Joseph Cotto in a recent opinion column quotes a couple of polls in which around 20% of the respondents stated that religion is not an important element in their lives and less than half have confidence in organized religion. He notes that most of our major social institutions—political, financial, and the media—have lost the confidence of the American people. [1] The American people are disillusioned with all these institutions because they are more interested in power, prestige, and money than in the welfare of the people they serve.
Joseph Cotto is not the first to notice this loss of faith in organized religion. Years ago Evgeny Barabanov stated:
The world, of course, has abandoned the Church, since the traditional groove reserved for creativity turned out to be too restricted for man. . . Today it is not the Church but the world which is creating a new civilization, and it is solving the problems with which it is faced on the basis of its own understanding of existence.
Barabanov stated the reason Christians have abandoned participating in the transformation of the world is because it is too difficult and we have tried to make our religion simpler and easier by making it only a belief system. [2] But that is not the plan God has for us. As we have demonstrated in this blog, God requires that we change our soul so we become like him and that is difficult to do but it is something that is within the capability of each of us. What we will discover is that when our soul becomes more like God, we will participate in the transformation of our world.
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[1] Joseph Cotto, “Are we losing faith in religion?”, The Madison Courier, July 17, 2014, p. A3.
[2] Evgeny Barabanov, “Schism Between the Church and World”, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, ed., From Under the Rubble, New York: Bantam Books, 1975, pp. 180-186.
