At the Washington Times, columnist Julia Duin writes about a Zen meditation group that meets in a Congregational church. Led by Sister Rose Mary Dougherty of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, the group’s members include a Baptist and a Catholic-turned-Quaker. They told Duin how Zen meditation had “deepened” their lives and helped them understand themselves better.
In Zen parlance, this is known as “gedo,” or “outside way,” Zen. Gedo is Zen practice applied to religions other than Buddhism or to develop supernatural power. I do not know if anyone ever succeeded with the supernatural power thing, but there’s nothing at all new about plugging Zen practice into other religions.
My impression is that mixing together of religious traditions has been more common in Asia than in the West. The government of Japan recognizes more than 150 schools of Buddhism, but these are nearly all sub-schools or combinations of Kegon, Shingon, Tendai, Pure Land, Zen, and Nichiren Buddhism, sometimes with elements of Shinto, Confucianism and even Christianity mixed in. In China many "Buddhist" temples are as much Taoist or Confucian as they are Buddhist.
Certainly mixing of religious traditions happens in the West, but on the whole westerners seem less free-wheeling about it. However, recently I've run into a number of essays claiming (usually with disapproval) that "mix-and-match" religion is on the rise. And I suspect it is.
Never before in the history of humankind have so many different religions been practiced side-by-side, and never before have the teachings of all religions been so easily accessed through the Web and mass media. However, if one looks at the recently released American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), the most obvious trend is that the percentage of Christians in America is shrinking and the percentage of those with no religion is growing. Growth of other religions, including Buddhism, seems relatively static. I don't see much "mixing" in the numbers, although perhaps the survey didn't ask the right questions.
I read about the ARIS survey on a different blog last week I think. I definitely feel the questions weren’t good enough to get more accurate results. There just seems to be something fishy about it. Though I think the overall trends are probably accurate enough.
A growing number of “unchurched” people sounds about right to me, but I agree with Barbara that perhaps this survey did not ask the right questions. Religion surveys, I suspect, do not distinguish between belief and identity. Loads of people feel, say, Jewish identity or Catholic identity without necessary actually practicing or even truly believing in those religions. One might ask if a non-practicing Catholic who practices Zen is really mixing and matching anything at all. It can be a touch call.