Defining Terms - Religion vs. Religiosity

I have been wont to contrast the terms "religion" and "religiosity" in these entries. It's more than time that I define their meaning.

A number of factors make this a timely discussion but the most immediate causes are the attempt by Pope Hitler Jugend the First to poach Anglican bigots and the decision by a French Court to cut through the religiosity, the veneer of religion, and define the Church of Scientology for what it is, the cult of a bunch of con artists purveying a lot of idiotic nonsense for personal profit.

Despite the appearance that I deride all religion, I have a certain respect for actual religion sincerely held. True, I do not believe in any god of the sort that George Carlin called "a big, imaginary friend in the sky." However, I do believe that religion - and here I specifically mean "religion" - can be a good thing. There is clear evidence for that positive benefit. The current Dalai Lama is unquestionably a person of deep religion and a force for good in our world. Dorothy Day and her Catholic Workers' Movement have been a force for good. The great Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated by the neo-fascists of El Salvador for his religion. I have known a number of people of deeply held religious belief from nuns and ministers to captains in the Salvation Army to decent lay people who manifest their religion in positive ways. I have also known good people who find comfort in their religion during trials physical, moral and circumstantial as they progress toward that universal vanishing point of death. What is common to all of those people is a depth of knowledge and understanding that comes from examination of their faiths. They have posed questions and found an answer in something far larger and more mysterious than themselves. They have decided that the grand mystery is god while I have decided that it is chance. Their decisions and mine come from confronting our questions and finding our own satisfactory answers.

Religiosity is the opposite. Religiosity derides understanding, thought, questioning and genuine confrontation with problems. Religiosity can be very comforting but at a cost. It matters not at all whether we are discussing Christian, Jewish, Mormon, Islamic, Hindu or any other form of fundamentalist religiosity, the basic message to adherents can be summed up as, "Don't think. Don't question. The answers are already laid out for you." Religiosity is religion for dummies, real dummies. Those dummies may be relatively smart people in other areas but they have such a need for certainty in something that they are willing and even eager to put aside rational thought to achieve that certainty.

Why that eagerness? I cannot look into the minds of those eager to empty those same minds and know for certain the motives - reasons would be granting them far too much - of those who surrender to the ignorance of religiosity. Clearly those motives are closely related if not identical to those of cultists. Essentially those motives seem to stem from blind egotism, selfishness and an utter lack of empathy. Yet also included seems to be a species of infantilism, a yearning for an authority figure who will tell the follower what to do and think and feel in all aspects of his or her life. The religiose seem to find comfort in a top-down structure in which a guru, Duce, Fuhrer, Pope or preacher pander to their weaknesses and bigotries.

While religion - many of whose sects started out in bursts of religiosity's fervor - tends to say that there are many things which we do not understand raising many questions. Religion suggests that in considering those questions and attempting to reach understanding it has concluded that the resolution to their uncertainty a god of some name or other.

Religiosity, on the other hand suggests that there are no questions and that a lack of understanding is simply a species of "over-thinking" the problem. All answers have been laid out in the past. All answers are in some book. Any confusion results from an imperfect understanding of that book, an understanding which the local imam, guru, rabbi or pastor is more than willing to supply for you from his special, revelatory insight. You need only surrender to the book, the leader, the cult. And, by the way, how do you take your coffee and would you like a piece of the cake that Mildred made?

Yes, the cultists are nothing if not welcoming and homey. It's only when you find that you like these people and you get some clues that they share your biases, fears and anger that the dogma of religiosity comes out. It may sound a bit odd at first but how can it be bad if it comes from the nice grandmother handing you a brownie and how can it be wrong if these people fear what you fear and hate what you hate?

A few years ago a person whom I'd met over the Internet through a common hobby interest insisted to me that her Baptist sect was not Protestant. She was a committed follower of Bob Jones, Sr. It seems that Bob Jones, Jr. had strayed into error in her view when he allowed some room for some contact amongst the races. She insisted that her faith had been transmitted directly from the original disciples of Jesus through the Cathars and Albigensians and that her faith as preached by Bob Jones, Sr. survived uncorrupted and undiluted until 1927. Apart from the fact that even a rudimentary knowledge of the beliefs of the Cathars and Albigensians quickly turns that claim into utter nonsense, the very premise that one set of ideas could be passed down for over 1900 years without the least divergence creeping in is simply insane. Yet what she claimed had its own logic. Like all cults, in order to isolate its adherents from all others there must be an ideology that the cultists are different from everyone else. They must be an elect with entitlement to special knowledge and privileges not available to those without excluded from or not yet privy to special grace conferred on the cultists. She had "drunk the Kool-Aid" in a way that is the metaphorical equivalent of the Jonestown horror from which we get the phrase.

This woman did not need to think. She was part of the Bob Jones-town Cult and enfolded in the unadulterated teachings of the Jesus who said, as Scripture tells us, "Suffer the little children to come unto me...but not the niggers." Her Jesus says, "For as much as you have done it unto these, my brethren, - only the white ones who are of the Bob Jones approved faith - you have done it unto me. And the rest can go suck wind." She holds these beliefs because they are part of her own visceral bigotry into which no thought, no question can penetrate and of which no deeper understanding is necessary or even allowed.

When former Arkansas governor, hale fellow well met and thoroughly frightening presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee, insists that he opposes the idea of evolution, he is placing himself in this camp of the religiose and mindless. Despite all attempts to manufacture phony evidence to the contrary, there is an overwhelming body of empirical evidence that life on this planet evolved by random, natural selection over millions of years. There is no valid evidence to the contrary. Yet Christian fundamentalist dogma insists that every word of the Bible is true, accurate and the word of their "big, imaginary friend in the sky." The answer "for dummies" is that the Biblical account, quick, easy and confined to a couple of chapters is the only answer. The Biblical account must necessarily be the only permissible answer largely because if it is not literally true then other Biblical stories might not be literally true either. If one thread in the fabric unravels the whole system of belief comes into question and questions are exactly that from which the religiose flee.

Religiosity would simply be the stuff of satire - not that it isn't already - were it not deadly dangerous. The Hasidic gangs in some New York City neighborhoods that beat up Jews moving their cars to the opposite side of the street on a Saturday are different only in specifics from the Hindu fundamentalists who destroyed a mosque in Amritsar or the suicide bombers who flew planes into the World Trade Centre eight years ago. The details of the acts are different, not the fanatical motivation.

Another aspect of religiosity, peculiar to American Christianity but with analogs in other religions, manifests itself in a perverse dogma of wealth and material success. One would think that the religion whose founder insisted that it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into heaven might not be a congenial home for a doctrine that Jesus wants his followers to be rich yet from the late Rev. Ike to the salesmen preaching in contemporary mega-churches the doctrine of Jesus the bringer of wealth finds voice in sermon after sermon. Like the hot coffee and pastries after church, this is part and parcel of the con. Not only is the mega-church welcoming and friendly but it promises its adherents prosperity and wealth through it many personal networking opportunities. After all, the wealth and success of the parishioner means a heaping offering plate and hefty income for the pastor.

It is actually nothing new. One of the great examples of architecture in the city of Boston is Henry Hobson Richardson's Trinity Church in Copley Square. Trinity is the church built for the great 19th Century preacher Phillips Brooks. If we posit a pantheon of gods the great god of Old Boston Brahmin wealth and Robber Baron lucre resides within Trinity's Roman arches there in Copley Square. Yet Brooks preached to his well-off congregation of responsibility and the obligations which their wealth imposed. Today's gospel of wealth is blissfully devoid of guilt. Any number of preachers will tell you that you deserve every penny you can squeeze out of anyone in your path. There is always an appeal for the odd addition to the church, personal jet for the minister, etc. Still, as I've pointed out before what's good for the parishoners' wallets is equally good for the preachers' wallets as well. It is a very ancient problem which, in early Christianity, was known as Simony, a term too little used and far less understood today.

The wonderful Sarah Vowell published an insightful and quirky study of my ancestors entitled The Wordy Shipmates. She concludes that both the best and worst of America originate with the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Plimouth Plantations. Though their self-righteousness is the bedrock of the worst bigotry, xenophobia and jingoism in the American character, their rejection of self-satisfaction and insistence that greater knowledge of their world led to greater knowledge of their god forms the bedrock of what is great and good in the American character too. Ms. Vowell's coming to that conclusion takes questioning and thought. It's why she is a writer and performer worthy of attention and on many levels. It is also why she and her book are anathema to religiosity.

Religiosity is, no offense to Soren Kierkergaard, always deals in eithers and ors. Everything must be true or false, black or white, in or out, right or wrong. There can be nothing between. Complexity leads to questions, uncertainty and confusion. Religiosity avoids complexity just as it does thought and questioning.

The great Rev. William Sloane Coffin said that we cannot blame god for the people who believe in him. I think he was correct though I think we can properly separate those who espouse religion from those infected with the disease of mere religiosity.

So when I use the term religion properly I am speaking of something of substance. Religion has depth, intelligence and complexity. One arrives at religion through understanding and questioning. Religion is open, permissive and alive. It can grow and change as ones understanding develops and evolves.

When defining religiosity the facile phrase "a mile wide and an inch deep" springs to mind but that phrase is far too generous. Religiosity is narrow, crabbed and without perceptible depth. It is an excuse for bigotry, hatred and exclusion. Religiosity is, quite literally, the apotheosis of ignorance.

So that is the distinction I regularly draw between religion and religiosity. It is what I mean by the terms. I will apologize for the times when I rage at fundamentalists and their claptrap and lump the religious with the religiose. What I will never apologize for is insulting religiosity because it is impossible to insult such crap too much. Religiosity is, at ground, the worst insult to religion there is.