Despite their varying theologies, evangelicalism, mainline Protestantism, Mormonism and Catholicism all have about a 55-45 female-male split in religious identification; for black churches, it’s 60-40.
.. American men twice as likely as women to call themselves atheists — something that will surprise exactly nobody who has sojourned among Richard Dawkins fans.
.. The fact that the gender gap is less apparent or reversed in the Islamic world and Israel is a suggestive indicator that something specific to Christianity is at work.
.. Peterson is “a believer in the New Religion, the one where God is the force for good inside each of us, and all religions are paths to wisdom, and the Bible stories are just guides on how to live our lives.”
.. When you think about the New Religion’s various cultural and (in the case of yoga) liturgical expressions, they generally skew female. Oprah’s roadshow of spiritual gurus includes men as well as women, but the intended audience for her revivals, as for the “The Secret” or “Eat Pray Love” or the collected works of Paulo Coelho, is very obviously feminine.
.. Meanwhile, men looking for post-Christian enlightenment seem to gravitate toward secular-rationalist cults like the New Atheism, or more recently toward toxic forms of alt-right politics.
.. But can a Peterson man and an Oprah woman be happy together?
Richard Rohr Meditation: Divinization
Spirituality is primarily about human transformation in this life, not just salvation in a future realm. While Western Christianity lost much of this emphasis, and became rather practical and often superficial, the Eastern church taught theosis or divinization as the very real process of growing in union and likeness with God in this world. [1] This is one of the many losses Christianity experienced in the Great Schism of 1054, when the popes of East and West mutually excommunicated one another.
.. Pope John Paul II was acknowledging that the Western church had largely lost its foundational belief in divinization, and in the practical order had even denied its possibility. Instead, we were just “sinners in the hands of an angry God” and even “totally depraved.” No wonder humans suffer from such lack of self-esteem today. We haven’t told them the central and foundational Good News! I believe this is the source of a lot of the anger and disillusionment with Christianity today.
Burning Man Staves Off Nihilism, If Only Temporarily
Burning Man is, in part, a quasi-religion of self-care. “Letting go,” the supposedly spiritual purpose of the Temple, is actually therapy. Healing emotional pain is a strategy for removing barriers to enjoyment. This isn’t a bad thing, of course. But hedonism becomes profane when it’s married to a “spirituality” meant to provide moral or mystical justification of living for oneself.
Commodity Culture
All great spirituality is about letting go. I say this as an absolute statement.
.. You see, if something is working, you don’t need another one or a higher one or a better one—which is what a consumer culture builds on. If something is already making you happy, you don’t need more of it. The fact that you need more and more and better and better of almost everything tells me that the commodity culture isn’t working.
.. The task of healthy religion is to communicate to you your inherent dignity and the dignity inherent in everything else too. If you do not discover that deep inherent meaning, then everything else will finally disappoint you, driving your obsession with more. As the Twelve Steppers wisely say, “You only need more and more of what is not working.”