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Religious or Spiritual?

Sermon for Oct. 18

2009

Recently we were told that our church would be featured on television

, and Ituned in to see what was toward. It turned out to deal mostly with a survey of Americans’ beliefs by PARADE Magazine.

When we were informed that it showed how many people proclaim that they are “spiritual, not religious”, something snapped… I had heardthis phrase one time too many.Indeed, when I consulted Google, “spiritual not religious”” returned 10,800,000references.

By contrast, “religious not spiritual” turned up… far fewer.So we may well wonder exactly what this

means

. One of the first things I noticedis that while many claim to be “spiritual not religious”, hardly anyone is ready to say heis “religious not spiritual” – apart from the 600 Facebookers who joined thegroup of thatname, probably for the same reason I did.Rather, it is usually Somebody Else who is described as “religious not spiritual”.This is something I have learned to treat as a warning signal, as with labels like “cult”,“ultra-“ or “fundamentalist”.Searching further, I found that the author of

Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion

employs a taxonomy where the“Spiritual and Religious” are "Mainstream Believers (Christian and not) withinstitutional traditions and liberal theologies”, and the “Religious, NOT Spiritual” are“Dogmatists (Christian and not) with reactionary theologies and fundamentalist agendas.”The imposition of labels like “liberal” and “reactionary” suggests that being “spiritual” isa matter of having the right kind of politics. Er, I don’t think so.

As I continue searching for clues, it seems that the “spiritual not religious”commonly engage in unfavorable assessments of something called “organized religion”.Besides sometimes provoking the question of why they think anarchic religion is so good,I find it difficult to connect with our actual, everyday experience. “The Church” saysFather Capon

, “—anybody’s version of it — may look fearsomely organized from theoutside, but once you’re in it, you have to be deaf, dumb and blind to avoid theconclusion that it is the most disorganized venture ever launched. Its public image may be that of a might lion on the prowl; what is really is, in this day and age at least, is aclowder of not too well co-ordinated pussycats falling all over each other.”When we make another attempt to find out just what “spiritual not religious”means, we often run into complaints about “religion” troubling us with what are labeled“dogmas”. Apparently “spirituality” means that we should stop at generalities about howit would be if we would only just be nice to each other, and not bother with a lot of complicated specifics.I would suggest, on the contrary, that the

content

of our faith means paying someattention to what it is that we believe and why. (And this is one of the things I have foundmost satisfying about the New Church). I find it hard to improve on the treatment given by Dorothy Sayers

, in dealing with an expostulation by a don who dismissed all suchmatters are solely “interesting to theologians”.…. we must unite with Athanasius to assure Tommy Atkinsand John Brown that the God who lived and died in theworld was the same God who made the world, and that,therefore, God himself has the best possible reasons for understanding and sympathizing with Tommy’s and John’s personal troubles.“But,” Tommy Atkins and John Brown willinstantly object, it can’t have mattered very much to him if he was God. A god can’t really suffer like you and me.Besides, the parson says we are to try and be like Christ; but that is all nonsense -- we can’t be God and it’s silly toask us to try.” This able exposition of the Eutychian heresycan scarcely be dismissed as merely “interesting totheologians”; it appears to interest Atkins and Brown to the point of irritation.Well, perhaps being “spiritual not religious” means not going to the trouble of coming together to engage in all sorts of repetitious practices which are, after all, only“rituals”.

They

can’t be important to being “spiritual”, can they?

The next part of my thesis is that once we know what our faith’s

content

is, itshould obviously follow that we go about

expressing

it through a

form

forms.

That iswhat we are doing when “two or three are gathered together.”And arriving in Heaven does not mean being done with this kind of “religion”.For Mr. Swedenborg assures us that in Heaven

all the preachers are from the Lord’sspiritual kingdom, and are readily received by audiences from His celestial kingdom.

Indeed, it would seem that we could hardly help being “spiritual”. For each andevery one of us is a spirit!Is there any reason to think that this means we should eschew being “religious”.Rather, hark back to our reading which tells us that anyone who leads a spiritual life willas a matter of course lead a moral and a civil one. I think that if Swedenborg were amongus today, he would write that there are those who exhibit a religious life without aspiritual one; but anyone who leads a spiritual life will as a matter of course have areligious life. And if we guide ourselves by these principles, we will have no need toworry about being “religious not spiritual”.

William Linden