I clearly see the need to find an alternative to the spiritual wasteland of secularism. But I think it is very important to differentiate between the worldy benefits of secular societies and their spiritual poverty.
As Phil Zuckerman has written "It is the highly secularized countries that tend to fare the best in terms of crime rates, prosperity, equality, freedom, democracy, women’s rights, human rights, educational attainment and life expectancy. [...] And those nations with the highest rates of religiosity tend to be the most problem-ridden in terms of high violent crime rates, high infant mortality rates, high poverty rates and high rates of corruption."
The question we should be able to answer is: If less religious respectively secular societies have so many (worldy) advantages over religious ones, why becoming religious in the first place?
My approximate answer would be we should become religious for our spiritual salvation. It seems possible to build a secular society that is not a wasteland in the worldy sense (well-being, low crime-rate etc.). So we should tell people why despite the prosperity of secular societies, there is a need for spiritual salvation.
I will get back to you on this, Matthias! Thanks too for your email. It may require a post in itself to address a question which, I am sure, plays on many minds.
For now, I would say first that I take issue with the materialistic measures by which the secular world defines success, and would argue that it fails even to succeed on its own terms. Prosperity to me cannot be defined solely or even primarily in terms of wealth, especially when it is concentrated in the hands of so few, and even those who have it remain susceptible to crippling anxiety. I would question what the point of educational attainment is when children's and teenagers' mental health is sacrificed for the sake of what amount to time-serving certificates which demonstrate little learning, and act more as tokens of acceptance into an economic system of brutal inequality. I'd be interested in Zuckerman's stats on crime rates, given our experiences in northern Europe and the US. The life expectancy stats may also be modified if they took abortion and, increasingly, euthanasia into account. One might also point out that some of the most secularised nations that have ever existed have been the USSR, China and North Korea, where Zuckerman's analysis would seem rather to flounder in pretty much every item on his list.
Women's rights are a very vexed matter, but one might suggest as a start, that societies which have permissive attitudes towards pornography, demean the role of mothers and remove various social safeguards for women (dear reader, interpret that as you will) are less friendly in some respects to women than certain more traditional and religious societies, though I admit that I would rather raise my daughters in Japan than Iran.
There is also one very crucial flaw in Zuckerman's list. Long life expectancy isn't much of a boon to a society which hardly produces any children. And without doubt, it is the most secularised countries which have the lowest birth rates. As Japan is discovering already, this poses economic problems. One could always take Canada's highly secular option and let the State encourage "burdens on society" to do the honourable thing... In terms of a purely materialist measure, that would increase "prosperity", at least for those who are left. Of course, many people take this into their own hands elsewhere. In the country where I live, which on the face of things is prosperous, very safe, with high educational attainment and life expectancy, there is a very sad and widespread habit of simply jumping in front of trains. A society that sees vast suicide rates as acceptable collateral damage is not one that I can consider an outright success.
One might also point to research which suggests that religious people have more children, and that their children tend to be happier than non-religious ones. However, not being the most practical of sorts, I'm not primarily concerned with these more utilitarian and pragmatic questions. I'd question the first premise, namely your question about "becoming religious." This is a question which has arisen only for a short time and in a small number of societies, even now. The idea that "religion" is something that one chooses from a supposedly neutral scientific/secular viewpoint, rather than part of the culture into which one is born, is really very new and applies to a minority of the world's population. I do not think that religion can or should aim to prosper as one of a line of products in a global supermarket of ideas. And this brings me to your email, in which you ask (forgive me for making this public) how religious belief differs from, say, a conspiracy theory. Part of the answer, I think, is correspondence. Do the various traditions of the world which we nowadays label as "religions" (a modern, western term) have any overarching conceptual/symbolic overlap, i.e. correspondence, which might suggest that they are indicative of truth about the nature of reality? Which of them encapsulates such truth most completely? You know my answer to both of those questions. I don't think Qanon quite fits the bill.
So - it looks like I've written something almost post-length after all - I don't think that religion, or at any rate the Christian religion, is about spiritual salvation as an add-on to an otherwise secular life. It is all-encompassing, giving an interpretative matrix (I would say, the true one) to all reality, and ritually orienting our whole being, corporal as much as spiritual, social as much as individual, towards the fulfilment of that reality: namely, union with God. We do not need speculation to see what a society truly immersed in that reality would look like, because it exists, particularly in monasteries, but also when they are at their best, in churches, at least in embryonic form. Happiness and sustainability are part of the ascetic and liturgical orientation which such a society provides. I don't think the same can be said of any non-religious or anti-religious society.
Nondualism - hmm, when our eternal destiny is to be in a bod with God, even as Jesus is now, a myriad of body temples filled with the Holy Spirit built together as living stones into a temple of the Living God, which is what I think the New Jerusalem in the cubic shape of the Holy of Holies in temple and tabernacle is, the “Bride of Christ” as introduced by the angel to, John. In a new heaven and new earth no less. God’s eternal reality is hopelessly, scandalously individualized, concrete, material and diverse, quite non Buddhist or Taoist I think.
Hello, Jeff. I appreciate what you are saying, but don't think that the glorious body can be equated so straightforwardly to the body of flesh we now inhabit, which, as St Paul says, is but a seed of what is to come. I'd be very wary of reducing God, who is Spirit, only to the material and concrete. Rather, since God is the one "in whom we live and move and have our being," I would say that the material is "within" the spiritual, rather than the other way round. And as the diversity of the Trinity does not preclude God's oneness, nor do I think the diversity of the cosmos precludes oneness with and in God. So I do think that there are at least analogies to be made with certain Buddhist ways of thinking, not least the idea of Buddha nature. I wonder whether you are a follower of N.T. Wright's school, and understand heaven as the renewal and remaking of this world, perhaps? That would explain our difference: because I'm more of the traditional "beatific vision" school, I'm afraid!
I don’t know who N.T. Wright is. Heaven at this point is where Jesus is at the right hand of God and he is preparing the many mansioned New Jerusalem now that will descend onto a New Earth in the future. Until then as it says to be away from the body is to be with the Lord, so when we die we go to where a Jesus is now, as Stephen the first martyr said, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” It seems to me that neo-Platonism has a streak of gnosticism and is too refined for this low class, unseemly concrete material way of looking at the eternal state. The Lord when queried by Paul said, “I am Jesus of Nazareth” not something like the “the Ground of All Being” or something akin to the Buddha nature. I know ordinary people who this Jesus of Nazareth has appeared to as he did Paul. The Book of Acts is still happening and to me doesn’t have a neo-platonic feel as the higher deeper way,.
I ordered The Lost Way to Good yesterday. I am very interested in what may more or less fit into the Dionysian tradition, particularly in the West, e.g., Meister Eckhart, Cloud of Unknowing, St. John of the Cross, etc., and how our own tradition can be clarified, enhanced, and even challenged by various forms of Buddhism, Taoism, etc. I look forward to reading it.
Thank you very much for buying it. I hope that it is of interest, and if so, please spread the word. Write to me here or we can start a discussion if you'd like me to expand or clarify anything - or if you find something I've got horribly wrong!
Glad you've got a copy of First Things! For some reason, they keep sending me two, but that gives me the chance to spread the word by giving one away to people I think might be sympathetic each month.
Congratulations! This review really piqued my curiosity and your book is going straight on my to-read list!
I am delighted to hear it!
I clearly see the need to find an alternative to the spiritual wasteland of secularism. But I think it is very important to differentiate between the worldy benefits of secular societies and their spiritual poverty.
As Phil Zuckerman has written "It is the highly secularized countries that tend to fare the best in terms of crime rates, prosperity, equality, freedom, democracy, women’s rights, human rights, educational attainment and life expectancy. [...] And those nations with the highest rates of religiosity tend to be the most problem-ridden in terms of high violent crime rates, high infant mortality rates, high poverty rates and high rates of corruption."
The question we should be able to answer is: If less religious respectively secular societies have so many (worldy) advantages over religious ones, why becoming religious in the first place?
My approximate answer would be we should become religious for our spiritual salvation. It seems possible to build a secular society that is not a wasteland in the worldy sense (well-being, low crime-rate etc.). So we should tell people why despite the prosperity of secular societies, there is a need for spiritual salvation.
What do you think?
I will get back to you on this, Matthias! Thanks too for your email. It may require a post in itself to address a question which, I am sure, plays on many minds.
For now, I would say first that I take issue with the materialistic measures by which the secular world defines success, and would argue that it fails even to succeed on its own terms. Prosperity to me cannot be defined solely or even primarily in terms of wealth, especially when it is concentrated in the hands of so few, and even those who have it remain susceptible to crippling anxiety. I would question what the point of educational attainment is when children's and teenagers' mental health is sacrificed for the sake of what amount to time-serving certificates which demonstrate little learning, and act more as tokens of acceptance into an economic system of brutal inequality. I'd be interested in Zuckerman's stats on crime rates, given our experiences in northern Europe and the US. The life expectancy stats may also be modified if they took abortion and, increasingly, euthanasia into account. One might also point out that some of the most secularised nations that have ever existed have been the USSR, China and North Korea, where Zuckerman's analysis would seem rather to flounder in pretty much every item on his list.
Women's rights are a very vexed matter, but one might suggest as a start, that societies which have permissive attitudes towards pornography, demean the role of mothers and remove various social safeguards for women (dear reader, interpret that as you will) are less friendly in some respects to women than certain more traditional and religious societies, though I admit that I would rather raise my daughters in Japan than Iran.
There is also one very crucial flaw in Zuckerman's list. Long life expectancy isn't much of a boon to a society which hardly produces any children. And without doubt, it is the most secularised countries which have the lowest birth rates. As Japan is discovering already, this poses economic problems. One could always take Canada's highly secular option and let the State encourage "burdens on society" to do the honourable thing... In terms of a purely materialist measure, that would increase "prosperity", at least for those who are left. Of course, many people take this into their own hands elsewhere. In the country where I live, which on the face of things is prosperous, very safe, with high educational attainment and life expectancy, there is a very sad and widespread habit of simply jumping in front of trains. A society that sees vast suicide rates as acceptable collateral damage is not one that I can consider an outright success.
One might also point to research which suggests that religious people have more children, and that their children tend to be happier than non-religious ones. However, not being the most practical of sorts, I'm not primarily concerned with these more utilitarian and pragmatic questions. I'd question the first premise, namely your question about "becoming religious." This is a question which has arisen only for a short time and in a small number of societies, even now. The idea that "religion" is something that one chooses from a supposedly neutral scientific/secular viewpoint, rather than part of the culture into which one is born, is really very new and applies to a minority of the world's population. I do not think that religion can or should aim to prosper as one of a line of products in a global supermarket of ideas. And this brings me to your email, in which you ask (forgive me for making this public) how religious belief differs from, say, a conspiracy theory. Part of the answer, I think, is correspondence. Do the various traditions of the world which we nowadays label as "religions" (a modern, western term) have any overarching conceptual/symbolic overlap, i.e. correspondence, which might suggest that they are indicative of truth about the nature of reality? Which of them encapsulates such truth most completely? You know my answer to both of those questions. I don't think Qanon quite fits the bill.
So - it looks like I've written something almost post-length after all - I don't think that religion, or at any rate the Christian religion, is about spiritual salvation as an add-on to an otherwise secular life. It is all-encompassing, giving an interpretative matrix (I would say, the true one) to all reality, and ritually orienting our whole being, corporal as much as spiritual, social as much as individual, towards the fulfilment of that reality: namely, union with God. We do not need speculation to see what a society truly immersed in that reality would look like, because it exists, particularly in monasteries, but also when they are at their best, in churches, at least in embryonic form. Happiness and sustainability are part of the ascetic and liturgical orientation which such a society provides. I don't think the same can be said of any non-religious or anti-religious society.
PS Thank you for buying the book! I look forward to your thoughts.
Nondualism - hmm, when our eternal destiny is to be in a bod with God, even as Jesus is now, a myriad of body temples filled with the Holy Spirit built together as living stones into a temple of the Living God, which is what I think the New Jerusalem in the cubic shape of the Holy of Holies in temple and tabernacle is, the “Bride of Christ” as introduced by the angel to, John. In a new heaven and new earth no less. God’s eternal reality is hopelessly, scandalously individualized, concrete, material and diverse, quite non Buddhist or Taoist I think.
Hello, Jeff. I appreciate what you are saying, but don't think that the glorious body can be equated so straightforwardly to the body of flesh we now inhabit, which, as St Paul says, is but a seed of what is to come. I'd be very wary of reducing God, who is Spirit, only to the material and concrete. Rather, since God is the one "in whom we live and move and have our being," I would say that the material is "within" the spiritual, rather than the other way round. And as the diversity of the Trinity does not preclude God's oneness, nor do I think the diversity of the cosmos precludes oneness with and in God. So I do think that there are at least analogies to be made with certain Buddhist ways of thinking, not least the idea of Buddha nature. I wonder whether you are a follower of N.T. Wright's school, and understand heaven as the renewal and remaking of this world, perhaps? That would explain our difference: because I'm more of the traditional "beatific vision" school, I'm afraid!
(PS I remain grateful for your comments and attention, and everything I write comes with the caveat that I could be wrong.)
I don’t know who N.T. Wright is. Heaven at this point is where Jesus is at the right hand of God and he is preparing the many mansioned New Jerusalem now that will descend onto a New Earth in the future. Until then as it says to be away from the body is to be with the Lord, so when we die we go to where a Jesus is now, as Stephen the first martyr said, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” It seems to me that neo-Platonism has a streak of gnosticism and is too refined for this low class, unseemly concrete material way of looking at the eternal state. The Lord when queried by Paul said, “I am Jesus of Nazareth” not something like the “the Ground of All Being” or something akin to the Buddha nature. I know ordinary people who this Jesus of Nazareth has appeared to as he did Paul. The Book of Acts is still happening and to me doesn’t have a neo-platonic feel as the higher deeper way,.
I ordered The Lost Way to Good yesterday. I am very interested in what may more or less fit into the Dionysian tradition, particularly in the West, e.g., Meister Eckhart, Cloud of Unknowing, St. John of the Cross, etc., and how our own tradition can be clarified, enhanced, and even challenged by various forms of Buddhism, Taoism, etc. I look forward to reading it.
Thank you very much for buying it. I hope that it is of interest, and if so, please spread the word. Write to me here or we can start a discussion if you'd like me to expand or clarify anything - or if you find something I've got horribly wrong!
I am conflicted. Do I read it here or in my copy of First Things?
Glad you've got a copy of First Things! For some reason, they keep sending me two, but that gives me the chance to spread the word by giving one away to people I think might be sympathetic each month.