Why Religion?

 

Why Religion?

September 20, 2022

 

It is of course widely known that the percentage of Americans who self-identify as Christians has been declining for decades. So has membership and attendance at Christian churches, especially but not exclusively the churches of the Protestant denominations we used to call mainline. I recently read one commentator speculating briefly on possible causes of that decline. The first one she mentioned went something like this. Societies tend to secularize as they develop. Once people’s basic needs are met, there is less reason for religion. This statement of course assumes that people have a reason, and as far as this statement is concerned, only one reason, for practicing a religious faith. That reason is that there is, or was, something missing from a person’s life. The function of religion here seems to be to make up for that which is missing. There’s an empty place in their lives, and religion fills that space for them until, and only until, something more specific, more material, comes along and fills it in a different, perhaps more obvious and immediate way.

This view of religion is essentially that of the atheists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. They called religion “the opiate of the masses.” They meant that religious faith numbs people to the pain caused by the lack of material security and freedom from oppression they experience. Unfortunately, conventional Christianity feeds this kind of cynicism about religion. It has come, and in Marx’s and Engel’s time had come, to be about little more than a promise of a blessed afterlife that would make up for the hardships in this one. It diverts people’s attention away from the need for justice and peace in this life. If diverting people’s attention in that way is the only function of religion, then Marx and Engels are right. Faith truly is little if any more than the opiate of the people.

Yet many of us who need not worry about our basic material needs being met know that there is much more to religion than that. Religion does indeed satisfy a need in our lives. It’s just a need different from our need of the things to keep us alive. If it didn’t fill a need, there would be no religion. What is that need? To understand that need we must carefully examine just what the human condition is, for our most basic needs arise from the fundamental circumstances of that condition. So just what is the human condition? What are its fundamental circumstances, and what needs arise from them? To answer those questions we begin by looking at certain life circumstances that are true of all people, both people secure in having their basic material needs met and people who aren’t.

The list of things common to all people includes at least the following:

 

·        We are all mortal. No one gets out of this life alive.

·        We all need food, water, and air to stay alive.

·        We are all sexual in one way or another, or at least all but a tiny fraction of us are.

·        We are all vulnerable to numerous things, including disease, bodily injury, violence, and despair.

 

Foundationally, we are all finite, mortal beings. We all have certain needs in common, and we all have to make it through life as best we can until life ends. We have to keep on living until one day we don’t. None of us can escape the existential circumstances of being mortal and vulnerable.

And most foundationally, we exist suspended between being and nonbeing, between life and death, between esse and nihil, between being and nothingness. We are not gods, and we certainly aren’t God. Because we aren’t, our lives are constantly at risk. We stand as conscious beings, and most improbable ones at that. We exist on what is less than a speck of dust in a universe so vast that we can express something of its size mathematically. Beyond numbers, its size is simply incomprehensible. Our speck of the universe is not only tiny, it is wildly improbable. Change just about any aspect of it, and there is no life on it at all. Yet here we are, existing between being and nonbeing. And, most improbably, we are conscious that that is what we’re doing. We are an almost infinitesimally small part of all that is, yet we know that that is precisely what we are.

And mostly we wish it were otherwise. We know, perhaps most of us only at a subconscious level, that we are mortal and at risk of falling into nothingness. We fear that we are unavoidably bound for nothingness. We wish it were otherwise, so we resist. We imagine ourselves as being much more than we really are. We delude ourselves that we can be gods not mortals. We act as though we were our own creators rather than improbable beings created by forces, divine or material, beyond our comprehension. We hate and resent being mortal, being fallible, being vulnerable.  We experience angst over our existence being always at risk.

We know, at least at some level of our psyches, how precarious our lives are and how small we are. We have a sense of how limited our being is. Yet we can conceive of a reality that is large beyond our comprehension. The universe is that, of course, but there’s more to our conception of some transhuman reality than that. The universe itself is mortal, or so scientists believe. We conceive of a reality that Is not mortal, that subsists beyond the risk and vulnerability of being human. We imagine  such a reality, and beyond that, we feel ourselves drawn to that reality. We long for connection with it. Please understand. I don’t mean that every single person perceives this reality and feels drawn to it. Yet that perception and that sense of being drawn are universal human experiences in the sense that humanity as a whole and every culture humanity has produced has that perception and feels drawn to it. We know that because we know that every human culture that has ever existed has created some way of understanding and connecting with that other reality. We call those other ways religions. This is indeed where religion enters the picture. We call the infinite being that we experience as drawing us, and for connection with which we long and strive, God, or the Tao, or Enlightenment, or Nirvana, or the Great Spirit, or something else. Humanity is very creative in coming up with ways to speak about the transcendent reality we cannot deny, as much as so many of us today do work at denying it.

Any authentic sense of that other reality comes to us as paradox, or rather, as a whole complex of paradoxes. Transcendent reality is to us the knowable unknown, or perhaps better the knowable unknowable, the present transcendent, the impersonal person, the conditional ultimate. And though we may say that we love God, most of us hate paradox. So we create religious systems that mostly obviate paradox. Sure, Christianity is grounded in two incomprehensible but profoundly true paradoxes, namely, Trinity and Incarnation. The more sophisticated among us know, accept, and cherish ultimate paradox, but most people don’t. Such people (and that’s most people) create nonparadoxical images of God with which they find it easier to relate than it is for them to relate to the impossible but true nature of paradox. They think of Jesus not as the possible impossibility but as our brother, our friend. They see only one side of divine paradox. They call God Father and think they have God pinned down to something familiar, something we know from our human experience. When some haughty theologian, like me, tells them God is paradox they don’t understand. So they deny the truth of paradox, or, mostly, they just ignore it.

And that actually is all right. See, our sense that God is drawing us into intimate connection with God doesn’t depend on our understanding the paradoxes of God. It doesn’t really depend on us knowing anything about God at all. There is a cognitive element in our connection with God, but mostly that connection is not cognitive. It is spiritual. It functions, or at least it can function, whether we’re conscious of it functioning or not. The question about any alleged spiritual, existential truth is not whether people understand it. It is whether or not a person’s sense of God responds to their human existential needs in a positive, constructive way. Which brings us back to my original topic here, namely, the human condition.

Perhaps the most foundational thing we can say about that condition is that we mortal, vulnerable, fallible beings exist in an existential tension between being and nonbeing. The great twentieth century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich taught us to think of the ultimate as pure being. We call that pure being God. How to exist in the existential tension between God and nonbeing is perhaps the most profound question of human life. Mostly, however, we do everything we can to avoid it. Though all life is conditional, we make up meanings for ourselves that are not conditional. We ascribe great significance to the meanings we create. Yet all of those meanings are ultimately false. They are false because all human existence is conditional, and there is no way for us to make it unconditional no matter how hard we try. The ultimate meaning we can have is that we exist in existential tension. We strive for pure being and abhor nonbeing. We are all struggling to find a way to live in peace in the tension between being and nonbeing in which we find ourselves.

And here’s the bottom line: Faith in pure being, that is, in God, is the only way to find that peace. It is the only way because it is the only way that acknowledges the reality of our ultimate existential dilemma. It is the only way that doesn’t deny one side of that dilemma, one side of our ultimate existential paradox. Secularism denies the being as God side of the paradox. So does any religion that conforms too closely to the ways and understandings of secular life. The ancient Gnostics denied the physical reality side of the paradox. Some modern spiritualists do too whether they call themselves Gnostics or not. Denying either side of the paradox of existence doesn’t make the paradox go away. It only creates a view of human existence that is incomplete. That is too simplistic. That ultimately will fail precisely because it does not recognize and come to terms with the foundational reality of human existence.

Yet whether it handles the subject adequately or not, dealing with the ultimate nature of existence is the foundational purpose of religion. Dealing with the actual realities of human existence, of the human condition, in a way that is at least somewhat adequate, is what religion, in the end, is all about. That, madam commentator, is the purpose of religion properly understood. Yes, people use religion in many other ways. They use it for self-justification. They use it to prop up their worldly hatreds and prejudices. They use it to condemn people of religions other than theirs. They use it to scare people into behaving properly. But none of those uses of religion is proper. They are all bastardizations of religious faith. People do use religion as a way of bearing the burdens and pains of their lives. It gets a great many people through the night. If it does that by truly connecting people with the truly divine, it is legitimate, indeed, it is a great blessing. It is enabling life in life’s ultimate existential state. It doesn’t legitimately do that by promising people pie in the sky when they die, though that, of course, is what a lot of Christianity says it does today. When it is legitimate, it does it by connecting people with ultimate reality. With being that is not conditional, or vulnerable, or mortal. It assures them, it assures us, that being prevails over nothingness. Being has always prevailed over nothingness, and it always will. With faith we can live at peace in our most profound existential dilemma. Without faith, angst prevails over peace. Peace in our souls and peace in our world are the ultimate goals of religion. May more and more of us come to understand that profound truth.