Diana Butler Bass Hopes for a “Spiritual Awakening”

on October 31, 2012

By Kristin Rudolph

“We’re living in a time of spiritual climate change,” Diana Butler Bass told attendees of a recent United Methodist Association of Communicators conference in Arlington, VA. Bass, an Episcopalian, church historian, and author of the book, Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening has “bright optimism” for the future of American Christianity despite the precipitous decline of mainline denominations over the past several decades.

Discussing the growth of “spirituality,” Bass reviewed statistics on the “rise of the nones” reported by the Pew Forum showing the “significant decline in the number who describe themselves as ‘Protestant.’” The “nones” do not identify with any particular religious group and also do not describe themselves as atheist or agnostic. Generally they prefer “spirituality” to “religion.” In just six years, the number of self-described Protestants has decreased by five percent, and for the first time since religious polling began in America, less than half of the population describe themselves as “Protestant.”

Read more here.

  1. Comment by Gabe on October 31, 2012 at 6:49 pm

    This is truly regrettable. Diana Butler Bass claims that a majority of Americans don’t want a system that is validated by an external source and want something that is validated internally. They want something to connect themselves to the inner divine. Well, humans have been doing that since our creation, so this is nothing new (despite her claims that this is something so innovative and exciting). In fact, it took a man dying a cross for each and everyone of us to allow us to begin to conquer this disease called sin. She’s just calling it by a different name.

  2. Comment by Alex P on October 31, 2012 at 9:26 pm

    I get the impression that Bass missed her calling as a writer for something like Vogue or Elle. She has this breathless way of gushing over the newest fashion in “spirituality” like someone gushing over a new shipment of shoes at Macy’s. (“Don’t you just love these, they’re divine!”) It never seems to cross her mind that people have souls, that there is some kind of eternal destiny for human beings that Jesus and the apostles took very seriously.

    If she lives long enough, and the Supreme Court outlaws any public expression of religion (don’t laugh – it’s posssible), she’ll probably publish a book with some title like: The Value of Silent Religion: Why We Were Wrong to Believe.

  3. Comment by Eric Lytle on November 5, 2012 at 11:02 am

    In her book Christianity for the Rest of Us, she praises some very lively “brand-name” churches, her term for mainline/liberal churches. Apparently since that book was published she got the message that the “brand-names” are losing members so fast that they will meet the fate of brands like Yugo and Pontiac. Whatever happens, she manages to “spin” it while thumbing her nose at evangelicals, those “off-brands” that, according to her, are trying to create a “one-party” Christianity in America. That’s called “sour grapes,” btw.

  4. Comment by Paul H on November 6, 2012 at 10:52 am

    You’re being very generous in referring to this author as “historian,” because her People’s History of Christianity should be titled Liberal Christians (Like Me) Who Lived in the Past. To her the medieval theologian Abelard was a saint because he was a world-class doubter and because he called the doctrine of the atonement “cruel.” She says Muslims and Christian in medieval Spain lived in “harmony,” overlooking that it was harmony enforced by the Muslims’ swords. She relates one incident from her own life which has to be false: she claims she saw a pro-lifer at the 1996 Republican Convention wearing a T-shirt that said Intolerance Is a Beautiful Thing – as if that would have gone unnoticed by all the liberal journalists there. I know she has a following, but her “veracity issues” won’t go away.

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