Religion: A Modest Proposal

Critic James Wood, in a recent article in the New Yorker (subscription required to read the entire article), looks at the dispute between "God and the new atheists." With recent books by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hithchins attacking "the god delusion" there have of course been a number of counter-arguments defendng the power of faith. As there have been for hundreds thousands of years. Nothing new.

In this particular dispute can I ask for one point of linguistic clarity? Can we make a distinction between that which is "spiritual" and that which is "religious"?

To wit: the word religion describes a community of belief much more than it describes the relationship of the individual believer to whatever is held to be holy. There may be one Holy Roman Catholic church, but there are many beliefs about the specific nature of god or Jesus or specific saints or teachings held by the members of that church, no matter what the pope says. Perhaps as many beliefs as there are self-professed catholics.

The article looks at a recent work by the Oxford don Terry Eagleton, who pulls off being both a Marxist and a Catholic. As soon as Wood tries to summarize Eagleton's defense of faith you can see the basic problem.

On the one hand Eagleton recognizes that the god of Aquinas (or Maimonides) is so far distant from the concerns of this planet that he (god) can only be talked about as the sum of all reality, the Thing that Is. This language is indistinguishable from the way that even atheists talk about the universe, or from the descriptions of the Tao or of the operations of sub-atomic particles. That is the Spiritual view, human beings trying to come to grips with the limits of our minds in comprehending the vastness of the exterior world. There may be elements of faith in the spiritual discussion, but it is still grounded in the open-ended process of approaching the numinous in the swirling, random dust of our lives.

It's when Eagleton starts to talk about the specific nature of god and the relationship to our daily lives that he goes to a different level entirely -- that of professed and shared belief whose main value, in the manner of Wittgenstein, is to connect us to the culture around is. That is Religion -- and it has almost nothing to do with spirituality. It may have much to do with social orthodoxy, and obviously has a great deal to do with forging political support and religious armies prepared to do battle with ... whomever.

When we talk about creeds or sects or organizational entities, we are talking about Religion, not about the nature of god or spiritual transcendence. When we try to understand why Life (in every sense) is what it is we have entered Spiritual realms.

For one thing, the individual on a spiritual path is, almost by definition, on an individual path. This has always been a major problem for any church -- keeping firm control of all those shining-eyed mystics who have experienced god for themselves, and don't need to go through a priest. Individual knowledge, then, threatens priest and church, while shared superstition and fear strengthen them.

At pretty much any period in human history (since the rise of cities and government and all that) religion was a kind of counterbalance to kings and earthly power, with dangers to both sides from either too cozy or too hostile a relationship. But both sides gain from subjugating the spiritual individual to the religious/political organization (and promising an afterlife better than this one -- the ultimate retirement benefit).

Somehow, the spiritual has survived, and perhaps you and I can agree (as individuals) to treat religion as Religion and spirituality as Spirituality. That might be a good start.