When I opened the front door, I was face to face with a young Jehovah’s Witness who was holding the hand of a small beaming child. A few weeks before, it was two handsome young Mormons. Now, doorbell-ringing religionists don’t get into my digs and don’t get any of my time reading their familiar hand-outs, so my answer to their question is no. But since I affirm their freedom to speak and admire their courage to witness to what they most deeply believe, I must say yes. So how? They came to bless me: how shall I bless them?
Every religion centers in a CULT (a mode of worship) and is against CULTS (innovative religious movements). These two facts—signaled by the singular and the plural of the same noun—are my opening clarification on the first of this week’s “On Faith” questions:
“Various religious groups in America, from Jehovah’s Witnesses to Mormons, have been considered cults at some point. What is the difference between a religion and a cult? What constitutes a real religion?”
1. Unfairly, the second question suggests a prejudicial answer to the first question: a cult is an UN-real, phony, pseudo-religion. This pejorative meaning of “cult” is itself pseudo-religious in excluding from “religion” the whole swatch of innovative religious movements in every human generation: “if it’s new, it’s bad.” By this illogic, all religion is bad, since every religion was once new.
2. When we free the first question from the second, we get several answers: (a.) A religion is an old cult, and a cult is a new religion or an innovative deviation from an old religion. (b.) An old religion has the evolved devotional / esthetic / intellectual / ethical / societal characteristics of a cult-ure, a cult being a not so fully developed religion and culture (religion being the heart of culture). (c.) The word “cult” can be extended metaphorically from religion to religion-like movements and even fads (examples: “the cult of personality” in the history of Marxist regimes; America’s current dismal “celebrity culture”; and “centers” of psycho-therapeutic processes, human-potential education, environmental rituals).
3. Freeing the second question from the judgmental word “real,” we face the plain-and-simple “What is a religion?” So huge a reality, so many useful definitions. Here’s mine for this occasion: A religion is human life centered in and celebrating what the particular religious community considers Most Real—the Most Real, whether or not conceived of as personal. (For me as a Christian, the Most Real is personal: One God—the Father, Jesus Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit.) While we experience degrees of reality throughout our experiences of the ways of knowing (religious, philosophical, interpersonal, esthetic, experimental-rational), we sense that the Most Real is different in kind, beyond differences in degree. Rene Descartes, a father of modern science and of the modern mind, used the medieval substance/accident distinction to state the difference starkly. “Only God is real, for only God has substance.”
4. That religion is most real which best honors the Most Real through the most human use of the full range of the ways of knowing and of the means of communicating what is believed to be known. That society is most human which best provides freedom of speech for competition and cooperation among ways of seeing-and-living-in the world (which is another definition of religion).
5. Like everything human, religion can be authentic or fraudulent. Like everything important, religion can be beneficial or dangerous. A current aggressive preachment is that religion is essentially fraudulent and dangerous, and eliminating it would improve the human condition. The irrationality of this antireligion appears first in self-cancellation: “The new atheism” is itself a religious impulse, a reaching out toward what is utopianly believed to be the Better Way toward a Better World. Into its altar is carved “REASON,” and its sermon explains that reason has the right and duty to narrow “truth” down to fact and narrow “fact” down to evidence and narrow “evidence” down to the experimentally verifiable/falsifiable. Reason is the only deity, and Science is the only way of worship. One more impoverishing fundamentalism for humanity to beware of.
6. Freedom of speech is a useless right unless we the people have the courage to speak up for what we most deeply believe. For faith is not belief in spite of evidence. Faith has the reasonable support of cumulative evidence that to our species, the reach of spirit is as real as the flow of flesh. (As G.K.Chesterton put it, “Humanity is incurably religious.”) No, faith is not belief in spite of evidence. It is the courage to live and speak what one believes--in spite of consequences.
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