In my recent endeavors to launch a new kind of spiritual community here in Northern Michigan, I and the people around me have struggled to really pin down who we are and what we believe. Since I have written extensively in my latest book, The Way of Jesus, about my aversion to forms of faith that are belief-driven (ie – based on a list of proscribed dogmas or tenets) I won’t dwell on that here. But I can’t tell you how challenging it has been to get a group of people together and functioning without such a belief list to guide us.
One of my fellow travelers in the Living Vision experiment happens to also be the president of the local Unitarian Universalist congregation. He sent me a very compelling piece by the grand poo-bah of the National UU Association that was the best articulation I’ve ever read on the trouble with belief. Here are a few choice excerpts for your consideration:
“The trouble is that we treat the question “What do you believe?” as an obvious and natural question. After all, religion is about what we believe, isn’t it? No! No. Religion is not about what you or I or Baptists or Catholics or Jews or Muslims or Hindus believe. I would even go a giant step further: Belief is the enemy of religion. Let me repeat that: Belief is the enemy of religion.
Perhaps I should explain. We are so immersed in a culture that views religion as a matter of what people believe that we think this is the way it has always been. It isn’t. All of this emphasis on what someone believes is actually very modern and very Western. No one objects to calling Buddhism a religion. Yet Buddhism has no theology at all in the way we use the word. Buddhists don’t believe anything, at least not anything that is a set of propositions. Buddhism doesn’t even have a god in the usual sense.
Jews have never had anything like a creed, a statement of belief. Ironically, Jesus, about whom there are all sorts of creeds, probably never encountered a creed in his life. The whole idea of a creed would have been foreign. Jews did have a definite sense of God, to be sure. However, the key to the God of the Jews is that he had a covenant with the people and gave the Hebrew people the law. The Hebrew scriptures never show any interest in what people believe. The scriptures show a lot of interest in what people do. They are supposed to love God and obey the commandments. The great prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, Amos, Ezekiel—were concerned with justice, compassion and being faithful to the covenant. They had no interest in doctrine.
The early Christian communities, while they did show more concern with what people believed, actually tolerated a lot of variety.
Islam, the next great religious movement, also has little theology. Its statement of faith is that there is no god but God and that Mohammed is his prophet. This is a way of insisting, as did the Jews, that there is only one God. And this is another way of saying that we all owe allegiance to a common source; we are all one people. The great emphasis in Islam is with what the faithful are supposed to do, not what they are supposed to think.
All the emphasis on religion as belief does not come on the scene until much later. It started with the Catholic church and its creeds, but it really got intense with the Reformation. All of this emphasis on religion being about believing the right things is really a modern development. Even the whole idea of belief has gotten twisted. The word used to be used in a very different way. “Belief” once meant “what I give my heart to” or “what I commit myself to.” Belief was linked to emotion and action. Belief did not mean agreeing with a set of metaphysical or theological propositions....
I want to make a more radical point. The point is that religious belief is actually the enemy of religion. Every major religious tradition seeks to impart a sense of wonder, mystery, awe and humility. Belief systems stop this cold. Belief systems start where our thinking stops.
Once we think we have explained it all, once we think we have all the answers, our minds close and we become arrogant, belligerent and defensive.
Just look at what happens when a belief system takes hold. What follows can be truly horrible. First, we categorize everyone who does not agree with us as either ignorant or evil. If we have the truth and are certain we have it, then our task in life becomes spreading this truth. Our task also becomes defending the truth from all of those who disagree. Believers have enemies everywhere. The world becomes a battleground. This is the world of Muslim fundamentalists blowing up innocent people and of Christian fundamentalists trying to criminalize gays and lesbians. This is the world of John Calvin burning Michael Servetus alive because Servetus did not agree with the doctrine of the Trinity. This is the world of the Spanish Inquisition. Once a religion becomes an all-encompassing belief
system, murder will surely follow.
Believers are dangerous. They always have been.
So, if religion isn’t really about what we believe, then what is it about? Can we be religious without a belief system? I am convinced that religion without belief is true religion. Religion that is focused on belief is a dangerous corruption of true religion.
Religion without belief is not phony religion. It isn’t fake religion or pretend religion or partial religion or religion lite. The problem with asking what someone believes is that it is the wrong question. True religion is about what we love, not about what we think. True religion is about what you and I hold sacred. The practice of true religion is faithfulness to what we love. The key religious questions you and I must answer are these: What do we love so much that we are moved to tears? What gives us unspeakable joy? What gives us peace beyond understanding? What do we love so much that it calls us to action? What do we care about so deeply that we willingly, enthusiastically, devote our lives to it?
When we focus on what we truly love, we ask life’s essential questions. We ask questions like, “How shall I live?” When we ask the question together in community, it becomes, “How shall we live together? What shall we do together?” When we focus on what we truly love, we discover something wonderful: we discover that we love the same things.
We realize that we need one another. We want to be compassionate and gentle with one another. We want to raise children who are kind, content and responsible. We want a place where we can come together to remind ourselves of what is truly worthwhile. That is what worship is—it is literally an affirmation of worth.
And we want to make a difference in the world. We are not content to be a club. We know there are hundreds, thousands, of neighbors who love what we love. And if they love what we love, they have the same religion we do. We open our hearts and our doors to them. Religion beyond belief is the religion millions of people long for. It is religion that transcends culture, race and class. It is religion where we can grow spiritually, a religion where we can forge deep and lasting relationships, a religion where we can join hands to help heal a broken world.
The central issue before us as a religious movement is not to decide what we believe. That will just set us to arguing among ourselves until the theological cows come home. (Trust me, the theological cows have been gone for millennia and they’re not coming home in our lifetime.) No, the central issue before us all is whether we will accept the challenge to become a religion beyond belief. We live at a time when religious tribalism kills people every day. Fundamentalists try to force their beliefs on others. Millions upon millions want no part of that kind of religion...”
- From Church of the Larger Fellowship’s Quest, Oct 2010
Rev. Paul Morales
I love Morales’s phrase “religion beyond belief,” and I intend to use it in attempt to better articulate what we at Living Vision are trying to live into. I am not a Unitarian. I am a follower of Jesus. But I am deeply grateful to Rev. Peter Morales, and I wholeheartedly embrace the expression of faith that he is seeking in and through his tradition. I believe with all my heart that the Jesus of the Gospels was after this very kind of religion, one that was “beyond belief” and centered on “what we love, not what we think.”
Leave me your comments and join the conversation!
Next Living Vision Gathering: This Thursday, January20 6-8pm Soup and Bread Discussion. For directions and more info email me at tobyjones48@gmail.com
