David Mills analyses the reasoning behind the common claim to be
‘spiritual but not religious’ and asks whether there is any merit in this attitude
It’s a great and self-serving mess, this claim to be ‘spiritual but not religious’, which we hear from almost anyone who talks about religion in public, outside those the worldlings define as fundamentalist (me, probably you, Benedict XVI, Hassidic Jews, devout Muslims, religious families with more than four children).
It is one of those easily remembered phrases that work like a ‘get out ofjail free’ card for anyone who feels he has to explain his lack of religious practice, and as a claim to superiority for those who care about being superior to those who practise an established religion
Indifferently inclusive
So we find Lady Gaga, the pornographic songstress, telling a reporter for The Times that she has a new spirituality just before taking her out for a night at a Berlin sex club. Asked by the reporter, ‘You were raised a Catholic – so when you say ‘God,’ do you mean the Catholic God, or a different, perhaps more spiritual sense of God?’, she responded, ‘More spiritual… There’s really no religion that doesn’t hate or condemn a certain kind of people, and I totally believe in all love and forgiveness, and excluding no one.’
You see what I mean. To be truly spiritual – on a scale on which ‘the Catholic God’ seems stuck in the middle – apparently means indifferently inclusive or (what is another way of saying the same thing) undogmatic.
I don’t think Ms Gaga or anyone else who talks like this has really thought it through. That God who forgives everyone and excludes no one doesn’t object to debauches in Berlin sex clubs. A point in his favour, from one point of view. But then he doesn’t object to murderers and torturers and corrupt bankers either. A point in his favour from no one’s point of view.
Definition
Even academics don’t see the problem. A few years ago a much- reported study of college students’ religious practice found that they become more ‘spiritual’ as their observance of their childhood faith declined. The researchers defined ‘spiritual’ as ‘growth in self-understanding, caring about others, becoming more of a global citizen and accepting others of different faiths.’ They simply dressed up their favoured attitudes by calling them ‘spiritual.’
The word ‘spiritual’ has no useful meaning if it does not refer to a relation to a real spirit, something from a world not our own, something supernatural, something that or someone who tells us things we do not know, judges us for our failures, and gives us ideals to strive for and maybe help in reaching them. It is not a useful word if it means a general inclination or shape of mind or emotional pattern or set of attitudes or collection of values. There is no reason to call any of these spiritual.
Unless, of course, you like that sense of importance and that comforting sense of social approval that our society still gives to ‘spiritual things,’ though not to religious things. It’s a warm and fuzzy word. It’s not like ‘religion.’ That’s a cold and forbidding word.
A better definition is not, however, wanted. The momentyou acknowledge a real spirit to whom your spirituality is oriented and by whom it is guided, however distant and unengaged that spirit may be, you have a religion. You are bound by something. You have marching orders. You have to ask what the spirit wants and what he requires and what he says.
As the writer Malcolm Muggeridge, himself a convert from a vaporous kind of religion, put it, we crave ‘a Christianity without tears…an idyll rather than a drama, with a happy ending instead of that gaunt Cross rising so inexorably into the sky.’
A default position
But why bother to be ‘spiritual’ at all? Why not be at least agnostic? Being ‘spiritual’ is a kind of natural default position. ‘Spiritual but not religious’ provides a comfortable compromise between the two sides of our natures, our desire for God and our desire to be God ourselves.
We want the spiritual-ish, because God made us to want him yet we do not want to want him, and we do not want him on his terms. If our hearts are restless without God, as St Augustine argued, they can be tranquilized with substitutes, of which ‘spirituality’ is easier to find and much less costly than the alternatives. Drugs and drink are bad for you, and wealth and sex are hard to get, and achievement takes work.
In times of trouble
Being ‘spiritual’ does not do us any good. It works fairly well when you are healthy and have enough money to enjoy life, and just want from your spirituality the feeling that all is well with the universe, particularly your corner of it. But it doesn’t help you much when things go from good to bad.
The man wasting away from pancreatic cancer will get no help nor comfort from the ‘spiritual,’ which will seem a lot less friendly and comforting when he feels pain morphine won’t suppress. He has no one to beg for help, no one to ask for comfort, no one to be with him, no one to meet when he crosses from this world to the next. He wants what religion promises.
And he is right to do so. The dying man is the true man, in the sense of being the one who reveals to us what we essentially are. We are on our death bed from the day we are born. To paraphrase Pascal, dying men want not the God of spirituality, but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
David Mills is the deputy editor of First Things ND