Religion Today

Biblical Marriage: Do We Approve?

March 7, 2012 — "Religion Today" is contributed by the University of Wyoming's Religious Studies Program to examine and to promote discussion of religious issues.

One of the ideal goals of life held up by Christianity is that of a "biblical marriage." This is a monogamous marriage between one man and one woman, usually seen as a loving and caring union. It receives the adjective "biblical" to clarify that the Bible approves of this form of marriage. This is accurate, but not the entire story.

The Bible approves of many different forms of marriage, some of which our society would find abhorrent or even criminal. A few of these relationships meet our understanding of a formal marriage, but others are approved relationships short of formal marriage, but which include sexual congress. Sometimes it is hard to tell which is which.

One of the most common forms of marriage in the Bible is polygyny, one man joined to two or more women. This may be a formal situation in which the man is legally wedded to each woman. Both King David and King Solomon had several formal marriages, sometimes to quite important women. For example, Solomon married a daughter of a Pharaoh, the most powerful ruler in the region.

Polygyny also takes place when one or more of the women are simply part of the household, often slaves. For example, Abraham's first son, Ishmael, was born from his wife's slave, Hagar, while Jacob had children with both Bilhah and Zilpah, the slaves of his two official wives.

Slavery is often the context for different types of marriage. Exodus 21 alone discusses four ways in which the slavery of women is the basis for union. An adult male who buys a female slave may enter into a relationship with her himself, either as his sole female partner or alongside an official wife. The master may also designate the woman as an official wife for his son, or as a partner for one of his male slaves.

Another widely known form of biblical marriage is the Levirate Marriage. In this case, if a married man dies childless, the widow is required to marry his brother (Deuteronomy 25) or a close relative (Ruth 4). The first son of the new union is treated as the dead man's heir. The surviving brother or relative may reject such a marriage, but the widow may not.

Then there is the case of a rapist in Deuteronomy 22:28-29. A man who rapes an unbetrothed virgin must marry his victim and is never allowed to divorce her. The woman has no choice in the matter.

Finally, a soldier who captures a "beautiful woman" while he is plundering an enemy's dwelling may bring her home and force her to marry him. Deuteronomy 21:10-14 puts a couple conditions on this marriage, including the right of the captive to mourn her parents, who presumably had been killed in the raid. Despite this caveat, this is essentially rape.

In modern America, Christianity, Judaism and our secular society view most of these unions as neither valid forms of marriage nor acceptable types of human relationships.

The rejection of these biblically approved types of marriage in favor of only monogamous marriage indicates that even Christians, who believe that the Bible is the basis for guiding their life, pick and choose which aspects of the Bible they will follow. In other words, all Scripture may be sacred, but not all Scripture is relevant, or even correct.

It is our modern sense of justice to both men and women that denies validity to these forms of marriage. We outlawed slavery more than a century and a half ago. We understand the trauma that rape brings upon a woman; permanently linking a woman to her rapist is just unthinkable.

The reason we view these ideas of marriage as invalid is that our society holds different concepts of men's and women's inherent nature, and we have different notions of what they need for successful and happy lives. Attempts to map our modern practices back onto the Bible fail, as shown here, because the social world imagined by the Bible has long disappeared.

The Meaning of the Natural World

February 22, 2012 — "Religion Today" is contributed by the University of Wyoming's Religious Studies Program to examine and promote discussion of religious issues.

The goal of the Enlightenment, that intellectual movement of the 18th century, was to establish human reason as the highest arbiter of knowledge, as opposed to divine revelation, the Christian Church's source of truth.

Although the accuracy of this claim is still debated among philosophers and theologians, it is clear that Reason and its offspring, "Science," have become important arenas of knowledge in our intellectual and cultural worlds. Indeed, wherever religion and science have offered differing explanations of the natural world, or even the cosmos, our society nearly always treats the scientific view more seriously than the religious one.

But even as religion's descriptions of the world have seemingly been beaten back before the unrelenting onslaught of science, there is one question where the roles are absolutely reversed. This is the question of meaning. Put in large-scale terms, what meaning does nature, the universe and the cosmos, hold? Placed in a smaller scale, what is the meaning of a flower's blooming in the spring?

Science can answer the questions of how a flower blooms, why a flower blooms, and even why it blooms in the spring. But it cannot assign an ultimate meaning or purpose to that event. In fact, science cannot even assign ultimate meaning to its own explanations. The theory of evolution, for example, gives strong explanatory power to biology, enabling it to tell us why and how new species of animals and plants develop, why some disappear, and so on. But evolution does not, even cannot, reveal its own ultimate purpose.

This inability is not restricted to biology. Astronomy, for instance, can describe the formation of black holes and develop a theory of gravitation to explain it, but trying to specify the purpose of a black hole is almost nonsensical in scientific terms. Physics can explain why water is the only compound that expands as a solid form rather than contracts, but it does not tell us what that means.

Does this mean that "Life, the Universe, and Everything" (as Douglas Adams would describe it) is meaningless? Absolutely not. Instead, meaning must come from outside of science itself.

It turns out that religions have been doing a pretty good job at answering the question of ultimate meaning. As the biologist Kenneth Miller argues in his book, "Finding Darwin's God" (Cliff Street Books, 2000), "Our human tendency to assign meaning and value must transcend science and, ultimately, must come from outside it. The science that results can thus be enriched and informed from its contact with the values and principles of faith. The God of Abraham does not tell us which proteins control the cell cycle. But he does give us a reason to care, a reason to cherish that understanding and, above all, a reason to prefer the light of knowledge to the darkness of ignorance."

What Might Have Been

Do you think that religious institutions should be free from government interference in their theological and moral beliefs? Do you think companies should be free to focus on their business and not be burdened with irrelevant regulations? Do you think all Americans should have regular access to reliable health care?

If you answered "yes" to at least two of these questions, then you should support national health care for the United States of America.

Our closest international allies, Great Britain and Canada, have shown the success of a national health service open to all citizens. Their health systems are cheaper on a per-person basis than the American approach and their citizens live longer and healthier lives. Why wouldn't we want that?

Well, our country's recent debates over health care have shown that the question is not so simple. Despite the years of wrangling and the bitterness engendered while passing the current bill, we may have improved American health care delivery (many would debate that statement), but we have achieved few permanent solutions.

Surprisingly, apart from general opposition to "Obama-care," health care has not been a major focus of the Republican primary campaign. One issue seems about to change that: Birth control.

The implementation of the new health care laws requires businesses to provide insurance that covers a basic package of care. That care includes birth control. For religious institutions that oppose birth control, such as the Catholic Church, this brings on a dilemma. While churches themselves are exempt from this rule, church-sponsored institutions such as hospitals, universities and schools are not.

The moral problem here is that these companies are now required to pay for medical services their doctrines oppose. Cries of opposition have gone out from officials ranging from college presidents to archbishops: Do not require us to provide services we believe are a sin.

Since the First Amendment forbids government from "prohibiting the free exercise" of religion, this seems like a clear-cut violation. As Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah has argued, the exemption for churches but not for church-sponsored institutions "falls far short of securing the religious liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment."

But what about the rights of a hospital's employees? Should they not have access to equal health care as the rest of America's citizenry?

Many of a Catholic hospital's or a Catholic university's employees do not belong to the Catholic Church. They too have religious rights and the free exercise of them should not be infringed by their employer just because the employer is a religious organization.

But the question about whether the employees belong to the Catholic Church is irrelevant. A recent survey indicates that 54 percent of individual Catholics believe that Catholic institutions should be required to include birth control in their health insurance. In fact, during their child-bearing years, 98 percent of Catholic women use birth control. Their freedom to pursue their own views of religious practice would be compromised by the exemption requested by the bishops and archbishops.

So it seems that the new health care system pits the religious rights of the institution against the religious rights of the American citizens who are their employees.

This conflict could have been avoided if a national health service provided by the government had been enacted. If businesses no longer were responsible for providing health care for their employees and instead health care came from the federal government to its citizens, then there would be no moral conflict.

The religious institutions would not be responsible for providing health care, and so they would not be put into the moral dilemma of going against their beliefs. There would be no violation of their First Amendment rights. And individuals, whatever religious institution or company they worked for, would be able to exercise their religious rights and their access to quality health care would not be compromised.

This would also have been good for American businesses. The worst regulations that can be imposed on a company are those that have nothing to do with the goal of the business. The requirement that American businesses arrange and pay for the health care of their employees is a burden that foists large costs on companies and hinders their competitiveness in the marketplace. If their employees received health care from the government rather than from businesses, then American businesses would prosper.

Unfortunately, this is a vision of what-might-have-been. It would have been better for America's principle of the "separation of Church and State," if the country had moved toward national health care.

The Best Training Ground for Democracy: A Business or a Church?

Many successful businessmen and businesswomen in America run for public office thinking their business background is good preparation for a leadership position in government. This is especially true if they managed a company and guided it from humble beginnings to a multimillion-dollar organization.

But perhaps there is a better preparation for government leadership -- namely, being a successful pastor of a church.

Say what?

Put simply, a business aims to balance the conflicting interests of four groups: investors, managers, employees and customers. The investors paid to set up the company and want to make a profit on that investment by selling to the customers the goods or services produced by the employees. Investors want to sell the product at a price that ensures a profit, but not so high the customers won't buy it.

The employees constitute much of the cost. A company needs employees to produce the product or service and so must pay them. Of course, employees want high wages, while investors desire the opposite.

In a successful company, managers balance the competing goals of the other three groups: the customers who want to minimize the purchase price, the employees who want to maximize wages, and the owners who want to maximize profits from the price by minimizing wages and other costs.

In most churches, by contrast, the investors and customers comprise the same group of people: the congregation. Furthermore, apart from the minister herself or himself, most of the "employees" are actually volunteers from the congregation: Sunday school teachers, choir members, ushers and so on. (Of course there are a few other employees: the secretary, janitor, organist and choir director.) "Management" also is volunteer; apart from the pastor, most management tasks are undertaken by committees of congregants.

So rather than the separate, competing groups underpinning a business, a church consists of one group of people who move among roles comparable to a company's four constituencies. Management in a church is not about balancing competition between groups, but about balancing the different interests coming from the same group.

A church needs to maximize products and services to the parishioners as customers -- whether matters of worship, education, social interaction, comforting and counseling, or spiritual uplift and salvation. At the same time, the church's management tries keep down the costs so that the parishioners as investors do not complain about them.

Of course, a church's goal is not monetary profit, but lies in the intangible benefits which the congregation receives. In other words, the products and services themselves comprise the "profit."

A church's management challenge is to provide what the congregation as customers want, for the cost that the congregation as investors are willing to pay through their tithes and donations. If the management fails in this balance, they can be removed.

So, which position is better training for government leadership in a democracy -- management of a company or a church? The management of the organization a government is most like, namely, a church.

In a democracy like the United States, the customers and the investors are essentially the same people -- namely, the citizens. The government provides goods and services for the citizens as customers while the citizens as investors pay for them through their taxes. As investors, the citizens also vote to hire and fire the management from among themselves who, in turn, are responsible for hiring and firing employees from among the citizens.

Why does a church provide training for democratic leadership? Because the similarity in organization gives ministers experience in the same human dynamics the government encounters.

In a business, management can play off the interests of customers against those of investors against those of employees. And if managers fail, only the investors can fire them.

In a democratic government and a church, the customers and the investors are the same, and the managers and the employees are just a subset of them. On the one hand, if the customers-investors are unhappy about either products or cost, they can fire management.

On the other hand, significant changes in management and employees impacts the welfare of the customers-investors. A reduction in investment (taxes) means a reduction in the number of employees who can function as citizen investors. That, in turn, forces reductions in goods and services to the citizen consumers who need them, which makes them unhappy and desirous of voting out management.

In the end, good democratic management skills are not those that pit different groups against each other, but those which understand that there is only one group of people who exhibit those differing interests.

(The ideas in this column were inspired by Paul Krugman's Jan. 12 column in the New York Times, "America Isn't a Corporation.")

Seeking the Essence of Tim Tebow in the Midst of Controversy and Ridicule

The Denver Broncos football team made the second round of the AFC playoffs, despite having only an even win-loss record during the regular season (8-8) and losing the season's last three games. This is thanks in large part to the Broncos' young quarterback, Tim Tebow.

Since Tebow rose to the Broncos' starting QB position in mid-season, he has become the most infuriating QB in the entire league. In most games he has played three quarters of middling-quality football only to pull out a win in the last quarter (or overtime) with a combination of spectacular plays and good luck.

But to judge by the reaction of football fans, the sports media and the Internet, the most infuriating aspect of Tebow is his religious beliefs and actions. Tebow often punctuates media remarks with thanks to his "Lord and Savior Jesus Christ," and will bless those with whom he talks. Sometimes he has written his favorite Bible verse, John 3:16, on the black patches under his eyes.

His most widely known religious act is that after each touchdown, Tim goes down on one knee in prayer. This move has become known as "Tebowing" and has spawned a range of YouTube videos of people Tebowing in front of famous world sites and local hotspots, and doing flash-mob Tebows.

Needless to say Tim Tebow has become a controversial figure, partly because of the way he plays football and partly because of his evangelical Christian persona. Many who weigh in on the debate think the two do not fit together. Why does he thank Jesus for the way he plays football when his play is clearly so mixed? Why does he so unabashedly and overtly act as an Evangelical when football is so tough, so seemingly against Christian values?

The answer lies in who Tim Tebow is, at the core of himself. Good athletes perform best when they are centered, when they have put all distractions out of their minds. Tebow lives, eats and breathes his religious beliefs -- not as a conscious act, but as part of his unconscious character. This character was developed over the course of his upbringing.

Tebow was born in the Philippines to Baptist missionary parents. His father is a pastor and his mother homeschooled him throughout primary and secondary school. He grew up almost solely within an Evangelical world, with little influence from non-Christian sources. High school football seems to have been the primary exception to this observation. But he did not attend the school he played for; before practice every day he attended his family's home school.

Tebow's religious personality and activities began to gain national attention when he was the quarterback for the University of Florida Gators. Even when he won the Heisman Trophy, as a sophomore, he was already gaining notoriety for the verse references on his eye black. This evangelizing action has been seen by many as a stunt.

But whereas many evangelicals secretly fear evangelizing (because they do not like to be embarrassed or ridiculed anymore than the rest of us), Tebow's upbringing made it an unquestioned part of his inner personality. He evangelizes when he is playing well. It is not a distraction that prevents him from getting in the zone and staying focused.

So how should we understand Tim's Tebowing? Most commentators, as well as the ridiculers, have seen it as part of his evangelizing. They understand it as part of his evangelical actions of trying to use public attention to win people to Christ.

I think it stems from the inner essence of his being. That is a fancy way of saying that Tebow has his moment of prayer because that is who he is. By pausing to connect with his God, Tebow recenters himself. In the midst of celebration and struggle, he takes a moment to connect with his core being, a being who believes unquestioningly that his first priority is his God, not his football. One does not have to have the same beliefs as Tebow to understand that he is sincere.

Speaking Internationally: The Languages of Joseph, Mary, and the Wise Men

The stories of Jesus' birth are stories of travel. In the Gospel of Luke, Mary and Joseph travel through the national territory, from Nazareth in Jewish Galilee to Bethlehem in Jewish Judea.

In Matthew's Gospel, the travel is international. The tale begins with the wise men traveling from the "East." They visit King Herod to ask for directions and then bring gifts to Mary, Joseph and Jesus in Bethlehem. After they leave, an angel sends Joseph and his family to Egypt, where they live until Herod's death.

So with all this international travel, how did the travelers communicate? What languages did they speak at home and abroad? Our answer to this question lies in understanding the languages spoken in Palestine and the extent to which they would have been used in the East and in Egypt.

Linguistically, Palestine was a cosmopolitan region in the first centuries B.C. and A.D. As a strip of land less than 75 miles wide on the eastern Mediterranean shore, Palestine often found itself between empires or swallowed up by one. Whether it was Egypt or Mesopotamia, or Persia, Greece or Rome, these imperial powers moved across Palestine, warred on its territory, and often absorbed Palestine into their territories.

So although Hebrew was the Jews' native language, by the time of Jesus' birth, they had centuries of experience with both Aramaic and Greek. Babylonia and Persia had brought them Aramaic as early as the eighth century B.C. When Alexander the Great conquered Palestine in 332 B.C., Greek became the imperial language. When the Romans arrived in 63 B.C., Greek retained its dominant role.

Both Persia and Alexander conquered wide swaths of territory beyond Palestine, ranging from Egypt to modern day Iraq and Iran far to the east. So all the conversations in the nativity story should have happened in Greek, right? Greek was the most recent language, it was used in Palestine, Egypt and the "East," and had been around for several centuries. Seems obvious.

If only it were so simple.

In the highly stratified societies of the ancient world, language did not change at the same speed at all social levels. The elite and educated classes learned a new imperial language most quickly, because the conquerors, who were relatively few in number, used them to rule the conquered country. The next group to pick up a new language was the traders and other business people, while the last was the peasants. Their fixed tie to their farms usually required interaction with the rulers only at tax-collecting time, and then probably through their own countrymen.

This was the main pattern of language acquisition for both Aramaic and Greek in this region. But after Alexander, a new linguistic development took place. As the elites learned Greek, Aramaic became the language of resistance. Among the lower classes, Aramaic was already in the process of replacing their native languages and this process continued until it was the lingua franca not just of Palestine but of all the eastern Mediterranean countries.

Apparently the upper classes retained Aramaic as well, for the inscriptions and documents of private individuals or local communities unearthed by archaeologists in this region are in Aramaic more frequently than in Greek. The elite may have spoken Greek to their conquerors, but they spoke Aramaic at home.

So when the upper-class "wise men" talked with King Herod, presumably in his Jerusalem palace, they probably conversed in the official language of Greek.

But when they arrived in Bethlehem, they most likely spoke the same language that Joseph and Mary were using with the local villagers, namely, Aramaic. As a carpenter, Joseph belonged to the artisan classes rather than the peasants, but the nationalist character that Aramaic had taken on would have made this his primary language.

So what language did Joseph and Mary speak in Egypt? Probably Aramaic. For the same phenomenon of linguistic resistance among the lower classes took place in Egypt as well as Palestine. Joseph and his family would have lived among the lower classes while they were in Egypt, and so would not have had any connection to the elite circles where Greek would have been the language of conversation.

This fits with the gospel's portrayal of the adult Jesus. Although the gospels are written in Greek, the shared language of the eastern Mediterranean, when they depict Jesus speaking in his native language-as in his final words on the cross-he speaks Aramaic.

The History of Religion in Wyoming

Over the past two centuries, Wyoming has undergone an enormous amount of religious change. From the religions of the many Native American tribes who lived in this land to Protestant and Catholic missionaries and settlers, to Mormons and to Chinese Buddhists and Daoists, the people living in Wyoming have adhered to and been influenced by many different religious views and practices.

A new book by long-time Wyoming resident and pastor Warren Murphy brings together into one narrative the stories of religious activity in Wyoming with the state's history for the first time. This work, "On Sacred Ground: A Religious and Spiritual History of Wyoming," is written for a popular audience and begins with the first endeavors of Christian missionaries and continues to current religious developments.

There are many stories here about many religions, religious organizations and their representatives, too many even to mention here. But I want to focus a single feature to which Murphy frequently returns, namely, the alternating fortunes of Protestantism and Catholicism in Wyoming.

Today, even the most casual tourist to Wyoming knows that Father Pierre Jean De Smet conducted the first Catholic Mass in 1840; it is carefully labeled on the state's official road map near Pinedale. It is less well-known that the first Protestant service took place nearby five years earlier in 1835. The Congregationalist minister Samuel Parker, along with his Presbyterian associate Dr. Marcus Whitman, preached to both the mountain men and the Indians gathered there at a rendezvous.

Why is De Smet's mass so well remembered and Parker's services not? Perhaps because Parker did not stay in Wyoming; at the end of that summer he continued on to present-day Washington state. Even though Whitman went back east to find more missionaries for the western frontier, when he returned with them in 1836, they too journeyed on to the Northwest. Other Protestant missionaries did the same in 1837 and 1838.

So when De Smet arrived in 1840, there were no Christian missionaries in Wyoming. De Smet by contrast remained in the area for more than a decade and led Catholics missions among the Indians. In fact, when the U.S. government called the tribes together for the Treaty of 1851, they requested De Smet's presence to help with the negotiations.

The years 1867-1869 caused a major change in Wyoming's character. The railroad was built across the southern part of the territory, the federal government officially designated Wyoming as a territory, and the reservation system was established for the Native Americans.

Now the tables shifted. In 1871, the Board of Indian Commissioners met to assign different denominations to supervise the reservations. Even though De Smet was assigned to the commission, the Catholic Church received responsibility for only four reservations while the Protestants acquired the other 38. The Episcopal Church alone received seven, including the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming.

The railroad brought many new settlers of European descent to Wyoming and the white population increased significantly. The missionary boards shifted their emphasis to this growing immigrant populace. Presbyterian minister Sheldon Jackson founded new churches in Cheyenne, Laramie and Rawlins in 1869. The Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians and Congregationalists were also active. Cheyenne's St Mark's Episcopal Church, begun in 1869, became the first church building erected in Wyoming.

By 1890, 43 church buildings had been erected in Wyoming, most along the train line paralleling the state's southern border, but several were built in the state's northern areas. Even though most of these churches were Protestant, a census taken at the time indicates that the vast majority of declared church members identified themselves as Catholics, some 8,453 people, while second place went to the Methodists with just 1,322. The Episcopalians were third with a mere 467.

Despite this, the 13,000 church members made up only a fifth of Wyoming's population. Nearly 80 percent of Wyoming's citizens were unchurched.

By the 21st century, these figures have shifted somewhat. The recent American Religious Landscape survey indicates about 50 percent of Wyoming citizens follow Protestant beliefs, about 25 percent adhere to Catholic beliefs, and 5 percent to Mormon beliefs. But 20 percent of the state's citizens still indicate "none of the above" when asked about their religious orientation.

So the 20th century brought about a significant increase in Christian beliefs, both in real numbers and in percentage terms, a development described in Murphy's book. But Wyomingites still reveal a high percentage of people unassociated with formal religion.

Note: This column is indebted to Warren Murphy's book, "On Sacred Ground: A Religious and Spiritual History of Wyoming," 2011; available through Amazon.com and BN.com..

Sports, Religion and Child Rape

by Paul V.M. Flesher

November 15, 2011 — President Ronald Reagan said it best, "Trust, but verify." He may have applied this old Russian proverb to United States' relations with the Soviet Union, but like any good proverb it fits many situations. It makes a good watch-word for parents in dealing with respected institutions, especially with regard to the possible sexual misbehavior of their representatives.

For the last two weeks, the news media have been filled with the discussion of Jerry Sandusky's use of Pennsylvania State University's football facilities for the alleged rape of young boys. The failure to stop this activity cost the university not only its legendary football coach Joe Paterno but more importantly its president, Graham Spanier, whose 15 years in that office helped build Penn State into an academic powerhouse.

Much of the media coverage has focused on Sandusky's alleged activities or on the failure of people in leadership within the university to stop Sandusky or to report him to the police. Editorials have ranged from shutting down Penn State's football program to the question of whether sexual crimes are simply part of big college sports.

Given the international attention paid to these illegal activities, I am sure that every coach, athletic director and university president, as well as high school principal, has wondered "could it happen here?" I am also certain that nearly every parent has asked themselves, "could this happen to my child?" and then, "how can I protect my child?"

The answer to this last question lies not in rejecting these institutions but in understanding the nature of institutions and applying Reagan's dictum, "Trust but verify."

Given Joe Paterno's adherence to Catholicism, the press analysis of this football story has frequently compared it to the scandal of sex abuse rocking the Catholic Church. The similarities of cover-up "to protect the reputation of the institution" are certainly strong. The parallel between the two is instructive.

In sociological terms, institutions have a two-fold character. On the one hand, an organization takes on a life of its own-to the point where the law has declared it a "person" with respect to many legal rights and responsibilities. On the other hand, institutions are simply organizations made up of people. An organization is no better or worse than the individuals who work in them.

The problem facing parents is the conflict between the identity and reputation of an institution (its "personhood") and the identity and reputation of the people in it.

This nation has many trusted and valued institutions: football, universities and churches are among them. Many parents and families belong to these organizations and volunteer their time to assist their activities. These institutions set, preach and teach high ideals-from good sportsmanship and fair play to the moral values of life. Parents expect these organizations to live up to their ideals.

At least 99.9 percent of the people involved in these institutions are good people of stellar character. But there are a tiny number of individuals in some of them whose character and intentions are immoral or even criminal. The trust which the institution's reputation instills in its members does not apply to them.

But how do you know who to avoid? You don't. So this is why Reagan's dictum is important, "Trust but verify." In other words, trust the institution. Trust its members as a whole. But verify the individuals who work with your children, in a thoughtful and sensible manner.

One final point. The rape of children is a crime. The legal term child "sexual abuse" makes it sound comparable to "alcohol abuse." You know, like the person who can't keep away from the bottle, so you send them to Alcoholics Anonymous for therapy. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The law distinguishes between "rape" and "abuse." The term "rape" connotes that the victim has the power of consent and refused to consent, while "abuse" connotes that the victim had no power to consent because they were a minor or were mentally handicapped. When this legal terminology is used in popular discourse, the terms' meaning changes. "Abuse" implies something less than "rape." This is incorrect; "abuse" is the term used for the rape of a child. So let's call it what it is, "child rape."

The Triumph of Abrahamic Monotheism

November 2, 2011 — By Paul V.M. Flesher

The world's population has just reached seven billion through a centuries-long process of growth and migration. The same process formed the distribution of the world's religions as we now know them today. The current result of that process is somewhat surprising; more than half of the world's people follow one of just two religions: Christianity or Islam. These two monotheistic religions comprise the world's two largest religions.

Christianity and Islam both trace their origins back to the Jewish Patriarch Abraham. The biblical book of Genesis tells how, during the second millennium B.C., Abraham and his household of 80 people followed a god known as Yahweh. Abraham's family grew into the People of Israel who formed Judaism, the earliest monotheistic religion, and worshipped Yahweh only. Later, in the first millennium CE (Common Era, formerly A.D.), both Christianity and Islam drew upon Judaism to create new religions worshipping this same God.

Christianity migrated as it expanded. After it origins in the first century CE in Palestine, it became the religion of the Roman Empire. That established it in the lands around the Mediterranean Sea and then brought it into Europe. When the European nations began colonizing other continents in the mid-second millennium CE, they carried their religion with them, with the result that the population of three continents became almost entirely Christian: North America, South America and Australia. Christianity has also become the largest religion in the southern half of Africa.

After its origins near the coast of the Red Sea in the seventh century, Islam quickly moved into the Middle East and the northern half of Africa. From there it went east, colonizing the Indian sub-continent and moving further east into Malaysia and Indonesia, which today constitutes the most populous Muslim nation.

Today, Christianity comprises about a third of the world's population, around 2.3 billion. About a quarter of the world's population, roughly 1.8 billion, follow Islam.

If we look at a map of the world showing where members of these Abrahamic religions reside in comparison to those of eastern religions, the impact is even more striking. Christianity or Islam dominate every continent except Asia– -- and even there Russia and the Middle East belong to the Abrahamic side. About 13 percent of the world's land area is occupied by members of Eastern religions, while almost 87 percent is dominated by Christianity or Islam.

Of course, this land area view is somewhat misleading, because Asia is home to two of the world's most densely populated large countries, India and China. At more than 1.2 billion people each, these two countries contain more than a third of the world's population between them.

India is in fact home to the world's third largest religion, Hinduism, which counts about a billion adherents and roughly 14 percent of the world's population. Asia is home to most of the world's Buddhists, but guesses about their population are highly uncertain and range from 300-350 million.

This is where we reach the limits of our ability to count more precisely, however. Hinduism may be the third largest religion, but it is smaller than the number of people around the world who follow no religion at all. About 16 percent of the world's population does not attach to any religion. These range from committed atheists to agnostics and secularists to people who check "none of the above" on surveys of religious belonging.

We should not forget communism's work to stamp out religious belief in China, Russia and other countries, nor the rise of secular and scientific worldviews in Europe, the Americas and elsewhere. The ability to perform a more accurate count might lower each religion's population a few percentage points. But it would not in the end change the general picture.

Is this a triumph of monotheism? I would not characterize it as such because there is no unity. Islam and Christianity are highly suspicious of each other. Within each religion, large groups do not even recognize other groups as belonging under the same religious umbrella. Evangelical Christians do not recognize the Mormons as Christians even though they are called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Don't forget that Protestant Christianity was formed through the rejection of the validity of the Catholic Church. In Islam, there is ongoing Sunni questioning of Shiite and Sufi forms of the religion.

So rather than a single, large monotheistic religious umbrella, monotheism is simply a category that contains numerous, squabbling members. Indeed, the world's largest Christian nation, the United States, is also the home to the world's largest variety of Christianities, all of whom would rather remain separate than join together.

Note: Numbers in this essay are based on information found at Adherents.com and pewforum.org/Global-Muslim-Population.aspx. For a dynamic graphic illustrating the growth and movement of world religions, go to www.mapsofwar.com/ind/history-of-religion.html .

Flesher is director of UW's Religious Studies Program. Past columns and more information about the program can be found on the Web at www.uwyo.edu/relstds . To comment on this column, visit http://religion-today.blogspot.com .

Photo:
Members of the Abrahamic religions of Christianity and Islam together dominate more than 80 percent of the Earth's land area. ( Dbachmann, Wikimedia Commons)

The Triumph of Abrahamic Monotheism?