A CASE OF BAD RELIGION

Recently I heard a good friend of mine say something like “I’ve just got over a bad case of religion.” At the time the remark seemed to be as appropriate as it was amusing, but on second thought I think the friend could have better said I’ve just got over a case of bad religion. Religion has had a hard time of it in recent years, especially among the youth, and my friend’s remarks were in that direction that says, in effect, that religion is a bad deal. And yet my friend is a person of deep religious faith, and he is definitely moving toward what I would call a true and meaningful religion. He may have once had a case of bad religion, but I doubt if his condition should ever be described as a bad case of religion. The distinction is important.

There is no reason for the term religion to be offensive. It refers to no disease that one might contract. It is not in itself either subversive or perversive. It is not something that one might “catch” and have a bad case of. Its Latin derivation suggests that it is an experience in which man returns to the God who created him, for it means “to bind back” or “to bind together.” Religion is thus a lost man’s pilgrimage back to God. Or it might be described as the love story in which the relationship between God and man is made whole.

There is but scant reference to the word itself in the Bible. In Acts 26:5 Paul speaks to King Agrippa about “our religion,” referring to Judaism. James 1:26 refers to “vain religion,” referring to an undisciplined life. In the next verse “religion that is pure and undefiled” is described as benevolence toward widows and orphans, as well as keeping oneself unstained by the world. That is about it insofar as the Bible is concerned, depending on what disposition translators make of the Greek words involved. In any event in the English word religion we have a meaningful and useful term that has nothing within it that need turn anyone off.

The English dictionary does indicate that the term has to do especially with the expression of religious faith or its external form. It embraces not simply one’s personal and private commitments, but his worship, ethics, philosophy, and institutional relations as well. One’s religion has to do with the way he treats his family as well as the way he views the world, and with the way he meets his obligations as well as the way he explains the nature of God.

There are too many positive elements about religion for it to be accounted ipso facto bad. Even if it be contagious it need not necessarily be a disease, and there is no reason to insist on its demise. I agree with my friend Krister Stendahl, dean at Harvard Divinity School, who in the last Bulletin says that “There is no sound basis for any fear that religion has no future. It is not a precious flower about to die out. The hunger for God is one of the grand forces in human existence. Man is an incurable religious being.”

But that religion can be bad is obvious enough. One only needs to read Cohen’s essay on The Dark Side of Religion to be reminded of how much inhumanity has been committed in the name of religion. Magic, superstition and ignorance have fostered homicide, wars, and burning of heretics. And to bring the truth of bad religion to our own door, we must concede that “Church of Christ religion” has not always blessed those who embraced it, and it was supposedly that religion that my friend had a bad case of. But I still insist that it was a case of bad Church of Christ religion rather than a bad case of Church of Christ religion, for even when we would shun the expression “Church of Christ religion,” the truth is that many of our people in the Church of Christ have a vital and dynamic religious faith. Others have a case of bad religion. What is the difference?

The answer to that depends in part on what we make religion mean. If with Dean Stendahl we see it as man’s hunger for God, then bad religion is a profession of God without any real desire for Him. If with the philosopher Whitehead we resort to a lighter definition and say that religion is what man does in his solitude, then bad religion is when God makes no real difference when man is alone. I think of religion as man’s search for harmony between himself and that which he considers to be the highest in the universe. This makes bad religion that which contributes nothing to that search for harmony or even frustrates the search by a demand for sectarian loyalties.

The scriptures teach us that religion is bad when there is a form of godliness but a denial of the power thereof. Jesus’ message to the religious Pharisees is that they were confusing form and substance, which always makes for bad religion. “You place upon men burdens too heavy for them to bear,” Jesus told them. They were making too much of form and not enough of substance. The substance of religion has more to do with what one is rather than what he does, with being rather than doing. While we do well both to tithe and to do the weightier things of the law, it is often the case that men get so involved in the intricacies of tithing that they neglect the things that matter most, and Jesus shows us that this is bad religion. If we can get the being right, the proper kind of doing should naturally follow. This has to do with sincerity, love and good will. Paul is telling us this when he insists that “The kingdom of heaven is not meat and drink, but peace, justice and joy in the Holy Spirit.” It is the truth that the lawyer saw in responding to Jesus’ teaching that the greatest commandments are to love God with all one’s personality and one’s neighbor as one’s self, for he saw that what really mattered was not form, a matter of sacrifices and offerings, as he had been taught. When Jesus saw that he got the point he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”

Religion is bad when it makes man the means of preserving its institutions rather than making man the end that its institutions serve. Jesus was willing to neglect the letter of the law by healing on the sabbath day, insisting that the sabbath is made for man rather than man being made for the sabbath. It is this that makes Communism a bad religion: it is willing to sacrifice the individual for the sake of the state.

The church has sometimes sacrificed man in order to preserve its forms, and it has sometimes forgotten its mission to minister to suffering humanity in order to support its institutions. This is of course bad religion.

It is good religion that causes man to love and to care and to hope; it is bad religion that oppresses him with fear and uncertainty. Good religion causes man to seek not only knowledge but also truth, such as the truth that is Jesus. Bad religion is satisfied with a knowledge about Jesus rather than the truth that is Jesus. Good religion makes one free, expands his mind, and invites him to a higher plane of being. Bad religion embalms him in obscurantism, traditionalism, and sectarianism.

Forms, traditions and institutions are part and parcel of religion. This is organized religion, the established church, all of which is all right so long as its mission is to serve man rather than to use man. In serving man organized religion has been a great blessing to the world, but when it has used man it has been a great curse. But our point is that religion can be good and often is. We make it good by making it work in our hearts. We make it good by being unaware of religion as such and by losing ourselves in service to others. — the Editor