Why Religion?

Why Religion?

I recently watched a program on PBS about the rise of early civilizations. One of the themes of the program was that religion arose when civilization arose, that is, when humans made the transition from being hunter gatherers to being settled agriculturalists. The experts the program had talking about this phenomenon were mostly archaeologists not experts in religion. They stressed the way in which religion functions to stabilize societies, how it acts as a unifying theme in cultures that holds people together by giving them common beliefs and common commitments. They also stressed how the rulers of ancient civilizations, especially Egypt, used religion to legitimate their rule by giving it divine authorization. The program didn’t limit its secular explanations of religion to ancient times. It showed the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, massive and impressive on the outside, beautiful on the inside. It explained that some Sultan or other had built this mosque during a time when the Ottoman Empire was suffering military defeats on both its western and eastern borders. It said he built the mosque to distract people from the empire’s problems and to show that Islam was still vital. It didn’t in any way suggest that perhaps the Sultan or his people had spiritual reasons for building it, that perhaps they built it as expression of their commitment to Islam and to the God with Whom Islam connects its people. The program showed so-called “whirling dervishes,” devotees of Sufi Islam who dance in a circular motion to induce a trance-like state of connection with the divine. It showed some of the men who practice this kind of Islam saying that in this practice they get closer to one another and feel a connection to the group. It made little or no mention of how the practitioners of Sufi Islam find a connection not just with each other but with God. This program’s consideration of the religion was done entirely from a secular perspective.

Now, I don’t mean here to deny that religion has functioned in those secular ways across human civilizations. It has, and in some places it still does. Yet this PBS program completely overlooked a deeper truth about why human beings develop and practice religions and in many cases devote their entire lives to them. The program focused on the political and social functions of religion while ignoring or at least minimizing any actual spiritual truth that religions express. In the views of the academic archaeologists that the program used, spiritual experience and yearning played no role in the rise of religion. Yet we know that there is more to religion than its possible political and social ramifications. Theologians and philosophers today know that a yearning for connection with the transcendent, spiritual element of reality is a universal human characteristic. Every human culture we know of has had a way of expressing that yearning. Every human culture has had a religion. That is, it has had a system of symbols, myths, and rituals through which the people of the culture have sought connection with a dimension of reality beyond the physical plane in which we live. Human religion is grounded at least as much in this universal human striving for connection with the beyond as it is any social or political function religion may serve.

Indeed, is it not clear that human religion is more grounded in that striving than it is in any social or political function? Consider this reality. Religion survives in human cultures even when the ruling forces of a culture are dead sent against religion and committed to eliminating it from a country’s life. That was the situation in the Soviet Union. Most of the former Russian Empire was under Communist rule beginning in 1917 (or at least beginning by the end of the civil war that followed the Bolshevik coup of that year) until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Soviet Communism was expressly and aggressively atheistic. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union would have destroyed religion altogether if it could have. Churches and other places of worship were closed in huge numbers. The clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church and other religious institutions were infiltrated and compromised by the Soviet state security services (the KGB and its predecessors). It was illegal to take children to church. It was illegal for any church to seek converts. When I was doing research in the Soviet Union during the 1975-76 academic year all we heard about the Russian Orthodox Church was that only old women attended its services. Yet there seemed to be generation after generation of old women going to church. People continued to have their children baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church. Indeed, Vladimir Putin was baptized as an infant. Beyond that, the Easter service I attended at the St. Sergius Holy Trinity Monastery outside Moscow in 1976 was heavily attended, and not only by old women. Perhaps part of the attachment some people felt to Russian Orthodoxy had more to do with the fact that it was the only truly Russian institution that remained in Soviet Russia, but surely there was more to it than that. Russian Orthodoxy, Judaism, Islam, and other religious traditions survived decades of restrictions and hostile propaganda against them because religions arise from and answer a basic human existential longing, the longing for connection with the transcendent reality we call God, a reality of which humans across time and physical location have sensed and longed to connect with.

Let me use my own Christian experience as another example of the persistence of faith and how it has nothing to do with propping up human systems. I am a man of faith. I have devoted the last twenty plus years of my life to getting a seminary education and serving as pastor of two small Christian churches. I can assure that I did not do that because I wanted to support the social, economic, and political power structures in my country. I believe that those structures must be broadly redesigned from the ground up if we are ever going to approach anything like equity in our national life. To me, Christianity challenges the injustices of American life at the deepest level. Jesus Christ calls us to care for the least of these not the wealthiest of these. Jesus Christ calls us to radical justice, radical nonviolence, and radical commitment to a transformed world in which the last are first, the first are last, the peacemakers are blessed, the poor are filled with good things, and the rich are sent empty away. None of that adds up to cement for unjust and oppressive social, political, and economic systems. None of that adds up to a prop for the powers that be. I am Christian because I find a powerful, transformative connection with God in the myths, symbols, and rituals of the Christian faith. My commitment to Jesus’ teachings of peace and justice flows from that connection. I am no support for the powers that be. My version of the Christian faith, which I share with millions of other Christians today, is no support for the powers that be. My Christian faith calls me to, in the words of Walter Wink, engage the powers for the purpose of transforming the world.

So that program I saw on PBS, interesting as it was, totally missed the mark on the meaning of religion. Yes, religion can be conservative, although to me the phrase conservative Christian is an oxymoron. Yes, after it became the established religion of the Roman Empire Christianity abandoned most of Jesus’ teachings about life in this life and diverted people’s attention to how to get to the next life, something about which Jesus said virtually nothing. Yes, power structures have often used religion to prop up their regimes by convincing people that they rule by divine right. Yet the undeniable truth of Christianity is that they don’t rule by divine right at all. In all of the world’s great religions properly understood God sides with the poor and the oppressed. God calls us to radical transformation of the unjust systems of the world. And in all of those great religions and in myriad smaller ones people find an authentic connection with God. They experience the power of God in their lives. They find hope, courage, and peace in the teachings of their religion. None of that has anything to do with holding oppressive societies together. It is rather the beginning of their undoing. I just hope that the next PBS program I see that seeks to explain religion does a better job of it than that one I saw the other day.