Karen Armstrong, "Does God Have a Future?"

In 1981, Karen Armstrong published Through the Narrow Gate, a controversial account of her experiences as a Sister of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, a Roman Catholic order. Armstrong had left the convent and the Church in 1972, "wearied by religion" and "worn out by years of struggle" and then spent the intervening years pursuing a doctorate in literature and teaching at a girls' school. Although she was gratified by the success of her book, Armstrong has described the real turning point in her life as having occurred during a series of trips she made to Jerusalem beginning in 1982. Shocked both by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and by the Palestinian intifada, Armstrong found herself questioning just how much Westerners-herself, included-knew or understood about the living conditions and the beliefs of Muslims living in the Middle East.

After realizing that Westerners "were posing as a tolerant and compassionate society and yet passing judgments from a position of extreme ignorance and irrationality," Armstrong committed herself to combating cross-cultural misperceptions and religious misunderstandings. She has written a number of books that explore relations between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, including Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World (1991); Mohammed: A Biography of the Prophet (1992); and Islam: A Short History (2000). She has also written, more recently, a biography, Buddha (2001), and The Battle for God (2000), a study of the rise of fundamentalism.

The selection that follows comes from A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, where Armstrong sets out to catalog ways that Jews, Christians, and Muslims have named and understood the experience of the divine. While working on this book, Armstrong has said that she came to understand the difference between religion per se and neurological conditions that skeptics believe are at the root of mystical visions and insights: "the difference is compassion," Armstrong notes, "which in religion is ethically based." By asking, "Does God have a future?" Armstrong bids her readers to consider what roles organized religion and personal experiences of the divine will have in the years to come.  

Armstrong, Karen. "Does God Have a Future?" A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Knopf, 1993), 377-399.
Digital image, biographical information, and opening and closing quotations drawn from the Random House web site.
Middle quotation drawn from M.M. Ali's profile of Karen Armstrong in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Feb. 1993, p. 38.

Links to Explore:

Fundamentalism Defined:from the University of Virginia's New Religious Movement's web site, a brief history of the rise of fundamentalism in the United States, along with links to prominent centers of fundamentalism.

International Testimony to an Infallible Bible: organization founded in 1976 to create an international meeting place for Christian fundamentalists, includes links to the group's definition of what a fundamentalist believes and recommended articles explaining the necessity of separating from the world.

World Database of Happiness: "an ongoing register of scientific research on subjective appreciation of life," this site includes data measuring happiness worldwide.

Mark Arkin's Review of Karen Armstrong's A History of God: originally published in The New Criterion in January 1994.

Questions for Learning:

• Fundamentalism Defined, on the New Religious Movement's web site, includes Jeffrey Hadden's description of the four types of fundamentalism: theological, political, cultural, and global. Can you provide contemporary examples of these four kinds of fundamentalism? Can fundamentalism ever be anything but a pejorative term in secular society? Is secular society, for this reason, another form of fundamentalism?
  
  
• Karen Armstrong defines fundamentalism as a "highly political spirituality, it is literal and intolerant in its vision." She does not, obviously, consider herself to be a fundamentalist. What would a fundamentalist say in response to such a characterization? Do you find evidence on the International Testimony to an Infallible Bible web site that supports Armstrong's assessment? Do these members of this organization see themselves as intolerant?
  
  
• At the end of "Does God Have a Future?" Armstrong offers a grim assessment of the spiritual state of the world. One might reasonably ask how she knows that the spiritual health of the world's residents. Working from a very different tradition, the researchers who have compiled the World Database of Happiness purport to be working on scientifically defensible measures of happiness. What do you think of their methods? Does their data support Armstrong's assessment of the world's spiritual health in 1994? Has global happiness grown over diminished since the publication of her book?
  
  
• In his review of A History of God, Mark Arkin asserts that Armstrong:
  

  seeks to remake the deity into a form that would suit her personal needs, having, as she confides on several occasions, discarded the Catholicism of her childhood. In the process, she diminishes the beliefs of those who would seek to live within the confines of a traditional faith and particularly those who find in the doctrines of sin and redemption through grace-the radical otherness of God-a path through this fallen and tragic world.

  Do you think this is a fair criticism of what Armstrong has written in the chapter, "Does God Have a Future?" If a reader like Arkin wouldn't care for Armstrong's argument, what kind of reader would? What do you make of the fact that, despite Arkin's strong criticism of Armstrong's scholarly and intellectual accomplishments, Armstrong has gone on to become an internationally recognized spokesperson on religious issues of every sort?

Questions for Connecting:

• We might say that in "Waiting for a Jew: Marginal Redemption at the Eighth Street Shul," Jonathan Boyarin also takes on Armstrong's question, "Does God have a future?" But Boyarin poses the question in a rather different way, concerned less with the disappearance of God than with the disappearance of a community of believers. As he recalls, the religious community of his childhood is today "as obliterated as any shtetl in Eastern Europe." If the survival of God depends on the reinvention of such communities in the ways that Boyarin describes, then what are we to make of Armstrong's call for a turn away from a "personal God" and toward a more mystical religion? Will this turn renew waning communities of faith or will it only hasten their disappearance?

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