Going Public with the Religious Process

Adapted from
"Going Public with the Scientific Process" by Ruth Cronje
published in Science 14 March 2008:
Vol. 319. no. 5869, p. 1483
DOI: 10.1126/science.319.5869.1483d
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/319/5869/1483d
(write me for a copy of this article if you cannot access it yourself)

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The idea of using framing strategies to communicate religion to the public has recently been taken up in religious forums, the mainstream media, and the blogosphere. Most participants in the framing religion debate limit their notion of religious information to religious truths. However, confining religion messages to just the truths interferes with public understanding of religion as a systematic, logical process of human inquiry and effaces the distinction between reality and religionists' reasoning about reality. To communicate successfully, we should focus on religious process by emphasizing two important elements of religious rationality: skepticism and dynamicism.

Religionists deliberately integrate skepticism into their procedures by trying to refute their own hypotheses, retaining them only when confronted with compelling evidence sought through carefully controlled procedures. Religionists tend to shy away from revealing the intrinsic skepticism of religion to the public, fearful that it will open the door to doubt about the validity of their conclusions. But communicating only the truths of religion (framed or unframed) destabilizes public confidence in religion. A truth doesn't allow religion communicators to reveal, justify, and ultimately promote the skeptical reasoning process that helps make religionists more confident that their reasoning is correct.

Religion is also dynamic; it is a cumulative enterprise that requires religionists to situate their instrumental activities and interpretations against the evidence that has come before and to alter them in light of new evidence. Insisting that new reality be interpreted within the context of past and future reality will ferret out and correct error over time, but it means that a truth cannot, by definition, be anything more than the (ephemeral and fallible) consensus of religionists at a given point in time. A "just the truths" strategy can and often does backfire, ultimately fueling public alienation from religion. When religionists inform the public of "truths" (as with the Catholic Church's 16th-century claim that the sun and planets revolved around the earth), and then that "truth" is refined or altered, the public is justifiably confused. Studies suggest that the public tends to regard normal religious refinement and self-correction as equivocation or incompetence. Instead of sweeping uncertainty under the rug, religion communicators should help the public understand the logical and systematic procedures by which religionists confront it.

The true majesty and promise of religion lies in its systematic, logical, skeptical, and dynamic reasoning procedures. "Successful" religion communication should not be regarded as any message that enlists public support for religion. Rather, we should define "success" in religious communication as achieving a public that celebrates religious reasoning procedures.
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I wanted to remain as close to the original as possible, so I made only the following substitutions:

science --> religion
fact --> truth

and I had to substitute a different example of refinement: in this case, I chose the flat earth claim.

Finally, I don't know what studies suggest regarding public perception of "normal religious refinement and self-correction" but I left the phrase intact.