Increase in "Cultural" Rather than Religious Jews

The August 14, 2009 edition of The Jewish Advocate, a venerable Boston-area Jewish weekly newspaper, reported that the proportion of "cultural Jews" has doubled over the past two decades to 37% of the U.S. Jewish population. "Cultural Jews" are defined as those answering the question "What is your religion, if any?" with, "no religion, atheist, agnostic, secular, or humanist", while qualifying themselves as Jews because their parents were Jewish or they had a Jewish upbringing. This sounds pretty close to what I define as "Ethnic Jews", except that some of these people may feel reluctantly Jewish, while I consider Ethnic Jews to at least somewhat enjoy the cultural aspects of Judaism. The rise in this group is attributed in the article to intermarriage and disaffection with Judaism. However, the latter must be the primary cause because people for whom religion plays a prominent role would not intermarry.

The Advocate article also reported that 500,000 out of the 3.6 million adults with a Jewish mother followed another religion, generally Christianity. The article paralleled the increase of secular Jews to the general increase in non-religious U.S. adults, which has climbed from 8% to 15% over the last 2 decades. However, the numbers show that, while secularism has risen by a similar percentage among both Jews and Christians, the proportion of the Jewish population that is secular is more than double that of the Christian population.

There seems to be two strong forces in the Jewish community that conflict with each other. One is the religious force, encouraging Jews to join synagogues and temples and to engage in Jewish prayers, rituals, and rules of behavior. The other is a tendency toward the worldly rather than the spiritual and mystical, towards the scientific rather than the dogmatic, towards open-mindedness rather than provincialism, and to reason and logic rather than blind obedience to rules. The latter cultural inclinations have no doubt greatly influenced Jewish contributions to science, medicine, academia, the creative arts, and the media. As an ethnic Jew, I admire these aspects of the culture. On the other hand, I feel some disappointment that a lack of emphasis on the spiritual and mystical in mainstream Judaism has left so many Jews indifferent about religious services. Christian religious services place an unabashed emphasis on God and spirituality, while mainstream Jewish temples emphasize humanistic values more than interaction with God.