Now here's a question for you. At a dinner last night with my parents and some of their friends, a medical doctor - the "black sheep" of a Plymouth Brethren family who told me he is "on the Dawkins side" - asked me: where did I see religion 500 years from now?
A good question, and not one I've encountered before. My answer was that I didn't think one side or the other (of believers and unbelievers) would win out decisively, that it would likely swing back and forth. Why think the next 500 years will be like the last 200 rather than the last 5000?
I'm no futurologist, and I'll admit that when I think about the future I think in terms of 5 and 50 years - and 50,000,000 - but not 500. (Was it Albert Camus who said that the absurd was the world 50 years after your death when nobody remembers you or anyone you cared about?) But the question isn't really about the future anyway, so much as about unchanging things in human nature and culture - and whatever else is at work in the world around us. In the aftermath of secularization theory, I don't think that religion is disappearing - what people with my kind of education were all taught to expect until very recently. Indeed I feel sometimes like we're coming out of a period of the eclipse of religion. But there are different ways of understanding the resilience of religion. I'm sort of a Marxist about religion: as long as there is injustice in human affairs there will be religion. But is that all? In class when we were reading Marx and I was, once again, surprising myself with the fervor of my enthusiasm for Marx's hopes, I told students that one could be a Marxist on all this and still be religious - until there is a revolution leading to true human history, religion will be human protest at human oppression, but once the oppression is gone we will be free to form a religion true to what's out there, unconstrained by the needs for consolation and justification. So: struggle for justice now, and leave religion for the future. Let religion (not just your own tradition necessarily) strengthen you in this noble struggle but never let it overshadow or distract from it.
Others wouldn't wait until the revolution for eschatological verification (a term of John Hick's which I'm misusing but not travestying). God (or the Tao or Purpose or whatever) is here and always has been and always will be, so of course there'll be religion in 500 years. It'll be available then (assuming there are still human beings kicking around in something like our form) just as it is now.
I wonder if my interlocutor hopes or expects that 500 years from now religion will be a distant and uninteresting memory, indeed an incomprehensible one. The people of the future will live our their lifespan doing rewarding things and then let go, satisfied in knowing they had the privilege of being part of the extraordinary world of meaning and relationship which human beings have been able to create around themselves. Indeed, that is already available now.
Maybe part of the privilege of living right now is that both of these are available, and available to stimulate and challenge each other - and my answer was not so much an unwillingness to think beyond the present as a hope that the present's possibilities persist. Maybe...
