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| Faith (photo by sailko) |
Based upon information provided by Sean McCloud of the Huffington
Post Blog, this may be more true than it is funny. McCloud, Associate Professor of Religion at Charlotte's University of North Carolina, points out that the 19.6% of Americans whom the October 2012 Pew Poll dubbed "Nones" (as having "no religious affiliation") actually includes many (55% of this 19.6%) that "hold to concepts such as god, gods, supernatural powers and ghosts."
McCloud contends that the reason Pew pronounced them all "Nones" is because Pew "constructs 'religion' as something institutional."
This narrow definition of religion tends to automatically exclude all those who believe in a non-institutional version of the divine. McCloud instead offers a "combinative" concept of religion - one that embraces the "many Americans" who "pick and mix ideas and practices from a variety of religious traditions, and then further combine these things with other cultural, folk and popular traditions concerning the supernatural."
There are many examples of combinative "Somes" in American culture. Although Harris Polls have indicated that 42-51% of respondents "think ghosts exist," there are few religious institutions in the United States that officially condone this belief. Another common "disconnect" concerns the pervasive belief in reincarnation. The Harris Poll has suggested within the past decade that 20-27% of Americans "believe that when they died they would be born on earth again as a human being to live another life."
Nevertheless, approximately only 1-3 % of Americans belong to religious traditions that "officially" include reincarnation theory.
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Copyright March 3, 2013 by Linda Van Slyke All Rights Reserved
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