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I Miss the Religious But Not Spiritual

I Miss the Religious But Not Spiritual

Last updated on: July 4, 2016 at 8:31 am by C. R. Wiley

I Miss the Religious But Not Spiritual 2016-07-04T08:31:42-04:00 C. R. Wiley

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I assume you’ve endured, as I have, that self-congratulatory nostrum of the Authentic: “I’m spiritual but not religious”.

Well, it got me thinking. That implies that there is the opposite somewhere out there, someone who is “religious but not spiritual”. Does such a creature even exist?

They’re hard to find these days, but I can assure that they did exist once upon a time. There were once herds of them, rumbling over the great midwestern plains. But they’ve been hunted to near extinction by the flower-children of Authenticity.

I’m here to tell you that I miss them.

They had their faults, but you know those already. The flower-children of Authenticity have so infused your mind with their psychedelic mind-altering drugs that your ability to see anything but their faults has gone blurry.

But if I had to choose between the “spiritual but not religious” and the “religious but not spiritual”–if those were the only choices I had–well, I’d go with the “religious but not spiritual” nine times out of ten.

Here’s what they looked like:

These people had what some today dismissively call “civil religion”. They came to church for the high holy days, and they were there for church picnics too. They expected their children to go to church, and sometimes they even took them. They were there for baptisms, funerals, and weddings, of course. But they also defended religious institutions in public. They could even get weepy singing Amazing Grace. And if someone defiled a church in someway, or just insulted it, they might even be the most visibly outraged.

What did these people know in their bones that we have forgotten? Here is a short list.

Religion gets us out of ourselves

What “spiritual but not religious” people are really into is themselves. They howl in protest at that, but the very dichotomy they’ve created between spirituality and religion demonstrates this. Religion is “just rules”, i.e. an external code of behavior. Spirituality is good because it wells up from within. Another name for this is solipsism. Yet another name is Sheilaism. You could say that the “spiritual but not religious” don’t really get rid of religion, they actually multiply it. Now everyone is his own guru with a following of one.

Religion has a social purpose

Religions bind communities together with rituals and symbols that remain meaningful whether or not you get their meanings, or even believe in them very much. The “religious but not spiritual” understand and accept this; the “spiritual but not religious” do not. Bonds can be bad, but they can also serve good purposes. The Latin root of the word “religion” means “to bind”.

Marriage is a bond, any sort of covenant is. Contracts bind people together; friendships do too. Bonds can vary in strength. And we all feel intuitively that we need other people, not just for a feeling of belonging, but also for plain and practical reasons. A religion provides a common script, something that helps people to work together. It is a bond, and it has its uses.

Hypocrisy isn’t all bad

Here’s another way to put it: Authenticity is overrated. Think about it this way, if someone wants to kill you, would you like him to be true to himself, or be a hypocrite in that moment? I’ll take hypocrisy–doing the right thing for the wrong reason. The great wit, Francois de La Rochefoucauld said, “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.”

Here’s something else to ponder: do you really believe all those beautiful people actually live up to all that politically correct pap they spout on television? Of course they don’t. But that’s always the way it is. Grow up and get used to it. Sure, we should strive for more. That’s why I only favor the “religious but not spiritual” if I have only two options.

The real ideal is being religious and spiritual: having a true religion and living up to it. Such are the angels and the saints. (At a minimum, this is what saints strive to do.)

But since we live in a fallen world, if I must settle for something short of the ideal, I’ll take the “religious but not spiritual”.

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