It would be misleading to claim that all American religion at century’s end could be captured with one metaphor. From the beginning, we have argued that the lines drawn on the religious maps remain and have certain kinds of significance. But the metaphorical mountains and rivers have their own secrets, which are now being laid bare. All too visible are those features of the landscape and climate that do not show up on the maps where political and organizational lines have been drawn.
New line-drawing also goes on, among people like Robert J. Lifton’s “constrictive” types as well as among people of open outlook. These latter seekers pursue integral and organic outlooks and ways of life through what has been called ressourcement, a return to sources. Extreme forms of this retrieval occur in fundamentalist efforts to draw boundaries and hold adherents with them while they promote negative views of the “other.” Moderate forms of this also take the form of patterns of resistance against the erosive and dissolving elements in American life, its spiritual marketplaces and cafeteria lines.
In the new century, one may expect a continued drama among those who, like so many around the world, have at least three choices. Some turn tribal and exclusive within their boundaries. Others seek to choose communal life of a more open character but still respectful of boundaries. Still others heed the call to “pay no attention to boundaries” and then invent new kinds of responses.
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[b]Loss of Boundaries within the Self[/b]
Psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, in a book significantly titled Boundaries (1969), won concurrence among many readers with his observation that there was emergent a “protean†sort of individual, named after the god Proteus, who could take an infinite number of forms or guises. Lifton posed over against this a reactionary emergent that he called “constrictive,†one who, fearing that he or she might be overwhelmed by change and that his or her commitments and persona would be dissolved, built up strong psychic defenses and ruled out signals that were in any way uncongenial—a sort of fundamentalist-prone individual. The boundaryless individual was free to pick and choose among sets of religious symbols, to be eclectic, to live with apparent contradictions in attachments, to make fleeting commitments, and to refuse to be loyal to denned dogmatic or traditional systems. Boundaries between sacred and secular, religion and nonreligion, inherited religion and innovative impulses, assent to authority and radical claims for autonomy, characterized the protean person in matters of faith. Such a type developed partly in response to the market situation—so many options were available and bid for attention—as well as because of an increase in mobility, plus the appeals of mass communication, the contacts made with “others†in mass higher education, intermarriage, and the like (Lifton 1969).
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Then said I, Woe is me! for [b]I am undone[/b]; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts.
Isaiah 6:5