I want to say a few words about religion, Oak Park, and our presidential election.
First, mainstream religions have experienced long-term membership declines, including my Catholic religion. Young people are increasingly opting out of traditional means of expressing spirituality, including attending church.
This can be put down to a number of causes, including an increasingly secular society, scandals, including the sexual assault scandals like those in the Catholic Church, and backward-looking religious leadership bent on preserving the past. Pope Francis cautions against church leaders being “museum keepers.”
In Oak Park, aging congregations have led to churches closing or cutting back, or merging, such as the four Catholic Churches in Oak Park being administered by one pastor.
In the midst of this decline, however, some new shoots are sprouting, including the many religious communities and non-religious folks working together to meet urgent needs. One recent example is how the Oak Park community banded together to support undocumented migrants who arrived in the West Side of Chicago and Oak Park over the last year.
The Migrant Ministry at St. Edmund, the housewares and furnishings ministry at Boulevard Presbyterian Church, and the Oak Park Supports Facebook group, are fine examples of collaboration between secular and religious organizations to serve the poor.
And while young people turn away from organized religion, at St. Giles/St. Catherine-St. Lucy, 150 high-schoolers attended an annual summer trip to Appalachia to repair the homes of residents, making them water tight and safe.
Examples like this make me scratch my head when I read that 80 percent of Evangelicals nationally support Donald Trump for President. The man who rode down the golden escalator and classified migrants as “murderers and rapists” continues to do so as an applause line in his stump speech. And then there are JD Vance traditionalists, Catholics who seek to replace the Beatitudes with culture wars focused on transsexuals, cat ladies and book banning.
Maybe their thought process began with overturning Roe v. Wade, but they now see a national ban on abortion in reach. So conservative Christians are almost all-in with Trump. This is so even as Trump reads opinion poll tea leaves and pretends to be both pro-life and in favor of what traditionalists and Evangelicals call “unnatural” interventions such as in vitro fertilization (IVF). And depending on the day, he is either for and against the Florida ban on abortion after six weeks.
So we are at a fork in the road (again) politically. But maybe also religiously.
Maybe Vance is right that spirituality is nothing more than reciting a checklist of this or that political program under the guise of “family values” and Christian Nationalism.
But maybe our experience lately in Oak Park shows a different way forward, or a new way in.
Only time will tell.