Losing Our Religion, Rediscovering the Core of Our Being
DT continues to do all he can to stir up the chaos, the shock, the abuses so we can’t keep up. My e-mails are flooded with petitions, unbelievable news stories, information on protests that happened and ones to join, and requests for money to fight back against the assaults. Never before did I so anticipate and cheer on suits against the government. I used to automatically delete 95% of emails; now, 95% seem too critical to ignore.
And notably, an article in the New York Times on Easter Sunday about how Americans desire and are turning to a belief in a god, soul, afterlife, a spiritual dimension to their lives. 92% of Americans claim they have some kind of spiritual belief. The article, Believing, by Lauren Jackson, appears in a section of the Times dramatically titled America Wants a God. It’s part of her now yearlong project studying a significant shift in American life, after decades of people turning away from religion. A good number of us, 40 million Americans, had left their churches, synagogues, etc. and looked to jobs, gym classes, mysticism, meditation, mostly secular replacements.
But since the pandemic, the environmental emergency, and DT, more and more of us have felt an “existential malaise.” Our world, our lives are threatened on so many fronts, and we want somewhere to turn for support, for reason, for care. And studies, including one by the Pew Research Center, show that people who practice a religion, or have some sort of regular spiritual practice, tend to be happier, and one from Harvard on how religion contributes to being healthier. (Yeah, Harvard.)
This revival of spiritual longing, or maybe desperation, rings very true to me. We see this in the great interest in mindfulness over the last 40 years. And on the other hand, we see it in the maybe one third of Americans who have declared DT their new God or savior. I don’t know how believing in the Donald’s holiness makes people happier. I mean, he sells bibles for extra cash and seems to sell access to power to evangelicals for votes.
If godly means moral, caring about the well-being of others, living by the Golden Rule or Ten Commandments, and knowledgeable of the content of whatever Holy teachings one says one believes in, I think DT is probably one of the last people on earth to be called godly. But he nevertheless claims the title so absolutely others seem to accept his insistence as proof. When an assassin’s bullet just grazed him, he claimed God intervened in his behalf. Maybe spreading hate has a happy edge to it, or makes people feel united in a community of shared bitterness. Or maybe people can mistake autocratic political power for power over eternity.
Since the early Middle Ages, religion was often pitted against reason. With a 20th century decrease in church membership there was an increase in trust in science, research, rationality. And, at the same time, an increase in materialism, in a commodification of every aspect of life. Our own attention, our very mind, became the biggest commodity to sell. Although maybe this effort of commodifying the human mind, of controlling the mind of others, has always been the biggest power that certain humans hungered for?
Separating science and spirit, matter and mind, rationality and emotion, thinking of life and truth as composed of two eternally separate realms, has been a way of thinking that can have deadly consequences. It pits us humans against ourselves, against others, against our physical world. This split at the core of our being is our greatest hurt, or maybe sin. And it’s all imagined. It’s all a result of cultural institutions and ideas, thoughts turned against our ability to think. This is one reason DT and his puppet GOP constantly assault science and scientists, higher education or education in general, critical thinking, reading books, and information on health, climate change, and history. In an important way, the time he wants to take us back to is the “Dark” or Early Middle Ages.
If mind was separable from matter and reason opposed to emotion, we could believe the feeling of love, beauty, empathy was of little importance compared to money and power. But to think critically, we must value feeling; we must give it some priority. To understand a time in history, for example, or a legal decision requires empathically placing ourselves into that time or particular situation. In other words, we use feeling. Emotion.
For me, as for many of us I think, it’s not religion we want. We want to decrease or evaporate the sense of a split at the core of our being. We want to find practices that reveal what always was there, the silence, the sense of presence. And at the same time, that reveal the actions we can take to protect our rights and the world that envelops us. So we can feel an upsurge of care, of strength in ourselves and in our relationships with and dependence on other beings⎼ what Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh called inter-being. We want to feel that our lives matter. It’s this interconnection that is the core of our being.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
