Beyond Religion

"The church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end." ~ Professor Sarah Coakley, Harvard Divinity School

"The task of religion is not to turn us into proper believers; it is to deepen the personal within us, to embrace the power of life, to expand our consciousness, in order that we might see things that eyes do not normally see. It is to seek a humanity that is not governed by the need for security, but is expressed in the ability to give ourselves away. It is to live not frightened by death, but rather called by the reality of death to go into our humanity so deeply and so passionately that even death is transcended. That is the call of the fully human one, the Jesus of the transformed consciousness."

“In my evangelical, fundamentalist Christian upbringing I was taught to believe that the scriptures were in fact the inerrant words of God. At that point in my life, I could sing with no hesitancy a hymn like “Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine,” which identified my commitment to Jesus with a “foretaste of glory divine.” The world of expanding knowledge and new learning, however, kept intruding into my evangelical security system, chipping away at my certainty. That understanding of scripture as inerrant ultimately proved to be little more than an untrustworthy leaking ship that had to be abandoned. Religious concepts become fragile indeed when education renders them no longer believable. Try as I might, sometimes with great fervor, remaining on board that biblical premise proved to be impossible. No human words, ancient or modern, I finally concluded, can ever capture ultimate truth, so I looked for a way out of that disintegrating biblical security system.

My exit from biblical fundamentalism actually came only when I discovered an alternative with equal power to which I could appeal. Its code name was “the authority of the church.” In retrospect I recognize that this was nothing more than a mini-step from one kind of fundamentalism into another, but it felt like a huge step for me at the time. I learned well the jargon of my new idolatry. “Not only did the church write the scriptures,” I asserted, “but the church also decided which books would constitute its sacred text.” Those assertions were in fact historically accurate, at least as far as the New Testament was concerned, but the conclusion I drew from those assertions did not really follow.

“The church alone,” I then stated, “has the authority to interpret the scriptures properly.” My flanks, I thought, were now well protected. Even as I parroted these clichés, however, I must have been aware of the weakness of this argument. Surely I recognized that I needed far more certainty than this if I were going to make these claims believable among those who were not, as I then was, in love with the church. All I had really done was to replace one inadequate authority, the Bible, with another equally inadequate authority, the church. For the church to serve as my final authority it had to be invested with some version of divine infallibility, just as the scriptures had previously been invested with divine inerrancy.

The hysteria that always seems to attend such assertions caused me to ask some very different questions. Do people who require certainty in religious matters, and their names appear to be legion, really believe what they are saying? Do they not know that they are just pretending? If they do know they are pretending then why do they act the way they act? When their religious authority-claims are challenged, their typical response is not to enter a rational discussion, but to engage in revealing anger. Anger never rises out of genuine commitment; it is always a product of threatened security. The human need to believe in God and in such ultimate matters as life beyond death, I concluded, must be greater than the human ability to believe these things. When people get to the point where they do not really believe what they are saying, they still seem to believe in believing in what they are saying! They do not even recognize the difference.

Nonetheless, I, like so many others, participated in this activity, and it worked for me for a number of years, serving during that time to still my restless search for answers that might keep my doubts in check and to convince me that there was an enduring and eternal truth that I would someday find. In retrospect I recognize that this inner need to believe was a factor inspiring my choice of a life path leading me into my career, first as a priest and ultimately as a bishop. In that profession, as in few others, I could wrestle openly and publicly with the questions of God and death and what, if anything, lies beyond death; and I could do it within the security of time-tested answers. I do not regret that choice for a minute, but that is because this career has in my particular experience had the power to lead me beyond all human answers and all human boundaries, including the boundary of religion itself, and into an unfettered search for truth and meaning that has no end. That is not everyone’s experience with religion; indeed religion does not typically encourage such exploration. It did, however, for me.

While no life ultimately escapes the reality of death, it is particularly difficult to avoid dealing with it in a religious profession. The ordained ones in our society are cast in the role of death’s interpreter in teaching, in pastoral care, in dealing with the diagnosis that announces someone’s impending demise, in grief management, in exploring death’s inconsistencies, in planning funeral services and in preaching on those occasions. Perhaps the secret hope of those in the church’s ministry is that we can deal with death, while still hiding inside the sanctuary of pious words and carefully nuanced traditional answers.

Death, however, has a peculiar ability to call us out of hiding in ways we did not originally anticipate. Even funeral services draw us into a dialogue with the non-believing world far more than we once imagined. Because of the interconnectedness of human life, the people constituting the congregations at funeral services are not necessarily believers. They have come primarily because they were close to the deceased or to one of the bereaved. It is not the faithful who fill the pews at a funeral, but rather a cross section of human life. People of various faith traditions and of no faith tradition come to funerals, most in various stages of their own spiritual development. The clergy quickly learn that the traditional pious assertions of the past do not engage many of those in attendance at funeral services.

This insight was publicly revealed recently in Washington, D.C., at the funeral of one of America’s best-known and most popular television journalists. Because this journalist had been an active Roman Catholic, his funeral, a requiem mass, was conducted by the recently retired cardinal archbishop of Washington. When the time came for the worshippers to go to the altar to receive the sacrament, it was made clear that not all were welcome to participate. Only Roman Catholics were invited to this altar. This jarring note of our tribal religious past was widely disobeyed by the mourners, among whom were many other easily identifiable television and media personalities known not to be Roman Catholics and, in some instances, not even to be religious people.

Drawn by their friendship with the deceased and perhaps by some inner need that the presence of death seems to elicit, they violated the rule and received the bread and wine. The Catholic League condemned them by name and this condemnation was subsequently picked up by newspapers, including America, the national Catholic weekly. These receivers of the sacrament at this Catholic altar were accused of “religious insensitivity to Catholic values” and of being “disrespectful of Catholic practices.” Funerals frequently prove to be far too public and too emotional to suit the comfort needs of those committed to sectarian religion. A liturgy designed for the mentality of a religious ghetto does not communicate well with those who live outside the ghetto. There are few hiding places for those who want to flee from reality into religion, though many still try to do so…”

"I experience God as expanded consciousness. Life is ever-unfolding. Consciousness is ever-rising. We see that in the growing human awareness of those who are different from the majority. We see it in our increasing sensitivity to, and in the enhanced sense of our responsibility for, the life of our world. All of these things, I believe, are the result of a new awareness of what it means to be human. In expanded consciousness, the barriers we erect and behind which we hide in our search for security actually serve to cut us off from the meaning of life. That is the great sin of organized religion. Organized religion seeks to turn us inward upon ourselves. It binds us into a world marked by enormous limitations.

Organized religion always divides the world into warring camps. It separates the followers of 'true religion' from the followers of that which it judges to be false religion. It separates true believers from heretics, the clean from the unclean, the saved from the unsaved, the baptized from the unbaptized, and the circumcised from the uncircumcised. These markers, however, cannot be part of the God experienced as life, love, being and consciousness. Whereas God's qualities cannot be categorized, branded or judged by external standards, religious markers such as being saved or being baptized can; the latter are nothing more than the manifestations of the supernatural tribal deity who builds the power of one people by diminishing the power of another.

It is only in the expansion of human life and the expansion of self-consciousness that we find the ability to cross barriers and to transcend boundaries. It is this expansion of life and consciousness that invites us into a new understanding of what it means to be human. Finally, it is this expansion of life and consciousness that links us, I believe, with eternity, with timelessness. It is this expansion of life and consciousness that I now think I can say links us with God. We have moved beyond religion, meaning that even God can no longer be a religious concept."

~ John Shelby Spong, Eternal Life: A New Vision: Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell                                                       

John Shelby Spong was bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark for 24 years before his retirement in 2001. He is a teaching bishop who makes contemporary theology accessible to the ordinary layperson. He is considered the champion of an inclusive faith by many, both inside and outside the Christian church.

A visiting lecturer at Harvard and at universities and churches worldwide, Bishop Spong delivers more than 200 public lectures each year to standing-room-only crowds. His extensive media appearances include a profile segment on 60 Minutes as well as appearances on Good Morning America, Fox News Live, Politically Incorrect, Larry King Live, The O’Reilly Factor, William F. Buckley’s Firing Line, and Extra. Bishop Spong and his wife, Christine Mary Spong, have five children and six grandchildren. They live in New Jersey.