In defense of organized religion

It’s hard to be “spiritual but not religious,” without some organization.

“I’m spiritual, not religious.” Have you ever heard someone say that? Perhaps you’ve said it yourself. There is something that can be attractive about a general metaphysical belief, one that isn’t organized through tradition and doctrine. For some people, being spiritual, but not religious, is a way to guard against the harm of organized religion, one that is particularly a sordid legacy of Christianity.

A few months ago, Ezra Klein, a New York Times columnist, interviewed Ross Douthat, a person whom I often disagree with, but who makes an interesting argument for why everyone should believe in God in his new book, “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.”

Douthat argues that institutional religions are important because they give us a grammar for belief, a place to deposit our spiritual impulses. He says, “I think what happens in conditions when you have weak institutional religions and a sort of secular expert class that is not militantly atheistic but sort of says officially that these things don’t happen, is that people feel like they can’t really go all the way up to the creator — God, Yahweh, Jehovah — outside of time and space, and they start looking for intermediate powers to become a locus for their own spiritual impulses. Stuff with psychedelics. Stuff with literal paganism, including stuff on the right…

“Christians would say that tendency is bad. It’s not that secondary spiritual powers don’t exist in the universe. There are, in fact, angels and demons and things like that. Saints and other powers perhaps more mysterious still. But not all those powers have human good in mind. And it’s better to approach them through one of the big old traditional religions that tries to subject them to a kind of higher ordering.”

Ezra Klein, Douthat’s interlocutor, gives Douthat credit for channeling belief in the metaphysical. But Douthat’s argument isn’t about channeling that belief or spirituality generally, but specifically into organized religion.

Klein jokes he’s suspicious of organized religion because he’s a Californian. He says, “But I am very familiar with a kind of California seeker mentality…But none of these really fit in any of the big religions. I’ve read enough of the religions to say that what I describe as the unruliness — when I say that, I mean enough things that don’t fit a simplified view of reality — that it would make me wonder about materialism. But also, I don’t think Judaism explains them all. I don’t think that Catholicism explains them all.”

Klein doesn’t think organized religions answer the questions that many spiritual seekers have, and Douthat’s retort is, “There are a certain number of big religions. They’ve stood the test of time. They’ve had a pretty powerful shaping influence on human history. Why wouldn’t you go in for one of them, rather than saying, in good California style: I just have to remain perfectly open.”

Klein’s answer back is, “I think, at a fundamental level, I expect that anything that has worked at mass scale, across many different institutional regimes, as an organized religion, is likely to have conformed so much to politics and institutions as to have strayed from how profoundly radical whatever kind of spiritual truth might exist.”

Klein says that organized religion is necessarily co-opted by political powers and cultural pressure. It becomes corrupted and thus it is worth being suspicious of. And of course, the big pressing example that surrounds us all, is Trump-style Christian Nationalism. I tend to appreciate that argument. But Douthat’s reply is interesting. He says, “I think you think you’re setting God free a bit from what you see as the corruptions of Trump-era Christianity or medieval Inquisition-era Christianity. And you’re like: No, God is bigger than that, and therefore, a religion that is always getting entangled with worldly power can’t be where God is.

“But what you end up with is a counsel of despair where you’re like: Well, the only religion that would be worthy of God is one that would be exterminated within 50 years of its founding by the cruel state. You end up saying that a religion good enough to join could not exist on the Earth.”

Douthat, a Catholic, argues that a hegemony is sort of critical to keeping a religion going, otherwise our forms of belief wouldn’t be able to last in this cruel and war-torn world. A convenient argument for a Catholic who wants to rationalize Catholicism’s bloody history, I think. Douthat confronts the critique that organized religion is about the consolidation of power by reappropriating that argument to say that the consolidation of power is precisely why we have organized religions. I’m offended by that argument, but it is one I hear commonly.

Both Klein and Douthat acknowledge that people may have a tendency toward metaphysical belief, but they don’t agree on the containers that might hold such a belief. My argument is similar to Douthat’s in that organized religions offer us containers, a grammar, a vernacular for belief. Our journey with God may eventually render these containers meaningless, or they may universalize our faith, but organized religion gives us a step to stand on.

The Spirit, on Pentecost, reunited the church in a common language, literally, when the diasporic people came together and could actually hear from one another. The Spirit of God, not military conquest, was what united people on Pentecost, the Spirit of God united the church. We don’t need political power, cultural hegemony, or military might to be united, to preserve our tradition, because the Spirit of God provides that for us.

The temptation to use violence to keep a particular form of organized religion alive is ever present. Christianity, by and large, has grown and kept itself alive through the sword. Christian Nationalism is one of them; Muslim Nationalism is another; Hindu Nationalism is another. And, if I can speak to this, so is Zionism: Jewish Nationalism. What many people in modern-day Israel are arguing for is the need for an ethnostate in order to preserve their way of being. I completely empathize with this desire, but I reject it as a way forward because of the amount of suffering it causes. No movement is worth killing people for. And I actually hold that belief because of my own Anabaptist convictions and our tradition.

Our history is not without its errors either. Famously, in our circles, is the Munster Rebellion, a radical Anabaptist attempt to establish a communal sectarian government in Munster, Germany. The rebellion was promptly squashed by the authorities, and to this day, St. Lambert’s Church, a Catholic church in Germany, hangs cages that held those rebels. The cages are still up as a reminder that such a rebellion would never happen again.

But despite the failure of the Munster Rebellion, Anabaptism continued to spread and grow, without a state, without an empire, and without violence. Today, Anabaptists are still united (enough) as a body, in an organized religion. We hold and nurture a body that gives us a container for our “spiritual impulses.” We worship together and we fellowship together because we are afforded this organized effort.

As we know already from our history, even without the violence of oppression, it is hard to stay together. Anabaptists, despite our unity and resilience 500 years after the first Anabaptisms, have undergone many splits and dwindling of our numbers too. Even after the Mennonite Church and the General Conference united in the early 2000s to form what we now know as Mennonite Church U.S.A., we’ve been sort of shrinking and splitting. Those conversations are ongoing today, pitting different groups of people among us against one another.

And even at the latest Mennonite World Conference meeting in Zurich, Switzerland, one that was held to honor 500 years of our tradition, those fissures were clear. I wasn’t there, but I hear that many in the Global Church were quite suspicious of the progressive movement in MCUSA. It clearly is hard to stay together.

We work hard to stay united, to reconcile despite our divisions, and to stay united. But it is the Spirit of God that holds us together, not violence and hegemony, and in fact, it is those things that seem to be what divide us.