RABBI ZELIZER: GUEST COLUMNIST

Rabbi Zelizer's Guest Columns as Published in Newspapers Around the Country

Quick dose of 9-11 religion soothes, doesn't change

Gerald L. Zelizer

Published January 8, 2002

Katherine Tully of Providence was raised as a Unitarian, but had not been to church in four years. Yet in the days following the Sept. 11 attacks, she dropped into the Trinity Episcopal Church of Boston and since then has kept right on going.

She is one of the thousands of returnees who led many of us on the pulpits to herald a new religious awakening in the United States after the attacks. Initial findings justified our optimism: Gallup reported significant increases in church and synagogue attendance and similar jumps in those affirming that religion was very important in their lives.

But the newest survey from Barna Research Group, a marketing firm that follows religious trends, indicates that people generally have returned to their old ways, prompting many to bemoan this lost opportunity.

George Barna himself said: "After the attack, millions of nominally churched or generally irreligious Americans were desperately seeking something that would restore stability and a sense of meaning to life. Fortunately, many of them turned to the church." Unfortunately, he said, "churches succeeded at putting on a friendly face but failed at motivating the vast majority of spiritual explorers to connect with Christ in a more intimate or intense manner."

That's not a complete view of what has happened, however. Religion actually performs two very different functions. One certainly is to transform lives in the long term, the failure Barna laments. But religion also seeks to soothe in the short term, and there the news is better.

There for those in need

The religious surge we experienced was from people seeking to have their shock softened, their mourning shared and their fears soothed. And religion did its job:

Attendance at worship services increased 25%, by some estimates, after the attacks.
Sunday school attendance also increased, as did daily prayer.
Gallup found that the percentage of Americans who said religion was very important to them increased from 57% last May to 64% after the attack.

But then things returned to normal, according to the findings of the Barna survey:

Attendance at worship services reverted to pre-attack levels; Sunday school attendance also leveled off.
Those who said they believed in an all-powerful, all-knowing God dropped from 72% pre-attack to 68% afterward.
Confidence in absolute moral truths dropped from 38% to 22%.

Intense, but short-lived

Why? Lives are only transformed spiritually and permanently when religious experiences accumulate in regular life passages, such as birth, adolescence, marriage and old age, and when religion is given the chance to repeat itself in fixed rituals and proscribed prayers.

Transformative religion is rarely born in spontaneous reactions to events such as Sept. 11, because those kind of cataclysmic happenings are too infrequent and isolated to build permanent and long-lasting faith. The spiritual fires that they ignite are intense, but not durable, even among the already religious.

Consider, for example, the spiritual route traveled by David Bach of Baldwin, Long Island. Bach regularly attended Sabbath services even prior to Sept. 11. But when 9-11 exploded into our world, he realized that "the standard prayers would not do it. I required something more spontaneous and less ritualized."

He created a Web site with original poetry and thoughts, as well as links to mainly Jewish theology, prayers, personal experiences and opinions about those events.

"It was comforting at first to have a resource besides the routine and predictable," he explains, "but now, as time has (passed), I increasingly rely less on the Web site and more on the accepted norms of Judaism."

Religion that calms after national traumas like Sept. 11 is comparable to an aspirin, which eliminates immediate pain. But when religion matures in regular and fixed events over a lifetime, it is like a daily vitamin that strengthens over the long haul.