by VorJack
Over at Religion in American history, Michael Altman has some reaction to an interview with Bear Grylls, star of the Discovery Channel’s Man vs. Wild. When Grylls claims to be non-religious, but gets effusive about Jesus, Altman reflects:
This split between Jesus and religion fascinates me. In the early 19th century American Christians tended to think of “religion” in terms of “true Religion” (Christianity) and the rest–usually four groups (Muslims, Jews, and Pagans/Heathens). By the early 20th century “religion” was a category within which Christianity fell alongside another ten to half-dozen religions (suddenly we have Daoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto etc.) Now, in the early 21st century I hear more and more (usually evangelical) Christians claiming that Jesus wasn’t religious at all–in fact true Christianity isn’t about religion–it’s about a relationship with Jesus. I’m not spiritual, or religious, I’m with Jesus.
I think he’s on to something there: the “spiritual but no religious” movement is, in part, an attempt to distinguish an individual’s Christianity from the growing mass of other religions – and the growing mass of Christian denominations. It’s a way to stand out and appear exceptional, now that Christianity is starting to look like just one of many religions.
The whole Gryll’s article is a stream with flows from Transcendentalism, Evangelicalism, Promise Keepers, muscular Christianity, and Graham’s “Make a decision for Christ today” revivalism.
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This is a confluence that isn’t necessarily fully thought out or self-selected. I don’t think Grylls went out and thought about becoming this sort of masculine Christian, nor do I think Relevant sought to portray him this way. This isn’t Sheila-ism. It’s something more organic and more accidental. It’s like religious run-off making its way into a creek of spirituality and carrying all sorts of cultural flotsam with it. What to call it, though? Perhaps Bear-ism?
I like the metaphor of the stream. You can imagine the religion as the stream, and the culture as the stream bed. Both shape each other, and you can’t really understand until you look at both.
This is a point I’ve made many times. Look at sermons and Christian writing from a century or more ago and you often see “religion” used as virtually synonymous with “Christianity.” After all, there was only one true religion, right? At least there was only one that mattered. But now that comparative religion has become such a common topic in the Western world, Christians are beginning to understand other religions better. Consequently, they’re starting to become a little unnerved that other religions seem to make as much sense as theirs does. So they have had to back away from religion = Christianity, or from calling Christianity a religion at all, in order to keep their beliefs special. It’s all word play, of course.
I cannot stand Bear Grylls. The few times I watched “Man vs. Wild” I rooted for Wild.
I’m with you on this one, GO WILD.
It is also possible to be an atheistic Christian, in the sense that one believes and tries to live the moral philosophy attributed to Jesus, but does not believe that he was a deity (as there are no deities). The Jefferson Bible is a very good compendium of the philosophy of Jesus, without the paranormal hyperbole of mystic fanaticism.
Now, in the early 21st century I hear more and more (usually evangelical) Christians claiming that Jesus wasn’t religious at all–in fact true Christianity isn’t about religion–it’s about a relationship with Jesus. I’m not spiritual, or religious, I’m with Jesus.
I have to wonder if this is a response to court rulings on the separation of church and state. “Of course we don’t want to force religion into the public schools, we just want to enabler students to have a relationship with Jesus.”
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Another aspect worthy of comment: some “liberal” Christians are willing to shrug off the more superstitious elements of Christianity, such as miracles, the literal truth of the Bible, etc. A prominent late 19th century example was Andrew Dickson White, author of A HISTORY OF THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY IN CHRISTENDOM, who considered himself a Christian:
“My hope is to aid–even if it be but a little–in the gradual and healthful dissolving away of this mass of unreason, that the stream of “religion pure and undefiled” may flow on broad and clear, a blessing to humanity.”
After White has jettisoned all of the unreason, I think it is fair to ask: What is left? What portion of Christianity does not fall into the category of unreason?
They are making it up themselves! It doesn’t seem to get through that they are molding Christianity to mean what they want it to mean, to dictate to themselves what they want god to have instructed, just like an ancient human with no better ideas made a myth and used it as an explanation.
This is not what they were raised to believe, they are being pushed in a direction slightly to very different. It’s one thing to think the bible is literal truth when it’s so obviously not, but it’s another thing to take that bible and consider it essentially true except for the parts that are not. Scholars examine the bible thoroughly and think they are doing a very wise thing to discard the nonsense and keep the sensible truth.
I generally imagine these liberal scholars to have studied religious thought, comparative religion, to be knowledgeable in this area. I don’t imagine any atheists would be attracted to such an area of study ahead of time, but rather someone who is committed to a religion in particular so it’s unbalanced, but when they learn so much and go back over their bible, they still throw out what they’ve learned are common myths, what’s impossible given other subjects they now have learned. What they don’t seem to see is that they are re-creating a new myth, inventing what they can consider a believable god, no better than someone who needs to throw a virgin in the volcano to keep it from destroying the village below, or fears a sudden mid-day eclipse signals the end of the world.
It’s funny to me how god becomes less and less real, less and less visible. Once he was the sun and the wind, then he was a book, then most of the book couldn’t have happened or doesn’t mean anything to humanity (according to scholars and liberal Christians). Clinging to a more and more abstract, invisible thing that creates and powers all life. Ridiculously blind to the fact.
Great comment, Kodie. I completely agree. I remember as I tried to cling to some shred of faith while the waters of reason rose and less and less land was visible I got to the point of basically making up a faith for myself. Everything factual knowledge and philosophical reason countered I would jettison, but I still had that sense of ‘believing in God’ and clung to my identity as a Catholic despite not believing a word of the Creed or their dogma. Looking back, I can see I simply shrank god and its meaning to the point where god was unnecessary for anything, and then realised I was (and always had been) believing in a pure guess.
What’s most glaringly strange to me is the continued effort to make one’s religion seem more important. To have a relationship, not just go through the motions, to intellectualize faith rather than be some primitive or gullible joiner, to make it a personal journey like a lot of other people = not a new or original idea. How many people are not satisfied with the answers their faith provides? Apparently a lot.
You start the journey with the idea that what you’ve already learned is a heap of crap, and that you have to investigate this heap, not just buy the whole thing like all the other church-goers, and make it mean something. “Make” being the operative word here, make, create, invent. You’re not knowing anything new, you’re just taking from the heap of crap to satisfy the similar urge that all those masses you tried to distance yourself from have, to believe in magic and be comforted, but not see that you have made it up to your specifications. Not all stay within a form of Christianity, I have to say which I’ve observed. It seems very popular for ex-Christians to be intrigued by some sort of pagan-hippie pantheism or Buddhism among a handful of other strategies. At least they are open-minded enough to try some of the other heaps.
“and clung to my identity as a Catholic”
JMW…herein is the problem friend. That is not the ‘identity’ Christ gave us, in fact we have been given no label, He is our only label, is our only identity, His spirit, His life in us, ie ‘Christ who IS our (very) life’ as it reads. So in the truth-only kind of truth (bear with me here, am going somewhere, am trying anyways, ha) there is no such thing as a Catholic, Protestant, Methodist, Charismatic, etc, there is only…Him, in us.
Religion gave you a ‘label’, a false ‘identity’. Your having left that identity behind is, paradoxically a very wise step toward and not away from Love despite ‘appearances’ because all your life you had associated (subconsciously, along with the rest of us) ‘God’ with that institution, ie ‘church’ because that’s where they told you that God could be found, in a church, a building somewhere, etc. That’s what religion does, it lies to us, cloaks the Truth, or tries to anyway until Truth (Himself) shows up in our lives and removes all the false and sundry ‘labels’ and identities that have been heaped, layered over us since we were very young.
But…you (JMW) shall know the Truth and the Truth (Himself) shall set you free’.
All the best on your journey JMW, its not over friend, not by a long shot, Love has no beginning or end, is circular, comes back around again, for you. But this time unveiled.
He already did that, you idiot. He came to the end of the circle and he decided not to spiral down the drain of crazy like you do, chasing your tail like you do, talking in circular mumbo-jumbo like you do. And there is plenty of love outside of your merry-go-round. Get it? You’re going nowhere, you’re walking with legs of two different lengths. That’s not a journey. You found nothing, you talk a great deal on this great nothing — that doesn’t make it something.
So what the difference JMW? How is that He is a greater reality to me than He is to you? Because you have never surrendered to Him (maybe to a church, a doctrine, a theology, a philosophy, etc) but never to Him…Personally.
That is what makes all the difference in your ‘world’, you reality. All the best
As I remember things thirty years ago, the line that “Christianity isn’t about religion, it’s about faith” or other such nonsense was generally a weapon aimed at people who had been raised in a mainstream Protestant church environment, who were nominal Christians at best. Most were turned off by the dry, dead, lukewarm hypocrisy they’d experienced of church as weekly social event, or often by people sitting next to them in the pews who did not practice what they preached.
So you would start to “share the gospel” with one of these people, and when they’d throw out the line about how “I grew up in church, and churches are boring, filled with hypocrites, etc”, you would counter with the argument, taken from the Coca Cola ads of the day, that Jesus is the “real thing”. He’s not a religion, or a set of rituals, laws, or sacraments but blah, blah, blah, blah…… You can have a RELATIONSHIP with Jesus. He will do this, he will do that, you can clap your hands to the songs in our church, so it’s got to be “real”– unlike all those false “religions” which are just bowing and kneeling, works with no faith, following the letter of the law while denying the power thereof.
That’s the way I experienced the tactic anyway, and that’s the way I used it. Things may have changed since then of course, but it seemed to be a pretty wide-spread mind-set in those days before the rise of Reagan, Falwell, Robertson, and the Religious Right.
In my experience both as evangelical and being immersed in evangelical communities for some years over a decade ago, the dichotomy between Jesus and religion had little to do with any anxieties about non-Christian religions but rather had to do with rejecting phariseism and embracing pietism, sola fide, and individualism. Unlike the Pharisees or the Catholics who thought that religious adherence to rules would earn your way into heaven, the evangelical understood that what really mattered was one’s personal relationship with Jesus. It was a rejection of legalism that exhibited no reference to other religions except insofar as it conceived them as essentially about rules and works and systems.
The idea was to take the characteristically Protestant rejection of Catholic hierarchy and corruptable formalism, equate it and all uses of the word “religion” with attempts to save yourself, and then lump all other bad religions in with the Catholics as essentially legalists who miss the pietistic, fideistic, individualistic point that only True, Born-Again Christians Who Have Asked Jesus Into Their Heart get.
Well and succinctly put.
Bear Grylls does the adverts for the Alpha Course! How can he possibly claim to be non-religious?! What a tool!
On this, we agree. He is a ginormous tool.
Let me rephrase: he is a ginormous, insufferable douchebag for whom the aspersion “tool” is far too kind.
Tools are for fixing things, right? I don’t know how ‘tool’ got redefined. I mean, I do know, but it’s such a misnomer when trying to use it as an insult.
I think it evolved from calling people “spanner”, but why that became a prejorative I have no idea.
At a guess, I’d have thought more at “screwing,” screwdriver–>tool. I also had a friend in college who occasionally referred to his johnson* as “the tool for any job,” see also, the song “Handyman” and probably other oblique references.
*Even farther off-topic, Johnson Controls is the name of a company whose thermostats always make me chuckle. Way to make it hot in here, make me remove a layer of clothing, Johnson Controls!
Tools are things that are USED – this makes sense in that sentence.
I’m sure I recall the Alpha Course itself claiming to be non-religious for a while. Not sure if it still keeps up the pretense though.
Ah, religious honesty! It’s not religious, it just takes place in churches, is taught by priests and says that the Bible and Jesus are the answers to all life’s problems. But it deffinitely isn’t religious. Honest.
I’d be interested in where they took the Press quotes from as a search only goes back to the alpha course itself … I do hope they haven’t taken them out of context!
Back in the 70s when I was moving away from xtianity, I went to a chain book store Walden’s to look for books on Buddhism, Toaism, etc. I looked through the “religious” section and found nothing. When I asked a clerk for assistance, I was redirected to “philosophy”. Nowadays with such hit series as “Left Behind” the book stores have a “religious fiction” or “xtian fiction” category. I resist the temptation to ask the clerk “Isn’t all of it fiction?”
Ray Mears > Bear Grylls. Fact.
My fundie friend seems to say the same thing – “I’m not religious, I’m spiritual”. I was told that religiouis people are the ones going through the motions of praying, attending churches, celebrating certain holidays without actually believing Jesus. Spiritual people do all the things religious people and they have a special relationship with God.
I wasn’t clear how anyone can tell which person is siritual and which is only religious because from the outside, they pretty much behave the same way. Only if you can read their minds like God. And this is the point when our conversation trails off.
I take it when someone claims to be spiritual, he is actually saying that he is the special true believer unlike all the other drones just going through the paces set forth by their cultural inertia.
It reminds me of any other cultural belonging – everyone thinks they’re the real deal and everyone else is just a poser. Enter, persecution complex: You laugh at me because I’m different, I laugh at you because you’re all the same.
Perhaps the Evangelical emphasis upon individual revelation and a personal relationship with one’s savior is responsible for the fracturing of the older denominations. Once you’re prepped to think that if you have a thought it came from God, you’re free to start your own storefront church or just do your own thing. pretty much like the New Age-ers who pick and choose from a dozen different faith traditions. I hope the mega-churches lose their appeal and their political power.