The eCrozier

David Dark’s new book, Life’s Too Short to Pretend You’re Not Religious, is brilliant. Dark’s other books are equally so (The Gospel According to America, Everyday Apocalypse, and The Sacredness of Questioning Everything). In this book, Dark delves into our religiosity, particularly those who claim they have no religion or who call themselves “spiritual, but not religious.” He doesn’t quote the 20th Century theologian, Paul Tillich, who wrote that our God is whatever our “ultimate concern” is, Dark actually goes deeper and wider than Tillich. Rather than “ultimate concern,” Dark writes of religion as our “controlling story.” What are the narrative strains that have been woven together by our experience to bring us to certain conclusions about life’s meaning and purpose? So, religion for Dark is more than a fixed point of “ultimate concern,” it’s the sum of our life-long experience, our “controlling stories,” that shape how we then make sense of life’s meaning and purpose.

Dark is quite gentle with people’s “controlling stories” who claim that their religion is Jedi from Star Wars or St John Coltrane, the Jazz genius who composed “A Love Supreme” (there’s actually a church who worships around that famous piece of music). It’s easy for us who have more traditional religious convictions and practices to snicker at such devotions dismissing them as bad religion. Dark doesn’t go there. While his own faith is solidly Christian, he recognizes clearly how we form convictions based on our “controlling stories.” Instead of taking cheap shots at other people’s religion, he’s more interested in helping us see more clearly about our own, whether we acknowledge we’re religious or not. He holds up a mirror where we can judge for ourselves whether or not our particular emperor is wearing any clothes. As I read Dark’s book, I recalled sociologist, Peter Berger, and his concept of plausibility structures. Religion serves as a plausibility structure for us. It helps us make the world intelligible.

So how’s your religion doing these days? Is it working for you? Or, are certain parts of its foundation cracking or crumbling? That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It may be that our our particular understanding or practice of our religion no longer is sense-making for us. It may be we’re dealing with the problem of suffering for the first time (at least it’s hitting us now) and our “controlling story” no longer works. Or, maybe our religion has been Manichaean, full of judgment for the “other” and our “controlling story” now has cracks in the foundation where mercy and forgiveness have seeped in. These shake the foundation of our “controlling story” in a good way, if we’re willing to pay attention.

Now, there is bad religion out there (and Dark I think would agree). Religion that denies reality rather than embraces it, that scapegoats others rather than holds us responsible for our lives, that promises only the good in life while not accounting for the bad. These are all elements of bad religion yet people have woven them into their lives and they’ve become part of their “controlling story.” I know I’m biased, but only Christianity calls us to embrace reality, not scapegoat others, sees us clearly for the mix of good and bad we all are, and accounts for all of that. Other religions do some of those, but not all of them. For me, Jesus and his cross is the only intelligible story that’s sense-making.

+Scott