Distinguish religion & spirituality

I swim in contrasting spiritual cultures—with those who are attached to religion and with those who are hostile or indifferent to religion. I reconcile them by keeping in mind an important distinction. Religion and spirituality are not the same thing, but they are often conflated. I think distinguishing between them could ease communication between two communities that chafe against each other.

Spiritual experiences that happen to everyone are called religious, and this conflation of the two deprives those who want to avoid religion of appreciating their essentially spiritual nature. In a discussion with atheists, I asked whether they didn’t prefer kindness to cruelty. Yes, they said, but that’s not spiritual. Not spiritual! It reminds me of a government declaring, “We don’t torture,” and, when given an example of their torturing, simply changing the definition of torture.

In my July 31 blog post, I cited a feature on artist Meinrad Craighead in the National Catholic Reporter, which stated that her “first real religious experience, at the age of seven, was not in the church but in nature, with her dog.” I would change a word in this statement; her experience was spiritual, not religious. Its only connection with church or religion was that religious people receive something similar in church.

I dare say many artists experience the Presence in beautiful nature but would deny that it’s spiritual. And scientists experience wondering awe in contemplating the universe, but many deny that the experience is spiritual because they associate spirituality with religion, which they regard with disgust as naïve and corrupt.

Those of us who see beauty in religion as well as the fraud and foolishness could help to bridge this divide by refraining from language that implies we own spirituality. Christians are prone to taking ownership of all things spiritual. Someone behaves generously and we call it “Christian.” That’s an insult to non-Christians who are just as apt to behave altruistically.

A family establishes mealtimes as the space for deep sharing and a Catholic might call it eucharist. But that puts a Christian cast on it and it could turn off an educated, enlightened family who desire no attachment to religion.

The great theologian Karl Rahner famously termed non-Christians who express a deep spirituality “anonymous Christians.” A Buddhist gently let him know it was insulting by asking how he would feel if he were called an “anonymous Buddhist.”

Given the right language, every human being responds to spiritual matters. This is why we must distinguish between the terms. Atheists are among the most spiritually inclined people I know. It is the reason they see religious nonsense and corruption and react negatively. But most over-react, and they sweep away what makes humans most human, the spiritual sensitivity at our core.

Some of the responsibility for that must be borne by Christians who have attached our brand onto all of spirituality. I urge fellow Christians to step out of our comfortable envelope where everyone uses language that absolutizes our particular brand of spiritual experience. It insulates us, inoculates against awareness of the harm in our language. Let’s step outside that box and stop referring to every experience that enlarges awareness of Transcendence as religious.

Using greater sensitivity in our language, we could join those who disdain religion in our common quest for truth, beauty, and goodness in all their forms. Honor, honesty, courage, cruelty, loveliness, ugliness, nobility, evil, and deception stir every human heart, whether religious or not. EVERYone, even the most despicable torturer, works for some perceived good.

To those who lump all religious people together, know that educated religious do not believe in the god you reject and ridicule. We’re not stupid. Between you and us lies the common ground of TRUTH/BEAUTY/GOODNESS that we could claim together if religion and spirituality were discussed as distinct from each other.