The Myth of Organized Religion

Last week the American novelist Anne Rice made headlines when she announced via Facebook that she was “quitting Christianity”.  Her explanation was that she could no longer tolerate the anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-birth control, anti-science and anti-Democrat teachings of the modern Christian church and so therefore she repudiated her membership in the religion while remaining committed to Christ himself.  While I agree wholeheartedly with Ms. Rice’s criticisms of the Church, I’m afraid her claim that she has “quit” the religion is inaccurate on at least two separate and slightly unequal fronts.

The first is somewhat semantic but it’s worth addressing nonetheless.  Anne’s enduring commitment to what she ostensibly perceives to be the true teachings of Christ (or at least the selected teachings she’ll choose to follow going forward) is in fact, the only prerequisite for calling oneself a Christian.  Indeed, the first “Christians” were a loose-nit band of Galilee residents who followed the teachings their iconoclastic leader, Jesus.  The group was small, unorganized, and wielded little in the way of societal clout or privilege.  They had no cathedrals, no scriptures, and by today’s standards would more likely to be described as a cult than a religion.  So if Rice has truly retained her devotion to Christ, then her claim that she’s quit Christianity is a slight misnomer.

But what I find much more problematic is this idea that we can somehow divorce spirituality from religion (Note: I use the term spirituality loosely throughout this article, but I generally take it to mean those elements of religion that we think of as being positive, as opposed to the authoritarian, prohibitionist, bigoted portions, of which there are many).  If I had a dollar for every time someone told me that they denounce “organized religion” but they are still “spiritual”, I wouldn’t be rich per se, but I could probably treat a good number of my friends to a steak dinner at The Keg.  The term is so trite and so poorly thought out that it makes me cringe.  The myth of organized religion is not the fact that organized religion exists (it most certainly does).  The myth is the implied assumption that all these new age spiritualists have somehow managed to concoct a system of spirituality that is totally liberated from the religious spirituality with which they’ve already been indoctrinated.

This myth is so pervasive that it has spawned an entire subgenre of non-fiction literature with authors like Deepak Chopra raking in millions a speaking to packed auditoriums.  But when you open up one of these books, you find that it’s saturated in the vernacular and ideologies of the religious traditions the authors seek to supplant.

Like many of the neo-spiritualists, I was once adamant that I should be described as spiritual but not religious because being an outright Christian had fallen out of fashion among my social circle at the time.  But one day when I took an honest look at my so-called spirituality, I realized that I was still clasping my hands together to pray every night, just like I had been taught in church.  Furthermore, when I prayed, I was still envisioning a Gandalf-like god, who was a white elderly male with a long white beard, dressed in a long white robe, and who “used the Earth as his footstool.”  That last bit is an actual quote that I heard in Sunday school as an 8-year-old and it always stuck with me.

The problem I was encountering was that I had been thoroughly inculcated with this Judeo-Christian construction of spirituality that it became my only frame of reference from which to conceive of and interpret spiritual and transcendent experiences.  So naturally when the time came to define my own spirituality, I reverted back to that frame of reference.  This is what I believe most “spiritual” people do.

The tragic reality is that until very recently (probably within the past 50 years) religion has enjoyed a monopoly on the discourse surrounding spirituality and all that it entails, from ethics to love to inspiration to spiritual upliftment.  As a result, we have yet to develop a lexicon and a framework with which to construct a spirituality that is not rooted in the doctrines of organized religion.  This is not to say that such a task is impossible.  In fact the secular humanists have gone a long way toward providing us with an alternative way to view ethics without having to invoke the threat of eternal damnation or any other superstitious nonsense. 

I liken this process to that of an English-speaker learning a second language.  When we first start to learn French, for example, every thought and every utterance is first formulated in English and then translated.  Consequently, what is produced is a stream of thoughts that, in the speaker’s mind, remain as projections of English onto a scaffold comprised of French grammar and vocabulary.  Or perhaps the correct analogy is that of an adult making his or her first attempt at learning any human language.  The study of feral children has shown us that a child who isn’t exposed to any human language before the age of around 12 will never be able to speak.  Perhaps religion, with it’s ready-made, neatly-packaged happy meal of cosmology, morality, and spirituality, has spared us the heavy lifting of having to truly think through these difficult questions on our own, thereby causing the necessary cognitive muscles to atrophy, forever robbing us of our ability to overcome religion’s intellectual hegemony.

Either way, this process of building an entirely new way to conceive of spirituality is highly difficult, highly non-trivial, and one that I’m afraid the average spiritualist is ill-equipped to take on.