I, Too, Don’t Trust “Organized Religion”

By all accounts, we are well into a cultural period defined in part by the decreasing importance of religion in peoples’ lives. We hear and read almost daily about the millennial generation’s a-religiosity, the so-called “nones,” and those who profess spirituality without religion. People discount and decry “organized religion” with a tone of contempt.  After all, some argue, “organized religion” has brought the human race such atrocities as the Crusades; it has undergirded racism in the South and patriarchy everywhere; it has protected pedophiles. Sadly, these criticisms accurately identify the human shortcomings manifest in and through institutions whose stated purpose is to love God and neighbor.

It may surprise some of my readers to hear that I, too, am an unbeliever. Although I am a baptized believer in Jesus Christ, an ordained Baptist minister, and a theology professor by vocation, I am intentionally a poor example of religiosity and try to hold religious institutions at arm’s length. In my view, religiosity, to many a synonym for hypocrisy, and institutionalism are more often anti-Christian than not. Furthermore, I find no incoherence or incongruity in my stance, as I hope to make clear in the following discussion.  I beg the reader’s patience because this clarification will require defining several important concepts and establishing the nature of their interrelationship. If I argue well, it will all become clear by the end.

First, a definition of “religion” seems appropriate.  Already the etymology of the term causes contention.  Linguists generally agree that it derives from Latin. The Roman Cicero derived it from relegere (re- “again” + legere “to read”) with the meaning “to go through again,” a definition that would emphasize the ritual character of religion. Later on, Servius, Lactantius, and Augustine of Hippo associated the term with religare “to bind fast” in the sense of placing under obligation or the bond between worshippers and their gods. The adjective religions “careful,” the antonym of negligens (“negligent”), offers yet another possibility. It would also emphasize the ritual character of religious practice.

Since etymology cannot satisfy the question, “What is ‘religion’?” we must turn to phenomenology:  What essential characteristic or characteristics do all of the world’s religions hold in common?

Immediately, however, we encounter a problem.  Most people would agree that Buddhism, for examples, qualifies as a religion, but the single characteristic most of those same people associate with religion – belief in a god or gods – does not pertain to Buddhism (or Jainism, Confucianism, modern Satanism, Scientology, and many others).  Buddhists (and the others) do hold a very specific central worldview, a basic concept that explains reality, and they live in a way that comports with this central worldview. One cannot observe another’s worldview, but one can observe the practices, the religion, that this worldview endangers. The noted German-American 20^th century theologian, Paul Tillich, defined the central worldview that governs how one lives one’s life as one’s “ultimate concern” – for Buddhists the Nothingness that is All, for Christians God as revealed in Jesus Christ, for Confucianists the principle of the orderly balance of the cosmos – in distinction from the religion it engenders.

This definition suggests three important axioms: (1) Religious faith is devotion to the “ultimate concern” of one’s life. Consequently, any devotion to a concern deemed “ultimate” can be categorized as a religion, whether the concern be a theistic deity, an ethnicity, a principle, a nation, or a sports team. (2) One runs the risk of placing “ultimate” confidence in a “penultimate” object that is unable to sustain expectations. (3) The practices associated with religious devotion are typical human expressions. Human beings will find an object of devotion and they will “worship” it. Indeed, human beings seem to have a natural religious impulse closely related to the human need to find or make meaning and to do so, often, by story-telling and ritual. Religious practice is both inevitable – everyone has an “ultimate concern” of some sort and one will live in a way that reflects this concern – and, to a degree, optional in its detail. In this sense, all the rituals of civil society – pledging allegiance to the flag, picnicking on the Fourth of July, and parades on Memorial Day (the latter two involve national “holy-days”) – are fundamentally religious in character.

In fact, the human origins of these ritual practices led another famous 20^th century theologian, Karl Barth, to deny outright that pure, essential Christianity is a religion. For him, true Christian faith can have no semblance of human endeavor to find or please God.  It is solely God’s gift.

Whatever one thinks of Barth’s claim, historically, the Christian church has been most authentic – in my view – when it has recognized the distinction between commitment to its “ultimate concern” (i.e. its commitment to God revealed in Jesus Christ) and the human authorship of most of the religious practices Christians observe as expressions of that devotion. In the period just after Martin Luther, for example, the Lutherans became enmeshed in a series of disagreements over the essential necessity of certain practices. They reached “concord” when they acknowledged that many Christian practices are adiaphora: valuable traditions, but not essentials.

We are not now discussing whether it is helpful to keep [traditions] because of peace or bodily profit…. The question at hand is whether the observances of human traditions are acts of worship necessary for righteousness before God.”  (“The Defense of the Augsburg Confession,” Apology VII and VIII: 34 in Triglot Concordia: The Symbolic Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church: German-Latin-English (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1921).

In fact, to invoke another insight stated by Tillich, one can generally distinguish between the spirit/Spirit that enlivens and authorizes a movement or group and the institutions that such movements inevitably generate. Energy requires a formal medium in order to drive action in the world, but these forms eventually can and regularly do claim the devotion due the “ultimate concern” they seek to serve. In these cases, Tillich argues, the institutions have devolved from expressions of the Spirit into demonic forces all their own.

Consequently, the human impulse to find meaning presents each of us with a series of challenges: Does the object of our “ultimate concern” merit such devotion or is it, instead, penultimate (Facism, a hobby, Alabama football, work, family, success)? Have the rituals and practices – organized religion – taken on forms that misrepresent, distort, or even corrupt the spirit/Spirit they seek to represent?

The solution to the latter problem cannot be the outright rejection of ritual, praxis, and form, per se, because devotion to an “ultimate concern” must, will, find some expression. It will organize somehow. Like the question of whether one’s “ultimate concern” can bear the weight of ultimacy, the question regarding the “organization” of one’s practice hinges on whether the forms and institutions express this devotion honestly, fully, and authentically.

Therefore, I agree with many of today’s critics of “organized religion” that the church, the chief target of this criticism, has largely confused penultimate with ultimate concerns. It has too much identified with culture, with the state, and with its own status and preservation. It has not loved God wholeheartedly and its neighbor as itself.

This is not to say, however, that the ultimate concern no longer demands response, that Christianity is possible without forms of expression, without some kind of church. In the words of the Reformation motto:  Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Reformanda.