A bishop’s religion problem
James Hazelwood is bishop of the ELCA Lutheran New England Synod. Remarkable to me for a bishop, he seems to prioritize spiritual concerns as much as institutional church promotion. Recently Hazelwood wrote a blog post titled, “Our Religion Problem.” As a churchman, he is somewhat tentative about this, as is the priest he quotes to start his reflection, who says:
Sometimes I wonder if the church’s main problem is that it points people to the church rather than God.
This “summarize[s] our religious problem quite well,” Hazelwood responds. He then discusses the now familiar trends in society of participation in formal religion in decline, while interest in spirituality and spiritual practices is growing. And here we get into a vocabulary problem. What is the difference between religion and spirituality?
Until fairly recently, the words could be used interchangeably. Or at least spirituality was considered an aspect of religion, along with things like worship, doctrine, theology, etc. Early in the 20th century, Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James published his famous book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. He did not have in mind singing in the choir or attending Sunday School, but individual experiences with God or the sacred, categorized then as “natural theology.”
Similarly, Hazelwood quotes renowned 20th century Swiss psychologist Carl Jung.
No matter what the world thinks about religious experience, the one who has it possesses a great treasure, a thing that has become for him a source of life, meaning, and beauty, and that has given a new splendor to the world and to mankind.
Again, Jung is not talking about anything to do with the church, which he abandoned early on (having multiple clergy as relatives probably didn’t help). Rather, by “religious experience” Jung means what today would be called a profound spiritual experience. In a famous TV interview late in his life, Jung was asked if he believed in God. “I don’t need to believe,” Jung responded. “I know.” This is the answer of a mystic, rather than a conventionally religious person, who would rarely be so bold.
It’s Hazelwood’s hope that today’s spirituality movement is returning religion to its original purpose.
As we witness the decline of the institutional expression of religion, we may also be seeing a resurgence of the original meaning of religion. The word religion is derived from the Latin religāre, meaning “to tie back”—to reconnect. At the heart of the word is the Latin verb ligāre, “to tie,” which is also the root of the English word ligament. Are we going back to reconnecting with a more substantive aspect of the sacred?
When we use “religion” today, we associate it with churches, synagogues, and temples. In a way, we are speaking of institutional aspects of religion. But I want us to broaden our understanding of that word. I am hoping we can return to the reconnecting experience of religion.
Hazelwood then points helpfully to a distinction William James made in discussing religion.
[James] distinguishes between primary religious encounters, which are direct personal experiences, and secondary religion, which involves teachings about the faith or its organizational aspects. Most of what happens today in the US American church is secondary religion – information, analysis, and description. I’ve come to believe this is one of the reasons for the decline in participation in institutional religion.
In contrast, primary religion is the direct experience of the holy, such as encounters with phenomena, hauntings, numinous creatures, conversations with angels, and experiences of gentle calm. Those encounters can be mountain-top experiences or subtle reminders of the blessing of being alive. They can be out in nature, inside a sanctuary, or around the corner from your place of work.
I think Hazelwood is spot on here but it’s more complicated than he lets on. He concludes this way.
We may live in a modern world filled with antibiotics, supersonic jets, and indoor plumbing, but the religious function deep within each human being has not disappeared. People are hungry and starved for primary religious experience. I wonder if our religion problem is that it’s not religious enough.
His last sentence is both vague (“I wonder…”) and obfuscating. It should read, “Our church problem is that it’s not religious enough,” for this is where the problem lies.
Richard Rohr has said, “Religion is one of the safest places to hide from God,” meaning religion in its contemporary sense of organized institutions. When you move to “experiential knowledge,” what James calls “primary religion,” Rohr says, “it’s spiritual.”
So, does institutional religion exist for the purpose of avoiding an encounter with God? I think you can make a good case that it does. It certainly is a theme of the Old Testament prophets. In one of his most cutting denunciations, Amos declares,
I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies…. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
And when Jesus overturns the money changers’ tables in the temple, he says,
It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you make it a den of robbers.
As John Dominic Crossan has said, Jesus’ action symbolically “destroys” the temple. He puts a stop to its normal operation, thus putting an end to temple religion.
Structured religion attempts to formalize our experience of God: this is where and when you should pray, these are the rituals you should perform, this is what you should believe, these are the teachers and preachers you should listen to. So long as the religious tradition and its designated leaders are believed and trusted, participants find this comforting and reassuring. They trust that God is indeed present in religion’s various manifestations, but rarely if ever have what James calls “a direct experience of the holy.”
Today, however, that confidence is much diminished. Religion’s historical origins are now seen as more human than divine. So too is its leadership, sullied in the exposure of countless personal scandals and cases of institutional corruption and abuse of power. Religious communities are increasingly distracted by social and political concerns, maintenance of property and assets, and organizational power struggles.
Hazelwood says, “People are hungry and starved for primary religious experience. I wonder if our religion problem is that it’s not religious enough.” There isn’t any “wondering” about it. The only thing to wonder is, whether religion can recreate itself to be the primary facilitator of people’s spiritual encounter with God, or is this the time when something new is arising to take its place.