Most of the time, I try to contain my posts to my specific thoughts on a topic, book, or experience. However, today, I’d like to write about something noted elsewhere: Muslim refugees in Europe becoming Christian. Please read the article first.
Okay, what did you think? (Please leave comments)
How cultural is religion? While it is true that many refugees may be converting because it is politically expedient, what if they are adapting to their new setting? This is a difficult issue for those of us in the United States. Why?
Well, part of our cultural take on religion is that it should be personal and individualistic. If you view our country’s stats on religion, you’ll notice that evangelical Christians make up our single largest religious demographic (Now, that’s an artificial majority to some extent because groups that hate each other and anathematize each other are thrown into the same category, but I digress…). The evangelical viewpoint puts the crux of religious experience on conversion — and it must be personal and individualistic for them in order for them to view it as authentic.
Even from just a Christian perspective, this factor skews our national perception of religion. For instance, worldwide there are 250-300 million Orthodox Christians, but they only make up 0.5% of the American population. There are 80-100 million Anglicans/Episcopalians in the world, but we only account for 1.2% of Americans. Even Catholics, only make up 20% of America’s Christians, but 1 out of every 2 Christians in the world is Catholic!
Okay, so what’s your point, Doc?
My point is that religion being social and cultural is the norm, not the exception in the world, even if you just look at Christianity. If you reread the article link closely, the Europeans quoted are not as worried about the personal nature of the conversion as they are worried about coercion. One of the major European contributions to the world (and they founded the USA through this idea) is that people should have freedom (although they may define it very differently from the USA). However, religion has a much stronger communal and cultural element in Europe — which is much more similar to how the refugees from Syria and elsewhere view religion than we Americans do.
So, what if asking whether these conversions are authentic is the wrong question? What if these refugees are simply adapting to their new lands, worshiping not a new God but the one God in the way that the people of those lands worship? Can we step out of our cultural biases enough to evaluate that question impartially?
What do you think?