So what is religion for, anyway?

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I'm going to do something that's rare for me and talk about actual religion, rather than just community stuff. If you hate reading about that kind of thing you're very welcome to skip.

I got buttonholed by some Mormons when I was in town yesterday. I decided to be polite to them, because I wasn't in a big hurry, and because Mormon missionaries these days look like bar mitzvah boys to me, so young in their big grown-up suits and shiny shoes, I kind of took pity on them. Though in retrospect they would probably have rather talked to someone who doesn't get a kick out of driving salesmen off-script. The conversation didn't actually go very well, because every time I said anything interesting they got all flustered and returned to their scripts anyway. And perhaps I shouldn't have been polite to them after all, perhaps I should have been righteously angry about their church's homophobia, racism and execrable habit of posthumously converting Holocaust victims and other distinctly non-Mormon people. But I think those things are basically not the fault of a couple of young missionaries, and I like to set a good example to proselytizers by taking a polite, respectful interest in their religious traditions and not trying to convince them they're wrong.

Anyway one of their stock questions on discovering that I'm a theist but not a Mormon was "what do you search for from God?" I tried to answer this concisely, thinking on my feet, and without using religious jargon that wouldn't mean anything to people from a different tradition. I don't think I really succeeded, but setting myself the challenge was thought-provoking. What I actually came out with was something like: I seek to discover how God wants us to act in the world and how to treat fellow human beings who I believe are created in the divine image. This got an almost comic reaction: sage nod, platitudes about yes, I quite underst... no wait, I have no idea what you just said!

And then a friend posted (locked) about her difficulties in choosing a church, and I was primed by the conversation with the missionaries to be thinking about what religion is for. So I came up with a theory, which I'll copy over from my comment to this other discussion, because I hope it's of interest to at least the religion geeks in my circle, and I'd like to pull it apart and come up with something better:

(Using "church" here to mean a religious community that meets regularly in a fixed location, so I don't have to keep typing "church or synagogue or mosque or temple etc".) I think a successful church needs three things, and how relatively important they are will vary between individuals and over time. I'm going to call them intellectual, spiritual and pastoral domains.

Intellectual: the church should teach things that are in line with current, evidence-based understanding of the world. It should be open to scholarship, both religious and historical-critical approaches to religious texts and beliefs, and secular scholarship and scientific advances. It should have room for doubt and be open to reinterpret stuff to fit into its social context. It can't afford to ask its congregants to check their critical faculties at the door.

Spiritual: the church needs to provide a moving, uplifting emotional experience of religion. This could beautiful music or architecture, it could be a charismatic, inspiring minister / leader / preacher what have you. It could also be simply time-honoured traditions which connect to a sense of shared culture and humanity. In most cases, for a church to be successful in the spiritual domain it needs to be somewhat conservative, because the things that press people's emotional buttons are atavistic and don't work well with lots of change and innovation and not knowing what to expect every week.

Pastoral: the church needs to function as a community. Members need to feel a connection to eachother, need to be able to turn to the community in times of crisis. This has to happen without becoming an exclusive, inward-facing clique, because the church also needs a constant stream of new members with fresh ideas. There needs to be space for kindness and outreach to people who aren't part of the inner circle, either because they're new to the community or because they aren't able to commit fully or because they're going through a theological crisis.

Ideally, a community which is successful in all three domains will also have some kind of shared external goal, making the world a better place, if you will, or social action, or actually mediating a relationship between worshippers and the divine. Otherwise it's just there to be a self-perpetuating meme machine, and that can be effective in the short term but eventually people will see through it.... (Yes, all of these needs can be fulfilled outside religion, I'm well aware, but the genius of religion is that at its best, it combines all three in one institution.)

I also clarified in the comments that it's a three-legged stool metaphor, no church can concentrate purely in one domain, you do need all three to an extent, though some communities do min-max things a bit. And of course they're not completely separate, all three domains will influence eachother to a great extent. Eg a person may not be able to have a spiritual experience unless they are at least somewhat intellectually satisfied by their church's teaching, while moving, meaningful services may well be a big factor in creating a sense of community, and so on.

I was also trying to connect my shiny new theory to the ongoing discussion about how one ought to respond to members of religious traditions whose teachings are homophobic. In some ways homophobia can be seen as a serious failure in the Pastoral domain, since (obviously) it excludes people who are in any way not straight or have friends who are. But there's probably a reason for it to do with strengthening the Spiritual domain, because a church than control its members' sexuality has a very major emotional hold on them. (I should add that I think this kind of approach is emotional manipulation and therefore false religion, but that's not a very useful statement because everybody thinks that their brand of spirituality is genuine and meaningful and other approaches are false and manipulative, and atheists may well think that all religion is manipulative or laying a claim to aesthetic experiences when there's no such thing as "spirituality".)

Obviously this doesn't make it ok for a religious org to behave like this. But it's possibly the beginning of an explanation for how come some otherwise perfectly lovely people may remain loyal to homophobic religious denominations: perhaps what they're looking for from religion is more about the Spiritual than the Pastoral domain? Or perhaps I'm talking complete nonsense, that usually happens when I make up classifications on a whim!

Comments

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This. It's the Ikea secret sauce - people will value something they've worked for more than something they haven't.