January 21, 2002

With which outsiders may a religious believer pray without betraying his own religious tradition? That's the question roiling the conservative Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, whose 2.6 million members make it the smaller of the two major Lutheran churches in America. And it's more important to religion and morality in America than you might think.

On September 23 of last year, the Rev. David Benke, the church's Atlantic district president, offered a prayer at the Yankee Stadium ecumenical memorial service for the World Trade Center victims. Though Benke shared the stage with Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Christian clergy, he prayed explicitly in the name of Jesus Christ.

That wasn't good enough for some of the more conservative church members, who have lodged formal charges against Benke with the Missouri Synod's governing body. The accusers — 17 pastors and one congregation — allege that Benke's presence and prayer crossed the line into "syncretism," which the LCMS defines as espousing the belief that all religions are equally true. Benke's defenders say that official church policy allows a pastor to pray at a civic event with non-Christians, as long as he is able to pray explicitly in Jesus' name — which Benke did.

Church officials are no longer commenting on the dispute, which is expected to be resolved this spring. A top source within the LCMS said, however, that much depends first on whether you view the Yankee Stadium service as a civic event or a religious service, and second on whether you believe Benke was praying with the other religious leaders, or in the midst of them.

To be sure, a case could be made that this kind of sectarian pettiness gives religion a bad name. Yet even if some go too far, the Lutherans are asking the right questions, particularly at a time when syncretism — what others call "universalism" — is a grave threat to religious identity and moral reasoning.

The Lutherans implicitly understand that if all religions, with their competing truth claims, are considered equally valid, then there is no such thing as absolute truth. This soft nihilism is increasingly dominant in American society. Consider the following poll results from the California-based Barna Research Group, which tracks trends in American religious life:

Morality is increasingly seen as malleable. In two recent, post-9/11 national surveys, Americans said by a 3-to-1 margin that moral truth is relative. A whopping 83 percent of teens embraced relativism, with 75 percent of those 18 to 35 approving of it.

Only two years ago (January 2000), 44 percent of Americans said moral truth was absolute; that number had declined to 22 percent by November 2001 — implying that the September 11 attacks did nothing to return the nation to traditional moral views.

Even more disturbing for conservative religious leaders, only 32 percent of Christians professing a personal commitment to Jesus Christ said they believe in moral absolutes. The number for Christian teenagers — a mere nine percent of whom believe in absolute moral truth — is roughly equivalent to that of non-religious teens.

Pollster George Barna said that compared to a similar poll ten years ago, people today are much more likely to allow their feelings guide their moral decision-making than the Bible or external moral codes. The result, he said, is that substantial numbers of professing Christians believe that abortion, gay sex, living together outside of marriage, and viewing pornography are morally acceptable.

"Without some firm and compelling basis for suggesting that such acts are inappropriate, people are left with philosophies such as 'if it feels good, do it,'" writes Barna. "The result is a mentality that esteems pluralism, relativism, tolerance, and diversity without critical reflection of the implications of particular views and actions."

In light of this, it's easier to understand why some Lutherans and others are wary of ecumenical events that appear to discard or overlook serious doctrinal differences among the various Christian churches, and between Christianity and other faiths. This has been especially true regarding post-9/11 interfaith services, which have gone heavy on religious unity.

"It's the lowest-common-denominator approach to interfaith dialogue, which is reduced to what I call Rodney King theology: 'Can't we all get along?'" says the Rev. Kendall Harmon, an Episcopal priest in South Carolina. "It eradicates genuine differences, and I think that's a problem. There are genuine differences between the Muslim faith and the Christian faith, but if you listen to many, many mainline [Christian] spokesmen in recent months, you'd never know it was true."

Nationally syndicated religion columnist Terry Mattingly says that nearly all religious bodies in what he calls "Oprah America" are grappling with some version of what has preoccupied the Missouri Synod Lutherans.

"Part of it is the difficulty we have in condemning anything. That's the spirit of the age we're in," Mattingly says. "The problem isn't saying that God exists; the problem is saying who God is."

Because ecumenism so often goes too far — John Paul II inviting African witch doctors to a Vatican-sponsored prayer conference for peace, for example, or the Episcopal priest who offered a Ground Zero prayer recognizing Muhammad and Buddha as "saints" who "led god's people to God's Light" — it is easy to overreact.

The Greek Orthodox monks who demonstrated against the pontiff's visit to Greece last year may have had perfectly valid points to make about Roman heresies, but they did themselves and the cause of honest interfaith dialogue no good by pronouncing curses upon his head, and denouncing him as a "two-headed grotesque monster" straight from the book of Revelation.

"The two perspectives that tend to get into the media are the loud, vociferous unfair critics of ecumenism on the one hand, and the very superficial, lowest common denominator ecumenists on the other," says Fr. Harmon, a veteran of interfaith dialogue and cooperation. "There are a lot of more moderate voices out there who never get heard from."

There is a lot to be said for tough, but respectful, honesty about religious differences. Mattingly says his fellow Orthodox Christians were actually pleased by the Vatican's 2000 document "Dominus Iesus," which inflamed many non-Catholics by restating traditional Roman claims that salvation comes exclusively through Jesus Christ, and that the Church of Rome is a necessary part of the salvific equation.

"The Orthodox said they would rather deal with an honest Catholicism than with a limp Catholicism that didn't make its truth claims," says Mattingly. "If you're ever going to see any kind of unification between the churches, it will have to be done on the basis of the truth. You can't do it by making truth go away, and sitting around singing 'Kumbaya.' And you don't have to agree with the Lutherans here to agree that they are upset about something worth being upset about."