The Conundrum of Religion, in One Video and a Chart

Certainty, belief, and the durable lamination of love and God.

Recently, I came across this heartwarming short video on social media:

There’s nothing not to love about this video.  It’s a young boy hitting his first home run and his dad reacting with joy and love.  The hug at the end is delicious.  Even if you don’t have kids, you can appreciate that such moments are what life is all about.  Pure love, pure joy, unadulterated delight.

I can almost picture the boy’s neurons firing and wiring together.  Baseball – home run – joy – Dad’s love: they’re all laminated together. 

Religion does a similar thing.

When you’re raised in a religion, everything good is wrapped up in it: family, belonging, love, friendship, community, meaning.  Some parts are particularly religious, like the explanations of why things are the way they are, or what we’re meant to do about it.  But more of the package, I think, is not specifically religious but is essentially human: how we gather together, how we define ourselves, how we succeed or fail, how we are worthy of love or not. It's that boy’s home run, but a thousandfold. 

I remember from my own childhood the powerful sense of belonging that came from singing the songs, learning the traditions, winning the approval of our parents and authority figures.  The whole edifice of life is constructed with religious materials.

Notice I haven’t used the word “God” yet, because I haven’t had to.  God may be part of that super-structure, especially in intensive Christian contexts such as charismatic, evangelical, or Pentacostal Protestantism, or conservative Catholicism.  But God, the Bible, morality—these are at once essential to religion and inessential to it. The doctrines and myths could be otherwise, but once they are set, they are installed with the rest of the cognitive software of religion, and quite hard to uninstall.

Which is why challenging them creates such resistance.  Denying the divinity of the Bible, or its teachings on gender, or its superiority over other religious texts isn’t about theology, textual analysis, and history, because for a traditionalist, those things are unconsciously tied up with all the good things that we most want from our lives.  The entire structure is threatened, and with it the form, validation and meaning it offers to the individual and her community.

Many years ago, I retold an apparently true story about Tim LaHaye, author of the Left Behind series of books about the End Times.  LaHaye’s father died when the boy was only ten years old; we can imagine his grief.  And then, at his father’s funeral, the minister said that death is not the end; that there is an afterlife; a world after this one.  “All of a sudden,” wrote LaHaye, “there was hope in my heart I’d see my father again.”

Imagine the young LaHaye at that moment, like the boy on the baseball field.  The teaching of the hereafter isn’t some theological point; it’s pressed together with his love of and grief for his father, and the hope that he’d see him again.  A hope that eventually congealed into belief, perhaps even into certainty, and became tied to a whole theology and eschatology that, in turn, influenced tens of millions of people. Thus was Tim LaHaye’s religious extremism born, not out of theological investigation but out of the trauma of a young boy who lost his dad.

Speaking of certainty, check out this graph based on data from the 2014 Pew study on religion:

In most of America, over half of the population is certain that God exists.  In most of the South, it’s greater than 70%.  Certain!  I’m a rabbi who has been blessed with mystical experiences on meditation retreats, psychedelics, and near-death experiences, and even I’m not certain.  I’m not sure I ever will be.  It’s hard for me to imagine what that religious consciousness must be like, and yet, according to this survey anyway, maybe two-thirds of Americans possess is.

At the very least, such certainty is not a matter of logical reasoning, or the operations of the pre-frontal cortex.  This is why atheism often seems so ridiculous to religious people; it acts as if religion is a set of propositions, as if religious belief were like the belief that it will rain tomorrow, or that the earth revolves around the sun.  These are testable hypotheses; but religious “belief” is not like that at all.  It’s an emotional, embodied context for belief, and it was put into place, for most people, when we were children. It’s held together not with reason but with the mortar of love, community, purpose, and all the rest.  It is the arena where we access love, relationship, and meaning. It’s where we many of us get to feel like that boy in the video.

I find all of this terribly depressing.  Because for the majority of adherents, this structure is very hard to deconstruct.  Either God wrote the Torah or I am not okay.  Either the voice I hear in my head is the Holy Spirit or I have no way out of sin.  And according to our best data, absent some significant rupture—being gay, for example—these strands are almost impossible to untangle.

Progressive, universalist, non-hierarchical, anti-fundamentalist religion—i.e., the kind I love to practice—has attempted, for around 200 years, to untangle them, to tease apart the meaning-making parts of religion from its specific myths and doctrines.  Thus we keep the “good” (love, community, justice-making, the sacred) and leave aside the “bad” (false statements of fact, particularism, sexism and other oppressions).  Sometimes we succeed; certainly, my entire religious life (or lives, if you count my dharma practice as religious) is based upon the possibility of this untangling. 

But it can also ring a little hollow.  Here’s a joke about that: What do you get when you cross a Unitarian-Universalist with a Jehovah’s Witness?  Someone who knocks on your door... for no reason at all.

Sure, sometimes, UU’s have the same passion as JW’s.  But the Witnesses’ quasi-fundamentalist theology does seem more motivating than UU’s broad, lovely, progressive non-doctrines, does it not? 

Certainly that’s true as a matter of numbers.  Mainline Protestantism, non-Orthodox Judaism, and progressive religion in general is on the decline in America, even if we lay claim to the large numbers of “Spiritual But Not Religious” as our spiritual siblings.  Old Time Religion, which provides certainties and answers, is becoming predominant, particularly in American politics but even among the weird diagonalist-dark web folks whose denizens – Russell Brand, Jordan Petersen, Joe Rogan – are embracing conservative forms of Christianity, despite their past and/or continued hedonism. 

I also find the “certainty” of the religious depressing because of the extension of that religiosity to the messiah Donald Trump.  Here, too, the tenets of the faith are rationally preposterous: the 2020 election was stolen, Trump is a good man maligned by the powerful, there is a cabal of perverts running the world.  But they are no more a matter of rational deduction than are religious doctrines of heaven and hell, Biblical inerrancy, or the young age of the Earth.  Yes, they answer some important questions—how America can be at once blessed by God and weakened by ‘wokeness,’ for example. But fundamentally, the tenets of MAGA function not as factual propositions but as boundary-markers of meaning, community, and belonging. 

And of course, they significantly overlap with conservative Christianity, as we’ve explored in this newsletter many times.  Trump may be an unlikely messiah, but that is how he functions for roughly 80 million Americans—usually the same ones who are certain that God exists. 

What can be done, given that this population of certain believers may be in charge of the country quite soon? 

I don’t have an answer.  There aren’t enough ruptures to make a significant dent in this population; there just aren’t enough gay people, psychedelic-taking people, or people with crises of faith.  And of course there’s an army of fundamentalists heaven-bent on keeping them in the fold somehow.  I used to think that the hedonistic pleasures of capitalism would erode the power of religious fundamentalism, but Christianity’s greatest strength is its mutability, and so the “prosperity gospel” and other recent movements have successfully absorbed capitalism into a faith that, in its Biblical form, is obviously opposed to it.  Certainly science won’t do it, or it would’ve done so already.  On the contrary, the vacuums of meaning created by technology and scientific materialism have made the appeal of religion stronger, not weaker. 

And obviously there’s no persuading a religious fundamentalist.  They may believe that they are receptive to reasoning and argumentation, but at the core, they have far too much at stake for that. 

This conundrum is personal as well as public for me.  How much religious lamination do I want to instill in my child?  My partner and I try to give our daughter the good parts of Judaism—the sweetness of Shabbat rituals, the joy of the holidays, the bonds of tradition and family—without the ethnocentrism, particularism, outdated God-language, and intergenerational trauma that comes with much American Jewishness.  But I wonder how durable that is, especially without the support of institutions and ‘thick’ communities.  Maybe durable progressive religion is simply impossible; maybe it really is all or nothing.  Right now, we’re just muddling through.

I wouldn’t want to deprive anyone of the love and joy that the dad and son experience in that video.  They are what make life worthwhile.  But when it’s not just baseball, when it’s a holistic system of meaning-making and community-building that addresses fundamental aspects of the human condition and is tied to convictions about how everyone else must also behave, that beautiful love comes at a cost.

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Happy official summer! We’re enjoying the Heat Dome here in the Northeast. Yet if you’d like to explore sobriety, I propose the “Climate Change Drinking Game” in which you drink each time a presidential candidate mentions the climate crisis in tonight’s debate. You’ll still be able to drive home.

I wrote my probably-last article for The Daily Beast this week, on the Supreme Court’s rebuke to the MAGA/IDW “Censorship Industrial Complex” conspiracy theory. It’s been a great run at the Beast, and while my editor is leaving as the paper charts a new course, I remain really appreciative of the opportunities I’ve had there, from eight years covering the Supreme Court to some really cool LGBTQ content we created a decade ago.

Some of what I’ve been consuming but not exactly enjoying this week:

• Judd Legum
  on the barely-reported censorship crusade in South Carolina.

• Thomas Zimmer
  ’s excellent and must-listen discussion with Chris Hayes about Project 2025.

• Some disturbing stats about antisemitism among Facebook group moderators

• Great short Times piece on how Gen-Z slang is an apt reflection of the world they’re inheriting

Finally, I’m pleased to report some nice, linear growth in subscribers — thank you for subscribing, if you do! I’m still looking to boost my paid subscribers, so if you’re able to chip in a bit to make this work sustainable, I’d appreciate that.

Happy Pride!