I spent years searching for resources to prop up my dying faith. I sifted through every potentially useful theological and philosophical apparatus I could find. Every one of them dissolved in my hands.
I can no longer look into the eyes of the suffering—all of their eyes, past and present—and believe that a God of any interesting sort is really out there. If there is a God, this God is either a malicious tyrant, an impotent sub-deity, or somehow preoccupied with other things. In any event, such gods hardly suffice for religious devotion.
“The steward of the senate named Gering; old Mrs. Kanzler; the tailor’s fat wife; the woman cook of Mr. Mengerdorf; a stranger; a strange woman; Baunach, a senator, the fattest citizen in Wurtzburg; the old smith of the court; an old woman; a little girl, nine or ten years old; a younger girl, her little sister; the mother of the two little aforementioned girls; Liebler’s daughter; Goebel’s child, the most beautiful girl in Wurtzburg; a student who knew many languages; two boys from the Minster, each twelve years old; Stepper’s little daughter; the woman who kept the bridge gate; an old woman; the little son of the town council bailiff; the wife of Knertz, the butcher; the infant daughter of Dr. Schultz; a little girl; Scharts, canon at Hach…”
Need I say more?
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The above—the problem of evil—is my main reason for giving up on God (god?). My second is the one cited below, a modified excerpt from a paper I wrote in grad school:
In spite of what many sociologists say, I am of the opinion that religion in a robust sense isdying. Its death is not identifiable with, say, reduced denominational loyalty or neglect of traditional doctrine, but with a trajectory of retreat accompanied by a demotion in function. It has assumed a defense strategy that has been formed in response to modern threats to religion.
First, what do I mean by “demotion in function”? I arrive at this idea by dividing the history of American religion into two stages: before and after the onset of the “quest culture.” Before the quest culture, in keeping with the larger part of the history of religion, institutions and doctrines functioned chiefly as explanation. Backed by divine authority and revelation, they answered questions like: Where does the world come from? Where do humans come from? and, Why did this or that event happen? In the late modern era, however, this role was gradually discredited owing, among other things, the increasing acceptance of scientific forms of explanation. For instance, only a hundred years ago, if the average American were asked, Where did the world come from?, he or she would probably reference the doctrine of creation: “God made it.” These days, fewer and fewer people would respond this way, citing instead the Big Bang or some other science-related explanation. This suggests that religion has largely lost its validity as a way of explaining how the nuts-and-bolts of the world hold together and where they come from. So, when I say that religion has been demoted in its function, I mean that, except in some Fundamentalist enclaves, religion is no longer allowed to function as an authoritative explanation of the outside world (at least, not to the degree that it had in the past). Viewed from another angle, this may simply be described as a feature of societal differentiation: religion no longer supplies an overarching umbrella of explanation and has become, alongside politics and the arts, one of many parts of a fragmented social order.
Second, in response to this demotion, religion has been forced to protect itself by assuming a trajectory of retreat. This notion relates to the fact that American spirituality has become so radically individualized and psychological. If, as I suggest, religion has lost its authority as explanation, the individualization of religion appears to be a kind of defense strategy: threatened by the growing dominance of secular explanations of the “outside world,” religion has retreated to the inner sphere of subjective experience where it can perform another, more practical role and can insulate itself from scientific critique. So, whereas scientists can easily question a religious claim like, “God makes the wind blow,” they would be hard pressed to question a claim like, “When meditating, I often feel the presence of my inner goddess.” In short, I am suggesting that American quest religion is, in part, a prophylactic strategy that keeps science on the outside where it can do no harm to religion, and which keeps religion on the inside where it will not feel threatened by science (although, of course, I have more than just science in mind).
In my view, this conception helps unify many features of contemporary American religion. 1) Quest: without the explanatory apparatus of religion to map out the world, it has become commonplace for people to feel as if they have lost their moorings. 2) Autonomy: without an overarching explanatory structure, it has become necessary for religion to make more modest claims about the scope of religious “truth”; a single belief system is no longer true for everybody, it need only be true “for me.” 3) God as immanent: secular thought forms have made it difficult to maintain that there is a personal being “out there” who, from time to time, interferes in worldly affairs. It seems more plausible to say that God is within my subjective experience since, in that way, no one except myself can have access to it. Having lost explanatory transcendence, God has become so immanent as to be above critique. 4) Achieved religious identity: if religion has no power to explain my place in the universe and if it is not “out there” in the structures of reality imposing itself upon me, I must trust my inner voice and, reflexively, choose my own religious identity. More examples could be cited, but these will suffice to illustrate how my second claim can unify a broad range of religious phenomena. Put differently, my claim is simply this: just as a turtle retracts its head and appendages within its protective shell upon seeing a predator, so American religion has retreated to a place within where it can avoid potential attacks from science and other non-religious modes of explanation.
1 comment:
You rock Vern! Thanks for writing the truth so clearly...Karen
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