‘Believers in exile’ from various religious groups

I read Asuncion David Maramba’s April 26 opinion piece about being religious and being spiritual, especially among our youth (“Spiritual but not religious”).

This trend is happening in our country, as it is all over the United States. Even the young adults identified with conservative churches in the United States, are beginning to move away from the institutional church. They are not all becoming atheists, or agnostics, or freethinkers. In fact, we now have a group of individuals who call themselves “believers in exile.” They also have a website (CenterForProgressiveChristianity.com).

These individuals read the works of Paul Tillich (“God as Ground of All Beings”), John Robinson (“Honest To God”), Bonhoeffer (“Religionless Christianity”), and other “postmodern” (some of them call themselves “post-Christian”) believers/thinkers. In fact, one of the more controversial members of the Center for Progressive Christianity is Bishop John Shelby Spong, a retired bishop of the Episcopal Church, who now lives in Newark, New Jersey.

There can be other reasons why this is happening, but we don’t have any academic research done yet, whether in the United States or in the Philippines.

These individuals are highly educated. But what we are seeing is that they are moving away from the theistic Judeo-Christian understanding of “God,” (an external deity who lives “up there” and who comes down to earth when people call or pray for help), to a “nontheistic” view of “God,” which I think is quite similar to Leo Tolstoy’s understanding of God’s kingdom as found “within us.”

Tolstoy has a book titled “The Kingdom of God is Within Us.” They are also very critical about the established church doctrines which they characterize as based on the “flat earth” mentality/worldview.

You can log on to Bishop Spong’s website ([email protected]).

—REV. JOHN NALUNDASAN RIINGEN (ret.),

San Diego, CA, USA