I sense a big risk in rightwing evangelical fundamentalist American religion.
First, they often like to say that they’re not religious. They don’t have an institutional relationship but a personal one with God.
Even this first aspect of their view is rife with traps, but it’s connected to the other traps, so I’ll leave it for now.
Religion isn’t a thing but is instead whatever connects us to our roots. Re-ligio is Latin for “to tie back.” It’s whatever we do in life that has this function for us. Of course it actually needs to do it not just make us think it’s happening. Religious practice can be alienating when corrupted and serve to separate us and not connect us back to anything: it can merely deliver us up as customers to something.
Spirit is the power of religion…and of life. Other suitable words for it might be energy or motivation. Motivation gets at its quality better. Like religion, spirit is not a thing. It’s whatever isn’t a thing, in fact. It’s a quality. It’s not like a substance that you just can’t see. For humans fuel isn’t just made up of calories but of the kind of calorie, the “why” of a calorie. The quality of what we do makes us able to do it. Meaning is the source for us.
Of course things are real and important but religion and spirit back them up and make them available to us, let us even see them. Reality is a word made up of the same roots as the word relationship. It takes two things to make reality. Us and them. Us and it. And the quality of the relationship determines its meaning, determines if we even see it. It’s the place where we do our naming of everything. If it means nothing to us we don’t even see it nor do we name it.
These kinds of things form the root of life. We build from them to find meaning.
We don’t start with things and we can’t build or live off of things. They let us down. It’s not their function to support us, only to have us use them.
A common lesson in all religion is to not cling to things. To not attach to them. Detachment lets us connect to our source and sets our spirit free and lets it do its work of keeping us alive, giving us air to breathe. Attachment is universally known to be slavery and the path to death, the path to evil and confusion. We can’t see things as they are when we’re attached to them. All things (pretty much) are good as is: it’s our mistaken ideas about them that make them bad for us. It’s not their fault. We fall into illusion about them. Illusion, or “bad light” is related to evil and to Lucifer: the angel of fallen light. It’s an accepted problem that no one is free from. So we do our best to detach, we do what we can. We have culture that helps us move in this direction. That’s what culture is for.
So there’s that.
Then there’s this personal relationship stuff. Every relationship is personal. But the phrase emphasizes person and personality. What are these things? Mere ego attributes, really. Essence can be considered the base of personality, prior to ego. There is a Person behind every person. But Essence is detached. It’s not particular. It’s not a thing. So a personal relationship with Jesus isn’t something like we have with other people. It’s like where our relations come from. It’s prior to what we think of as a personal relation. It’s its foundation. It’s not about the person, the flesh, the body standing in front of you. Jesus himself represents a quality of relationship. He is not part of a particular relationship that we can “have” as we possess some thing or object.
In religion, spirit, heaven, truth there is no possession, no having, no objects, no things.
There is only quality, meaning, relationship…and spirit and truth themselves.
Humans have various faculties naturally: intellect, memory, will. As we let them detach from the flawed and limited things of the world…yes, let them…they’re trying to do this all the time…they’re trying to tell us that things aren’t the answer…but we need to help, to practice, to work in that direction to do our part…they respectively turn into faith, hope and love. These virtues are our elevated faculties. Religions agree on this.
So I see a big risk in churches today because I don’t hear anything spiritual being discussed or taught—only things, rules, facts. The emphasis on arguments, opinions, and positions, of binary choices and committee-work, of social campaigns and construction projects, reveal the real political nature of what’s going on.
It’s true that these churches aren’t religious. Then they add the “personal relationship” angle and what it amounts to is a cult of personality. A culture of personality, with the “cult” coming into play because it doesn’t seem to be a healthy culture: one of the people involved, the main star, isn’t actually present. Jesus isn’t treated as if he is spiritually present in terms of quality, meaning and motivation. The people behave as if they are romantically swooning over a physical, mortal body in their midst. It’s a political situation. With an absentee candidate…but an infinite number of vice presidents all claiming to know the candidate’s literal, physical, particular thoughts about doing or not doing thing X or Y. There’s a specific “plan for my life” coming down from a head office: with no realization that it’s quality and meaning that a spiritual plan is concerned with.
Politics is fine in its place. But here it’s not admitted or realized that what’s happening is essentially political. The Religious Right feels very comfortable with the political process, but it doesn’t see what’s really happening to it. And this illusion is where manipuation and exploitation easily enters. It’s not religion—so their conceit is true but not in the way they imagine—but it’s also bad politics. Not knowing what you are messes you up both ways.
It also seems like there’s a stunting, a permanent adolescence: there’s a Sunday School view of the situation that’s appropriate for children being merely intensified and used by adults—without the qualitative transformation that adulthood needs to bring.
This kind of thing is where the project (partly because it’s conceived of as a project in the first place) goes wrong and causes evil.
