People sometimes ask me, ‘Am I religious?’, and my instinctive answer is ‘No.’ That might seem strange, given the number of religious books I’ve written and the fact that I’m a Christian minister, but actually I suspect many of us would want to answer the same. Religion has a bad name, and not without reason. Take the history of the Church. As any militant atheist, or even sceptical agnostic, would immediately point out, its history is hardly one to be proud of, littered as it is with evils that make a mockery of everything Jesus taught and that Christians are meant to stand for. The Spanish Inquistion, the burning of witches, wars in the name of religion, the burning of ‘heretics’, forced conversions, persecution of other Christians and those of other faiths – and then, in more recent times, unshamed sexism and homophobia, not to mention child-abuse scandals – have repeatedly dragged the Church’s name through the mud. Sadly, organised religion –Christian or otherwise – constantly runs the risk of undermining the very thing it sets out to embody and safeguard. Too easily, we seek to prescribe what truth is, defining God in our own image, and woe betide anyone who disagrees.
Yet such a negative assessment tells only half the story. In countless ways, also, the Church has been a force for good across the centuries, seeking to make known the love of Christ through word and deed, and striving to bring healing to a troubled world. I’ve personally been privileged to know a host of wonderful Christians who have offered untold inspiration, and members of other faith traditions could equally point to spiritual giants of their own. I would never want to disparage any of that for a moment.
What all this tells us, I think – and I consider the issues it raises in much greater detail in my two-part group-study book A Chequered Legacy: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of the Church (Book 1: The Good; Book 2: The Bad and the Ugly) – is that we need constantly to distinguish between God and religion, for we have an understandable but unfortunate tendency to conflate the two. The following, taken from my book The Teacher, explores the vital difference between them, and the importance of recognising the limitations of our understanding.
Religion
I saw theologians debating, clerics arguing, schisms separating, zealots persecuting – and I grieved at such a denial of what was supposedly held dear. Yet I saw also believers campaigning for justice, serving their community, working together to restore and reconcile – and for a moment faith was restored.
‘What, then, of religion?’ I asked. ‘How has it brought such joy, yet such sorrow; such insight, yet such bigotry; such good, yet such evil; such blessing, yet such a curse?’
And the Teacher reminded me that the divine is beyond words, greater than we can ever comprehend, let alone confine to creed or dogma: ‘God is greater than any human being, towering above us in majesty; who can begin to be anything like such a tutor? Who has decreed the way God should take, or who can say, “You have done wrong”? Surely the divine is so awesome that we can never know it fully; the number of its years is beyond our reckoning.’
‘So can we not know God?’ I asked. ‘Is religion a folly, a deceit, an illusion?’
‘God has made everything beautiful in its time,’ answered the Teacher with a shake of the head, ‘and has put a glimpse of eternity in the human heart. Yet no one is able fully to fathom everything that God has done.’
‘What, then, can we say of God?’ I asked. ‘For much has been written, and many claim that theirs and theirs alone is the way to truth. And of doctrine and teaching there seems to be no end.’
Then the Teacher answered me, ‘When in the presence of the divine, avoid being over-hasty to speak, in a hurry to blurt out whatever comes into your mind. Given that God is in heaven and you are on earth, let your words be few. Much dreaming and many words are empty. Therefore, stand in awe before God.’
And I understood then that religion has a place, but that it must know its place too; that it is a searching after truth, never a quest that is finished. And I realised that whenever religion claims to be wholly right, it is deeply wrong; that it is better to have no religion than to believe ours is the only one worth having; and that in striving to protect truth, religion often destroys it, as much obscuring as revealing the face of God.
And what is the face of God but the face of love? Without love, religion is nothing: like night without day – a tyrant that brings death in the name of the giver of life. And those who condemn in the name of faith, who persecute and destroy, demean not just themselves but also the God they claim to worship.
Truly, there is nothing worth killing for, least of all religion, and though some things are worth dying for, religion is not among them.
So then, hold fast to God, but hang loose to religion, and never confuse the two.