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Inventing Our Own Religions: We MUST Take this Seriously

Inventing Our Own Religions: We MUST Take this Seriously

Last updated on: January 29, 2014 at 3:03 pm by Christy Thomas

Inventing Our Own Religions: We MUST Take this Seriously 2014-01-29T15:03:25-05:00 Christy Thomas

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EVERYONE who is concerned for the future of the church needs to read this article. Quick summary: the teacher of a community college class in comparative religions puts her students in groups and give them this assignment: invent a new religion. The author writes, “last semester emerged as a perfect case study of millennial religion,” and then notes:

There were several components of religion that were glaringly absent. Not one of them had career clergy who were in charge of services, rituals, or care of the congregation. There were, for the most part, no regular meetings of the faithful. Some had monthly or annual gatherings, like conferences, but most were very individualized religions, centering on personal growth and enrichment away from a physical community.

There was also no concept of hell, or any punishment for those who chose to leave the invented religions.

Their “religions” were all about them, not about God. It’s what I call Carson the Butler theology: “Carson,” of course, is the Downton Abbey exquisitely trained butler whose job revolves around making sure the upstairs family have no real concerns–all is taken care of for them. The entire focus is on individual experience–we get out of it.

Just before this article came out, I had been wondering if we as a nation are forming an addiction to individuality and what that would mean for religious faith.

What spurred this was the recent reading of an article that began like this: “In my last year on Wall Street, my bonus was $3.6 million–and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough.” The author, former Wall Street trader Sam Polk, was thirty years old when he faced this truth about himself: he was addicted to money.

His essay deserves a read for many reasons, particularly his call for those who have great wealth to consider putting 25% of their mega-million dollar yearly bonuses into funds to be used for the common good. It also deserves a read for his insight into addictive behaviors.

Polk had spent some years as a drug and alcohol abuser, and knew the signs of dangerous addictions, but it took him years to make the connection between his need for massive amounts of money and his prior need for massive amounts of drugs and alcohol.

But, as he noted, addictions are addictions, and we are very much an addictive society.

What do they do for us? As a rule, they help us numb pain, the existential angst that pervades our world, the pain of rejection, of loneliness, of difference, of unhealed wounds and unmourned deaths. Indulging our addictions enhances the pleasure centers of the brain. And pleasure is a powerful antidote to that existential angst.

The world today can be increasingly tailored to our individuality, which is why I am wondering if that also is becoming an addiction. News sources are becoming increasingly tailored to our own political stances–no reason to read or interact with those who disagree. We are constantly told to express our individuality, to stand out, to drink only our specialty brands of craft beers or follow eating plans particularly tailored to our body types while we work out with our personal trainers–no group classes for us. Designer drugs are in the offing–drugs that will be created just for the ailing individual.

I’m not saying this is bad–I am saying this is something the church must address. Because today almost everyone I know can and does pick what they will believe and what they will not believe. This college exercise just confirmed it. The understanding of why we need times of communal worship is just about to disappear. Again, note what this teacher learned from this exercise (bold typeface is mine):

Most of the religions my class invented incorporated Eastern religious ideas like meditation— especially meditation used for psychological growth or personal fulfillment—as well as ideas like reincarnation and karma. When Western religions were included, the pieces taken from them were such things as pilgrimage, like the hajj to Mecca required by Muslims, or rituals like prayer. But the prayer was of a particular stripe, always centering on personal—or even material—enrichment.

Pay attention: any interest in religion is there because ultimately, it is all about us.

This always has been and always will be the ultimate sin of humanity: we will trade the worship of God into the worship of our selves. That’s the Genesis story, “You’ll be like God!” says the crafty Tempter. That’s what Jesus said such a powerful “No” to when also faced with those temptations in the desert. But it’s what most people say “Yes” to. We want the universe to center around us.

Now, let’s go back to addictions: if most are driven ultimately by our internal pain, one source of pain relief is good human relationships. The gathered church, groups of people coming together with the stated intentionality of choosing for a period of time to worship something other than themselves and in that worship, seeking to bring healing to the world, has always been a powerful place to build human relationships.

Much research shows that people with good face-to-face social/family networks and support tend to live much longer and much happier, healthier more stable lives. Now I wonder if our tendency to be nation of loners, of “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps” philosophies, of individualized everything from news to decor to education to exercise to video games to religion may feed this growing addiction to individuality.

Unfortunately, in a world where much is tailored to our individuality, we find ourselves unprepared for the messiness and unpredictability of human interaction, making it harder to connect. And we’re certainly not prepared to meet a Holy God who doesn’t revolve around our own wants and needs. The idea that all shall bend the knee to Jesus is nearly anathema in our world.

Yet the less we connect, the deeper our pain. The deeper our pain, the greater the need to dull it. The greater the need to dull it . . . well, this is not hard to figure out, is it?

So, here is the question: taking seriously what happened in that college classroom as indicative of the future of faith experience, how can we learn to be a transformational gathered community that can speak with Holy Love in the language of this emerging demographic group? What will the church look like as we do this?

I have no fear that the church will disappear–God is, God was, and God will be, and will continue to seek to redeem this broken and hurting creation with the message of grace and reconciliation. But church as we have it now must change form to speak to these people.

Let us always remember the power of Acts, Chapter Two: the people in Jerusalem heard the words of the Gospel in their own languages.

We have a whole new language to learn. And tossing around words like “hell,” “sinner,” and words of exclusion and condemnation (especially when used in regard to the LGBTQ community) make absolutely no sense to the millennials. These young men and women deserve to hear the Gospel (another word that communicates essentially nothing to them) in their language. That’s what sacrificial love does. That’s what Jesus did. And that’s what we’ve got to do–if we actually do believe our Gospel.

I speak here particularly to The United Methodist Church, which is facing a giant crisis of purpose and identity and very likely destruction. Can we, as a people who hold to grace as our center, grace shown in every possible way by Jesus, re-form ourselves to bring words of life to these millennials? Can we re-create our methods and structures so we may be those who do takes Acts Two seriously?

Or, and I am posing this right now as an either/or, are we so addicted to our current structures, our procedure, our “methods,” and our need to find the glorious past rather than move to a different future that we won’t actually learn those new languages?

Millenial Theology; The United Methodist Church

Sam Polk

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