those that disagree as "environmental racists" - borrowing from the NAACP's vendre un canard à moitié to drive home the point to his willing audience. Ah, how I miss predictable Pacific Lutheran intellectualism - the sad part for students is that folks like me are ascribed "wing nut" status by the Ivory Tower and made completely unwelcome on campus. I have never been asked to present before a class, much less debate a professor. Conservatives on campus, yet one more "None Zone" the left doesn't want to talk about...

It is also notable that Harrop entirely misses the obvious situation many of us have observed around the Northwest for many years: that mainline denominations have become so intolerantly liberal, so incredibly fundamentalist in their liberal outspokenness - that anything but their mantra is "hate speech" and cannot be tolerated. Try holding a contrary opinion amidst the Church Council of Greater Seattle or National Council of Churches mindset and its overwhelmingly liberal political agenda (.pdf) and see how far you get - and what level of inclusiveness you are afforded by them.

There are around fifteen church denominations represented by the Church Council of Greater Seattle, and so it properly purports itself to speak for the mainline perspective in this community. Yet far from being peacemakers and doing outreach to perspectives beyond their own agenda, one need not look hard to observe how they (and partners in their Peace & Justice Task Force) engage in blog-rants and direct action protests - directed at anyone who disagrees with them.

Don't get me wrong, they have the right to do that. But I have to say, it is just this: As a "mainline" Christian in Seattle, the Church Council of Greater Seattle should not presume to speak for me (or protest on my behalf), ever. They represent their own political perspectives, not mine. It is important for people of faith to talk amongst themselves, and hear differing perspectives. But it is just plain wrong for them to be politically active in the name of their faith: that goes for the left as well as for the conservatives Harrop focuses upon.

I am looking for Harrop to fully inform her readers on the innuendo she created by her column today - and suggest that had she spoken with a few more sources regarding "The None Zone" - she might have found a far more interesting and compelling explanation for why our region is a religious "Black Hole" - just ask hard questions of the prevailing religious orthodoxy called the Church Council of Greater Seattle.

This might have led Harrop to perhaps uncover that she made blatantly false assumptions about the post-modern, non-denominational, evangelical Christian churches in the Northwest. But then again, she is merely playing along with the United Church of Christ in tarring with that same broad brush - with their frankly bizarre television ads broadcasting what they perceive about the hearts of Christians who disagree with them. No doubt there is maybe one oddball church in America that conducts itself as the Congregationalist viewpoint insists occurs "out there" in I-hate-America-land, but that is just the point. They claim it is symbolic speech, but in reality it is dogmatic liberal orthodoxy being pushed in exactly the same fundamentalist way in which they accuse Christian conservatives. And yet the Congregationalists wonder about declining attendance...

If Harrop really wanted to dig into faith and spirituality in this part of the country, she would uncover an enormous dichotomy. Particularly with regard to thriving churches in Seattle. Of Bible-based teaching with LOUD rock worship music, containing congregations that are diverse of opinion - who are WAY LESS politically active than the often moribund houses of worship under the banner of the outspoken protesters running the Church Council of Greater Seattle.

I read a column today that took some facts about Seattle and put a "spin" on it that does not exist in any manifest reality - in fact, it exists more in examination of the converse.

Now, Ms. Harrop about your comparison between the Oregon and Georgia murder rates. Can you correlate that to church attendance? Or is there, just maybe, no connection whatsoever? And maybe, just maybe, it relates to an actual well-documented correlation between urban poverty rates? What's that? The comparison was just a bit of Bible Belt humor you wanted to throw into your piece as an artifice, nothing more?

Gosh, Ms. Harrop, sounded more to me like you were preaching to the choir.

Update: Yesterday I sent this e-mail:
Dear Ms. Harrop:

Would you kindly advise me of the name of this denomination and your source on the "anti" Earth Day activity? I would like to follow up with them about this quote from your interesting essay today:

"In Seattle, Earth Day is kind of a public holiday. But one conservative denomination put on a counter-Earth Day service, contending that the celebration is pagan."

I really appreciate your perspective, but do have a differing view.

This morning I received the following response:

Scott,

The church that did the counter Earth Day service was the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod congregation.


Froma Harrop

So the answer is a clear obfuscation - but she basically admits that it was one congregation, not an entire denomination. And this is hardly a post-modern mega-church denomination as implied by her reference in the same paragraph of the column.

To review, lets go over a definition:

fun·da·men·tal·ism (fnd-mntl-zm) n.
A usually religious movement or point of view characterized by a return to fundamental principles, by rigid adherence to those principles, and often by intolerance of other views and opposition to secularism.
An organized, militant Evangelical movement originating in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century in opposition to Protestant Liberalism and secularism, insisting on the inerrancy of Scripture.
Adherence to the theology of this movement.

Note the definition reads "usually" religious. But in the case of left wing political values, politics is religion. Replace secularism with conservatism, Protestant Liberalism with Evangelical Christianity, secularism with private sector, and Scripture with liberal social justice policies - and behold a good working definition of the Church Council of Greater Seattle - and the National Council of Churches.

Liberal = Fundamentalist. Check out today's column by Rabbi Daniel Lapin here. Hat tip to Patrick Bell, much obliged!