August 16, 2011
Beyond Religious Illiteracy
In pastoral research, we are firmly in the age of the rage for literacy.
The consensus is striking, the baton relayed from one domain of ecclesial expertise to another: from pastoral workers, to seminary and graduate theological school faculty, to some of the most influential sociologists of religion and practical theologians, and finally to young adults and teenagers themselves, the urge to describe and denounce religious illiteracy has become both diatribe and truism in almost any discussion of the practice of faith today in Christian circles.
A whole vocabulary of spiritual insouciance is marshaled to frame common practice and to symbolize the tendency of the larger secularizing American society: teenagers and young adults are said to be “uncatechized,” “poorly discipled,” they constitute a “domestic mission field,” they suffer from any number of deformations of faith-imagination.