Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, director of the Law and Religion Program at SUNY’s University at Buffalo Law School, discussing one of the themes in her new book:
"[There is] a new openness to seeing Americans as naturally 'faith-based,' enabled, I believe, by a convergence between a broad range of humanistic critiques of scientistic understandings of the person, social scientific and biological; social and political movements that originated in the mid-twentieth century; and a contemporaneous shift in religious authority and anthropology from the church to the individual. The exclusivity of materialist/medicalized understandings of the entire range of human capabilities and experience, as well as ecclesiastical capacity to insist on orthodoxy and particularity, are both fast eroding in the face of these changes. It’s a next step in the radical disestablishment of religion in this country. This shift toward locating authority in the individual means that it’s much easier for people to move among religious communities, religious ideas, and religious practices in a much more ambiguous way, a way that is less determined by someone outside oneself."
Sullivan doesn't say whether this shift in authority from corporate to individual is bad, she just say that it is. So what do you think?
Do you sense a shift in religious authority from corporate to individual?
Is this affecting "ecclesiastical capacity to insist on orthodoxy and particularity" (think ELCA Churchwide Assembly)?
Is it creating a new generation of religious nomads?
Pingback: