Another politics related danger is becoming too strongly associated with one political party or another. The difficulty in the US is that one political party is strongly associated with a pro-life position on abortion but a strongly anti-life position on capital punishment and most other life-related issues. While the other major party is pro-choice on abortion but pro-life on most other issues. Neither party is consistently in harmony with church moral teaching. When church leaders are too supportive of one political party or another, it seems hypocritical. They also seem to be failing at their responsibilities, as religion becomes a tool for political ends.
The church must take stands on political issues, at least to the extent of presenting the relevant moral teaching. Just as much, it must also avoid any hint of alignment with a political party. Failure to do so simply adds another link in the chain of mistrust that alienates young people from the church.
The way we understand the world around us has changed over the years and this has had a big impact on our approach to religion. In the past our understanding of the world was based on what we could perceive and reason about, on the stories that were handed down to us from the past and from religious truths that were revealed to us in Scripture. This worked for thousands of years and in many cultures.
In Europe several hundred years ago, people began to use experimental methods to understand the world. This empirical approach lead to many scientific advances and a tremendous growth in theoretical and practical knowledge. While the focus was empirical, the change it introduced was almost magical. So much was happening to make the world different, that it was almost dreamlike.
The 20th century brought a wake-up call. The destruction caused by two world wars, ceaseless police actions by the military and the failed promises of technology brought a profound skepticism to many people. They questioned the value of the received stories and traditions. They lost trust in the bedrock social institutions of society; such as politics, the church, the media and universities. They lost trust in the wisdom and stories that people passed from one generation to the next. They lost trust that there was even anything one could reasonably call “truth”. Was everything “fake news” …noise you put out as part of a power game to control others? This skeptical view is sometimes referred to as “post-modernism”.
Yet there was still a hunger in the hearts of people that was not being fed. People would talk about “being spiritual but not religious”, implying a desire for the transcendent but skepticism that our social and religious institutions could satisfy that desire. Spirituality was viewed more and more as an individual relationship with the transcendent, a personal depth experience, than living out a religious tradition. People were more willing to place their trust in various spiritual technologies than they were to place their trust in a social institution that had failed them.
All these factors have come together in a “perfect storm”. The post-modern perception of the world, with its profound skepticism over our social institutions and even the existence of objective truth, provides a setting that is reinforced by the scandals. The result is the growing number of those who do not affiliate with any religious tradition; that is, the “nones”. Still, the yearning for the transcendent remains. The popularity of being “spiritual but not religious” points to a possible answer to the search for a way to respond to the challenge presented by the “perfect storm”.
Most religious traditions view a community as having a relationship with the divine. One’s relationship with God was understood as integral with one’s membership in the community. The Hebrew people and later Israel saw themselves as having a relationship with God, as revealed in the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and later Moses and described in the books of Genesis and Exodus. He would be their God and they would be His people.
One of the insights of the Judeo-Christian tradition is the idea that it is possible to have a personal relationship with God. Relationship with the divine isn’t just about having a membership card in some community. It is also about a personal experience of the transcendent, which affirms the reality of God and that it is possible to encounter the divine in some meaningful way. The challenge however is to encounter the divine and not simply fall in love with a fantasy conjured up by the mirror of our imagination. That fantasy doesn’t lead us to God but to idolatry. Before long God becomes a tool lending divine authority to our desires and ideas…think jihad, inquisition and centuries of religious wars.
Theologians and mystics have wrestled with this challenge for millennia. Dionysius the Aeropagite, a fifth century monk and Church Father, described the names of God. He identified the names that we can know as those characteristics of the divine that are accessible to us through Scripture (Creator, Redeemer, etc.) and those names that are unknowable simply because God is beyond us. We lack the capacity to speak these names because we are creatures, not the creator. A similar understanding of our inability to grasp the reality of God, beyond a very limited range of understanding, is found in other Church Fathers (Origen, Basil, Gregory Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa). Keeping the insights offered by these saints in mind, we can avoid the trap of falling in love with a fantasy of our making.
Yet, the challenge remains. How do we enter into a personal relationship with the divine? How do we relate to that which we can not understand or even clearly perceive? Perhaps we can draw on the insights offered by classic authors, as well as more recent thinkers and seekers of the divine.