Listening through the rain

If you listen closely, you can hear a lot of things. Even when it's raining.

In late July, our family spent a waterlogged week taking in general information sessions and tours of several colleges and universities in Massachusetts. On a wet Friday, while dodging numerous puddles, my wife and I trudged across the Harvard University campus wearing hastily purchased plastic ponchos, with our daughters either doing without or sporting a more useful umbrella. In Harvard Yard, we listened to a rising junior named Katie tell us about this fabled place, the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States.

"Over there is the president's office. Thirty freshmen, hand-picked by the president, live in dorm rooms on the upper floors of her building." Interesting. "Over there is the dorm, called Weld House, where John F. Kennedy lived as a freshman during the 1936-'37 academic year after dropping out of Princeton the year before due to illness." More interesting. "And there is the John Harvard statue. Visitors regularly pass by it each day, all day, and touch his foot." What Katie didn't tell us is that a custom at this tradition-laden school is to urinate on the Harvard statue at night, apparently every night. Disgusting. Fortunately, one of our children was well aware of this nocturnal practice and we demurred at touching Harvard's toe.

Katie also showed us Memorial Church, the official chapel of the university. "Services are held each weekday at 8:45 and at 11 o'clock on Sunday, or so I understand."

"Or so I understand." If you listen closely, you can hear a lot of things. Even when it's raining.

What I heard is, Katie doesn't go to chapel. The service times were part of the tour information she was expected to memorize but she had no personal experience of Memorial Church. Katie knew the faculty-student ratio, knew the specific requirements to graduate, knew the admission rate, which, by the way, for 2012-2013 was a mere 5.9 percent, et al. Not a word, though, about Harvard University having religious roots. Nothing about John Harvard being a minister of the Gospel. We did hear that Harvard was founded in 1636 by the Massachusetts Bay Colony but with nary a reference to it being a religious group, namely the fabled Puritans. The Puritans landed in 1630 with Gov. John Winthrop proclaiming the community settled on Christian principles will be a "city on a hill." The admissions office apparently thinks the tourists should connect the dots.

I don't blame Katie. I'm sure she relayed all the information she was trained to say. It seems clear to me, however, that the admissions office airbrushed out of the tour spiel Harvard's religious roots.

Katie is obviously bright and articulate and surely will achieve her dream of becoming a medical doctor. She is representative, though, of what is happening in our country. A wide swath of the United States pays fealty to civil religion -- namely general religious ideas interwoven with American values. More and more of our fellow citizens identify with no church at all. Fully 20 percent of Americans, the highest percentage since records have been kept, say they have "no preference," according to the Pew Forum on Religious Life.

There are those who suggest this significant level of apathy is a great opportunity for the church -- a post-Christendom chance to relay the Gospel of Christ to an increasingly unbelieving society. Perhaps it is. Perhaps there are modern-day versions of St. Paul out there, going to the American version of Athens and helping folks discover that God is not unknown but has been most fully revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

But all I can think of as I write this column is a fresh-faced Harvard coed saying, "or so I understand." Yes, if you listen closely, you can hear a lot of things. Even when it's raining.

Dr. Jeff Long is executive director of the Chateau Girardeau Foundation, is a part-time instructor at Southeast Missouri State University in religious studies and is a retired United Methodist pastor.