I Hope You(We) Are Wrong

In recent years there has been a whole lot of anxiety about the “Nones.” (Nones are those people who, when asked their religious affiliation, answer “none” on census surveys and the like.) Their numbers are growing and an even more recent survey says they aren’t just leaving organized religion behind, they are leaving the whole notion of God (gods, god) behind as well.

I expect there to be a whole new level of anxiety as this comes to the attention of religious leaders. But I read it, and thought: we’re surprised? Here’s the thing: those Nones are members of one of the best educated generations in the history of humanity. We’ve crammed as much knowledge as we can into their young brains, and they are hooked up to 24 hour news feeds and portable electronic devices that bring them the words of everyday people all over the world at all hours of the day and night.

Their village is the planet. They are under absolutely no misapprehension that most people are just like them. Stability is a foreign word in their lives. They cut their teeth on plate tectonics, while my parents’ science books still thought something as big as a continent couldn’t move. My science books taught me all the predictable “laws” of physics that dear old Isaac Newton came up with, they are growing up in the world of quantum physics where laws are laughable and certainty isn’t a word you can use.

Their world is utterly diverse, always changing, never static, and filled with uncertainty. Their world tells them that even at the most basic fundamentals of the universe we cannot know anything for certain. (If you are over the age of say 35 and haven’t kept up with modern physics do  a little Googling and prepare for a monster headache.) And what do they see of religion from their parents’ and grandparents’ generations?

Utter certainty. Think about it: the religious people who make the news are those who will tell you without flinching that they have the one true way to God. That they know without a doubt that abortion is murder, homosexuality is a mortal sin, Allah/God/Jesus is the only God, you can fill in your own list. The religious people in the news really think that those who don’t agree with them are going to be sent to hell, forever. And they’ll say it! They are entirely certain, a discussion or debate is futile.

And these bright, curious young people are just not going to buy that anymore. It is plain bad logic in a world bigger than a village. There are today roughly five or six major religions in the world that directly conflict with each other on a great many points of dogma. And pretty much all of them claim to be right. Now say you are a young intelligent, well connected person, you are going to guess there are a couple hundred active religions today, say a couple thousand throughout history (likely many more but let’s keep things manageable). At one point, you’ll guess, every tribe of 20 or so people had its own religious system. Now if there is a divine sort of being out there that gives a fig about human beings knowing about it, why would that divine being leave absolute truth about him (it is always a him) in the hands of one tiny little tribe or people, and then punish the whole world for not getting on board somehow with that one right religion. As a divine being goes you’d have to be utterly capricious, down right evil (if the punishment for not getting it randomly right is indeed hell) or just colossally incompetent. Given those options I honestly can’t blame near 10% of the population for saying “this is stupid, I’m opting out of the god thing entirely.”

Had that been my experience I’d have likely opted out years ago too.

There is a great cartoon that I think fits here, it is one of my favorites. Snoopy is sitting on his dog house writing a book, what the book is about has changed; from politics, to theology, you name it. But his title stays the same. “Have you considered the possibility you might be wrong?” Ah, there it is. Uncertainty, which comes with a big old dose of humility.

Because here is what does make sense. That religion and spirituality has obviously been incredibly important to a great many people throughout human history. For some reason we just keep coming back to it, no matter who we are or where we are. And it is clear that the ways religion and spirituality have been expressed are as diverse as the people expressing them. But all that diversity gets at something bigger than we are, bigger than we can really wrap our heads around. And the important bit is that those religions are at their best when they stand in mute awe and curious wonder, or when they want to show and tell their lived experience like giddy children discovering their first snail in the grass. They are at their worst when they are absolutely certain.

There are too few voices within my tradition speaking out strongly for mystery. We Christians believe in a God that we start off saying is beyond knowledge, and yet as well known as a dear friend. We talk about three in one and one in three, we talk about a God who comes human, but is still God. We talk about bread and wine being body and blood. We talk about gathered people throughout space and time being the Body of that human/God. And yet somehow the voices among us who realize how little we can grasp are losing the microphone to those who demand ultimate certainty. Not much on that list sounds like the sort of thing that lends itself to anything but head shaking mystery.

I’d like to propose something incredibly radical to those of us Generation X and older, but pretty darn obvious to those born in the midst of the information age: that we admit that we are probably wrong. (About a lot of things.) That none of us have the one straight shot to the one universal truth. That there might not even be a universal truth, at least not one we humans are advanced enough to be able to grasp or articulate. (But we’ll keep trying anyway, because that’s what we humans do and that’s OK, the journey is what matters, the search.)

What if, we religious people said: we stand before the whole vast unimaginable universe and we fall down in awe. We have experienced something in this world that is totally Other. Something so Other that we chose to call it God, or Yahweh, or Shiva or a thousand other utterly inadequate names; something so beyond us we know we can never be certain about it. But we have experienced it as real and important, as maybe the most important thing there is. And we’d like to share that with others, because we really think this matters to what it means to be human: to be somehow, mysteriously, connected to something bigger than our individual selves and through that unnameable something, to each other.

We Christians can share the love we’ve experienced and that we call Father/Mother, Jesus, Spirit. Our Jewish friends can share the power and love and constancy of the God of Abraham, and Deborah. Our Muslim friends can share the mystery of Allah. Our Buddhist friends can teach us of universal suffering, and about freedom from that suffering. Our Hindu friends can show us the many, many faces with which the Divine has revealed Herself among them. None of us has to become a Buddhist, or Hindu, or Christian; we just have to become a little less doggedly certain.

For those who are not under 30 this probably sounds like heresy, a direct attack on everything we hold dear. (From a priest no less.) I don’t think so. Rather, I think, it is the loosening of our death grip on a tradition that is a holy mishmash of the divine and the human. I think it is releasing our stranglehold on the idol of certainty, and making room for the Spirit to move and dance among us. It is letting go of our need to keep our religion alive, and unchanged, in favor of keeping our souls alive.

In the spirit of such openness. I really would like to know what you think. Especially reflecting on how your age and culture influence your response…