Now it's a museum. Is Islam on the decline?
Raw Story loves a provocative headline, there's no doubt about that ('sokay, so do I).
Well, the first part is true; the reason for it, less so. As Neil Young is singing on my stereo just now, "In the fields of opportunity it's plowing time again!"
Hagia Sophia is the lesson from history, here. Originally a Greek Orthodox church, it was refashioned into an Islamic mosque.
The same sort of conversions have been taking place in Buffalo’s East Side. Many former Catholic churches have, over the years, been converted into other denominations – Baptist, African Methodist Episcopal and Evangelical – to accommodate the area’s African American community.Besides, I thought the big religious news in America was the rise of the "nones," not the replacement of Christianity for other world religions. And, of course, this isn't news in any sense of the word. There's an office building in Austin, Texas, near the neighborhood where I used to live, that was once a Catholic convent. Houston has a public library that was once a church. Lakewood Church has a church in what was once a basketball arena. I think it's interesting, but "as Christianity declines"?
But several former Christian churches in Buffalo’s East Side also now serve as sites of worship for other religions. Two mosques, Bait Ul Mamur Inc. Masjid and Masjid Zakariya, used to be Saint Joachim’s Roman Catholic Church and Holy Mother of Rosary Polish National Catholic Church, respectively.
Or is it as people move away from old neighborhoods, and new groups move in? Was the conversion to an Islamic mosque and a new name, Hagia Sophia, in 1453 a sign of the decline of Christianity? When I entered seminary, incoming students went on a retreat to a former Catholic seminary, in a building built to house priests in training (no sex jokes, please). The building was old, built when St. Louis was a major center for the Roman church. At the time I had an MG Midget, and if I could have gotten it into the building, I could have literally driven it down the halls of the dormitory, even turned around in those halls. The space was built to house several hundred people very comfortably, much more comfortably than the college dorm I spent two years in. That seminary had long ago closed, and the diocese leased the building for retreats like ours. Was that a sign of the decline of Christianity?
Churches close, or get repurposed, all the time. "Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang," Shakespeare wrote, and the reference to "choirs" was to ecclesiastical architecture, some of which fell into ruin in England when Henry VIII seized it from the Church in Rome. And what of the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E.? It wasn't the decline of Judaism, but it's birth (I mean the non-Temple centered religion that came to known as Judaism).
Really, this idea that the world was a harmonious unit that only began to fracture into complexity (and so "decline") is a silly and ignorant adolescent one. The real problem of decline is in the Great Barrier Reef and other problems; not in turning an abandoned building into something useful, like a brewery. Change happens; and sometimes, that's not a bad thing.
A few weeks ago I was traveling back home from a trip without any real deadline, so I detoured half hour out of the way to visit where I grew up for a period in the early 70's. It sits on the southern border of the Adirondack Mountains, an area poor then and poor now (at the time 90% of the school budget came from the state of NY). We attended a very small Methodist Church that shared a minister with a bigger church the next town over. 43 years later I was almost shocked to see the church still operating, and clearly was still sharing a minister with the same church since it now shared their name. Memory is a funny thing, I remember it as small, but it was barely bigger than a two car garage. Multiple times a year I drive through the nearby areas in the southern Adirondacks. Over the last 20+ years, we have watched small church after small church in the little towns and villages close. The buildings look worse and worse, then the for sale signs go up, often for years running. For the lucky ones that are bought and become local historical societirs, or homes, or at least given a coat of paint as they wait. Others are just decaying into nothing.
ReplyDeleteAn inner-city church that runs a food pantry and soup kitchen, andwhere I volunteer every month is going through a synod sponsored process to decide how to close. The congregation is very old and shrinking, many members having grown up in the church but now living in the suburbs. What comes next? Knowing them, they would be grateful to have it become a mosque, for they want it to stay a house of worship. This is the cycle. In small towns the population is shrinking, and families are having far fewer children. In the cities the population is shifting. The churches were built, consecrated and became places of worship. They will be de-consecrated and become something else. Time moves on.