How Religion Works
I would like to address three related questions. The first is how churches and religions actually function. The second is the big question of how we can talk meaningfully of God’s existence and the third is whether churches and religions have a future, and if so what it might look like.
I’ll ground what I have to say in the Christian tradition, because that’s the one in which I have experience. Christian churches are first and foremost public institutions set up to fulfil a purpose, which they may describe as proclaiming the kingdom of God on Earth. They claim to have a liberating message, that there’s a loving God who cares infinitely for each of us, that he is personal, that he has a plan for our lives and that we can enjoy an eternity with him in heaven. This can be very comforting for those who believe it, but many of us struggle with it, not least when we hear reports of corruption or misconduct among church officials. We may not want the church to be perfect – it will never be perfect so long as I’m a member of it – but we at least want it to be as good as secular institutions.
Those of us with a long allegiance to our churches may have a history of wrestling with doubts, not only about the church’s performance vis-à-vis the secular world but also about the whole story of a loving God, and we may well have felt that it was disloyal to admit these doubts. I don’t know about you, but I was brought up to believe that I should fight to ‘preserve the faith’ into which I was baptised. This makes me a bit wary of talking about my doubts to members of the church I attend, as I don’t want to upset people unnecessarily. Round Easter this year, however, and fed up with lockdown, I did something I’d never done before. I allowed the flood-gates to open and wrote out a whole list of things which were getting to me about the church. I’ll share my list with you. Your list may be different from mine, but I wouldn’t mind betting that there is a good deal of overlap.
- Religion is authoritarian, built on claims to ‘know’. The question ‘how do you know?’ invites the catch all answer ‘Revelation’.
- Being authoritarian, religion can be anti-democratic. In the end, this is in contradiction, not only to one of the fundamental assumptions of contemporary Western society but also, it can be argued, to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, according to which the Spirit ‘enlightens everyone’.
- Much religion is dualistic: mind / spirit is good, body bad.
- That makes it anti-human, certainly anti-sex. It’s interesting to see how Jesus serves a double role in the churches, both as an historical person and as a model of what humanity should be like. But we have no mention of Jesus’s sexuality or much else that makes him an individual. Which allows some within the church to claim, in practice if not in theory, that the ideal life is sexless!
- It’s a small step from this to identifying all pleasure with self-indulgence. This is not to say that self-indulgence doesn’t exist, but maybe we shouldn’t be quite so afraid of pleasure as we often are!
- Religion can be very cruel. Many years ago I spent a short time in a seminary and while there witnessed some of the cruelest actions I have ever seen, all carried out in the name of a God of love.
- At a deeper level religion has incorporated a lot of what I might call magical thinking. There are always stories about unusual events, making it difficult for us to know what actually happened. We can ask ourselves what a television camera at Lourdes or for that matter in Jesus’ tomb would have recorded. Here I think it’s useful to observe what happens when new religious movements are getting off the ground. Stories accumulate fast and improbable events are urged as ‘proof’ of the religion’s divine approval.
- Religion can encourage superstition; I have even seen ‘superstition’ defined as ‘not believing the Catholic faith’!
Now I don’t pretend that this is the whole picture of what churches and religious communities do. Mercifully they’re often very welcoming and bring a real lift to their neighbourhood. All the same, writing my list proved liberating, and what surprises me is that I hadn’t written it long ago. But such is the urge to believe and to stick with our commitment that it can feel risky to come out and admit what we really feel.
Maybe inside we’re all a bit like the child in Gerard Hughes’s story of Uncle George. Every week a child is dressed in his uncomfortable Sunday best and taken to a formal gathering which makes a great fuss of Uncle George and reminds him in the most flattering of terms just how wonderful he is. These sessions bore the child to tears, but when everybody else is speaking in such reverential tones he daren’t admit it. And when he is asked, ‘Now, don’t you just love Uncle George?’ of course he daren’t say no!
The first thing we need to do, then, is to step back and observe dispassionately how religions function. What we find first of all is that they answer certain human needs. One of these is the need for stories and moral precepts which can help us to form our moral compass. It’s this idea that lies behind a definition of religion I came across some years ago but haven’t been able to find since. I think it comes from the philosopher R.B. Braithwaite who said that religion is essentially ‘ethics plus stories’.
That’s good, but it can be expanded. Religious stories form a focus for people’s identities, so that if you identify as Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu or whatever, then that gives you a sense of who you are and a basis from which you can criticise the prevailing culture in which you live. As well as providing stories, religion answers a need for ceremonies to mark important events in life, things such as marriage, founding a family, the birth of a child or the passing of a parent. Another very important function of religion, of course, is to form a basis for spirituality which is all about how we humans understand our lives and how we can flourish in harmony with the natural world. These are all very positive functions for religions. Where religions go wrong, it seems to me, is when they claim to know more than they do.
Some years ago I worked as an organist in the Church of Norway and became very friendly with one of the pastors in our parish. We would have long discussions on religious matters, and I used to enjoy teasing him by asking, ‘How do you know that?’ at which point he would roar with laughter. The standard answer, to the question ‘How do you know that?’ is, of course, Revelation. But then how do you know that it’s revealed by God? There are lots of revelation claims around, and if one is supposed to be the authentic revelation it needs somehow to show why we should adopt this story as opposed to any of its rivals.
Revelation is a complex topic and just how God is supposed to have informed us of what he wants us to know can be answered in a number of ways. One of the most obvious is Scripture – God has revealed himself in this or that text or collection of texts. We will all have seen, however, how Scripture can be misused by individuals or power-groups claiming to know just how everyone should behave and how everyone should think. To identify revelation simply with Scripture gives rise to questions over interpretation. A possible way round this is to say that while scripture is not to be identified with revelation, it nevertheless points to it. Thus a Christian may say that the Bible points to the person of Jesus, a Muslim may say the Quran contains countless examples of good human lives and God’s message to his representatives, the prophets. There is certainly more mileage in this view than in the view that every word of Scripture is literally true.
But Scripture is still built on the presupposition that God exists, and this brings me to my second big question, the God question. What does it mean to say that God exists? This is certainly problematic. To illustrate this, let’s swap the letters of the word ‘god’ around and say ‘dog’ exists. Well, of course ‘dog’ exists as a word enabling us to assign certain items in our experience to a category, in this case that of dogs. But it’s individual dogs which exist, while the category is an abstraction. Then of course the category of ‘dog’ belongs within a larger category, that of ‘animal’, which belongs within the still larger category of ‘thing’. This is how we, as humans, think. But then to what category does ‘God’ belong? ‘Thing’, or perhaps ‘Being’ seems to be the most general of categories, but God doesn’t seem to be any kind of thing, at least not anything within our everyday experience. And yet if we speak of God as person, or even as a Trinity of persons with properties like wrath or mercy or compassion, isn’t this thinking of him as some kind of thing – a thing which has those properties as opposed to others? Alternatively we may try using mystical words like ‘Being’ with a capital B or ‘transcendence’, but in that case God doesn’t seem to have any properties at all, which raises the question of how we can speak of him.
My suggestion is that we drop the question of God’s existence and look instead at what the word ‘God’ does. Some years ago in discussion with a former student who was struggling with religious questions, I found myself suggesting that ‘God’ was not a thing which might or might not exist, but a value-word, standing for, or pointing to, values like truth-telling, compassion and everything that contributes towards human flourishing and survival. Significantly this view preserves ethical values while offering a rather different perspective on the idea of an authoritarian God who issues commandments prescribing how humans are to live. On the view I’m recommending ‘God’ is a creation of human language, and the values which lie behind his supposed ‘commandments’ are those which we have learned, or are learning by trial and error, make for human wellbeing.
This interpretation also allows for the possibility that values may change – dare I say ‘progress’? – over time. At the beginning of the 18th century slavery was widely accepted but is now seen as morally offensive. In our own time questions round race, sexuality and gender have come into focus, and while individuals may disagree as to what kinds of behaviour, if any, are sinful, they are at least likely to agree that hounding down and persecuting people who carry out acts they disapprove of is morally wrong.
It should be noted that this view of how religion works doesn’t absolutely rule out the transcendent. In that sense it’s agnostic rather than atheist. It’s a view which leaves room for what Bishop David Jenkins used to call ‘disclosure situations’, experiences in which through nature, or art, or perhaps even in church, people feel they have been taken out of themselves and put in touch with something coming from ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’ their everyday experience. Of course we can’t prove that this is what they do, and no doubt people’s past has a part to play in what they experience. But such experiences are deeply human and it’s in these that religion can come alive.
This brings me to my third question, of how churches will be in the future. I think we have to recognise that for many people in our time God is indeed dead and that religion has played a big role in killing him. How? By claiming to know what as human beings we do not know and by treating religious dogmas as metaphysical truths. If the churches are to have a future, maybe we should drop the metaphysics and all the authoritarian stuff, listen to people where they are and accompany them on their journey – and indeed many churches already do that. But religion can do more than just give support to individuals. It can still with its stories challenge and inspire and open us up to mystery. At the same time religion is realistic in recognising that we are flawed individuals, so that solving the problems confronting humanity is not going to be easy.
It seems that we have on the one hand good religion which is realistic and inspirational and bad religion with those authoritarian claims to know. There’s the problem. Good religion will inspire people and enable them to recognise in themselves the dangers of a hatred which can all too easily present itself as righteous indignation; bad religion will assure them that they’re right and that they must join in the crusade against sin. In essence this is populism. People will believe any charismatic and unscrupulous leader – political or religious – who feeds them stories they want to believe. And I’m afraid I haven’t a rational answer to that, but maybe, just maybe, there’s a religious one. Under lockdown for many the Crucifixion story became a story of God’s identification with suffering humanity. The effect of this was to bring Crucifixion and Resurrection – God and humanity – very close together, as parts of the same mystery. The resurrection story offered hope, but we shouldn’t deceive ourselves. It’s we who must make the Resurrection happen.
A former music teacher and lifelong organist, Iain Robertson has been well placed to observe how churches function in practice.