Faiths change over time. They bring different parts of their experience of God into sharper focus and allow previous certainties to fade. Whether you call that new truth, or rediscovered truth, either way it can argued that it’s a form of evolutionary behavior.
Paul Pardi starts from that point in an essay on the Huffington Post. He then claims that religion is evolving “before our eyes” in the present moment. (Others like Phyllis Tickle in her work on Emergence make the same claim.) He goes on to list three of the specific pressures that he believes are driving the present rate of change:
“The first is overwhelming pressure from science and a broad shift toward a rationalist worldview. Atheism has always been a fringe effort in the U.S., but a series of events at the turn of the century helped birth the New Atheist movement. The effort to include intelligent design theories in science curriculum was a major wake-up call for prominent atheists as was a resurgence of religiously motivated terrorist activity in the United States and Europe. The movement has succeeded in establishing the primacy of scientific explanation — a view formerly confined mainly to the academy — at the cost of other explanatory models, particularly religious ones.
[…]The second change is coming by way of the tremendous pressure exerted on religion from the flattening of the earth. As the world shrinks, young people are exposed to — and are easily able to interact with — others who hold very different worldviews. Kids now have access to a wealth of information about religions other than the one in which they were raised. Brand loyalty no longer is a given when it comes to religion and that’s creating a massive shift in what people accept as true about their particular faith and about faith in general.
A Pew study conducted last year earmarked some trends that support this shift. They found that, ‘young adults are less convinced of God’s existence than their elders are today; 64 percent of young adults say they are absolutely certain of God’s existence, compared with 73 percent of those ages 30 and older.’ The personal importance of religion (I understand this as distinct from general spirituality) is declining. ‘Less than half of adults under age 30 say that religion is very important in their lives (45 percent), compared with roughly six-in-10 adults 30 and older (54 percent among those ages 30-49, 59 percent among those ages 50-64 and 69 percent among those ages 65 and older).’ Religion certainly is not dead, but what it means and how it’s expressed is evolving.
Finally, and perhaps most significantly, religion is being forced to change from the inside out due to what could crassly be called a services problem: Congregations are becoming dissatisfied with what formal religion has to offer. Believers find efforts to ‘modernize’ shallow and patronizing. While small numbers are turning to more liturgical and morally or socially demanding faiths (opting for Mormon, traditional Catholic and even Muslim communities), many are choosing to leave institutional religion altogether, exchanging it for a more personalized faith — or no faith at all.”
Read the full essay here.