CATTI二级口译精讲第38讲讲义

篇章练习（二）

The United States has become “the most religiously diverse nation in the world,” according to Harvard’s Diana Eck in her 2001 book, The New Religious America. Today, Eck writes, the United States has at least 1,200 mosques and more Muslims than Episcopalians, with Islamic faithful and worship houses increasing while several mainstream Protestant denominations are in mild decline. //

Depending on whose figures you use, Muslims have passed or are just about to pass Jews as a share of the American population1. Meanwhile, Eck argues that Los Angeles has become “the most complex Buddhist city in the world” and America has become “the most religiously diverse nation in the world”. The Founders dreamed that America would be a land of spiritual freedom. Americans are now exercising that freedom to a degree perhaps unprecedented in history. The Founders would be proud, if not bewildered, to hear that it is now respectable to be a witch. //

The rise of plural beliefs2 in the United States should not suggest that Christianity is in decline. Far from it3: the Christian faith has flourished alongside rival beliefs4. According to an April 2001 Gallup poll, 82 percent of Americans now describe themselves as Christian—down only a little from 89 percent in 1947, when Gallup began polling on this subject. In the same April 2001 poll, 10 percent put themselves into all non-Christian faith categories, and 8 percent said they were not believers. Christians outnumber adherents of all other beliefs by eight to one. //

Moreover, since World War II, numbers for American Christianity are up. Media commentary tends to drum on attendance declines among the mainstream Protestant denominations. For instance, the Episcopal and Presbyterian churches contracted throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and the losses didn’t stop until the 1990s. But though some liberal Christian denominations may be down, the faith's traditional subsets are thriving. So is the share of Americans who view themselves as Christian. //

Consider the population math. If children were treated as having the same faiths as their parents, the 89 percent Christian share of the U.S. population just after World War II meant that America held about 130 million Christians. The 82 percent share of Christians in today's much larger population means there are now about 230 million American Christians.5 One hundred million new Christians in just 50 years!6 This single figure swamps all other religious data for the contemporary United States and may swamp all religious data in the nation's history, considering that adding the first 100 million Christians to the country's population took roughly two centuries. //

That America could become religiously diverse while remaining basically Christian would surely have pleased the Founders.7 Most of them assumed as a matter of course that the new nation would be Christian. George Washington, for example, said in his farewell address that Christianity would be essential if the nation was to have moral character. //

The freedom of religion that the Founders had in mind was to choose among Christian denominations or to reject Christianity and embrace no faith. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which he called an achievement equal to writing the Declaration of Independence, his aim was to protect people's freedom to revere Jesus in whatever way seemed fitting to them and to prevent state legislatures from "establishing" any particular Christian denomination. //

Thanks to the Founders' instincts regarding separation of church and state, all faiths are flourishing in the United States. Attendance at religious services is higher here than in any other Western nation and by some measures higher than in any nation in the world. Today 57 percent of Americans say they regularly attend a worship service. Membership in religious faiths has steadily increased as well. At the turn of the 20th century, 41 percent of Americans considered themselves a formal member of some faith. Today that share has grown to 70 percent. //

Self-described faith membership is much lower in other Western nations and observance lower still. Only 10 percent of people in the United Kingdom and Sweden regularly attend church, 15 percent in France and Germany, 20 percent in Italy, about 25 percent in Israel. Yet all these nations have official, or near-official, sanctioned religions. //

Religious observance is lower in Western Europe. Maybe it is because of the lingering memories of the bloody warfare that faith has caused in the Old World8, whereas North America was mainly spared the curse of killing in the name of religion. It is also very likely that Americans accept faith because government has nothing to do with it. This may be an ominous sign for advocates of faith-based government spending; in the long run, anything that connects the state and religion may only dilute faith. //

That helps explain some public ambivalence about President Bush's proposed expansion of federal support for faith-based organizations. The best study was conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. It found that 75 percent favored the basic idea and yet that 78 percent opposed allowing government-funded religious groups to discriminate against those who violated tenets of their faith, which was an essential clause of the Bush proposal. More than three-quarters of Pew's respondents said religion could contribute to solving the country's problems. But 68 percent also worried that getting government "too involved" with spiritual organizations would be bad for faith. //

(Adapted from “Religion in America: The New Ecumenicalism” by Gregg Easterbrook, The Brookings Review, Winter 2002 Vol.20 No.1 pp. 45-48) 来源:可可英语 http://www.kekenet.com/kouyi/201408/318577.shtml