Losing My Religion 

                There are a lot of things wrong about the way we think about the world.  There are a lot of things that prevent us from evolving a more embodied and grounded way of interacting with one another.  But one of the biggest is religion, at least the kind of religion that we have developed in our culture.  I don’t mean to suggest that spirituality or belief is wrong, just the formation of churches and congregations that are really nothing more than tribal enforcers of purity and exclusion.  Religion has done more to eat away at our politics and civility than anything else.  To top it off, the religions that are most adamant about their superiority are the ones who are least likely to actually follow any of the major concepts they supposedly adhere to.

                I was raised by a Catholic mother in a small town dominated by a Baptist church.  My father’s family belonged to a particularly virulent and illiterate branch of Protestant Christianity.  None of this had anything to do with God, at least as far as I could tell.  It was all about adults arguing about who was right and who was saved.  My Grandmother frequently told me I was going to Hell.  I got to the point where it was hard to take any of it seriously anymore.  The Edict of Milan, which legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire, transformed a loose affiliation of ‘christian’ practices that were multiple and diverse into dogma.  When the Reformation came as a political and economic struggle cloaked in theology, 500,000 people were killed in six months – most of them probably killed by neighbors and relatives.

                We live in an age dominated by religious conflict.  We live in a country where politics has been perversely focused on ‘religion.’  Too much of American Protestant and Evangelical thought is a strange mix of capitalism, patriotism and an Old Testament oriented Christianity.  It has little to do with an historically accurate or inclusive approach to the Gospel.   When ‘Godfearing’ Evangelicals can excuse and rationalize Trump, what is left to salvage of this mess?  We argue and militarize differences in theology that seem minute and arcane to the rest of the world.  The rest of the world is busy killing each other over the transmission of the Prophet’s message.  Eight-year old girls are raped and murdered as part of a religious caste conflict.  Can’t we just agree that whatever it was that started us on this path, it’s been an absolute failure?

                Identity politics has followed the same dead- end vision of religion, devolving all too frequently in a trial of who is most pure.  My Grandmother would have said they are all going to Hell.  We live in a world that demands we see a bigger affiliation.  Hate groups and separatists are gaining power precisely because they are united by hate in a way the majority of more tolerant souls are not.  None of us has an identity that is sustainable outside of a coalition of people who support us but are not like us. I don’t have to go to your church, believe the same things or identify the same way you do to be a good person.  We have to find a way to get beyond the barriers of identity, not because the identities aren’t true, but because we need a broader, larger community to honor and protect them.

                I feel that the only way for me to reclaim any sense of the spiritual in the world is to lose my religion.  It’s easy for me at this point to set aside the obvious markers of religion; a church, a country an ethnicity.  But I want to go farther than that.  I want to reclaim a sense of becoming as opposed to a sense of belonging to a category or tribe.  I feel like the only way to reclaim what I have lost in all these conflicts is to try and be part of something bigger.  Being old helps.  I’m not as valuable a team member as I once was.  I wear the cloak of elderly invisibility most days – just another old fart in a donut shop, trying to pay with cash instead of credit.  The moment is filled with distraction and anxiety, but the thing that calls us forward is larger that all of this.  I am part of something that is still asking me to try and understand it on its own terms.  Something that keeps reminding me that there is a lot I don’t know.  Maybe we just need to return to the spirits before religion.  We need to listen to the wind.  We need to reacquaint ourselves with the stars.