The Return to Religion ~ Part One
The Return to Religion ~ Part One
The first in a two-part essay about whether we're seeing a renewal of religion in Western culture and what it might mean. Today, my own journey "there and back again" with faith.
Once, when I was working as a bookseller, I came across a book by Richard Holloway called On Forgiveness. Although my natural curiosity led me to take the book home and read it, I still had defensive walls up; having been burned by religion in ways that left scorch marks on my psyche, I read his book with a cautious eye out for any hint that this ex-bishop might be smuggling in religious bigotry or faith-based irrationality. I found none of it.
In fact, I found nothing of the Christianity I knew and that sermonised weekly on the same subjects this book was about. Just as Holloway sounded nothing like the pastors I’d known, his forgiveness and love and hope sounded nothing like that of the churches I’d attended. Holloway himself is sensitive to these differences, writing, “I have asked myself repeatedly in recent years whether I can still call myself a Christian, holding the faith in the way I now do. The answer to my question may be No ...”
Holloway was also very different from the atheists I looked up to at the time. The Qur’an teaches to “repair the evil done to you with something that is better”. I’d found something better than fundamentalist religion in so-called new atheism, but it wasn’t up to the challenge of poetic renditions of religion, so non-sectarian as to be impossible to pull any kind of dogma from. This view of things was able to agree on all the boringly obvious stuff – evolution’s a fact, of course; miracles are more of a metaphor – and still see that there’s much more to discuss. The new atheists, meanwhile, kept rehashing arguments about the basics.
I met with Holloway’s worldview the way he describes others responding to On Forgiveness in its introduction, “not so much as a thesis they agreed or disagreed with, but as a question that prompted a reply”. Holloway goes on to write that Nietzsche reminds us of the need “to prevent incidents from the past becoming the gravediggers of the present”. This line floored me, and I decided that my route forward was being blocked by the debris of my past. So I began sifting through it, in a way my atheism was unequipped to help me with.
This journey led me to explore the creative and often conflicting ways humans have lived out their faiths. This was an autodidactic class in comparative religion that my own religious upbringing had not prepared me for, having divided the world neatly into “proper Christians” and everyone else. My interests remained largely centred on Christianity, though lessons have been found across the religious spectrum. Discovering this diversity allowed me to more usefully direct my opprobrium at the narrow-minded fundamentalism that had hurt me, rather than at Christianity as a whole.
I began the work of what Holloway describes as “one of the most astonishing and liberating of the human experience(s)”, which was forgiving not the indoctrination but the indoctrinators. The anger I felt at having been “lied to” melted into a compassion for those who’d been lied to themselves and had perpetuated only what they honestly thought best for me. There were undoubtedly also those in the church who’d cynically exploited their power for personal gain, and the responsibility then became making peace accordingly with the role they each played in poisoning me against religion.
Finally, I moved past the ephemera of my own story to take stock of the greater human story that religion has always been a part of. As I read more from Holloway, I engaged with ideas explored by Karen Armstrong, Jordan Peterson, Marilynne Robinson, and Paul Kingsnorth, among others. As irreligious friends expressed mild confusion at my interest, I bumped up against a question: why did I keep returning to religion in my wondering wandering? What is it about the traditions of faith, as well as the liturgies and architectures of its institutions, that so capture my imagination and speak to me of transcendence?
“The transcendent,” Jordan Peterson once said in conversation with Roger Scruton, “is what we bump up against when we realise our ignorance.” Peterson says that transcendence is that which exists beyond what we know or think we know. He goes on to describe how ignorance manifests in error when it comes up against unknown reality – he cites the way we argue with someone when we believe something about them that’s false. The conversation “goes sideways”, revealing that we’ve made a mistake in our assessment of the reality in front of us. “Error is the place where transcendence reveals itself.”
There are other important facets to transcendence, but Peterson’s idea goes some way to accurately describing it. This notion of realising error might be why one of the more common “spiritual” moments had even by non-religious people is being outside at night, somewhere still and quiet, and looking straight up into the cosmos at the stars. For a second that shudders through your being, you perceive (imperfectly but potently) that the way you live your life almost every second of every day is an illusion. We live in practical ignorance of the fact of how small we are and in protective forgetfulness of how fleeting is our time on Earth.
I suspect that one of the major roles of religion is to put us in the appropriate place to countenance our errors of perception and encounter transcendence. Our hymns and idols, rituals and reliquaries, the smells and bells of religious traditions are all indications towards the “spiritual” but they all fall short. It is simultaneously this “failure” and being positioned to focus on what is beyond ourselves that opens us up in the right place, time, and manner to experience the transcendent.
Fundamentalism and literalism of all varieties provide casuistic non-explanations to hide the failures from us. There’s no admitting of error in such churches, which is why those of a more open-minded approach witnessing these services can often feel like they’re listening to the cacophony of an inexpert piano recital from someone who thinks he’s playing perfectly. No one gets much from it, except the deluded individual who perpetuates his self-serving fantasy.
We often seek a wholeness to vicariously live through and so soothe the suffering of being incomplete. Too often, religions have pretended to have attained perfection, selling believers the promise of wholeness. Rather than approaching religion as already having The Answer (whatever that might be), imagine how liberating and fulfilling it could be to see religion instead as a search for answers. I’m reminded of what Kant said about the sublime, which religion is uniquely oriented towards:
“Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt.”
This is why I find myself drawn back to religion. It’s because I’m human, and I have all the human concerns and questions that we as a species are unable to silence with the noise of modern life. It’s because one of the exceedingly few places left in our society to ask those questions is in religion. And it’s because religion doesn’t shy away from “the immensity of the attempt” to bring us face to face with the sublime.
Further Reading:
• Doubts and Loves, Richard Holloway (2001)
• On Forgiveness, Richard Holloway (2002)
• The Rare or Unread Stories of Grant Allen: 1848-1899, “The Missing Link”, Grant Allen (2019)