Here's something from my world that will seem like less than a news flash to many of you.  Churches aren't doing well in what some sociologists call "center cities."  Center cities are not necessarily urban centers, but are places where secular, university culture holds sway-Cambridge, yes, but also lower Manhattan or Northampton, both places where friends of mine are starting new churches.  And it's not just that churches are doing poorly in such places; they're doing hideously poorly.  A 1995 survey claimed that a whopping 2% of Cantabridgians were in a church on the average weekend, as compared to 35% to 40% nationwide.  My friends in Manhattan say the number in their neighborhood is closer to 0.5%--dramatically less that what we can prove at the moment in, say, China. 

Now you may have a persuasive interpretation for this: to wit, what do you expect in areas where most people have this thing called an education?  Religion, you point out, is from an era of superstition (namely any era in human history except the last four hundred years in the West).  People with even a hint of a scientific worldview have moved on!

Sure.  On the other hand, maybe it's something else.

You might remember the late, great psychologist M. Scott Peck, who wrote the biggest-selling book of the 1980s, The Road Less Traveled.  In a later book, he proposed a four-stage theory of human spiritual and emotional development.  If we were perfectly emotionally healthy, all of us would progress to his final stage by our early twenties.  But trauma tends to stall all of us out.  His theory, he hopes, might give some perspective on why we all distrust whole swaths of the rest of the world.

So his Stage 1 you might call criminal.  This corresponds to the toddler years.  The average toddler doesn't do so well in caring for you.  As they tantrum over a toy denied, not many will stop and say, "But this isn't the most important thing on earth.  And I haven't asked once how you're doing, Daddy?  Has it been a good day?"

Peck says there are two primary settings for people stuck in Stage 1: jail (for obvious reasons) and the boardroom, where high-functioning Stage 1 folks can often be quite ruthless and successful.

His Stage 2 you might call rules-based.  This shows up at about age six or seven.  Now the child comes to care what Mommy and Daddy want them to do and they start to judge their criminal younger siblings.  The best settings, said Peck, for those of us stuck in Stage 2 are the military (often a key transitional institution for those moving out of Stage 1) and, gulp, churches. 

Peck argues that perhaps 90% or more of churches function this way.  They help people sort out the rules of life.  He's at pains not to judge this, saying that this is the very heart of our country, that Stage 2 churches customarily develop good citizens and good parents, and there's nothing wrong with that.

But there's a Stage 3, which you might call rebellious and which, as you'd imagine, corresponds to the teenage years.  The healthy teen will invariably begin to ask what's behind all these rules they're being fed.  Often the best answer they get will be quit being such a smart aleck, and thus begins their war with all things Stage 2.  Universities are the best settings for Stage 3, filled, as they are, with 18 to 21-year-olds.  Complaints from conservative quarters that universities are monolithically liberal, on this theory, just recognize what will always be true.  They're Stage 3.

You might guess that, along these lines, the Republican Party would fall pretty neatly into Stage 2.  The Democratic Party, perhaps not as obviously, would be a hybrid of Stage 3 and Stage 1.  Which might also address the differing, but equally violent, forms of contempt each party feels for the other.  Stage 2 sees Stage 3 as lawbreakers, as libertines!  Note how, in some circles, the word "liberal" is something so obviously bad that you don't even have to say why it's bad.

The reverse contempt Stage 3 feels for Stage 2 might be summarized in the thousands of anti-Bush bumper stickers you'll see in Cambridge, which dismiss him as beneath their criticism-much like their own parents, perhaps?

But what Stage 3 (again, rebellious) doesn't realize is that there actually are answers to their questions, that there's more out there than skepticism.  Peck calls this stage mystical.  The Stage 4 person realizes that many of the things they were taught in Stage 2 are actually true, but true in a richer and far-less certain sense than they once thought.  The Stage 4 person has walked into a world where everything around them suddenly seems to be "Truth"-and truth that will take much more than a lifetime to explore.

This might explain the hundreds of academic types we (and our friends in Manhattan and Northampton) see re-engage with faith.  They'd thought they'd rejected God, but they discover, to their shock, that all that they'd rejected was Stage 2. 

There's infinitely more to be said here.  (I actually have a book coming out on just this subject.)  But for our purposes today, can I suggest that there's an unfathomably richer world out there than can be captured by mere skepticism.  In the name of being heroically enlightened, it'd be a bit of a letdown to discover you were just stalled out in Stage 3.