Discussions about faith have become more and more a part of my life over the last decade. I think this is due to several things:
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My own generation reaching middle age and beyond. People begin to survey their lives, to take the measure of things, and to reflect on the state of their legacy. We are far enough along that there have been divorces, and cases of ruin, and the loss of grandparents and increasingly even parents. There is a moment in life at which you look around and know, viscerally, that the end is coming for you, and that most of your life is behind you, and that time is running short to achieve a satisfactory “totality” when the end arrives.
- Our children reaching a certain age. With the characteristic delayed fertility of advanced industrial societies, it’s in our forties and fifties that Generation X (a certain socioeconomic slice of Generation X in particular that seems to be mine) find their children at that age—namely the early and middle teens—at which questions of religion begin to emerge with substance, and we are confronted with some “tough questions” about the meaning of life and the foundations of morality and being.
- Our particular shared present. The culture wars, the return of international relations and global warfare as forces in history, the pursuit of artificial intelligence, and a budding but highly sought after transhumanism all sponsor, just underneath the surface, a larger civilizational debate on moral commitments and, lurking even deeper, the metaphysics that underwrite them. We don’t tend to admit it, and in fact even try to suppress and deny it, but our epoch is an epoch of grand debate and reflection about this frame.
So it is that I find myself consuming all sides of this debate. As a professionally trained social scientist with multiple degrees in anthropology and sociology, up to and including the doctoral level, religion has always been of interest to me. I have for decades owned multiple translations of the Bible, the Koran, the foundational Taoist texts, the Bhagavad Gita, translations of the Egyptian burial scrolls, and so on, as well as all the usual suspects, i.e. Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religions Life to play off against the works of Marx and the maudlin corners of the Frankfurt School and so on.
It has, in some very strange ways, been uncomfortable to situate myself, however, in this landscape of religious practice and thought, both because it’s long been an unsettled question for me by now, and because as someone with both this kind of training and with the social roles that I inhabit (father of children becoming teenagers, son of parents reaching the ends of their lives, the “educated in this topic” friend of people struggling to meet the challenges of the same stage of life, and so on).
But—I just stumbled onto two formulations that I very much appreciate, whose language and sensibility appeals to me. I wish I had the courage to attribute them to their source, but for the moment I do not. (You’ll all find that I become much more courageous once my children reach adulthood and are no longer potentially impacted as significantly by the things I do and say in public, even if “in public” means on an obscure blog that nobody reads anyway).
Note that in particular, the third bullet above draws tight circles on just how forthcoming we can be in public about the things that we consume; it is bold enough to say these days that one consumes “everything from all corners” and leave it at that. To go farther isn’t, at the moment, a good idea.
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The first formulation that I have fallen in love with is an inversion of the phrase that one hears everywhere around our society, and I can’t believe that I never really came to it before. It doesn’t fit me precisely, but I am taken with the notion of calling myself “religious but not spiritual.” Like I said, that doesn’t quite fit, in that I don’t go to any church and don’t belong any denomination, either within Judeo-Christianity or beyond it, but at the same time it is in keeping with the way in which I’ve tended to address these questions with my kids.
I tell them: that in my experience, there are moral adherents and immoral adherents in every belief system, but that what’s also true is that the religious texts and bodies of tradition, across all cultures, are in some sense the collected wisdom of the ages, and are amongst the greatest literary and philosophical treasures of humanity; that for this reason it is a deep disservice and also the height of error to approach them facilely or with literal or tribal smugness, as to approach them this way is to surely get them wrong; that any person who truly plans to become culturally literate should have some reasoned, reflective, and critical engagement with them all in the end, not least because the substantial majority of the people on the planet are adherents to one tradition or the other; and that in a great many ways they are strikingly similar in their ultimate content, though this is not at all immediately evident in many cases and relies on an understanding that is hard-won, requiring wisdom and discrimination.
I also tell them that I don’t practice any particular faith in the practical sense—I don’t attend, I don’t belong-to, etc.—and that it is not my place to either encourage or discourage anyone’s adherence to any of them.
It would be easy, having read that, to say “well that’s not at all ‘religious but not spiritual’ so what are you on about,” but when placed alongside the other formulation that I stumbled across this morning, things take on a different patina.
The other formulation, which was given in reference to someone else, was that the person in question was not becoming stuck in questions about “belief in the metaphysical,” and was instead “noticing that they were already” an adherent to a tradition in many ways—in the values that they hold, in the ways that they interact with the world and the moral positions that they take, and that they have spent recent years “pulling at the threads” of the positions that they already take and the behaviors in which they already engage—quite apart from metaphysical commitments, ritual practice, “personal relationships” with deities, and so on—and “coming to see that there is something foundational” behind them that points back to the religious universe.
More than a few people in life are familiar with some of the formulations I’ve used in the past—for example that if I “look for the people like me, who think what I think and act the ways that I try to act”—that I notice “where most of them are standing,” so to speak, in the demographics of religion and morality, and wonder “if those are actually my people.” I’ve also said that I’ve engaged in serious reflection on whether one can be a Catholic, or a Buddhist, or a Taoist, etc. without actually being “a believer,” a question about both the metaphysics and the practical utility of “belief” and the borders of “practice” that has remained unresolved for me for some years now.
But taken together, these two formulations I think hit home for me very much. I’m functionally unable to engage with “belief in the metaphysical” for whatever reason, but for a decade I have been “noticing that I am already” holding particular values and engaging in a set of moral and ethical habits and commitments that situate me very clearly in some ways, and I continue to “pull at the threads” of what this all means to try to arrive at foundations and first principles, leaving me in some sense in the state of inadvertently being religious in some sense in relation to everyday behavior, without necessarily being someone whose practices are highly spiritual or ritualistic.
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This is a word soup, but these are hard questions, particularly in relation to what Christianity calls a “fallen world.” It is for the very reason that we humans are noisy (in the information theory sense) in both our belief and practice that religion matters to begin with. It is, empirically, a force that functions to constrain this noise, both at the personal level and at the social level—noise that would otherwise grow out of control, exponentially, and to devastating effect in my opinion. But that means in practice that understanding is hard-won; to get there, you have to fight your way through throngs of “merely humans” that all, to one extent or another, betray all of it—and are expected to do so, otherwise they shouldn’t be there (in a state of practicing, in a state of believing, in a church, in a set of stated moral commitments) to begin with, because there would be no need.
It’s a particularly difficult thing to do as a parent. I’m glad I’m not the parent positioned and committed such that I simply tell my children “this is what’s True” so “just go to church,” which is what I experienced as a child. I saw how that went over for me—and it took me decades to find my way back to (and be to able to tolerate) questions like these in the first place. I’d love to have been raised without developing a kind of oppositional defiant disorder about the religious question that colored my thought about the whole pile of it for decades, and I see an awful lot of that in my generation.
In some sense it should be a warning to parents—dogma for dogma’s sake is bad. Understand your commitments and the reasons for them before you try to convey them to others, and never do this by force.
Hopefully my children will be able to tackle this without all of the same baggage, as the questions are fundamental to a meaningful life.