Top Ten Religion Stories 2009

As the year (to say nothing of the decade) winds down, news media inevitably blossom with "top ten" lists. For my money, one can find the most entertaining and thoughtful of these on The Onion's AV Club site (my favorites: 45 Most Indelible Moments from 2009 TV; Best Bad Movies of the 00's).

More relevant to this blog's purpose, however, are the top ten theology stories from various points around the web. Collin Hansen of Christianity Today offers his list here. Time Magazine's list is here (scroll down--they're doing top ten everything). The Religion Newswriters Association made a list (with many runners-up) here. More are sure to come, though the RNA's list seems to be attracting the most attention from the evangelical/Christian blogosphere thus far.

No one story appears on all three lists. Time and the RNA lists share the most overlap, largely due to their focus on religion in toto rather than on a particular facet of Christianity. Even so, their priorities differ markedly. Time, for instance, gives primary importance to the growing and self-conscious secularist trend in Europe, including (as an example) the Swiss ban on Muslim minarets I've written about previously. The RNA rates that story as number 11 (the first among the runners-up), and Hansen mentions it not at all.

President Obama appears on the more wide-net lists, though for Time his significance lies in his continuance of Bush-era faith-based programs. RNA lists that item as 16. Number one on RNA's list is Obama's speech in Cairo in which he pledges better relations to the world's Muslims, assuring his audience that the US is not at war with Islam (reflect for a moment on the significance of his needing to offer such a reassurance). The Christianity Today list focuses not so much on Obama as on Rick Warren's participation (as one of many pray-ers) in Obama's inauguration (#7). Both Time and the RNA include the president's speech at Notre Dame and the extreme counter-reaction against it as, respectively, 7 and 6.

First on the Christianity Today list is a story unmentioned on the other lists: the ongoing translation battles around the New International Version and the (widely criticized among evangelicals) "Today's New International Version." As this story explains, the translation committee responsible for the two versions plans to phase both out in favor of an as-yet-unproduced version in 2011. The NIV has long been the most popular non-King James rendering of the Bible in evangelical churches; it's the standard pew Bible, so changes to it (as evidenced by the TNIV controversy) provoke tension.

The committee seems mainly concerned with scholarly and linguistic issues, but most evangelical commentators sideline these in favor of a more culture-warrior question: will the new version contain "gender-neutral" language? The committee has yet to decide. I don't envy them their choice. Scholarly and linguistic trends may dictate "brothers and sisters" to reflect that an epistle's "dear brothers" refers to more than just males. But to many evangelicals, spelling out terms of inclusive address in such a manner suggests a bow to liberalism and feminism, an alteration of the inerrant word.

I'm surprised, I must say, by the fact that the CT list (which in fairness concerns stories about theology rather than religion) doesn't include such items as James Dobson's stepping down from being chair of Focus on the Family, the Catholic Church's overture to Anglicans, or George Tiller's murder in a Lutheran Church.

Missing from all three lists is any reference to the Ugandan anti-homosexuality bill being debated in that country's parliament. More important than the bill itself is the tensions within global Christianity that this debate has begun to reveal, a tension mirrored by the Anglican Communion's unease about some African bishops' setting up alternative sub-Communions for disaffected US Anglicans.

Indeed, were I (in my relative ignorance) to suggest the most important trend of 2009 or of the past decade, it would be the increasing tension between religious and nonreligious worldviews. I get nervous when I consider Europe's more strident secularism (e.g., French President Nicolas Sarkozy's suggestion that burquas be banned in public, the Swiss minaret controversy, animosity toward Muslims) side-by-side with the growing/maturing Christianities (and other faiths) of the Global South. These are incompatible worldviews, and they promise to come into conflict sooner rather than later.

More and more, I'm convinced Stanley Fish was right when he offered "religion" as the make-or-break issue of the 21st century. I only hope (and pray) that the next ten years offer stories with more hope of "making" than "breaking."

More tomorrow,

JF