I have been thinking a lot this past year. For a long time, I have been restless, frustrated, angry, despairing, and sometimes hopeful, but mostly not. I find most experiences of religion, whether in my pastoral role or my academic one, to be predictable and uninteresting. Part of me feels it is not worth the inner turmoil and I should simply walk away, but then what?
Until I answer that equation, I shall remain in a state of inner conflict. I am torn between taking a wild leap into the dark and working out what moves are available to me. I can’t find my way to either place at the moment, so I shall try to make my frustrations work for me. I am still interested in all my basic questions about God, religion, life, and faith, but I am interested in religion in the places where it is least obvious. I sometimes feel religion exists in a cycle of self-understanding from which it will never free itself and I will always be at odds with it. It is not all bad—in fact, some of it is great; I just need to figure out how to work within it in a way that is healthy and life-giving to me and to my community.
Religion is difficult to wrestle with, something demonstrated in the etymology of the word. The dictionary is vague on the origin of the word religion. It is often declared—usually by religious people—to be derived from the Latin religare, “to bind”—which fits nicely with the idea of God and religion inextricably interwoven. But others say it evolved from relegere, which means “to reread.” These two stems could lead to quite different understandings of what exactly is going on when we talk about religion. Perhaps religion is best understood as having a couple different trajectories. But if those trajectories aren’t held in tension, you get a form of religion that has no bite and resists change. “The last experience of God is often the obstacle to the next experience of God,” Richard Rohr once said at a conference I hosted with some friends.
My tension lies in the fact that we are in a time of upheaval and destabilization, and I am often in environments where the response to that is to avoid the problem rather than rise to meet it head-on. During my doctoral work, I studied sociologist Pitirim Sorokin’s theory about cultural development, which classified societies according to what he termed their “cultural mentality.” Societies can be “ideational” (reality is spiritual), “sensate” (reality is material), or “idealistic” (a synthesis of the two). He suggested that major civilizations evolve from an ideational to an idealistic mentality, then eventually to a sensate one. Each phase of cultural development not only describes the nature of reality, but also stipulates the nature of human needs and goals to be satisfied, the extent to which they should be satisfied, and their methods of satisfaction. Sorokin’s theory was controversial and flawed, but I was taken by the fact that many of his theoretical prognoses were born out of studying literature and the arts as much as economics and other indicators.
Using Sorokin’s theory, we might say we are transitioning from an ideational period into a sensate one, blending our materialism with spirituality, although we don’t operate with such distinct binaries these days. That shift destabilizes religion, and this is what interests me.
Lots of religious talk seeks to offer stabilization and security, maintaining the idea that religion is a talismanic set of beliefs about the world, like a rabbit’s foot. For me, religion, and Christian faith in particular, is not a set of beliefs. Instead, it is an expression of a way of being in the world, embracing the world in order to discover life.