At an event for the families of incoming students today, the parents of three of the students in my upcoming first year seminar came to introduce themselves. Unexpected, since there weren't that many people at the event, and even more unexpected because all three told me their son was in the class. Last year's first year seminar had all women! Is it something in the title, "DIY Religion"?
The parents were all curious what "DIY Religion" meant, too. Didn't they read the course description? I hope their kids did! I told them that the course starts with the reality that more and more people are turning way from "organized religion" to do their own thing, something we'll be learning about first-hand from alums. But in fact this entrepreneurial spirit is less new than it might seem. The vitality of religious traditions has always come from the ways in which people make them their own. That so many religious leaders insist on the importance of this or that practice or teaching just tells you at least some folks were doing other things. The story is messy, and not always happy. But the DIY impulse is part of taking a religion seriously, and part of how traditions grow.
What I didn't get into was how New Schooly the class will be. I mentioned that it's the Lang fortieth and that we'll be hearing all about life at and after the college from alums, of course. But the readings are New School-heavy too, as we've been at the forefront of appreciating the reality of DIY religion from the getgo. Most obviously, "lived religion" approaches build on the transformed understanding of human history and psychology offered by pragmatists, and amplified by qualitative sociologists. But New School also contributed to the rise and fall of secularization theory. And, in tandem with that, to exploration of what could take the place of forms of religion becoming obsolete. Indeed one of the New School founders, Herbert Croly, actually offered "schools of social research" as a kind of DIY religion of humanity!
If humanism is to triumph over the headstrong and capable particularism which is the immediately dangerous enemy, it must anticipate in the lives of its own promoters the beginning of that better cooperation between science and social purpose, between the intelligence and the will, which it hopes to spread throughout the world. Probably such cooperation will not go very far until it receives an impulse from the restoration of religion to a worthier place in human life, but the religious revival, if it comes, must come when and where it pleases. In the meantime, something can be done to anticipate by education the birth of the new faith, and in this pedestrian job, schools of social research ... could make an indispensable contribution.
"A School of Social Research," The New Republic June 8, 1918: 167-71, 171