Religion vs Spirituality

Religion vs Spirituality July 24, 2022 Dr. Roger Ray Click here to see the video Albert Einstein: The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed. Similar to the hysteria brewed up about Y2K at the beginning of this century by people who didn’t understand computers, in 2012 there was an attempt at creating similar panic around what was purported to be the end of the ancient Mayan calendar by people who don’t understand Mesoamerican history. There was a lot of speculation that on December 21, 2012 the world would end because the ancient Mayans had ended their calendar on that date. I have no idea why anyone thought that an ancient culture’s calendar should project time into infinity or why the Mayans would be able predict the end of the world when they didn’t seem to be able to predict the collapse of their own civilization. But, for reasons that don’t make any logical sense, people tend to think that ancient wisdom is somehow superior to modern wisdom. I suspect that most of you, were brought up to believe this unquestioningly, whether your family was Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, you grew up being taught to assume that the wisdom in your ancient holy book was superior to anything else, whether it was a history book or a physics book; your holy book equated to truth. This is less so for Buddhists and Hindus who are typically more focused on practices than they are on holy writ, but still, in all of our cultures, we tend to award ancient insight with some special magical knowledge. And when the facts collide with scripture, many of us in more progressive communities, were often guilty of intellectual gymnastics as we tried to explain what this or that term actually meant in ancient Hebrew or Kione Greek. We labored over Paul’s references to homosexuality, insisting that he didn’t really mean what he apparently rather clearly said. When, what should be obvious to all of us, is that these ancients, while often producing wonderful poetry and narratives, also had very unsophisticated knowledge of science or psychology and, as Bill Maher so plainly puts it, no author of any part of these scriptures had the slightest idea where the sun goes at night. Qualitatively, if you lay the writings of Plato and Aristotle beside the content of the Bible or the Quran, it is evident that ancient Greek philosophy is a whole lot more insightful, better written, and more intelligent than anything in our holy books, but we still wouldn’t turn to Plato or Aristotle for answers to complex modern problems. I am grateful to have spent time studying the scriptures as an account of the beliefs of our ancestors and studying history can be informative about interpreting our present, but turning to scripture as a source of moral authority in the 21st century is every bit as dumb as trying to use 1st century dentistry to teach our next generation of dentists. This devotion to ancient texts is a lot of what has made modern religion so irrelevant to this generation. We are living in a time of fairly rapid decline in participation in organized religion. I don’t want to get too bogged down in graphs and statistics but let me just describe the speed of the trend. We entered this century with about 70% of Americans at least claiming membership in some kind of religious community, and in the first two decades that figure had actually dropped below half. I have not found reliable numbers more specifically looking at the effects of the pandemic, but I know that the past 2.5 years have been devastating to our Springfield congregation and I suspect that it has had a huge impact in most churches. The denomination into which I was born, boasted about 2 million members when I was a child. By the time I graduated from seminary, that was down to about 1 million. In the past few years, their active numbers have dropped to about 200,000, a tenth of what they were when I was a kid. The much more conservative Churches of Christ, have experienced about the same decline. Even Catholic Church attendance has dropped by about 20% during this century. This has been especially devastating to monastic communities, many of which are simply watching themselves decline into extinction. The decline rate has not been as great among authoritarian churches like the Catholics and the Mormons, in part because strict loyalty to the teachings of the church is demanded of them from an early age. You can typically switch from a Methodist Church to a Presbyterian Church without being disowned by your parents but leaving the Mormon or Catholic church is often a rather more dramatic departure. Catholics even have a term of disdain for free thinking members of their church, they call them “cafeteria Catholics.” That is, they may like the Catholic liturgy and even beliefs about heaven and hell, but choose to reject church teachings about birth control or abortion. You can find broad condemnation for cafeteria Catholics all over the Catholic world which insists that if you are Catholic, you have to swallow the whole enchilada. I am surprised that anyone still accepts that kind of mental imprisonment, but it happens still. The decline in church attendance has been pretty well mirrored in my own decline in respect for organized religion. My former denomination, a communion that I loved and was proud to be a part of, over the decades became a greater and greater embarrassment, with one scandal after another, making the institution’s hypocrisy impossible to tolerate. During all of these years of numerical decline, the phrase that has come up increasingly often among the unchurched is the disclaimer, “I’m spiritual but not religious.” And like a lot of popular sayings, that can mean something quite profound, or it can be a shallow statement that is drenched in so much narcissism that it basically equates to saying, “I quit going to church and started to worship myself.” To be fair, there are good and bad things about being religious, and there are some very good things about being more of a solo act in your spirituality, but there are some real vulnerabilities there as well. An old friend of mine recently reminded me of something he heard me say in a sermon about 15 years ago that seems a bit humorous to me now, but he claims that I said, “Being spiritual and not religious is all well enough except for the fact that people who are spiritual and not religious never get anything done.” Which goes to the “organized” part of “organized religion.” When I was a denominational pastor, we built a Habitat House every year. We fielded large relief teams to poor nations and poor neighborhoods, and to hurricane and tornado devastated communities. If there is anything that I really miss about my former life as a denominational pastor, it was that; joining in with a team to help a homeless family build their own home, or cutting bamboo and mixing mortar in a depression in the ground to build a feeding center for a school in rural Nicaragua. It takes money and younger and stronger volunteers to do things like that. We have about 15,000 viewers and listeners scattered around the globe, but I can’t call together 25 of them to jump in a bus and go to Appalachia with me to assist poor farmers in the Eastern Kentucky mountains. People who rant and rave about how much they hate organized religion will still take their kid to St Jude’s Hospital when they have cancer, and they never complain about the fact that they don’t have to pay for the medical miracles they receive there. I despise the opulence and wasted money of mega churches in our area, but, like most of you, whenever I am traveling abroad, I never fail to go and marvel at the cathedrals in those historical cities and what, after all, is a cathedral but a 500 year old megachurch? Religious art, music, and architecture has enriched our culture and fed our souls for centuries. Sure, it came with homophobia, misogyny, pedophilia, and patriarchy but is anyone here sorry that they are rebuilding Notre Dame after the great fire of 2019? For centuries, statesmen and philosophers have predicted the death of organized religion. They do that with good reason because of the moral and intellectual weakness of it and the growing irrelevance of it to a modern society. However, you only have to listen to the campaign ads of many of the current candidates for governor and US Senators around the country to realize that huge portion of our society is still, even in this modern era, entirely prepared to whole heartedly believe some of the dumbest stuff imaginable. So, I am afraid, organized religion, while in decline, is likely to be around for many more decades if not centuries. Increasingly marginalized and losing social influence, but stubbornly refusing to die. The Jewish, Dutch philosopher of the 17th century said of this combination of ancient religion and current law, that “Laws which prescribe what everyone else must believe, and forbid men to say or write anything against this or that opinion, are often passed to gratify, or rather to appease the anger of those who cannot abide independent minds.” We fought for marriage equality for decades against a mindless devotion among conservative to ancient religious prejudices and once equality was won, people were quietly amazed that it made no noticeable difference in their straight relationships. It was almost like getting the Supreme Court to decide that the sky is blue and grass is green. Ancient religion was wrong, modern medicine, psychology, and ethics were right. But, again, with a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, there are whispers of trying to turn the clock back and take away these rights, just as they have taken away a woman’s right to manage her own reproductive life. So, ancient superstitions and values informed only by myths have not died away from our world. The fight for reason remains. If I have not already made it very clear, please allow me to sum up by reiterating my basic complaint about what it has meant to be religious: When you try to take the wonder, the awe, the existential experience of the “I” and the “Thou” out of our awareness that we live in a holy and amazing universe and put it down in a book, a creed, a set of dogmatic beliefs and doctrines, you are necessarily killing everything wonderful about faith. You turn a living faith into a dead religion. One of my theology professors at Vanderbilt called this “trying to eff the ineffable.” You can write a poem about love, but you cannot write a prescription for love. Or as some more witty preacher put it once, “Focusing on religion over spirituality is like going to a restaurant and eating the menu.” I could go on all day about what all is wrong with organized religion but I must also add the warning that independent thinking without any accountability to a community of faith, often leads to equally superstitious thought that is different from creedal religion only in that it is so silly and narcissistic. Spiritual people can question everything, they can be free to consider anything in their search for truth. But still, like peer review in academics, I am just suggesting that in our freedom, we not lose sight of critical thinking, discernment, and the insights of scholarship. If we can approach our spiritual lives in an honest search for an informed world view, maybe we can preserve the community that we enjoyed in more traditional church life. I’m not knocking the good things that we do as individuals, but an individual cannot build a Habitat House or start a St Jude’s Hospital, and while we can demonstrate regressive government decisions on our own, it sure does have more impact if we can demonstrate with a few hundred similarly inspired peers. There are things that we can do together that we cannot do alone. So please, though I appreciate every one of our global listeners and viewers as well as our local supporters, please don’t let the content we provide be a substitute for being in community. Continue to search for your tribe. Be connected to others who will inevitably not be just like you or agree with you on everything, but with whom you share a sincere search for what is true, what is good, and what honors the grand mystery of existence.