Honolulu Star-Bulletin from Honolulu, Hawaii • 103

The Suoday Star-Bulletin e. Advertiser Honolulu, June S. 978 F-3 Americans seen turning from traditional religion alslike the Catholic Church's charismatic (evangelical) movement and renaissance of lay participation, are highly visible and imbued with a significance disproportionate to their members' numbers. Some of the important things actually occurring in contemporary religion are the following: A breakdown in the importance of institutional structures and high-level intellectual religious life; An augmentation of the role of laity, of small groups, and of personal experience whether evangelical. Catholic or Eastern.

WE ARE WITNESSING, in other words, a transformation of today's large, monolithic religious structures into small entities, both with society and within the believers' minds. Yet this is occurring in the midst of a popular spiritual thirst that remains unquenched. Thus, a growing number of Americans are slackening their spiritual thirst by being "born again" or discovering enlightenment amid the shelter of a small group of kindred souls and without excessive benefit of clergy. One way to get a handle on this process is to think of it as the last stage in the process known as "secularization." which has been going on in Western society for several centuries. This process does, not entail the death of religion, only changes in its societal role and structure.

For there is no historical evidence that secularization creates a decline in interest in religious issues or de The writer is the Bishop James W. Bashford Professor of Oriental Studies at University of Southern California 's School of Religion. By ROBERT S. ELLWOOD JR. i Lot Anprlrt Timet Service Something, everyone agrees, is going on in American religion.

But there is little agreement on what is actually happening, and this clash of perceptions clouds all assessments of its significance, which may be more disheartening than it looks. Certainly the drums keep beating the message of change. During the past two years, both national news weeklies, a television network and a variety of respected newspapers and periodicals have noted the apparent renaissance of evangelical Christianity and the growth of various ultra-orthodox Jewish groups. Jimmy Carter's "born again" Southern Baptism was a much-discussed if ultimately minor issue in the last presidential campaign and, since then, it seems that nearly every political commentator has become something of an expert on the social implications of Protestant fundamentalism. BUT APPEARANCES are often deceiving, and 1 for one suspect that what we have here is something less than meets the eye.

Just as the advent of an Aquarian Age Consciousness 111, which was so widely prophesied during the 1960s, never quite came to pass, I believe that 10 years from now the latest "Great Awakening" will have come and gone, leaving a perceptible though not overwhelming imprint on America's spiritual psyche. For despite all the ballyhoo, polls conducted in 1976 and 1977 showed that somewhere between 25 percent and 35 percent of all adult Americans adhere to evangelical faiths. That proportion sounds impressive, but as most historians of American religion would agree, it has not changed in at least a century, though the evangelicals' absolute numbers have grown along with the nation's population. Moreover, despite the highly publicized conversions of a number of celebrities and popular athletes, a Gallup Poll conducted last year showed that the average American evangelical is still most likely to be a white woman over 50 years of age, possessed of a high school education and living in a small Southern town. HOWEVER, that same Gallup Poll revealed a trend which, while not nearly so widely publicized, is at least as significant as the current evangelical ferment.

According to the survey, 4 percent of all Americans over 18 years of age are into Transcendental Meditation, while 3 percent practice Yoga, 2 percent embrace "mysticism" and 1 percent adhere to an "Eastern Religion." In other words, 10 percent of the adult American population now. practices some "unconventional" form of spirituality. These people, according to Gallup, tend to be single, college-educated and living alone on the East or West Coast. If this movement of approximately 14 million individuals had actually sprung into being since the 1960s, it would be far greater news than the purported evangelical awakening. But here again, the historian of religion is likely to deny the novelty of this phenomenon.

Indeed, for more than 100 years Americans including such admired and influential thinkers as Ralph Waldo Emerson. Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman have allowed an abiding interest in the spirituality of the East to coexist with their more conventional evangelicism, Catholicism and the rest. RELIGION IS lively and changing if not necessarily in the ways apparent to the pundits. But the nature of these changes does show why the evangelical and mystical reviv stroys the individual's desire for religious expression. Certainly, that has not been the case in the very secular 20th Century.

Rather, secularization has forced religion to become increasingly divorced from the major structures of society first from economics, then from the state (which for all practical purposes ended state churches), then from educa- Lot Angtttt Tlnwt ermine religious life, and a different relation of religion to Western culture as a whole. Folk religion lacks historical sense, since history is carried by the great tradition. American religion is becoming more "folk" as it adapts, more and more the modes of contemporary culture, and abandons its sense of being part of a tradition stretching back to the Middle Ages and beyond. Clearly, failure to arrest this trend will mean the end of organized reli-, gion's intellectual and moral influence in American society. Perhaps the uniquely religious American people will wish to prevent this; haps they will be satisfied to express their spirituality in increasingly private, subjective and nonintellectual fashions.

In either case, the jury is still out on American religion and the workings of its destiny mainstreams of contemporary national and cultural life pursue different courses, like passing ships whose lights are barely seen over the horizon. Religion has its private glories and apocalypses, science and culture have theirs, and today they seem to neither fraternize nor to argue despite the fact they often coexist in the same human breasts. WHAT THIS STRANGE state of affairs suggests is that, in anthropological terms, American religion is a technological society's equivalent of a folk religion rather than religion in the great tradition of Western culture. This process has nothing to do with vitality, or religion's ability to meet the spiritual needs of individuals folk religions often are intensely practiced and meet ordinary needs very well. They can even exercise great political power.

But it does mean a different structure of tion, and finally, from those sorts of religious institutions which parallel the major institutions of modern society. In other words, secularization spells an end to the great professional, bureaucratic, and monolithic churches. Consider the intellectual scene. In the last generation, theological giants like Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Reinhold and Richard Niebuhr were able to hold their own in the academic world. They were taken seriously, both by scholars and the general public, as they built sophisticated bridges between religion and culture.

But no one would argue that even the most admired of today's religious leaders are intellectual adepts in the sense of Tillich or Barth, however well these contemporary prophets play the role of spiritual populist. Instead, today's religion and the Farewell to Hawaii Crime-law reform drags By RICHARD L. STROUT Christian Science Monitor Service understand each other pretty well, "I (N.B. old English); after all what Englishman worth his salt would not understand. "You wan' beef bran?" As good yeomen of England we have always liked to have our beef and eat it.

WE HAVE DONE OUR share of fighting and conquering too as a nation, but recently perhaps because of our diminished status in world affairs, we are more peaceful in outlook, as individuals and as a nation. True, we have "punch-ups," after some soccer matches (football to many is our national disease Oh! football equals soccer) but our police do not carry guns and by the time the average copper, (bobby, policemen) has drawn his truncheon (a short club), the villain has usually run away. We then apprehend our criminals by a process of deduction and elimination in the true Sherlock Holmes' manner, although if the truth be known most of us, including our policemen, are more Doctor Watsonish, and not clear, incisive Holmes types. I must say, I am struck by the1 pace of your lives in what should be a somnolent tropical atmosphere. You seem to be always going places, and perhaps as member of a No.

2 nation, this is inevitable. When we, the British, were a No. 1 nation the pace of life was essentially slower horse drawn carriages, and sailing ships a lot of people still walked too. AS WE HAVE SLID down the league table of powerful nations I think we have still retained some of the slower pace of former times in much of our national life. "That's precisely why we are slidin' down, The writer is Mary Helen Kaser's exchange teacher at Roosevelt High School.

Mrs. Kaser and her husband Tom, Advertiser education writer on leave of absence, have been living in Roberts' home in England tor the past year while Mrs. Kaser teaches in Roberts' school there. By BRIAN ROBERTS Soon. I will return to the land of my birth England.

There will be mixed feelings about leaving this tropical isle, which has turned my formerly lily-white legs an off-white color which I persuade myself is a golden brown. The islanders and their devotion to physical fitness have not, alas, radically affected my basically puny physique, and in spite of plenty of swimming, my torso remains slender and lightly muscled. Jogging has fascinated me. I confess, but I am a non-participating devotee and still relish the idea of a brisk walk in England's cooler clime, with the lure of good English beer to follow a not too strenuous walk. i'j GOING TO MARKET was an expression I only know in relation to the nursery rhyme: To market, to market to buy a fat pig Home again, home again Jiggity jig Here I guess it means going to the stores, which is still foreign to my ears as I have always said, "going to the shops" or "going In spite of these and many other linguistic differences, I am sure Bernard Shaw was overstating the case when he said our two nations Brit-' ain and the USA were two nations divided by a common language.

We IT REPLACES ALL present law on sentencing, probation, and parole with a system of fixed prison terms, and sets up a new institution a sentencing commission to draw up guidelines for judges. It terminates a major tenet of much current social philosophy society does not send people to prison primarily for rehabilitation, it says, but to punish'1 them, to get them out of the way, to protect the public- This means the end of the indeterminate sentence by which prisoners reduced their penalty by good behav-! ior (for example, three to 10 years for robbery). The present parole boards would be things of the past. It would provide shorter initial sentences in many' cases, but since they would not be reduced by parole, the actual time in jail would be higher. This probably means a larger prison population.

Hardly any law with criminal penalties is excluded the Sherman Antitrust Act. the Clayton the Con-trolled Substances Act. The measure has a staggering sweep. Much public argument is over civil the position of the press, the government's right to wiretap, and the like but subjects covered go far beyond that. DEFENDING THE DELAY in approving the revi-" sion is Rep.

Peter W. Rodino. chairman of the'" House Judiciary Committee. He promises "most careful and precise The judgment of 'the subcommittee to proceed slowly was a unanimous decision." 1 goin' to the dogs, damn it!" I can hear some old Tory say in his London club, as he wakes up from his after-lunch nap, "No drive! Workers too damn idle." He probably falls asleep again beneath his copy of The Times. I can sense my endeavor at lightness evaporating as I touch, ever so slightly, on "work" and "politics." and yet I feel we must strive for good humor in our everyday affairs.

The world of nuclear weapons and foreign policy is a serious world over which we, as individuals, seem to have little control. We can, however, influence people; we can smile, try to understand and help our neighbors, which is what your renowned aloha spirit is all about. I wish you all well, in this beautiful state and particularly here at Roosevelt. Don't let big business destroy you, or rather dictate all of your lifestyles and aspirations. I will carry a powerful image from here of strong, brown, young men riding the big waves.

The image encapsulates ideas of youth, beauty, courage, strength, and the immense power of nature. The cars, the fantastic variety of goods, the luxury items may in one way be necessary but they are not what life should be about, and every young person who braves the deep and every old one who attempts the marathon knows that. WE ENGLISH have had to fight to keep our overpopulated countryside and mountains free, open to all and fairly unspoiled. You Hawaiians, are doing the same, but the threats and pressures on your environment are greater. Cherish your wild places and keep a place also in your society for some of the wilder individuals on this planet the non-conformers the guys who don't agree with you, who look We have plenty of freaks and unusual minorities in Britain and I think we gain from maintaining a society that does not expect all to conform.

All is becoming similarly bland, from our beer to our educational methods. Napoleon once described the English as a "nation of small shop keepers." I like to think we are a nation of eccentric individuals who have agreed to live in a sort of harmony. We have been fortunate I know with our long, relatively stable political development and I am sure the more positive, aggressive American individual must regard the Britisher as a peculiar character. I hope I have done nothing to dispel that myth, as to be fully understood would be very boring. Fare thee well, ye good people of Roosevelt High School.

My stay has been rewarding, but England's fair green land calls one of her sons home. Aloha! WASHINGTON The greatest proposed codification of criminal law in American history passed the Senate overwhelmingly and stands awaiting House action. Reformers rub their eyes; after 10 years of agitation and study they can't believe they are now going to see the monumental work complete. They are right they probably aren't. That codification is needed nearly everybody agrees.

That it will occur at any time soon seems dubious. FOR 200 YEARS rules of federal criminal procedure have collected in the laws like pieces of furniture in a cobwebby attic; it was agreed a decade ago that a housecleaning is long overdue. Unanswered questions included: Should interference with a federal carrier pigeon be a criminal offense? It's the law. Is it fair for a judge to sentence a malefactor to five years in prison while another judge in another district lets the culprit off with a warning for the same offense? There is presently wide disparity in sentencing. Other conditions have changed too.

"Thirty dollars or thirty days" seems no more in balance today than some of the other features of the present laws. The Senate undertook the monumental work of recodification of the whole structure of American criminal law in Lyndon Johnson's day; after seven years' work during the Nixon and Ford administrations. Senator John L. McClellan, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, presented his huge compilation, S. 1.

in early 1975. It immediately was denounced by liberals for placing harsh restrictions on civil liberties. MANY JURISTS and students joined in the criticism. The committee yielded ground. It made another attack on the subject and compromises were worked out through a deal between two oddly paired senators, conservative Strom Thurmond, and Edward Kennedy.

D-Mass. Kennedy is expected soon to become chairman of the important committee. A "telephone-book" measure was compiled of 682 pages. At the last minute three provisions were added from the floor, tightening the Logan Act, which restricts citizens' dealings with foreign countries, establishing a system of preventive detention, and forbidding sending information on abortion through the mails. The bill then passed Jan.

30, 72-15. Supporters couldn't believe it. Some 3,000 laws written over 200 years are involved; the musty legal attic would be cleaned out at last, they hoped. Not so. House judicial subcommittees looked dispassionately at the Senate's huge work of unification, ratification, and codification.

There have been subsequent days of hearings before the criminal justice subcommittee, chaired by Rep. James R. Mann, and the surface is barely scratched. Criminal law, says Chairman Mann, "should not be subject to trade-offs and compromise in the name of reform." Few laymen realize the extraordinary ramifications of the present bill. i "Hey! You have to sign these 24 forms, in duplicate, for the pail and broom!".