“What Does Religion Have to Offer to a World in Crisis?”

“What Does Religion Have to Offer to a World in Crisis?”   December 4, 2022

Dr. Roger Ray       Click here to see the video

This is a portion of a resolution from the 2022 "Seventh Congress of Leaders of World Religions and Traditional Religions" in Kazakhstan 

1. A tumbling world 

We are living in a tumbling world. The challenges for humanity are enormous: 

·       Barbaric wars are waged in many parts of the world; (there is a growing)  threat of nuclear disasters in war zones. 

·       The sensitive climate system has reached many tipping points; if these are exceeded, the living space on earth is threatened. 

·       Wars, hopelessness due to poverty and climate catastrophes have already driven more than 100 million people to flee; the political tensions in the receiving countries are increasing. 

·       In rich countries, computerization is changing the social structure in a similar way to industrialization. 

·       The pandemic has overshadowed these challenges and pushed them into the background. In the meantime, they have reached politics. 

2. Many people are unsettled, fear is spreading 

Many people are increasingly feeling these threatening developments in their everyday lives. Forests are burning in Europe. Rivers have unprecedented low water levels. Elsewhere there is flooding. Because corn and wheat cannot be shipped freely from Ukraine, hunger is being exacerbated in many parts of the world. Energy prices are rising worldwide. Even in rich countries, the cost of living is becoming prohibitive for the more vulnerable. Such experiences unsettle people. They make fear. But fear de-solidarizes and creates a “non-culture” of growing rivalry. 

Some political populists and religious fundamentalists use fear, lies and greed to widen the gaps between nations, cultures and religions, fuel hatred and violence, spread nationalism (national egoism) and xenophobia. 

I have to confess that one of the best parts of having been the founding pastor on an entirely independent little liberal church is that we don’t have many meetings. During my 30 years as a denominational pastor, I had so many local, state, national and international meetings, conferences, assemblies, many of which were very time consuming at the end of them I usually felt that I had wasted time and money listening to what amounted to balloon juice. 

But the mere fact that I don’t attend them anymore doesn’t mean that such meetings do not go on without me. David and I came upon a report from this fall’s congress of world religions in Kazakhstan to be of sufficient interest that we are devoting our next few sermons to addressing one of their resolutions. The conference was addressing the very basic question of what faiths of all sorts have to offer to a world that is clearly suffering from many different crises at once? 

 

This is something David and I have discussed on a nearly weekly basis for a few years now. A generation ago, it seemed to me that the world’s devotion to religions that expressed themselves in forms of magical thinking, superstition, and rituals were giving way to a new and more rational view of faith, primarily focused on ethics. However, whether due to the pandemic or the rise of fascism around the world, it seems like that process has gone into reverse. Rational, philosophical approaches to faith are now in rapid decline, and embarrassingly irrational and superstitious religion is stronger than ever. I hardly know how to express my personal disappointment in this development but the fact of our decline is reinforced every Sunday morning when I drive to our little gathering here in Springfield.

 

I drive past mega churches with full parking lots where thousands of our neighbors gather to sing highly repetitive and fairly vacuous songs, while waving their hands in the air and engaging in glossolalia, what they call “speaking in tongues,” an almost certain sign of an abandonment of all critical thinking and facts in favor of an other-worldly emphasis on a supernatural theistic world which, if you are honest about it, obviously does not exist. 

I have consoled myself for years with the awareness of that we have thousands of listeners around the globe even though our local congregation has always been small but since the pandemic began, we have become very small, and the flat-earth society, meeting under various denominational monikers, seems to be growing stronger. 

 

I have woefully concluded that the world does not much seem to want progressive theology or moral philosophy but that does not mean that the world does not need it. This fall’s congress of the leaders of world religions bluntly called our current state of affairs, “a tumbling world.”

 

This current European war looks so much like the beginnings of the world wars from early in the last century, only now Russia’s pathological land theft from Ukraine not only threatens to pull Europe, the United States, and China into the conflict, but there is the added threat of either nuclear war or a nuclear accident resulting from sloppy deployment of conventional weapons. This is creating a refugee crisis, adding millions of people to the already huge displacement from other regional conflicts and from the growing ravages of climate change. There is also a huge increase in malnutrition because the huge grain harvests in Ukraine are being prevented from being distributed to the nations that depend on these shipments. 

Things have been so bad in Europe and the Middle East for the past nine months that the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un has had to resort to firing off lots of intercontinental missiles just to get some media attention, and remind us all that Vladimir Putin isn’t the only dangerously reckless world leader. 

We were already in the midst of rapid economic changes in the west with the growing advent of automation lowering the market value of labor when the pandemic began, accelerating the pace of change and making unskilled labor in an ever more vulnerable situation, made palpably worse by the onset of global inflation. . . inflation is an inconvenience to the economically well situated and a crisis creating homelessness and food insecurity for millions more. 

 

It is precisely this sort of crisis that historically fuels the public’s appetite for other-worldly religious beliefs. We have literally seen this happen for centuries. Philosophers, especially in the east, began predicting the end of supernatural theistic religions as early as the fifth century before the common era but something always happens to increase despair about the future of this world that makes a fearful public double down on religions that promise deliverance in an invisible, non-existent, after life.

Shortly after our own Revolutionary War in which Americans sought independence, the French had a revolution to establish reason as the new religion for the modern age. They destroyed religious art and symbols and turned churches into Temples of Reason. They portrayed reason as a goddess, in part to thumb their noses at the traditionally male monarchy. There was also a certain subtle slap at the moralism of the church by depicting her with bare breasts because it was popular among French prostitutes of the time to give themselves the names of Greek goddesses . . . the French have a none too obscure love of iconoclasm.

 

But this shift in beliefs among thought leaders in France was not unfamiliar to the founders of the United States. None other than George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe were all Deists, believing that the only divinity in the world was our collective human wisdom. 

 

It seemed, at the end of the eighteenth century, that abusive power of organized religion was being rejected, along with all of the neurotic guilt and prejudices it created. The French and American Revolutions were signs of hope in the future, a more free and scientific age. However, both revolutions failed to deliver on their promises. Liberation from the monarchy and the church did not equate to liberation from the ravages of poverty caused by capitalism. 

 

Supernatural religion continually enjoys rebirth in the desperation of people who have lost all hope in this world. Thomas Jefferson famously predicted that by the end of his lifetime, traditional forms of religion would have become extinct and maybe it would have if he had not been such a slave owning and raping, classist, narcissist but I will not take your time to delve into that topic.

 

I am personally a part of the tail-end of the baby boom. My generation came into being following WWII, a time of economic expansion and a time when fascism had been defeated and seemingly permanent national boundaries had been drawn, hopefully bringing an end to traditional warfare. 

 

The defeat of the Nazis and fascists and the relative detent with communism was sealed by my generation being forced to say a newly revised pledge of allegiance to the flag that was both religious and patriotic. We sang the national anthem at baseball games, we prayed at football games. Every meeting of the Kiwanis Club, Lions’ Club, Optimists, and even the Sunday assembly before Sunday School every week featured the national anthem and a pledge of allegiance. We were raised to be unthinkingly devoted to America, its constitution, its values of democracy, freedom, and equality. 

 

Personally, I didn’t like it. I believe that I was just 14 years old when I put 2 and 2 together and realized that the pledge of allegiance was supposed to be a solemn promise to unquestioningly participate in whatever crazy war our American corporations tried to get us into and even as a young teen, I could see the moral weakness of our military involvement in Vietnam. 

 

I recognized early, and my awareness of my nation’s moral failings were sealed the summer I spent watching the Watergate hearings, that America had great but unrealized goals. I think that I was patriotic so far as democracy and freedom went, but I wasn’t crazy about the institution that claimed control of the ship of state. 

 

But nothing prepared me for the re-emergence of fascism in America. I watched in stunned disbelief when an American president organized a coup to overthrow the government of which he was the head! Thousands of violent fascists stormed and defiled the Capitol building in an attempt to overthrow democracy and liberty and freedom. And now, nearly two years later, our nation seems to be paralyzed in a moral quandary, unable to criminally charge and put on trial the people who nearly destroyed the oldest democracy in the world and who now, quite publicly, plan to organize better and try again. My casual search for a quiet tropical retirement haven has taken on a certain urgency now as I am no longer certain that our constitutional democracy will survive the challenges it now faces. 

 

Of course, assuming that I might live for another 20 or 25 years, I have to find a  tropical island paradise that won’t be swallowed by the rising sea levels before I meet mortality in person. But, if I am honest about it, escaping America’s problems by retiring to the tropics is terribly similar to the people who escape from the challenges of life by embracing magical religious beliefs. The tropics offer a better climate, a beach, scuba diving, and an assortment of rum fruit drinks, but it is still escapism, isn’t it?

 

Rather than accepting the defeat of rational religion and either running away or falling into the arms of a mind-numbing superstitious religion, can we try, once again, to enthrone reason as our religion? As David will be touching on in sermons over the next couple of weeks, traditional religion is often one of the things that divides us and is at the root of a lot of what is wrong with modern society, as seen again this past week in the violent attack in a gay bar in Colorado Springs. A lot of fear, prejudice, hatred, and suspicion have religious origins and at the very least progressives need to reform our own camp to eradicate such religious prejudices from the world. 

 

But there is also a fundamental connectedness to progressive spirituality, a connectedness that is not fearful of immigrants, or refugees, that is not nationalistic, seeking always to expand the boundaries of empire, either by political control or economic domination. 

 

In the early part of the 20^th century, the British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, realized that with the advance of communication technology and the advent of easier and more affordable global travel would bring people who had been kept isolated through sheer distance and geography into closer and closer contact. Even before the internet, FaceBook, TicTok, and Twitter, Russell realized that closer contact would result in more fear, anger, territorialism, and disgusting levels of ideological purity.

A century ago, he advised us: 

“Love is wise; hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like. We can only live together in that way. But if we are to live together, and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.”

 

Bertrand Russell would certainly have not suggested that we need formal religion to teach that kind of charity and tolerance. If you can’t tell the difference between right and wrong, you are not necessarily in need of religion, you are in need of a conscience. 

 

I am proposing that spirituality, spiritual communities, are one answer, a part of an answer, to helping a world that is tumbling, literally falling apart, to undergo a revolution that is about freedom, democracy, equality, and justice. We don’t need heaven or hell, souls, demons, or angels, and forgive me for saying it this bluntly, the last thing the world needs is more belief in an imaginary friend in the clouds . . . but we do need more tolerance, more understanding, more compassion, and maybe we can even work our way up to having more love. I hope that spiritual communities will survive to promote this kind of rational religion. The shelf life of traditional religions have surely gone past their “best if used by” date.