Of Being Religious

Being religious is not all that fashionable these days, particularly among  the so-called Millennials, the next generation to succeed the largely religious baby-boomers. Church growth experts are wringing their hands. Pundits are proclaiming the inevitable death of organized religion, certainly mainstream organized religion. Atheists, now celebrity in pop culture, claim to be the largest minority of theological sectarianism. Bill Maher, with whom I agree on many things, host of HBO’s RealTime, is fond of saying smugly that religion is the root of all that is wrong in culture, both in the U.S. and around the world. Certainly, religion has loaned its name to nefarious purposes… but the root? I beg to differ. My son Rhett, not a practicing Christian, thinks I should go on Bill Maher’s show and defend religion. I could do that. Call me Bill.

Marx called religion “the opiate of the people”. Freud called it an illusion; and certainly given the church’s track record over the centuries, scathing critique has been merited. The church has supported violence, oppression, injustice and ignorance in order to protect the status quo, all in the name of God. We don’t need to look far for glaring examples.The church indeed has invited such critique in its self-serving quest to ask people to believe the unbelievable and to do the unthinkable. Such self examination and critique is merited and necessary if we are to get real about faith in general and religion in particular. What is truly amazing is that the church has survived at all.

I am convinced that the human is endowed with the religious impulse, that in our collective DNA, in our collective memory, there is the predisposition towards meaning and mystery and beauty; that despite rampant evil in the world, there is an innate good order insisting on taking root in our common life. The religious life is the means, the framework within which we should be able to articulate such a vision; a framework within which we may speculate as to the truth, which is ever unfolding, ever being revealed. A framework, also in which we celebrate such a life, and give thanks for it. The church’s greatest error has been its insistence on a dogmatic belief system closed to new awareness, new knowledge, new inspiration, new truth. The church that insists on such will die in irrelevancy.

The mystics and free-thinkers over the centuries have known this. They are religious, but have never gotten the press, nor has the institutional church approved of them. Their faith has as much to do with aesthetics as it does with order. Indeed our faith is lifeless without the engaged imagination. In short, religion is an art, not a science. And to that end, faith is much more about practice than it is about belief. If we artfully practice the rudiments of faith, mercy, compassion, justice, reconciliation and the restoration of the human community, then the vision of the divine will ring true…. the divine being not some theistic projection of a God aloof in the heavens… but the divine being a gracious life of well being and freedom and joy for all who inhabit this earth… all people… manifested in our own day… That is what divine means, no more, no less.

So, I too am an “a-theist.” That is, I don’t believe in a male God distant in the heavens, who swoops into creation from time to time to perform supernatural acts… the super, imaginary friend, as Bill Maher puts it. But I do believe in a God who is alive among us, becoming as we become, as the creation becomes… influencing imaginatively with artful improvisation the created order towards the good and the true and the beautiful, suffering and evil notwithstanding… Scripture, art, and human expression apprehended with imaginative and critical eye will serve us well, will inform us along the way. But, to be sure, the religious life is dead without honesty and intellectual and emotional integrity; dead without our burning questions, and it is dead also without the practice of the good, the practice of love for our world.

If you believe in the art of the Good… you believe in God…. Call me, Bill.