Does Religion Have to Change?

I've had some interesting reading about faith (religion) and change/modernity in the past week. From the book Bobos in Paradise that concludes that our culture is spiritually bankrupt to the ways in which the Republican Presidential Candidates have been pandering a diverse group of Evangelical Christian Leaders (and vice-versa) jockeying for endorsements we see what philosophers have been claiming for the past few years: religion rather than confimring Nietzsch'e affirmation that "God is dead!" has experienced a hyper-resurrection in Western Culture. This is fleshed out in a great special report in the Economist last week "Religion and Public Life" HERE's an interview with one of those authors, to an article in today's SF Chronicle "Behold-religion just needs to dance," to some thoughtful blog article by friend and colleague Bruce Reyes-Chow on his blog (check out the entry on the same SF Chronicle article and "Number 1 Reason why the PCUSA... ").

Religion is increasingly (and has been now with the emergence of the cultural shift around President Bush years ago) playing a larger - or at least more visible (for good or for bad) - role in our culture, society and political establishment. But is it what faith is meant, or intended to be?

Does the church have to change? Hell yes. Read Bruce's entry and the comments/discussion. But that doesn't mean that the essence of faith does. For me what my faith is based upon isn't dogma, a religious establishment or ecclesiastical system, but rather a key teaching, a foundational example, an invitation to follow Jesus in what I do, how I think, the lens through which I view my neighbor and make decisions, as well as the forming factor of my relationships, commitments and raison d'etre. Faith needs to change, or be transformed, in its relationship - or enslavement to the Western paradigm of modernity. It needs to be liberated to what it orignially was (what Jacques Ellul calls X in the Subversion of Christianity), to a new vision, freed possibly by what we calls post-modernism or the emerging cultural shift happening in, around and among us all. Faith doesn't have to change because we've created it and want it to. We have to change the way that we talk about it, describe it with imperfect vocabulary, and experience it as communities of faith.