The eCrozier

Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, ‘Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. – Acts 17:22

With observations by researchers about the growing “religion-less-ness” of our culture, one thing obvious (at least to me) has been lost: It’s not happening. Yes, folk aren’t participating in traditional religious groups as they once did. The recent data on Millennials indicate that only about 11% of them have some form of traditional spiritual practice connected to a church, synagogue, or mosque. And we’re seeing similar lower percentages across all age and demographic groups. That, however, doesn’t mean we’re not religious. We are, just not in the same way previous generations have been.

Everyone is religious. Many evolutionary scientists now contend it’s baked into our genes. So, the question shouldn’t be about whether humans are religious. It should rather be about how humans express their religious practices. St. Paul’s observation 2000 years ago is still relevant today. We might now say: “Secularists, I see how extremely religious you are in every way!” Andrew Sullivan recently wrote that religion “exists because we humans are the only species, so far as we can know, who have evolved to know explicitly that, one day in the future, we will die. And this existential fact requires some way of reconciling us to it while we are alive.” The 1987 film Moonstruck has Olympia Dukakis playing the aging Rose who’s trying to understand why her husband is cheating on her. She concludes it’s because he fears death. Some men, she surmises, cheat trying to reconcile, or cheat, their inevitable deaths.

So, we all practice religion in different ways. The great theologian Paul Tillich called religion our “ultimate concern.” Whatever that concern is then becomes our religion. For some people, work is their religion (hitting me close). Their devotion to their jobs dominates their waking hours (and sometimes their dreams) so much so it becomes their religion. Once we understand religion’s role, we’ll see its pervasive presence. For example, some people express their religious practice through diet and exercise. They believe that if they get both of those right, then their lives will be righteous. For others, managing their desired image through Twitter is their religion, curating that image carefully so they’ll get their imagined lives righteous.

What all these religious practices have in common is an effort at self-justification. They presume that if a person can just be successful at their job, finish that marathon, avoid the wrong kind of foods, or appear in the right way to followers on Twitter, then their lives will be justified. All these efforts merely replace the worship of God with different forms of self-worship in a vain attempt at self-justification. But as the Collect for the 3rd Sunday in Lent reminds us: “we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves.” And yet, we persist because we’re drawn to religion, especially the self-justifying kind. But we can’t reconcile ourselves. And that’s what makes Christianity different from all other faith traditions. It’s grounded in God’s justification of us, not in our efforts to justify ourselves. As that old hymn reminds us: “All other ground is sinking sand.”

+Scott