“I‘m spiritual, but not religious"—that’s an increasingly popular claim these days. I’ve heard it in my neighborhood, on buses, and at the supermarket. And, of course, I’ve heard it from students and fellow faculty members at the secular liberal-arts college where I teach. According to results from a 2010 Pew survey, it’s also an apt descriptor for many members of the millennial generation. The phrase has become something of a badge of honor in our culture. As the Northwestern professor Barbara Newman put it in a recent essay on the state of spirituality, “With this claim we absolve ourselves of complicity in the evils perpetrated by every religious institution on earth. We escape ‘organized religion’ with its stultifying conformity, its routinized prayers, its pointless quibbles over dogma, its oppressive ‘we-they’ mentality. We skim the spiritual cream off the top, leaving the bucket of sour milk behind.”
As someone who still drinks from the bucket, I’ll confess: I’m one of those oddballs who define themselves as both spiritual and religious. I attend church weekly, I observe my religion’s liturgical seasons, and I participate in my church’s fellowship opportunities and service projects. But because any mention of these ritual behaviors has so often occasioned bewilderment, astonishment, or embarrassment among my academic peers who see themselves as intelligently “beyond religion,” I find myself pausing to consider why I bother.
My religious involvement has deep roots, going back to the church my parents attended, which was also my grandparents’ church. As an infant, I was baptized into a Protestant denomination of Christianity—one of those churches with a formal creed based on a single statement of faith to be memorized in confirmation class. A modest reddish-brown brick building on the corner, the church drew in blue-collar workers alongside white-collar ones, including faculty from a church-affiliated college nearby. We were middle of the road, zealous for little other than offering friendship for those who were adrift.
Twenty years later, I’ve moved to an entirely different town, yet I’ve continued to worship within the same Protestant tradition. Having studied a variety of Christian belief systems, as well as several other religions, I cannot say that I stay with my church because I regard it as the one true path to salvation. The lover of high-church liturgy in me is more Roman Catholic than Protestant, and in Anglo-Catholic fashion I tend to see ritual and sacrament rather than creed as the heart of Christianity. My belief in balancing contraries may be better satisfied by Hinduism than by my version of Protestantism, yet I’ve remained faithful to my church because that’s where I was planted, and I haven’t found compelling enough reasons to go elsewhere. Above all, the people I’ve met at church are warm, down to earth, and unpretentious. As the rector at a neighboring Episcopal church once remarked, “Each brand of Christianity does have its own character—its ethos,” and I guess the character of this particular denomination appeals to me.
But why a religious life at all? There are many reasons for my persistence in the religious life despite the myriad academic influences that might lead one to abandon such a course. First, I worship regularly out of a desire to give thanks to the divine source of all life—what Dante calls “l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle” (the love that moves the sun and other stars). It is a simple desire, calling me each week to inhabit one of God’s houses.
Second, I remain religious because the formal words and music, the ritual seasons, and the constant practice of religious conformity make life beautiful. In secular culture, conformity almost always has negative connotations; however in my Christian tradition, it is a virtue. What my church and many other religious traditions have in common is a desire to make life lovelier—to give it a form and meaning with ultimate value. And as my family journeys each year from the hopeful expectation of Advent to Christmas’s joyous new beginning to the wisdom-seeking of Epiphany, the somber reflection and repentance of Lent, and then the exhilarated action of Easter and Pentecost, we try to imitate the pattern of Christ’s pilgrimage and, in our small way, participate in the beauty of his life.
Third, I partake in church life because it encourages empathy in unexpected places. Ironically, this argument for religion is best put by a character in an early novel by Jeanette Winterson, a postmodernist who once famously fled the religious life of her fanatical Pentecostal family. In her novel The Passion, the eccentric former priest Patrick avers that “it made sense, whether you believed or not, it made sense to go to church and think about someone who wasn’t your family or your enemy.” That call to self-transcendence is at the heart of religious experience for me: it’s an opportunity to pray, laugh, cry, and celebrate with people I might not otherwise know or care about, but to whom I’m bound because they are part of God’s family.
In this sense, I remain religious because I want to retain the character of my first church home and enjoy communion with a cross-section of human beings I might only rarely encounter in the privileged and, yes, elitist world of the college community. Much as we’d like to pretend otherwise, most colleges are communities where diversity is not as diverse as we’d like to think. Colleges have made admirable efforts to pursue diversity in terms of those qualities that now have an institutional imprimatur: gender, race, and ethnicity. But they are less visibly committed to considering many other things diversity might mean—for instance, class, political, vocational, or generational diversity.
By contrast, my religious congregation transcends politics, age, class, vocation. It unites nurses, supermarket stockers, schoolteachers, public defenders, architects, lab technicians, and even a man who hikes miles to our church from the local halfway house. They are just the kind of people one doesn’t typically encounter at faculty parties, where it would be unusual to meet a college custodian or food-service employee, however polite we are in daily conversations with such people.
Yet my church’s Sunday communion service is just that: a party, a banquet, a symposium where all types of people mingle over bread and wine through the religion that binds us together. It’s an experience one doesn’t always find in the intellectually focused milieu of academic communities. Colleges may boast of anti-elitism by espousing the destruction of traditional canons of literature or by the teaching of Marxist paradigms in the classroom, but how many of those anti-elitist academics fraternize with someone who is not an intellectual?
Likewise, my congregation unites young and old in a way that is rare in the youth-centered world of academe—a place where people start impatiently tapping their toes and checking the retirement clock as soon as colleagues pass 60. Often the only elderly who matter are alums with the means to donate. And even among professors, there is a noticeable abyss between the very young and the very old. Walk into the faculty lounge at my college and observe the snowy-tufted professors emeriti clustered alone at a single table, rarely interacting with younger faculty, who in turn seem either unaware of or uninterested in their academic elders.
That stratification of old and young is an automatic part of our contemporary mind-set. But at my church, there are more than a few white-haired folk, bent with age, hobbling to the altar with the help of cane or walker.
I treasure the wisdom and life experiences the elderly share; indeed, some of the people I most admire are parishioners who are 70 or older. With names like Ruth and Mildred, spines curved like Cs and bodies wizened and thin as beanpoles, nylons an orangey shade of tan and orthopedic shoes, elderly parishioners are often single women who have never married or who have been widowed for years. They are the women it’s so easy to overlook in the park or on the street. Certainly one does not often see them in academe. But they are the devoted workers behind soup-kitchen cooking and quilt-making for children in Africa. They are the packers of college care kits, the organizers of walks to end hunger, the lamplighters for human-rights watches. And, as my children have discovered, they are the sources of hearty hugs and boundless love.
That link between past and present is a final reason that I continue to participate in religious life. Perhaps that’s the last invisible tie religion makes possible. Why say the same words over and over each Sunday, the spiritual but not religious might ask? Why not do something new and different? Why not devise one’s own words? Maybe there’s some value in tracing the words of those who have gone before and being reminded that, as diverse as our identities are, we share such common human experiences as childbirth, friendship, love, suffering, and death.
From the Latin “religare” (to bind back), religion is—at its best—about binding people together. Such an idea is aptly captured by the homely words of a hymn sung to the tune of an old Afro-American spiritual: “In Christ there is no east or west,/ In Him no south or north;/ but one great fellowship of love/ throughout the whole wide earth.” After the pattern of this hymn, the church, when it functions rightly, invites a collapsing of conventional boundaries for the purpose of greater unity—not just in ways that are cool or trendy, but in every possible way. So blest be the tie that binds past and present, young and old, factory worker and academic.
Carla Arnell is an associate professor of English at Lake Forest College.
