The Heavens

Andrew Greeley’s new book Religion in Europe at the End of the Second Millennium reports that 86% of people in Ireland and 21% in the former East Germany believe in heaven. Americans tend to believe more like the Irish. American military and political leaders, especially in times of crisis or mourning, assume that 100% of Americans do.

When President Bush spoke about the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia, he assured grievers that Kalpana Chawla, the Hindu aboard the shuttle, had “wanted to reach the stars” and had now gone “there and beyond”. He said to mourning families that “in God’s own time, we can pray that the day of your reunion will come” – presumably also in heaven.

In his speech after the Challenger tragedy 17 years earlier, President Reagan, in his role as priest in America’s civil religion, announced that the crew (including a Buddhist, a Jew and a non-religious person) had all “slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God”.

Theologian Larry Rasmussen, in his book Dietrich Bonhoeffer: His Significance for North Americans, observed that President Reagan’s language was “in keeping with triumphalist optimism” and added, “There is no truth-telling here, except the illusory truth of a theology of glory.” This comforting illusion must be maintained, he explained, because without it Americans might experience a long and dangerous national “slide into despair and cynicism”.

Rasmussen recognized that while American civil religion often sounds like the faith-language of particular religions, it actually competes with these religions theologically. In Christianity, the route to heaven is through faith in Jesus Christ and God’s dispensing of grace. In civil religion, it is through “works”, by being a citizen, a patriot, a self-sacrificial exemplar – which the Columbia and Challenger astronauts certainly were. Evidently, in times of crisis, Christian citizens are able to believe in two religions and two paths of salvation at the same time. In mourning, we are all presumed to be universalists.

This is a Sightings column distributed by the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.