Though Eastern and Earth-centered religions are spreading rapidly in America, they are still widely regarded as eccentric and outside the mainstream. Eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism contain thousands of years of wisdom, and Westerners have much to learn from them. But they are based on cultures fundamentally different from this one. A Hindu or Buddhist America would require not merely great religious change, but great cultural change as well. Given that American culture is proving to be the most unstoppable force on the globe, it is hard to imagine.
The anti-technological bias of Earth-centered religions pits them against the other of this era's unstoppable forces. Pop culture visions of a neopagan America usually begin with an ecological holocaust that stops technology in its tracks. Short of such a catastrophe, America is unlikely to turn away from its technology, and unlikely to be dominated by an Earth-centered religion.
Historical monotheism and Scientism, on the other hand, are rival establishments engaged in a perpetual struggle for power, symbolized by such issues as school prayer or the teaching of evolution. It is natural to imagine the future as belonging to one or the other of them, either in the form of a Christian revival (as in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), or as the rational, postreligious world of the original Star Trek television series. As we shall see, however, there are good reasons why neither combatant can win out, and why I believe that the future will take a different course entirely.
The Infertility of Christianity
Christians tend to be embarrassed by (or to deny entirely) the extent to which their religion has changed over the centuries, but they shouldn't be. In generation after generation, people have faced challenges unforeseen by their ancestors, and though they have often needed to discard the ideas and practices that had been handed down to them, they have been able to find in the Christian myths, symbols, and sacred texts the wherewithal they needed to construct a viable religion for their times. Such an ability to provide new meaning and guidance in unforeseen circumstances is an essential virtue if a religion is to endure. It is a virtue that late 20th century Christianity is in danger of losing.
The Moral Inadequacy of Scientism
Would a Scientistic, postreligious society lack for anything that religion might have given it? I believe that it would. Though such a society may not lack for moral values, it would lack the ability to create new moral values. A Scientistic society could retain moral values from a prior religion, and might even implement those values more efficiently than the religious society did. But as technological and social change distanced it from the vision of its religious ancestors, such a society would face a grim choice: It could continue to enforce an increasingly irrelevant and pointless morality, or it could replace the outmoded moral values with the only kind of values science understands--physical values like pleasure, lack of pain, or convenience.