In his preamble to the new “Religion” issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, Lewis Lapham describes the downfall of traditional religion as he experienced it:
I came to my early acquaintance with the Bible in company with my first readings of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Bulfinch’s Mythology, but as an unbaptized child raised in a family unaffiliated with the teachings of a church, I missed the explanation as to why the stories about Moses and Jesus were to be taken as true while those about Apollo and Rumpelstiltskin were not.
Four years at Yale College in the 1950s rendered the question moot. It wasn’t that I’d missed the explanation; there was no explanation to miss, at least not one accessible by means other than the proverbial leap of faith.
Further on, he articulates a religious vision of his own:
I take it as a task of the twenty-first century to come forward with the fabrication of an image of the divine more closely allied with the strands in the double helix and the structure of the cell, an image that reburies in the desert sand the murderous fiats of Moses and Muhammad and are therefore more useful to societies destined to remain God-fearing. Accept religion as a work of the human imagination (the God made in man’s image one and the same with the man made in God’s image) and the means of creation is not a brooding upon the waters or an engineering of the firmament, but the telling of a story.
“God,” he continues, “is the greatest of man’s inventions.” Read more at Lapham’s Quarterly.