It is quite common these days among my ministerial colleagues of various theological flavors to disparage, denounce, and mock the phrase “spiritual but not religious.”
I get the objection. It can be the easy way out, allowing one to claim all the good things about religion and spirituality without having to deal with the yucky bits of organized religions. And no doubt there is something about a real challenge to engage the tradition, to deal with the parts that are less than attractive on the principle that those places may well be the very places where real growth or depth, pick your metaphor, can happen.
And.
I find something just a bit smarmy in many of the comments from professional religious leaders in their dismissals of the spiritual but not religious. Let’s set aside the question of if they’re hoping to reach these folk, why they think snark is going to be useful. Bottom line they seem to want to put the weight of responsibility on the unchurched. Typical of these might be UCC minister Lillian Daniel, who has gotten some mileage out of her recent book “When Spiritual but Not Religious is Not Enough.”
When I heard her speak at a clergy conference last year I heard a bright and witty person fast with the one liners, and to my mind very much putting the onus on the unchurched. She and most of the critics of what are sometimes called the SBNR seem to be ignoring why people may not find the churches and temples and synagogues in fact worthy of their time and energy.
The rush to condemn I’ve come to find a bit unseemly. It is like those brave souls who decide to take a stand against New Atheist bullies. Ignoring the fact that atheists are the most despised minority group in America and standing up to them really doesn’t take much courage. In addition to the thought there might well be a reason or two for their being pugnacious, it allows people to ignore completely, or nearly, the atheist’s arguments, which I find for the most part deeply challenging to intellectually honest believers. Classic straw man argument to avoid the real challenge. Old news. But kind of sad…
And here again I think there’s something very much challenging to those of us who belong to religious institutions, whether our institutions are conservative or liberal, that people are choosing to ignore, killing, well, fortunately, at this time simply belittling the messengers…
According to a 2013 Gallup poll maybe a third of Americans consider themselves spiritual but not religious. There are challenges to that number, but it points to something significant going on. And maybe instead of mocking the challenge, there are more profitable things to do…
First, as a matter of sociological concern the division of spiritual and religious, artificial as it might be linguistically, is intriguing. It sets up the possibility of examining the institutions of religion and personal religiosity separately. To the question do they at some point need to be seen in relationship? I would say of course. But that’s not the important thing.
Second, and here’s my main point: There’s something deeply wrong in the institutions that people are intuitively noticing, while at the same time articulating the deep need we human beings have for a spiritual or religious dimension to our lives.
Our churches, our temples, our synagogues have failed us.
People are asking for bread, and our churches, temples and synagogues, too often, are passing out stones.
No wonder people are throwing rocks at the institutions. They were given those rocks by the churches, temples and synagogues.
Religion is collapsing around our ears. Well the structures, the institutions are collapsing.
And it is perhaps time for those who believe in the institutions to look inward. As a wise man once said, it might be time to turn from obsessing about the speck of dust in that other person’s eye, when there’s a two by four blocking your vision.
Now, maybe it’s all for the best.
Let the old churches die off.
Perhaps new things will emerge that actually serve the needs of people.
And.
I think there are many important things the old institutions do carry. But it is time, past time, for some honest self-examination, to find what another great man once directed people to look for, weighing out the transient and the permanent in the traditions.
That’s the call to some heavy lifting.
I think it will turn out there’s a whole lot more of the transient than the permanent in them.
And, to shift the metaphor one more time, it might be time, again, past time, to do some pruning of these aging bushes…
Monday morning thought…
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