ABSTRACT
The metaphor of religion as a navigational chart is appropriate for Protestantism, for the image of the individual making his or her way through a difficult passage is at the heart of the Protestant view of life. In some ways, it is difficult to distinguish the spirituality of Protestantism from the general spirituality in North American civil religion, for US and English Canadian culture was born out of Protestantism. And death seems the end of that spirituality, for it would be the end of life, of consciousness, of contact with the eternal. In many ways, the religion to which we belong is an accident of birth. We can also think of Protestantism beginning with a change in historical consciousness, individualism, and with a change in technology, the invention of the printing press. In the individualistic spirituality of Protestantism, death raises the possibility that the individual ends with the demise of the physical. For Protestants, the answer to death is salvation.
