Preparing to teach a college class in religion has me asking the question, What is religion? In the context of a particular faith we can invoke the music, stories, ritual, and symbols that shape its identity, but the general question about the nature of religion is harder to address. What do people have in common when they practice religion?
Scholars trace the word religion to the Latin religare, which means to bind fast or connect, having to do with humans and gods. It contains the same root as ligament or ligature. So we can say that religion binds together the natural world and the realm of the spirit. It also connects those who share the same faith with one another, and it connects the various aspects of an individual’s life within a worldview that helps to make sense of one’s experience.
Inspired by Elizabeth Johnson’s Quest for the Living God, we might say that religion is the practice of bringing our hearts and minds to an attempt to live, along with others, in the awareness of the greater reality. It means concerning ourselves with what is really real. Mircea Eliade, in Patterns in Comparative Religions, also invokes the sense of ultimate reality when he says that “Sacredness is, above all, real.”
Religion is based in the experience of its founders and their encounter with this ultimate reality. It offers a framework for those who follow, helping them to understand and perhaps to experience the divine in a similar way. It also allows a community to grow around that shared understanding and experience.
Whether we view it positively in terms of community or more negatively as an institution, religion is an aspect of the collective. For better or worse, it’s what we do together in an attempt to find meaning.
Yet according to Joseph Campbell in Thou Art That, “Carl Jung says that one of the functions of religion is to protect us against the religious experience. That is because in formal religion, it is all concretized and formulated. But, by its nature, such an experience is one that only you can have. As soon as you classify it with anybody else’s, it loses its character.”Campbell accurately points out the tension between the needs of the individual and those of the group, a tension found not only in formal religion but in any group, from the family to the nation.
In my own experience, I find that religion at its best grows out of spiritual life. The spiritual heart of religion, as I understand it, is the desire to live in relationship with what might be called the Divine. Ideally, everything we do begins with that.
The religious community that I know well is the church, which is made up of all kinds of people at different places in their faith journey. Some of them would agree that spiritual life is the heart of their experience of church, others are mainly focused on the work informed by it. But over time, through discussions and worship experiences, from friendships and shared work, the church offers a place for all people to cultivate richer and more meaningful lives. At its best, and in spite of its worst, the church offers both challenge and encouragement to grow in myriad ways. From what I know of them, this is the way of other faiths as well. Religion can offer a framework in which to shape a life with greater meaning and joy.
What do you understand religion to be?
It seems to me that one way religion protects us against religious experience is by setting aside sacred ground. When we enter the House of God of a Sunday we have the sense of leaving the ungodly world behind, to enter the presence of a God who lives in a small building we need only spend an hour or two in every week. I think this is an unconscious but powerful thing that happens when we step across that threshold into a world of symbol, costume, special language and music. We have come into a not so subtly different world, and, leaving those things behind when we reenter the outside world, we have a sense of leaving God behind too, in God’s small building. In my time as a professional Christian I have often wished there were a sign above the church doors, in letters so large that you can’t help but read it as you leave, saying: prepare to enter the house of God. Somehow I doubt the institution would go for it. They like having God in that building. Loose in the world, what might God do? Better to keep church in church, safe with smells, bells, robes and collars.
Hi, I really liked this post, and the comment above. My own personal experience of religion has been mixed. I loved it as a child, but I do think that what Steve says above is part of the trap I fell into – a separation of ‘church’ and my life. I also think the other way religion can separate us from religious experience is that people get so focused on moral judgments, and then they are focused outwards, on judging others, and not on their own personal relationship with the divine. And this is something I have seen in Eastern religions too, BTW, as someone who has been in and out of many Buddhist and non-dual spiritual communities as well. Judgment of this type seems to just be a natural tendency of the human ego, and religion can all to easily come to support that.
On the other hand, I see the community value of religion, and have been trying to work out ways to provide that for my children. And so many, really most, of the mystics I admire from all different world religions found their way within a religious structure/organization, so I know that that can support and foster a personal spirituality, when it is understood that way, and of course I know many people in real life too for whom that is true…
Thx for a thought-provoking post
Thanks for your comments, Steve and Lisa, and for the conversation they open. It’s all too common to find religion separated from everyday experience, as if spiritual life were disconnected from embodied life. Yet I think there are people inside churches who recognize the error of that approach to church or to any faith. Sacred symbols and rituals can be powerful ways of connecting us with what is ultimately real. As Steve points out, the problem is when people see them as constituting religious life rather than pointing towards it.
Judging others is another way to lose track of what religion has to offer, and I think your observation about what is going on when that happens is very wise, Lisa. The human ego is susceptible to that in all kinds of contexts, and religious communities are no exception.
Barbara Brown Taylor says in her book, An Altar in the World, “Those who belong to communities of faith have acquired a certain patience with what is sometimes called organized religion. They have learned to forgive its shortcomings as they have learned to forgive themselves.” I like the experience, wisdom, and tolerance present in those lines. Taking part in any kind of community at all does require some patience, but when things go well they can foster genuine growth.