Episcopal Church Foundation Vital Practices - Blogs

December 20, 2011

Who are you waiting for?

The Nones are having none of it. And all of it too.

Last week, in an editorial for the New York Times, Eric Weiner introduced us to the Nones. The Nones are the roughly 12% of the population (nearly a quarter among youth) who are opting out of religious affiliation because “we’ve mixed politics and religion so completely that many simply opt out of both.”

This doesn’t mean, however, that Nones are necessarily atheists. “Nones are the undecided of the religious world. We drift spiritually and dabble in everything from Sufism to Kabbalah to, yes, Catholicism and Judaism.” Be sure to read the rest of his article here.

I read this article while flying home to celebrate Christmas with family, a yearly trip made awkward by the fact that my family is resolutely nonreligious. We’re the Nones, in other words, and though we will be celebrating family, food, gift giving, and togetherness, we will avoid any mention of the birth of Christ. (When I’ve asked why my family has always been so disinterested in religion, their answers have always echoed Weiner’s article - that the Christianities they’d encountered were too political, too hypocritical, and too removed from the practical concerns of raising three kids on a police officer’s salary.)

By the end of the article, Weiner argues that we need a Steve Jobs for religion, a person who can help move us beyond the current religious landscape and help us create “a new way of being religious”, one that is “straightforward and unencumbered and absolutely intuitive.” I have to admit that I smiled when I read this part of the article, in part because it reminded me of why I was drawn to Christianity in the first place.

The high school I attended in Texas was a religious & political landmine of sorts. Never mind the law (or non-Christian students), Christian prayers were regularly offered before football games and Christian speakers brought in for general assemblies. Small cadres of students walked out of biology classes when evolution was discussed, and excellent books like Snow Falling on Cedars were banned in English courses most likely because it depicts an interracial relationship. For my siblings and me, this made us very leery of any sort of religious involvement, and my siblings have continued to hold to this line.

For me, though, I ultimately became fascinated by the historical life of Jesus of Nazareth and the life of the early church. In my junior year of high school, I was surprised to learn that he was a critic the religious leaders of his day, that he called them out as hypocritical, obsessed with power, and excessively bureaucratic. I was moved by his insistence that we reorient faith toward the outcast and helped make a complex religious system “straightforward and unencumbered and absolutely intuitive.” In other words, as a None and raised by Nones, I found my Steve Jobs of religion in the life of Jesus and the early church, and this ultimately led me to take a second look at Christianity and church in general.

Weiner’s article points out the fact that Nones are waiting for a Steve Jobs for religion, but I would add that many churchgoers are also in a time of hope, waiting, and expectation. Though a regular churchgoer, I also find myself wanting to worship in a community that is less politically polarized, more oriented toward the outcast, less encumbered by the minutia of the sacred, and more straightforward and intuitive. And this is, in sum, whom I’m waiting for this Advent.