Recently I had one of those brief, dashed-off exchanges on Facebook®, the kind that are rife with misunderstanding and miscommunication, about the nature of religion. I stand by my belief that the original and enduring function of religion is to enforce a society’s ethos. I paraphrase Emile Durkheim when I maintain that the totem is the tribe and the tribe is the totem. In other words, although I DO believe in God, I think all our concepts about who and what God is will forever be inadequate – at least in this plane of existence – because our minds are finite and God is not. Therefore our ideas about and images (i.e., totems) of God necessarily represent our (the tribe’s) inherent biases about ethics and morality. In other words, a society’s idea of God reflects that society’s ideas about morality and ethics. The totem is the tribe, and the tribe the totem.
What follows is an adaptation of an explanation I sent one of the correspondents in the discussion.
I want to clarify that I didn’t mean to insult religion, or any particular religion, on Facebook® recently. I also would like to say that I haven’t categorically determined never to join another religion. I am currently ‘unchurched’, but I cannot say I would never join another religion, nor even at this point which I would join (I’m hovering around three these days—more below).
However, I do think the original purpose or function of religion in society is to maintain the ethos of that society. Prophets and reformers arise from time to time to call people to a higher spirituality, but very soon their message of reform simply gets woven back into the fabric of religion’s function, which is social control. Jesus of Nazareth was just one of the many prophets over the years who tried to change things (and did to a certain extent). In monoreligious societies, such as a tribe of indigenous Australians, the nature of the ethos enforcement within the society is rather clear. In a multicultural, multireligious nation such as ours, the society that a specific religion tries to control is made up of the members of that religion. In other words, one of the main functions of Methodism is to maintain the ethos of Methodism among its members. However, some of the more evangelical/fundamentalist religions feel it is their duty to enforce their ethos on the whole of US society, and even on the whole world.
Religion can be an excellent platform for spirituality, and many people use it as such. Many people also use religion to stifle spirituality. We probably have no hard numbers or percentages of how many religious adherents are truly spiritual as opposed to those oriented merely toward policing the boundaries of individual behaviors, and perceptions (not to mention past history—remember, I was raised a fundamentalist, and didn’t leave that religion until I was 31) would therefore determine whether I or another person see spirituality among the religious as common or rare. To my thinking real spirituality among religious people is quite rare, and something akin to miraculous, if not outrightly so. In my more cynical moments, a person creating spirituality in a religious context almost seems to me to be spinning gold from straw. (A person more cynical than me once described it this way: If spirituality is like a full-blown disease, then religion is like a vaccine – if gives you just enough of the disease to keep you from catching a full-blown case.) In my less cynical moments I think of spiritually oriented religious adherents as beating their swords (religion) into plowshares (spirituality)—in other words, not miraculous per se, but definitely a task that one has to opt to do, and not a task inherent in religion itself. I assume some find spirituality within religion a more common occurrence than I do.
Also I do not mean to imply that non-spiritual religious people are ‘bad’. They can be quite ethical, and even exhibit sacrifice and compassion. I simply think that their motivation for doing so is often more about conformity to a perceived religious norm, and that often that conformity can prevent them from taking their spiritual lives higher. They aren’t bad people, but they may well be limited people.
I say all this for several reasons. One, I don’t think a person has to be religious, or adopt a specific religion to be spiritual. However, I recognize that for many people it helps. Maybe spinning gold from straw is difficult, but less difficult than spinning gold from nothing whatsoever. Maybe beating a sword into a plowshare is difficult, but still easier (for some people) than mining the iron ore for oneself, then smelting it and molding it. Still, I think non-religious people can be spiritual if they choose to be, and even atheists and agnostics can have deeply spiritual lives (even if they wouldn’t necessarily want to label them as such).
Two, as a person who studies religion a lot, and who maintains an ongoing interest in religion (not to mention harboring the possibility of joining a religious community in the future), I want to be very clear in my mind about what religion is and does, what purpose it serves in the human mind and human society, and what it doesn’t do. I feel that if I do decide someday to join a religion, I will be better able to use religion to pursue a spiritual life if I keep in mind the counter-spiritual elements inherent in religion. Knowing the functions and limitations of a tool can help me adapt it (or reshape it) to other uses.
Third, as an INFP (Myers-Briggs), I by nature seek the harmonies among the pursuers of spirituality. I intrinsically want to bring together real spiritual seekers, despite their particular religious path, or even if they have eschewed religious paths altogether. Therefore, to me spirituality is important, and religion, while fascinating, is secondary. And the fact that religion seems so often, to me at least, to get in the way of people developing spiritual lives frustrates me, and frustrates my desire to see and point out harmonies.
As for myself, when I do seriously think about joining a religious community, I’m torn between Christianity (specifically either Quakerism, with its communal quiet contemplation, or Catholicism/Orthodoxy, with its access to the saints and its inspirational liturgy), Buddhism (again with the quiet contemplation, and a very reasonable grasp of Reality), and Islam (with its emphasis on a Unitary Deity, its inspiring prayer liturgy and its surprising flexibility). Interestingly, I find these three to be the world’s most “portable” religions, and by this I mean “able to transcend cultural barriers”, especially Christianity and Buddhism, with Islam a bit less so.
I have no desire to insult religion. I don’t insult swords by calling them swords instead of plowshares. I just want accurate understandings of its nature and purpose, so that spiritual people can better transcend its limitations.
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