When Religion Is It's Own Worst Enemy

A lot of truth in this poster and it's one reason religion is taking a nose dive in the West.

I stole the following comment from an NCR article by Michael Sean Winters discussing this BBC article.  I felt bad about the theft until I saw it was written by Jim McCrea who I consider a valuable member of this blog community---just as he is for many other progressive blogs.  The BBC article reports on a study done by two researchers whose data suggests that the future of religion in nine Western countries is decidedly dim.  Winters disagrees with the researchers in no uncertain terms, but Jim McCrea has the better take by far--at least as far as I'm concerned.

"People tend to think that "religion" is defined by the structures with which we are currently familiar. For many people that is ALL that religion is. As those structures fade, weaken, become irrelevant and/or boring and generally no longer appeal, then they (“religion”) will disappear.

“Habits of The Heart, by Robert Bellah et al., spoke convincingly of the tendency of Americans to seek a religion that will satisfy them, confirm their expectations, and make them feel good about themselves - in other words, a religion that will leave them where they are, one completely incapable of transforming them. “ (John Garvey, Of Several Minds” The Protestant Moment? Commonweal, 10/8/93) (We seem to like our political parties this way too.)

However, what is happening is not new and was predicted by the humanistic psychologist, Abraham Maslow, in his 1964 book, Religions, Value and Peak Experiences:

“Most people lose or forget the subjectively religious experience, and redefined Religion as a set of habits, behaviors, dogmas, forms, which at the extreme becomes entirely legalistic and bureaucratic, conventional, empty, and in the truest meaning of the word, anti religious. The mystic experience, the illumination, the great awakening, along with the charismatic seer who started the whole thing are forgotten, lost or transformed into their opposites. Organized Religion, the churches, finally may become the major enemy of the religious experience and the religious experiencer.”

Roman Catholicism today seems to find itself in a very similar situation. Throughout its historical foothold it has increasingly become irrelevant in the lives of large portions of the citizenry of those footholds. The preservation of the bureaucratic model has become the raison d’etre of organizational Catholicism. The next push for evangelization most likely will be just one more panicky attempt to rearrange the deck chairs on the sinking Barque of Peter.

For those who take religion seriously, belief is not a self-righteous claim to some privileged moral status. The spiritual discipline against self-righteousness is the very essence of meaningful and, may I say it – true religion. Until and unless people grasp the need for such a discipline, they will misunderstand the nature of religion to console, and equally importantly, to challenge and to confront.

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Maslow's point that religions themselves are becoming the major enemy of religious experience will never be accepted by religious authorities, but that certainly doesn't make Maslow's observation wrong.  It only makes it more correct.  Nothing kills spiritual or mystical experience like religious certainty and the attendant sense of self righteousness this can engender in followers.  When a religion stops challenging and confronting it's own failures, flaws, misconceptions, and outdated doctrines it ceases to be a living entity.  It can no longer provide meaningful religious experiences for the vast majority of it's believers and those believers will look elsewhere for spiritual meaning.  And so it is entirely possible that nine countries in the West will soon be dominated by spiritual seekers and the religiously non affiliated and Roman Catholicism will fade to virtually nothing as a major cultural player.

Along these same lines, in Jamie Manson's latest article she talks about a class assignment she gave two very different groups of students.  One was composed of basic eighteen year old freshman, and the other was considerably older.  She asked them to create their own religion.  The vast majority of students in both groups created very similar religions which virtually ruled out any formal leadership structure or dogmatic moral code:

..."When I questioned both classes about this lack of leadership and a fixed moral code, I received the same answers. They do not trust religious leadership. Why? Because they believe that religious leaders are not living out the morality they espouse.
Not only do these students believe that they do not need a mediator between themselves and God, many believe that the mediator may actually taint or obstruct their relationships with the holy."

The reasoning Jamie found for this lack of leadership and moral code sounds suspiciously like Maslow's observation.  Hypocritical religious leadership kills religious experience.  It does not foster it.  It becomes it's own worst enemy. People, in larger and larger numbers, believe they are religiously better off with out religious leadership and the institutions that shelters that leadership.  This is not about rejecting religious/spiritual experience, but about rejecting the institutions and leaders who think they can dictate what becomes a static religious experience.

This is a big time serious message the Vatican needs to hear if it even remotely cares about the future of the Church in the West.  The Burke's of the Vatican have to understand they can not substitute irrational abusive moral codes and high religious theatre for legitimate religious experience.  This substitution might work for a small minority but for the vast majority it's a hypocritical turn off.  In his concluding remarks on the above linked study, Winters suggests the BBC sees the Church as nothing more than the Easter Bunny with property.  Trouble is MSW might have hit on the truth for a lot of people when it comes to legitimate religious experience versus institutional religion and it's too often hypocritical leadership.