Religious Truth in a Secular World

What is a religion? That question seems simple and straightforward, because we all, even those with no particular faith, have experience with religion and religious people. In the English-speaking world, our minds may flash directly to antique churches with their towering spires, mosques with their towers for the muezzins, or 19th-Century photos of Native Americans performing the Ghost Dance. Images of ritual and tradition appear readily in our minds.

But what do these religions have in common? That becomes fuzzier. Accustomed to Christianity as our authentic religious benchmark, we might say religions are systems established to worship God. But God, a unifying transcendent force which created reality and will someday judge us, is a distinctly Abrahamic belief; it doesn’t exist in other religions, like Buddhism or Confucianism. Even within Abrahamic tradition, Jews especially debate how literally to take “God.”

This has become pointed in recent weeks as we’ve witnessed religious people among the most aggressive in denying the risks associated with COVID-19. While most mainline Christian churches remain closed, those which have denied closing orders have been particularly vocal, demanding attention and praise for their supposedly bold stands on “religious freedom.” It’s too early to say how influential these churches are, but they’re certainly loud.

As religious historian Stephen Prothero writes, all religions aren’t necessarily identical. Not all have God or the gods, not all have programmed religious services, and many don’t even have written religious texts. Some Kumbaya-singing philosophers will assert all religions are different paths to salvation, but “salvation” is a particularly Christian precept which doesn’t appear in other traditions. It’s really tough to determine what makes a “real” religion.

I don’t proclaim any particular expertise, just an abundance of intellectual curiosity and a bevy of reading behind me. But I’ve noticed two principles which it appears religions share. First, all religions I’ve studied share a belief in capital-T Truth. That is, they believe in a constant and transcendent reality, which may be beyond this world or within it, and which we can partly apprehend with our senses. All religions agree reality exists.

Second, having agreed on the frequently controversial precondition that reality is real, they agree that someone, in the past, has glimpsed enough of that transcendent capital-T Truth to teach others about it. Whether that person is a prophet, like Jeremiah or Mohammed; an especially enlightened mortal, like the Buddha; or a physical manifestation of the divine, like Jesus or Krishna, some person apprehends reality enough to guide everyone else.

Importantly, that person usually needs to be conveniently dead (or, like Jesus and Elijah, ascended). While the living may introduce new “truths,” those truths usually die with the founders: think Charles Manson or Jim Jones. Only when those truths pass onto the second generation, who become evangelists and carry the tradition outward, does the truth become a religion. Sadly, this tends to fix the truth in the past.

Having given this two-part definition, I acknowledge I’ve left room for certain philosophies we wouldn’t necessarily consider religions. Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Adam Smith all introduced philosophical systems which people quote generously to justify choices made today. Like Jeremiah or Lao Tzu, these eminences are conveniently dead, and therefore immune from questioning. Does that make psychoanalysis, evolution, and economics religions?

Arguably, yes. I’ve recently read philosophers, like Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou, who quote Freud exactly like a Christian quoting Jesus, as a source of Truth which is fixed and transcendent. Ardent capitalists and Marxists cite their respective prophets with equal confidence. While science is arguably less fixed on a Truth revealed in the past, the ubiquity of posters with Darwin and Einstein quotes in classrooms implies a low-key dogmatic impulse.

Modernist philosophies like Marxism and Freudianism aren’t superficially religious, because they don’t use language frequently associated with religions, like “soul” and “heaven.” But they certainly behave like religions, because they assert insights about Truth, as revealed by a wise but conveniently dead prophet. I suggest that, when a philosophy jumps tracks from its founder and becomes a source of received truth, rather than a starting line for inquiry, that’s religion.

Further, perhaps religion, even godless religions like Marxism and Freudianism, are necessary, because humans need some baseline received truth. We cannot, like children, ask “But why?” forever, because that’s thinking backward. We need a foundation, an intellectual floor, to build forward from. That’s why, as spiritual religions like Christianity seem increasingly removed from modern life, materialist religions step forward to fill that important role.