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Losing our religion?

Losing our religion?

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Still shop of beginning of ABC news story on US religious decline

Last month, ABC News broadcast a 10-minute report titled, Is America losing its religion? So, more than just a sound bite. It began with the story of a Catholic parish in Buffalo, New York, with a large building but an ever-shrinking congregation. It formally closed last summer and the property has been sold.

The reporter spoke with a priest with the title “Diocese Vicar for Renewal and Development.” Despite that title, this priest’s primary role seemed to be managing the closing of parishes too small to continue. In the past twenty years, he said, their diocese had closed half its congregations, and more closures were to come. This process was euphemistically called the “Road to Renewal.”

The report discussed how this trend was broad based and transcended denominations. Examples were given of evangelical Protestant and mainline Protestant congregations in similar straights. The now oft-repeated statistic was cited that less than half of American adults say they are members of a religious community, a dramatic drop from 75 years ago. The result: congregations by the thousands are closing every year.

When asked why all this is happening, the Catholic priest gave an unintentionally ironic answer. “We’ve become a culture that doesn’t need God as much as we think we do.” Well, I think I know what he was trying to say, and I think he is wrong. Not needing God isn’t the issue.

Several times in the report, religious leaders expressed the view that in turning away from religion, people were turning away from God. I would challenge them to support that conclusion. Surveys show that belief in God has remained steady, including among those who have left organized religion.

Personally, I know of many people who have stopped being active church members yet remain people of faith, often with serious spiritual practices and voluntary service activities. But just as important, the converse also has to be admitted. Namely, that churches have always had many members who were spiritually shallow and often did little more than attend worship services, aka “go to church.”

For churches today, that disconnect has finally become too wide to maintain and is at a breaking point. Increasingly, people with a deep spirituality are finding the institutional church irrelevant. They are no longer interested in maintaining buildings, serving on boards and committees, attending rote worship services, and the other routines of church life.

On the other hand, the people who belonged to churches out of habit and family tradition are also disappearing. The “whiff of religion” they received from church isn’t enough anymore to keep them involved. Or just as likely, their children who have become adults, see no point in going through the religious motions their parents went through. As to anyone considering joining a church, the seemingly unending parade of sex and financial scandals and the polarizing politicization of many churches are all big turnoffs.

Today, churches are often dominated by retirees who remember when churches were full and often the center of people’s social lives. They don’t understand why things have changed, or don’t want to understand. They ensure that the proposals coming down the pike year-after-year for “renewing the church” ultimately go nowhere because they don’t want the church to change. They like it the way it is. And as their numbers shrink, so do their churches. Last one out, turn off the lights.

Unfortunately, many of those recruited for church leadership roles, including clergy, hang on to the old church traditions. It was disheartening to hear this relatively young priest repeating the worn-out trope that people are leaving church because they are leaving God. He needs to get out more.

But that’s the danger of institutions: at some point self-preservation becomes their primary goal. And leaders are selected for how strongly they affirm that goal. Yet the point comes when even a sinking ship’s captain has to cry out, “Abandon ship!” and direct everyone into a lifeboat or to grab a life vest and jump. The ship of the church may not be at that point, but it’s getting close.

While those committed to the institutional church see a society skidding into spiritual darkness, I see plenty of evidence of spiritual vitality. We are certainly in a time of exploration where new language, practices, theologies, and philosophies are being tried out and tested. Much may seem strange to the traditionalists, and much will be discarded along the way. But as individuals and in groups, in person and online, people everywhere are actively searching for a spirituality that meaningfully connects their life, in all its dimensions, with the Creative Energy that is our origin and the source of hope and renewal in all our difficulties.

What options does the church have to respond to this new spirituality? I think this popular organizational maxim is as good as any: Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Speaking a new language

Speaking a new language

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Pillars of Creation photo by James Webb Space Telescope
Photo of the Pillars of Creation by the James Webb Space Telescope (2022)

Recently I came across a piece of writing that stunned me with its clarity and wisdom. It was an essay I came across on YouTube by a young man who creates videos on spirituality and nonduality. Going by the online name ASCENDOR, he has no apparent religious affiliation but has learned much from the world’s various spiritual traditions and from life.

There is an intelligence that endlessly holds everything in perfect harmony. It permeates all that is, both seen and unseen. It is the force that guides the stars in their orbits and sets the planets to dance in precise order. Effortlessly, it orchestrates the rhythm of the universe – from the gentle ebb and flow of the seas to the winds that carry the clouds across the sky.

Within this intelligence, everything finds its place. The trees grow as if they understand the language of light, stretching towards the sun, knowing that their growth is part of a greater plan. The animals instinctively follow their nature, migrating, hunting, resting, creating a perfect balance in the web of life. The seasons shift in an eternal cycle, as if an invisible hand gently directs them, allowing everything to bloom and fade at just the right moment.

Even in the smallest things, this intelligence reveals itself. A tiny seed, seemingly insignificant, contains within it the blueprint of an entire tree. It knows when to sprout, grow, and bear fruit – not through thought, but through pure being, through the infallible wisdom of life itself.

Everything happens in harmony, as if the universe were a single, vast symphony, where each note plays exactly in its proper place. This intelligence is not distant or separate from us; it is within everything we are and experience. It is in our breath, in the beating of our hearts, in every thought that comes and goes.

You have never seen a sulking or despairing tree, questioning its existence or losing itself in thoughts of the future. Trees live in natural harmony, rooted in deep trust. They surrender to the flow of life, carried by an intelligence far beyond the grasp of the human mind. In the same way, you too can let go of your worries, for they are not needed to live a beautiful life. When the weight of your worries lifts, the search ends. The ego-driven energy dissolves, and in this newfound vastness, the entire cosmos – everything that exists – becomes your family. Or, more accurately, you recognize yourself in all things.

What is being talked about here? Life, existence, reality, being, and “an intelligence that endlessly holds everything in perfect harmony.” There is so much to be pondered and explored in these words. One word that is not used, however, is “god”, though anyone from a religious tradition would want to say that is what the “intelligence” spoken of here means.

For me, however, this essay supports the late Catholic theologian Karl Rahner’s belief that we should stop using the word “god”, at least for a long while. Regardless of one’s beliefs, the word has accumulated so many ideas over the centuries, and has become so rigid, that is hides more than it reveals. By avoiding the word, as is done here, we are forced into questioning and exploring, rather than assuming we’ve got “it all” figured out.

Yet religions have great difficulty with the idea that they haven’t each got it all figured out—and usually exclusively. Speaking in Singapore during his recent Asia trip, Pope Francis got himself into hot water by publicly expressing this inclusive viewpoint.

“Religions are like different languages in order to arrive at God, but God is God for all. Since God is God for all, then we are all children of God…. If you start to fight, ‘my religion is more important than yours, mine is true and yours isn’t,’ where will that lead us? There’s only one God, and each of us has a language to arrive at God.”

The pope’s conservative critics once again were horrified at his openness and broad-mindedness. A retired archbishop responded incredulously,

“To suggest, even loosely, that Catholics walk a more or less similar path to God as other religions drains martyrdom of its meaning. Why give up your life for Christ when other paths may get us to the same God?”

Of course, he completely misses Francis’ point. God is the universal truth, not any religion. But this bishop and countless others like him are so wedded to their religious institutions that they can’t make that distinction. Such ossified misunderstandings are dragging religion down around the world.

The growing numbers of the “spiritual, not religious” reflects an attempt to find new language for this universal truth, ultimate reality, ground of being, which religion traditionally calls God. One of its most commonly expressed beliefs is that this ultimate reality is not in some particular place far off but here and now. As it says in the essay: “This intelligence is not distant or separate from us; it is within everything we are and experience.”

In a recent blog post reflecting on the pope’s words, Christian nonduality teacher Marshall Davis affirms his declaration but takes issue with one aspect of it.

In this regard both Pope Francis and his critics go astray. Religions are not paths to God. There are no paths to God. Religions are not different paths up the same mountain. Identifying religions as paths to God assumes that God is somewhere else and we need to travel to arrive at God. 

God is not somewhere else. God is here now…. If religions are paths, then they are dead ends. They often serve as barriers to discovering God. They become God substitutes….  

God is not found by hiking a trail up a spiritual mountain but by discovering that there is no trail and no mountain. There is only the Divine here now. All we need to do is open our eyes. We need to get out of our own way. All we need is eyes to see and ears to hear.  As Jesus said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” 

Davis also just published a new video in his series on the spiritual awakenings of people in the Bible. This one is on Job. After chapters of talking about his sufferings, Job finally gets his meeting with God to find out what it’s all about. As Davis says, God doesn’t use theology or quote scripture. Instead, he gives a long speech about the wonders of creation. God is telling Job that he is never going to figure this out with reason. Instead, he needs to fully experience the world around him to discover his place within it.

This is the wisdom that this new yet ancient spirituality is appealing to, rather than the theology and rationalism religion has relied on for centuries. As ASCENDOR says in his essay,

There is an intelligence that endlessly holds everything in perfect harmony. It permeates all that is, both seen and unseen…. Within this intelligence, everything finds its place…. Even in the smallest things, this intelligence reveals itself.

Here are the seeds of a new creed for our time. The great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas said that the first book of scripture is the universe itself. How was that wisdom lost? Or why was it never assimilated in the first place? I’ve come to believe that the church’s anemic response to the climate crisis is due to it never sincerely believing in the sacredness of creation. And yet all of us have experienced spiritual renewal spending time in our gardens, gazing at the stars, or walking in the woods.

As Paul says in Acts, “God is the one in whom we live, and move, and have our being.” Davis is right that there is no path to God. How could there be a path to where we already are? The “intelligence” at the heart of everything is here now, around and within us. We just need to be still, and look and listen, with our minds and our hearts.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Repurposing the church: conclusion (part 3)

Repurposing the church: conclusion (part 3)

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Storefront church
A storefront church in Toronto.

In almost any conversation about the church’s future, the elephant in the room, the thing everyone is aware of but no one wants to talk about, is God. Perhaps it’s because people take God as a given, needing no discussion, but I don’t think so. For some it may be that they would feel too awkward or embarrassed. But I think the main reason God is “off the table” is that people know it would open a can of worms. It would reveal that people are all over the map on who or what God is, and that few adhere to the church’s “official” position.

It’s been well over a century since the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “God is dead … and we have killed him.” Despite hysterical distortions by his opponents then and since, Nietzsche was basically reporting a historical fact: the notion of God common in the ancient and medieval world was no more. That God was “killed” by the creation of a science-based world that has no place for such a God. That God is now homeless and unemployed, since heaven has no place in the universe and the universe has no need for God to keep it going.

Are a scientific worldview and the idea of God incompatible? Well, yes and no. If God is a being in some extraterrestrial location called heaven, who intervenes in the operation of the universe and the affairs of humanity, then yes, you have to choose one or the other. And if you choose science, then no God. This, of course, is the fundamentalists’ assumption and the reason for their hostility to the modern world.

Yet most Christians (including most fundamentalists to a degree) want to have their cake and eat it too. They accept science and the marvels it has brought to modern life, yet somehow also want to keep a personal God existing somewhere out there. Thus, Christians live with their religion and their science-dominated daily lives in separate compartments, with interaction between them rare and, when it does happen, awkward, if not explosive.

Or at least, that’s how it’s been. For I think we have reached a tipping point where most people now find this an impossible and unnecessary juggling act. The one bond above all others which has held people to the church is finally dissolving, and that’s a belief in a theistic God, God as an extraterrestrial being somewhere out there.

I say both impossible and unnecessary because people are discovering that, despite the church’s age-old denial, there are other ways to understand and experience God. Furthermore, many Christians are discovering that within Christianity there have always been alternative viewpoints, expressed by the mystics but also more than a few theologians, not to mention countless ordinary clergy and lay church members.

The growing number of those identifying as “spiritual but not religious” is the most tangible sign of this movement. These are people who have abandoned the theistic deity of traditional religion yet maintain a belief in an essential spiritual and sacred dimension to life. As surveys have shown, many may still express a belief in God, but often this is not the God of the church’s creeds and doctrines. This is often a God of experience rather than of theological belief.

A few months ago I wrote a blog post called “God Has Left the Building” and discussed how spirituality is rapidly displacing traditional notions of religion like Christianity.

Spirituality is now in broad use to refer to the experience of the sacred and of mystery in life and in the world. Many teachers and authors of various religious traditions, and of no tradition, commonly use the term to identify this dimension of reality. Spirituality is being seen as a way to reestablish our connection with the natural world and stem our abuse of it. And, being a religiously “neutral” term, spirituality is also providing a new opening for interaction with the sciences, especially psychology and theoretical physics.

Unfortunately, traditional Christianity is largely left behind in all this. The church cannot let go of “the Big Guy upstairs”, with its hymns, prayers, and rituals still directed to this imaginary being somewhere “above” us, imploring his forgiveness for our misdeeds and intervention in our many problems. While such piety still has some appeal, it is shrinking by the day, as evidenced by the ever-increasing numbers of empty pews.

The biggest thing missed by today’s distressed church leaders is that the church’s decline is largely a rejection of worship and the theistic God worship is centered on. Shrinking worship attendance means that millions of people have realized that they can get along fine without it and its weekly reconnection to the God-out-there. This is the reason the pandemic lockdown was such a blow. Forced to stop their worship practice, many discovered they didn’t really miss it and found other things to do with that time.

The pandemic lockdown was a missed opportunity, for this was when the church could have recognized that worship’s time is over. As I go on to say in the post I quoted above, the problem with worship is the church’s problem with God. The theistic God in heaven, the “sky God” as he’s sometimes been called, or God as Batman as Sam Harris described him, swooping in to rescue us from disaster, simply doesn’t work in the world today. As long as it clings to such a notion, the church can’t say anything intelligible, let alone meaningful, about such a God.

As I have shared these ideas in various places and settings, I rarely if ever get any pushback. While some raised in the church still cling to its traditional notions, the vast majority of people, both inside and outside the church, have moved on. Yet the church has hardly budged. Especially in worship, its hymns, liturgy, prayers, creeds, and preaching still assume this yawning gap between God, reigning in heaven, and the world and each one of us.

Spirituality is the recognition that there is no gap. God, as Paul says in Acts, is the one “in whom we live, and move, and have our being.” Or as St. Augustine said, and many spiritual teachers have repeated over the centuries, “God is closer to us than we are to ourselves.” And as Meister Eckhart says, the man who 700 years ago spearheaded the greatest effort to redirect the church toward this orientation:

Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things. Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God. Every creature is a word of God.

Churches measure their vitality by how many people are in worship, yet it is worship that is dragging down the church. It is like an addiction, a habit the church can’t let go of. That many people, especially clergy, would be astonished, and even outraged, at such an idea shows how difficult breaking this habit will be. They don’t see that culture is breaking that habit for them, as churches close by the thousands.

No doubt many repurposed churches will retain a regular community gathering, though hopefully called something other than “worship”. But here is the great learning opportunity: let members reexamine church traditions and decide how they can be reimagined and repurposed, or that they just need to go. What opens us to recognize God’s presence here and now? How do we recognize the holiness of this time and place, of everyone present, and of the world around us? And how do we tell the story of Jesus, not as the Son of God, but as a child of God who lived to show that this is the identity of every person?

For this, finally, is what a repurposed church is about: following Jesus as the revealer of our oneness with God, of our true nature as Spirit, of each of our beings as a unique embodiment of God’s own Being. In that light, much of what has passed for “essential” church life will fade away or be radically reimagined. The church will no longer proclaim the “story of salvation” as Christ’s deliverance of the world from sin. Rather, the church will be a place to “experience salvation” as the awakening to our true nature, revealed in Jesus’ life and teaching.

A repurposed church will be a place to learn from spiritual masters of past and present, whatever their religious label. Here people will be guided to follow the “pathless path”, which leads them to where they already are by discovering they have never NOT been apart from God, but only lost in their egoic mind’s delusions of separateness. In a repurposed church they will be supported in a journey inward, to discover both their true selves and the God who is the core of their being. As Meister Eckhart taught,

There is a huge silence inside each of us that beckons us into itself, and the recovery of our own silence can begin to teach us the language of heaven.

This may be the most difficult of the lessons a repurposed church must learn, but it is crucial. That after a centuries-long obsession with words—scripture, creeds, doctrines, theology, sermons, hymns, prayers, liturgy—God is not found in them. Rather, as Elijah learned at the mouth of his cave, God is in our silence. And in a repurposed church, silence will be its sacrament.

 

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Repurposing the church

Repurposing the church

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A former church now become a restaurant
The former Good Shepherd Lutheran Church building now serves as a restaurant.

Earlier this month, a New York Times article told the story of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in the Chicago suburb of Des Plaines, not far from O’Hare airport. Well, it actually told the story of its building because Good Shepherd no longer exists. It closed a number of years ago and its building, situated in a pastoral lakeside setting, was converted into an upscale restaurant. The article highlights one couple who came to the restaurant to celebrate their wedding anniversary. They had been married in that same building 34 years earlier.

The story goes on to tell of a number of church buildings around the country repurposed in a variety of ways.

Around the world, houses of worship have been converted to restaurants, breweries, hotels, art centers, theaters and even sports complexes. Some abandoned churches have been transformed into mixed-use developments, blending retail and residential space, and affordable housing.

A church in New York City became a disco and one in St. Louis a skate park. Years ago, I stayed in a Chicago church that had become a B&B and I’ve seen a number of church buildings converted to single family homes.

The possibilities are presumably endless—as are the opportunities. Churches are closing by the thousands every year. A sociologist of church trends is quoted as saying that 100,000 Protestant churches in the US could close this decade, which would be close to 20% of such congregations. This after thousands closed in prior years. The story for Roman Catholic parishes is much the same.

Having spent most of my professional life in churches, I can say with some confidence that this situation will only get worse before it gets better, whatever “better” might mean. For most of the people remaining in churches, better means stopping their church’s membership shrinkage and then start growing again. Na’ gonna’ happen. But it’s almost impossible to convince churchgoers of that. I know. I’ve tried.

The people remaining in congregations like going to church. Most have done it all their lives and want to keep doing it as long as they can. Talk of changing, renewing, remaking, transforming the church gets a blank look from them. “We like it the way it is. We just wish there were more of us.” But in fact, their numbers are getting steadily older and fewer. Last one out, turn off the lights.

Now one might think church leaders, who are primarily clergy, would be steering churches in a new direction but they don’t get it either. For most of them, also, the primary goal is to preserve the institution. Which isn’t surprising since clergy are essentially trained to be institutional leaders. But that’s unfortunate since it is the institutional nature of Christianity that is the problem.

In a blog post last fall, Marshall Davis, a retired Baptist minister and now teacher of nondual Christianity, sees the church’s day of reckoning fast approaching.

The church does not have a problem; the church is the problem. The church thinks the problem is in the culture outside the church, but the real problem is in the church culture. The church does not see that, and therefore it has no motivation to change. Instead it doubles down on the culture wars. Because of the church’s spiritual blindness, the only solution left to God is so drastic that no one wants to think about it.

The church needs to die, so it can be resurrected as an entirely new creation. For that reason I am not dismayed when I read ever-worsening statistics about the decline of the church. I see God’s hand in it. Like a gardener or farmer, God is turning over the soil, in order to prepare for a new season.

Most people today just aren’t interested in belonging to a church, or to any other religious organization for that matter. That’s very hard for Christians, lay or clergy, to comprehend. For them being a Christian means belonging to a church. They enjoy the worship services (mostly), the “coffee and” after worship, Bible studies, service opportunities, etc.

Primarily, though, people enjoy the friendships they have with other church members who they encounter at such events. But newcomers or people outside a congregation’s “inner circle” often find these activities are “not all that.” Add to that the scandals, political divisions, and internal squabbles that rack many congregations and folks looking in from the outside will say, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

More than the church’s organizational flaws, however, is the fact that it is simply not offering what people are looking for. In clinging to its traditions, the church has been blinded to a cultural sea change occurring all around it. The result, as Davis says in a later post, is that people are looking elsewhere to meet their spiritual needs.

I see God at work in the hearts and minds of people who are leaving the church. People are looking more closely at what they believe … and don’t believe. They are deconstructing the faith they were raised in (if they were raised in a religious tradition). Upon careful examination, many are deciding that their religious tradition is not true. 

So church decline has little to do with liberal or conservative. It has everything to do with people looking for meaning and purpose, beauty and truth, community and meaningful relationships in life. People are not finding those in churches, so they are looking elsewhere. They are looking to other religious traditions and humanistic philosophies. They are exploring other spiritual practices and beliefs.  

Throughout my ministry career, I have watched my denomination, and others like it, struggle to stem their decline. The proposals and renewal programs have been endless, and millions of dollars spent on them. Nothing has changed. But to use a commercial metaphor, all of these efforts have dealt with the packaging. No one, it seems, whether in the pews or the pulpit, dares to question whether it might actually be the product itself that is the problem.

Specifically, but only briefly, the church needs to finally acknowledge that its ancient sin/salvation shtick is over. Not only are people outside not interested in it but many in the pews—and pulpits!—don’t buy it anymore, either. The carrot-and-stick of heaven and hell are way past their sell by date. Many churches today, of course, barely pay lip service to this tradition. Yet it is still at the core of these churches’ creeds, liturgies, calendars, prayers, hymns, and education materials.

“But that’s what Jesus is all about, isn’t it?” That’s certainly the direction the early church pulled him and it’s the direction the church has gone ever since. But there is good evidence now that many early Christians were not onboard with that viewpoint and instead understood Jesus very differently (see the gospel of Thomas, for instance, where the crucifixion and resurrection are never mentioned). And throughout its history, there has always been a minority in the church who viewed Jesus as something other than a “savior from sin”, the mystics being the most notable.

More importantly, thanks to modern New Testament scholarship, and when we remove our “savior-colored glasses”, it has become easy to see that Jesus himself showed little interest in salvation religion, his “attack” on the temple being perhaps Exhibit A. Rather, his primary concern was with the suffering of people in their daily lives, whether physical, emotional, or spiritual. In Mark, the gospel’s “good news” is that God’s kingdom is here, now, at our finger tips. And in Luke Jesus declares,

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

While the church certainly affirms these texts, what isn’t acknowledged is that they have nothing to do with the ancient sin/salvation mantra the church has recited for nearly two millennia. It is so ingrained that, as I said above, the church’s predicament will have to get worse before it gets better. People within the church today won’t be able to undo the doctrines, imagery, and language that have sustained the church for so long. It’s what they’re there for.

Nonetheless, I share Marshall Davis’ view that from this dying will come a new rising. The Spirit is indeed “turning over the soil.” It may not look like much now but in the spring, however long that is in coming, new growth will appear. Then, repurposing church buildings will give way to repurposing the church itself.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support, which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

God has left the building

God has left the building

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Intoned in a dramatic voice (by lead actor Kelsey Grammer), many of the episodes of the long running TV comedy, Frasier, concluded with the announcement, “Frasier has left the building.” If he had known the phrase, the iconoclastic 19th century German philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche, might have used it and declared, “God has left the building.” Instead, he famously (or infamously) said, “God is dead … and we have killed him.”

This Sunday is Trinity Sunday. It is an odd “feast day” because it is the only one dedicated to a doctrine. The Trinity has been argued about throughout church history. The meaning of it has never been clearly stated, so that Jews and Muslims both view it as a polytheistic heresy. Nearly every group that has separated from orthodox Christianity has done so, at least in part, over rejecting the Trinity.

Nonetheless, century after century, the church has clung to the Trinity like a life preserver. But as is always the case when we need to rise to a new level of maturity, it’s time for the church to let it go, and swim.

Typically, the problem with the Trinity has been with “persons” two and three: Jesus, as the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit. How could the human Jesus be divine? How can the Holy Spirit be a separate divine entity? But I don’t think that’s the real problem. The “problem” is actually with the first person, God the Father, because he’s the one that’s “left the building.”

When I was in seminary in the late 1970s, there was great controversy over “God language” and the maleness of God. “Inclusive language” should be used to refer to God, it was said, as God was not male or female. Or God was both. It was never clear which it was. Old prayers and hymns were revised to reflect this, and new ones were created. Even the Bible was retranslated. But the results of all this were often awkward and stilted.

What was rarely discussed, however, was who, or what, this God actually is. In other words, Nietzsche’s announcement from over a century ago was not part of the conversation. In debating God’s gender, were we actually talking about anything at all?

“God is dead… and we have killed him.” That second phrase often gets left off. What Nietzsche was referring to was the transition to the modern world. In ancient and medieval times, superhuman divine beings existed in a nearly invisible heavenly realm above the clouds. The three-tiered universe was like a layer cake, a lower realm or “underworld” of the dead and/or hell, earth was the middle layer, and above that was an upper realm called heaven. It was often believed to have several levels of its own, where God, or the gods, and various angelic-type beings all existed.

As I said in my latest video, all this, of course, was swept away by Galileo and his scientific successors. The being called God, or God the Father in Christian terms, disappeared along with God’s abode. How can there be a God if there is no place for God to be? That this is now universally accepted is demonstrated by the fact that no one is breathless waiting for the new Webb telescope, peering further into space than ever before, to discover heaven at the edge of the universe. God the Father has left the building.

The belief in God as a supreme being existing somewhere “out there” is called theism. To not believe in such a God is called a-theism. In American culture, it’s one of the most disreputable labels a person can be given. But that’s because it’s misunderstood to mean not believing in God, when it actually means not believing in the theistic being God-out-there.

Recently, pollsters have expressed confusion about why the decline in religious identity has not been matched by a rise in atheism, which remains in the low single-digits. That’s because many of these people also think atheism means “no god.” In reality, many of them likely are a-theists because they have dropped a belief in a God-out-there. But that doesn’t mean they don’t believe in God.

What do the “spiritual, not religious” believe in then? What are the alternatives to God the Father, to God-out-there? Not to be flippant, but it’s the God-right-here. Such an understanding of God is found around the world and throughout history. In fact, archaeology indicates such a notion of God has been around a lot longer than that of a God-far-off.

Early archaeology and anthropology were dominated by Christian Westerners. We still live with their prejudiced judgments. They scoffed at, what was to them, the primitive and clearly inferior animism and pantheism of prehistoric and indigenous peoples. Yet the notion that God pervades reality and that we live in a sacred, spirit filled world has been the a more common view than theism. Today, contemporary indigenous spirituality is viewed much more positively, often as something modern people can learn from.

There has also been renewed interest in the centuries-long tradition of Christian mysticism. To borrow the title of the popular 17th century mystical work of Brother Andrew, in simple terms mysticism is “the practice of the presence of God.” Mystics (who are present also in Judaism and Islam) generally have little interest in traditional liturgy and theology. They are usually not concerned about achieving forgiveness of their sins, but of knowing God’s presence within and around them, and of being awakened, enlightened, transformed by that experience.

What’s surprising to many is that such a description could also be applied to Jesus. In the gospels, Jesus shows little interest in temple ritual, believing rather in God’s presence within and around him. Unfortunately, the church got the notion that this made Jesus unique because he was the Son of God. Yet the case can be made (and increasingly now is made) that Jesus viewed himself as a child of God, like everyone else. His ministry was demonstrating a life possible for anyone who has been awakened by the Spirit to their true identity.

Today, much of the language of the Bible and traditional religion is too pious and antique for modern ears. Indeed, in the 1960s, the renowned Roman Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner, said the church should stop using the word “God” for fifty years because it had been so abused and misused! What we need to remember is that all words are metaphors and approximations. There is a valuable Buddhist saying that all words and teachings are like a finger pointing at the moon. We too easily get obsessed with the finger, when what we need to be looking at is the moon.

Surprisingly, and significantly, “spirituality “is now in broad use to refer to the experience of the sacred and of mystery in life and in the world. Many teachers and authors of various religious traditions, or of no tradition, commonly use the term to identify this dimension of reality. Spirituality is being seen as a way to reestablish our connection with the natural world and stem our abuse of it. And, being a religiously “neutral” term, spirituality is also providing a new opening for interaction with the sciences, especially psychology and theoretical physics.

Unfortunately, traditional Christianity is largely left behind in all this. The church cannot let go of “the Big Guy upstairs”, with its hymns, prayers, and rituals still directed to this imaginary being somewhere “above” us, imploring his forgiveness for our misdeeds and intervention in our many problems. While such piety still has some appeal, it is shrinking by the day, as evidenced by the ever-increasing numbers of empty pews.

God the Father has left the building. Yet rather than being dead and gone as Nietzsche assumed, God is increasingly recognized as a sacred spirit, the unifying and energizing dimension of all reality, embodied must fully in human consciousness.

In the biblical story, this spirit brought creation out of chaos and the first human to life. At his baptism, the spirit awakened Jesus to his sacred identity. Knowing this spirit, he taught that the “realm of God” was not a unique place far off somewhere but here and now, within and all around us. Centuries later, that vision may finally be coming to life.

 

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Giving Up Bad Theology for Lent

Giving Up Bad Theology for Lent

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Last week this picture was shared on Facebook. It’s from the front of University Christian Church in San Diego, giving the topics of their Sunday worship services in Lent. The overall theme, as you see, is “Giving Up Bad Theology for Lent.” There were dozens of comments on the post, almost all affirmative, and many giving more suggestions for the list.

The numerical shrinking of churches (both in size and number) is an unavoidable topic in church life today. The rise of the “Nones” (those who would respond “none of the above” when asked their religion) and the “spiritual but not religious” is widely discussed but with little depth or understanding. Most often that discussion seems like people timidly looking out of their church windows and wondering, “Where’s everybody going?”

But this church’s daring Lenten series, and the responses to the picture of their banner, confirm my sense that this is the wrong picture. While many in church are befuddled by people abandoning the church, I have found that at least as many wonder, “Why am I still here? Why am I still inside and not out there with them?”

The pandemic lockdown brought that question to the fore for many people. When churches reopened after nearly a year of closure, quite a few asked, “Do I really want to go back?” and then decided they really didn’t.

It’s often said that organizations hire consultants, not to make changes, but to avoid them. The consultant usually finds that those within the organization know very well what has gone wrong. A big, expensive report is prepared and presented to management. A few feeble attempts are made to implement its recommendations but soon it is filed away and forgotten.

Something similar has been going on in the church. The items on the San Diego church’s “bad theology” list have been kicked around for a century, at least. And commenters easily came up with more suggestions. Over the decades, notable theologians have pointed out in detail the many places that the church’s traditional beliefs and practices are incompatible with the modern world.

The past several weeks I have been facilitating a Zoom book discussion group. We are reading Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them) by Bible scholar, Bart Ehrman. In the book, Ehrman reveals the New Testament to be a very human, multi-authored, heavily edited, often contradictory, historically questionable, theological hodgepodge. The Bible certainly still has value, Ehrman says, but it can’t be the inerrant, literally true, straight forward source which fundamentalists and others claim it is.

Ehrman repeatedly makes two points. First, nothing he says is radical or new in his field of New Testament scholarship. Second, but most of what he says is unknown to average church members. Then he asks: Why? Why are these things being kept under wraps? Why aren’t pastors teaching these things?

Ehrman is playing the role of the consultant. The organization knows what he says is true, but it doesn’t like what he has to say and wishes he would go away. And many have played Ehrman’s role before him, always with the same results. “Thank you very much. What you say is very important. But this just isn’t the right time to implement your recommendations. We’ll certainly keep them in mind for the future.”

But the future never arrives. As a result, the church’s creeds, doctrines, catechisms, liturgy, prayers, hymns, and preaching continue to espouse ideas that literally make no sense in today’s world.

Now, however, a growing number in the church’s pews also know they don’t make sense. Hence, University Church’s Lent series. But something keeps them coming: the music, the coffee and donuts, the kids’ ministry, a personable minister/priest, the community service programs, etc. In that sense, the church resembles those blown out Easter eggs which have a very pretty shell but nothing of substance inside.

Eventually, however, the shell cracks: the nice minister leaves, a favorite program gets cancelled, a squabble or scandal breaks out, and what held people is gone, so they leave. Some will look for a new church but increasingly many will not. They can find the aesthetic, communal, educational, or social service qualities they enjoyed somewhere else. The religious component? That was the least attractive part. And that, too, can now be found, more sensibly and more meaningfully, in other places.

During Lent and Easter, the church doubles down on many of its least believable and most outrageous notions. God requires the torturous crucifixion of his “only Son” Jesus to appease his wrath and forgive the sins of a disobedient world. Jesus is bodily “raised” and then goes to heaven, preparing the way for the faithful to follow him later.

But from grade school science we know that all physical bodies inevitably decay and disappear. In the universe of the Hubble and Webb telescopes, heaven is unlocatable and, even for the faithful, unimaginable. And the God who orchestrated Jesus’ death? The late Bishop John Shelby Spong wrote, “I wouldn’t love such a God. I’d hate him.” Yet the hymns, readings, prayers, and preaching this time of year will be filled with such incredible images and ideas.

When confronted about this, most non-fundamentalist clergy will talk about image and symbol and metaphor, spring and hope and rebirth. When pressed about the inadequacy of such a response, they may shrug their shoulders and say, “What can I do? It’s tradition. It’s what people expect.” The lectionary says use these readings, the liturgy says recite these prayers, the hymnal says sing these songs. And hopefully most people will understand the wink and the nudge that goes with it all.

“What can I do?” What can the church do? Well, for one, it could start taking seriously all those consultants: the countless theologians and biblical scholars it has trained and paid for who have tried to show a different way ahead.

They have actually done a pretty good job of, among other things, revealing Jesus without the layers of mythology and doctrine that have shrouded him for so long. This is the Jesus of the parables, of the beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount, and of the mystical vision of God’s kingdom around and within us. This is the Jesus who hung around with all the wrong people and said God prioritized love and forgiveness over law keeping. In other words, these scholarly consultants have enabled us, as the late Bible scholar Marcus Borg said, to “meet Jesus again for the first time.”

What befuddles me is that I think this is the Jesus and the God most people, within and outside the church, know, appreciate, and believe in. Centering the church on them ought to be obvious and welcome. Yet they are nearly unrecognizable under the elaborate costumes of ages past which church authority clings to out of nostalgia, fear, laziness, and jealousy.

The only thing that will “save” the church is an enormous letting go. As Jesus says in a popular Lent text from John,

Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies it bears much fruit.

And in another popular John story, Jesus says after the raising of Lazarus, “Unbind him and let him go.” Jesus and God need to be set free from the ancient wrappings that have constricted them, and us, for so long.

A bishop’s religion problem

A bishop’s religion problem

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Crumbling church in the countrysideJames 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.