The title “Sightings” might lead readers to imagine that these columns are solely interested in visual appearances of religions, say, placards at protests, in the cinema or theater, and so forth. But today we ponder the auditory “appearance” of religion, or, more specifically, the loss of religious voice at this cultural moment in the United States. That might sound odd since we seem to be hearing soundbites of religious chatter all the time.
 
To be honest, this topic—“mute religion”—is hardly novel. Sociologists speak about the “nones,” those without religious affiliation. Historians chart the shifts in religious rhetoric when movements and peoples collide, for good or ill. Religion scholars note how religions co-opt the discourse of other religions thereby silencing what came before. But the topic took graphic, public, and visual form (!) in a New York Times Op-Ed by Jonathan Merritt published online Saturday, October 13, 2018, “It’s Getting Harder to Speak About God.” (It was published in print on Sunday, October 14, 2018, as “We Need to Talk About God.”) Merritt, son of a megachurch pastor and student of American religion, notes that while a great majority of Americans identify as Christian (of some sort), an overwhelming number of them are not comfortable speaking about faith and their religious experiences. Merritt helpfully quotes playwright Thornton Wilder, one particularly adept at mixing sound and vision, noting, “The revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem—new persuasive words for defaced or degraded ones.”  
 
The question becomes, what are the forces and consequences of defacing and degrading religious words? Scholars of religion know this problem all too well and likewise the strategies, rhetorical and conceptual, that thinkers have used to counter degradation. At stake is not just the ostensive object of holy words—God, gods, spirits, Buddha nature, Nirvana or whatever. Also at stake, although Merritt just hints at it, is the reach, depth, and nuance of human existence. What is defaced is the universe of discourse for articulating the highest human aspirations as human aspirations whatever else they might be, say, heaven, theosis or salvation. As the great poet Czeslaw Milosz once remarked, religious ideas have become as abstract for modern people as the highest forms of physics. The public is losing the vocabulary to articulate living aspirations. And this means that we also increasingly lack the means to express the depth and self-denigration of human life: sin, guilt, evil, estrangement and so on. 
 
The loss of voice defaces religious words, but it also flattens human life rendering people mute about the ambiguous and fraught texture of their existence. Merritt’s research, based on a study by The Journal of Positive Psychology, shows a decline over the last century of “virtue discourse” and so words like patience, gentleness, faithfulness, kindness, and thankfulness. Simply listen to the political speech in this country, late-night comedians, street protests, and the like to get the point. There is a reflexive dynamic to human speech: what we say reflects who we are and shapes what we are becoming. Words matter, greatly. 
 
Again, what are the causes of this defacement of religious and moral discourse? The answers, it seems, are many: forces of secularization, the rise and dominance of economic, biological, and scientific discourse, the death of any meaningful religious education, outrage at the hypocrisy and abuse so rampant in churches, among other religious communities, the blatant manipulation of religious terms by politicians, evangelists, and even businesses in order to sell policies, salvation, and brands. In fact, it is not that religious and moral discourses somehow disappear. Rather they migrate from a rhetorical “home” into other cultural and social spheres where they are defaced and degraded by the purposes driving those spheres: political power, church size, or economic success. The public discussion of religion is so woefully impoverished that it renders people mute about their highest aspirations as well as their deepest faults.
 
This is not to say that we need gatekeepers or language police for religious and moral discourse! Our cultural moment does suggest that we need to reclaim and replenish religious and moral vocabularies for the human work they can and should do. Religious and moral thinkers have long faced the problem of the defacement of discourse. Consider just the monotheistic traditions. Christian theologians have engaged in God-talk in terms of the supreme eminence—God is that which none greater can be conceived, to cite St. Anselm—or the way of negation—God at once is and is not that which we say or think about God. Muslim thinkers note the ninety-nine names of God and the Rabbis engaged in endless commentary and debate about God and scripture. The problem is that language and the human mind tend to substantialize God, to attribute “thingness” to God, and thus reduce the divine to an object like any other object. Obviously, God is “male” because the Bible calls him “Father!” Religious language is defaced, then, when God is equated with our thoughts and ideas about God and so ready for political, religious, and economic agendas. 
 
Little wonder, then, that a culture saturated with images—on TV, the media and the like—God too becomes an image, a thing. And little wonder, too, that reflective people find this to be childish fantasy while also losing the capacity to speak about their aspirations and faults. Worse still biblical literalists perpetuate the problem even as the so-called “mainline churches” hesitate to unfold the riches of their traditions in order to address it. One task of religious thinking in this environment is to shatter the images and ideas and words we toss around when speaking of God. Religious thinkers throughout the ages have undertaken just such a task while also providing ways to speak rightly and profoundly about the reach and ambiguity of human life.
 
An analogous degrading is found in public moral discourse. We have squeezed the whole of the moral life with its richness and ambiguity—so hope, hate, love, forgiveness, betrayal, responsibility, attention, deceit and so on—into a few words: rights and wrongs, duties, choice, freedom. The meaning of these words is endlessly debated in public while the vast ocean of the moral life is rendered mute. Thankfully moral thinkers, mostly women (think of Iris Murdoch, the late Mary Midgley, Martha Nussbaum and others), have sought to reclaim a richer discourse. Yet in a society where the astonishing diversity of peoples and beliefs often makes law the arbiter of human relations, it is not surprising that our moral vocabulary is a matter of rights and wrongs. The deep inwardness of the moral life, like the pangs of conscience, the rage of anger, or the wanderings of desire, is defaced. In this situation, the task is not the slaying of idols, but to return moral reflection to the texture of lived reality.
 
The point of Sightings is not to advocate answers to religious and moral problems; that is left up to each and every reader to determine. The purpose of these columns is to seek to understand the public appearance of religion. Sometime the appearance of religion is under its opposite, as, for instance, when religious muteness betrays deep longings to articulate the reach of human aspirations and the depth of human faults. Whatever the case, a public that is mute about religion is at the whims of those who would exploit people’s hope and their trust. ​

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William Schweiker (PhD’85) is the Edward L. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor of Theological Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

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Sightings is edited by Joel Brown, a PhD student in Religions in America at the Divinity School. Sign up here to receive Sightings via email. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter.