Thirty-four million Americans have given up on organized religion, according to the most recent American Religious Identification Survey. Yet for many of these dropouts -- from churches, synagogues, temples and so on -- spirituality is still a vital part of their lives.
How else would you explain the phenomenal success of Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now, Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love (soon a major motion picture), or the writings of the Dalai Lama, Deepak Chopra, and others like them? Just because people are fed up with organized religion doesn't mean their appetite for spiritual things has been swallowed up, too.
I know because I was one of these millions who dropped out of active involvement in organized religion. But unlike the majority of the other 33,999,999 dropouts, I was a religious leader when I did.
I grew up in the church, the son of a Southern Baptist minister. When I graduated from college, I went to seminary, and after several years of study, I began my career as a professional minister. It wasn't long, however, before I discovered that the church was more lost than the world it was trying to save.
Go into many churches today, and instead of finding an institution interested in saving the world, what you may find is an institution vastly more interested in saving itself. For example, people go to church to find God. Instead of finding God, however, followers are often saddled with a catalogue of "do's" and "don'ts" as onerous as the US tax code. They are told what to think, how to believe, as well as how they're supposed to live.
In many places, the church is still the most segregated place in America. Where I grew up, some 40 or so years ago, many of my neighbors attended the Baptist church my father served. That is, if they were white Baptists; the black Baptists had a church of their own. Or they attended one of the other three mostly-segregated churches that occupied one of the four corners of Main Street. Today, however, your neighbor is just as likely to be black as white, or Muslim as Christian. Maybe people are leaving the church because they'd prefer to live in the real world -- the desegregated one.
Then, there are those church leaders who seem obsessed with having the biggest church, the largest crowds and the most expensive campuses. While 40 million people died of starvation in the last decade, churches spent $10 billion on campuses.
Perhaps some churchgoers departed because they'd rather their charity actually make a difference in the world.
If you went to church looking for relief from the stress and burdens of living, you might have found more of the same, only dressed as beliefs and dogmas, rules and expectations Then, there's the debating, disagreement, and division that goes on between churches, as well as between people in the same church. I call it the "We're right! You're Wrong!" syndrome: each group insisting that their beliefs are right, which by implication means that everyone else's beliefs are wrong. "We're in; you're out!" "We're the chosen ones; you're not!" Maybe those who came looking for some sanity in life are leaving the church to preserve what little remains.
What about the seemingly endless clergy scandals? It may be several years yet before we know the full impact of this demonic debacle. I suspect that scores of people are just plain fed up with an institution that would "condemn gays and lesbians for coming out of their closets," as someone characterized it, "while hiding clergy pedophiles in its own."
Some 15 or so years ago I, like millions of others, dropped out of active involvement in the church. Soon thereafter, I began wondering where to go to find God. For a few years, I went nowhere. I just wandered around in a kind of spiritual wilderness. Then, one Sunday afternoon, completely unexpectedly as well as outside the church, I had a deeply profound spiritual awakening. I describe it in my book, The Enoch Factor.
Among the many realizations to which I awakened was this: "You don't have to go to church to know God." For reasons too obvious to mention, this isn't the kind of message the church, or any religion, wants spread around. But it's true nonetheless. There is no religion, not even the Christian religion, holding the title deed to God. God's grace is not limited to a select few. The moment any religion believes it is, you can be sure that religion knows nothing of God.
If there is anything Jesus, and the Buddha, made abundantly clear it is that the wind blows where it will. You can hear it, see its effects, and feel its power, but you can never contain it. In other words, the moment I stopped trying to find God, God found me. I love the way Deepak Chopra once framed it: "God is not difficult to find; God is impossible to ignore."
Even the title to this article, "Finding God After Religion," seems to imply that there's something you must "do" to know God. But the real truth is this: there is nothing you need to do to know God. You know God already. The mistake that virtually all religions make, including Christianity, is to confuse beliefs for faith and, as a consequence, condition people to think that there are things that they must do, duties that they must perform, etc., for God to be pleased and her presence to be known.
Finding God after religion? Remember the following: In Eastern thought, there's something called "the law of least effort," or "do less and accomplish more." If you will give up the "doing" and, instead, just enjoy "being," I think you'll make a great discovery. The psalmist said, "Be still and know ... " In my own experience, I have found that when I'm present (and that's my spiritual practice), I'm immediately in Presence, the real and sacred sanctuary of God.
What more would you want? What more would religion ever give you?
Follow Steve McSwain on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DrSteveMcSwain
Philip Goldberg: Toward a Broader Understanding of Religion's Functions
By expanding and deepening the way we frame the subject of religion, we can examine religious institutions and spiritual phenomena in a more productive way. Here's a model I find useful.
CHRISTIANITY:
The belief that some cosmic
Jewish Zombie can make you
liveforever if you symbolically
eat his flesh and telepathically
tell him that you accept him
as your master, so he can remove
an evil force from your soul
that is present in humanity because
a rib-woman was convinced by a
talking snake to eat from a magical tree.
Makes perfect sense.
I thought that excesses of religion demonstrated by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Jim Jones suicide cults, and sexual abuse of children by the supposedly holy men would provide the population with practical evidence that religions impede progress. We do not need imaginary paradise after death to act ethically. Ethics can be based on the fact that cooperativity is more productive for us than contrariness. Working together it is possible for us to accomplish many goals. There are tangible rewards we can enjoy during our lifetimes. No imaginary paradise is required.
Sky pilots, soul shepherds, and various other proselytizing parasites have been leading people away from reason and logic far too long . Despite my willing toleration of choice to select belief or non-belief the playing field is far from fair. Children are indoctrinated into many belief systems before they can make rational decisions. They are led to accept views of life and the universe that handicap their ability to learn about reality. We don't permit children to consume alcohol because intoxication is considered unhealthy for their bodies and minds...why is intoxicating them with ideals of religions any less healthy?
Like literature, you can learn a lot by studying these theologies. Like literature, you should also understand that they say more about the author than the subject.
Anyone telling you what to believe is either selling something or has bought what someone else sold them. I can easily believe in God; I just can't believe in God the way manmade religion presents Him.
Please elaborate on the "many ways" Jesus spoke about enjoying life. Two or three of his sayings will do.
Thank you.
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Here are a few, Trevand. I tried to post the quotes, but HP deleted my entire comment. So here are the scripture citations.
John 10:10
John 14:27
Matthew 6:25-31
Matthew 11:19
John 15:11
You can look them up here: http://bible.oremus.org/
In 1600's Protestants tossed away 1600 years of Christian History and Consistant teaching since Christ life, and took to everyone have their own belief ignoring God's teaching. As Martin Luther said we have created 1,500 different version of who Jesus is such division can only come from Satan.
You said, "The author (Paul) was a man that had a cultural view of women's role in society. Paul's view has nothing to do with the greater story line of scripture. "
Please identify for me where it say anywhere in the Bible where it says that we have permission to take the parts that make us uncomfortable into "historical context'. Please find me where it says that God gives us permission to follow the commandments we like and ignore the rest.
Could you do that for me please, because I can't seem to find it myself? Good luck, btw.
I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absented myself from Christian assemblies. By Ben Franklin
I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of humankind has preserved the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has
produced! John Adams
A professorship of theology should have no place in our institution.
Thomas Jefferson, University of Virginia
The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. Thomas Jefferson
Do the Christian fundamentalists not study history or just choose to ignore it?
We don't need churches or priests; the plan was to make all of us into agents of social change, continuing the work Jesus began (all of which involved helping the poor, needy, disenfranchised outcasts of society). You know, that stuff being called "socialism" in the news. That's the very stuff you are supposed to be doing,if you are a Christian.
Those ministers that continue to don robes and play high priest are making a mockery of Jesus commission. Ministers have one job: to focus attendees on the WORK of Jesus and to get them to do the same. There is nothing difficult about the Christian message; it's just that Christians would rather study it, than do it. For they know once they acknowledge understanding, THEY WILL BE FORCE TO ACT.
I remember a day in my life. Not a regular day but "the"day. I was severely injured and facing the end of my life as I lay dying and fully aware. I think everyone wonders what they will think when faced with the end of their life. Not knowing how much time I had I thought of those few things most precious to me.
My 1st dying wish was to see my family again.
My 2nd dying wish was to see the woman I loved again.
My 3rd dying wish was make it to California if I ever made it through.
It was a scary time but I made it through. Several family members came to visit. My Mary Ann called me at my bedside giving me great comfort and came to visit me when I came home even after she had moved on. And I took everything I owned and crammed it in my car. Whatever didn't fit I threw in the trash and hit the road for my new life and second chance in California.
If anything it's given me strength to move forward now without fear, without guilt and without the weight of false moralities of organized religion.
I am free.
Hermosa Beach Baby!!!
Like you, I dished organized religion long ago. It never spoke to my soul. Though not faced with the physical end of life, I do find myself on a spiritual precipice, ready to dish the status quo, cram everything I own that will fit into my car, give everything else away, and hit the road (to paraphrase). It's a desire that has been percolating in my spirit for a long time.
Unfortunately unlike you, I have not yet emboldened myself enough to take the leap. My comfort zone (which frankly is not all that comfortable these days) has indeed become my prison with me serving as prisoner, guard and warden. Your story gives me inspiration to imagine a breakout. Now for the strength to plan it and the courage to execute it!
(Any tips?)