Richard Rodriguez: On Religion in America

Bill Moyers has a very interesting program called "Faith and Reason". You can catch the program on a PBS station. Richard Rodriguez was the most recent guest of the program. Here are a few of his quotes:

"You learn in America to speak two ways. You learn in public discourse not to be very specific about your religious life. Or, if we talk about it, we'll find a secular way of doing it that will not be offensive to people of non-belief. So, that you go through life with these alternate voices."
--Richard Rodriguez

For Rodriguez, who grew up in what he calls a "medieval village," a small town where the "only people [he] knew were Catholics," part of the appeal of Catholicism is the sense of certainty and belonging provided by what he sees as the Catholic community's almost tribal sense of mutual belief.

Rodriguez feels that Americans are "communal people" who hunger for a sense of "communal assurance" that is harder to find in a more complex world. But at the same time, he feels that we hunger for individuality.

Rodriguez made some interesting points about America's conflict in the use of language. For example, in the political world the United States language uses the pronoun "I". Yet when you go to a church the emphasis is on "We".

How do we balance our need for community and individuality?