You Are Not Religious

Why would you be?

So? (Photo: Getty)

When asked about your religious belief, the correct response is “agnostic.” It means “I don’t know.” That’s a fact: You don’t know. I don’t know. Nobody knows. The origin of the universe? The true nature of reality? Existence after death? Please. We only discovered atoms a couple of hundred years ago. Quantum physics, a hundred years ago. Then there was string theory, which may or may not get us closer to a fundamental understanding of reality, and after that there will be an endless succession of new intellectual doors that humanity walks through for thousands and thousands more years, until our species inevitably goes extinct. Be thankful for the small glimpses of knowledge available to us now. Gaze up into the sky, at the billions and billions of galaxies just like ours, and reflect on the fact that you will never know much about any of them. Nor will you know the nature of the deeper substrate of creation that caused your mind to blink into consciousness and will one day cause it to blink out. Our knowledge, and all that we will know before we pass away, is the flickering of a match against an endless darkness. This is our fate. It is not a tragedy; it just is. Acceptance of this is honesty.

Likewise, failure to accept this is self-deception. But a very human type. Our minds can form the questions, but cannot access the answers. This is unsatisfying. So we tell stories. We create mythology, and legends, and origin stories that define cultures. This is natural. If you’re going to kick the bucket in 20 or 40 or 80 years, of course you want your curiosity satisfied before you go. Religions of today are just the mythologies that haven’t died out yet. They will persist as long as they seem plausible to enough people, and then, eventually, they will die out, or give way to new permutations of stories. All perfectly normal. Nothing surprising about it. Then again, nothing very honest about it, either.

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Many people, turned off by the coldness of agnosticism—or the haughtiness of atheism, which combines the dissatisfaction of agnosticism with a determination to be rude about it—describe themselves as “spiritual.” This is less of an actual category of belief than a mark of yearning. “I understand that religion is myth but I still want answers,” it says. It represents a lack of conviction, an aversion to full acceptance of our limitations. It is an embrace of the fact that there is more out there than we know, accompanied by a refusal to embrace the fact that we will never know what it is.

Still, the measurable decline of organized religion in the modern world is progress. It is part of the process. When people are equipped with very little knowledge of their own, they fully embrace formal religions, which provide a complete set of answers to their questions, and a system of values, and a social hierarchy. When people acquire some knowledge, they can begin to see the obvious flaws in those strict religious systems. So their affinity devolves into less strict patterns of “spiritual” belief. Maybe your grandmother was an observant Catholic, and your mother went to church just out of cultural habit, and you are a person who just meditates and burns incense. It’s fine. As long as modern scientific knowledge increases, and our daily lives change in response, old and inflexible religious doctrines will inevitably look more and more ridiculous.

This is why the chief demand of religion is faith: You must commit to reject the facts in order to embrace the faith. You must be willing to disbelieve your lying eyes. It’s a test of loyalty, like asking a kid to shoot someone to get into a gang. Scientific knowledge, of course, spreads erratically and unevenly around the world, and there will be many people in many places for many years who are prone to faith as the best available option. But over time, you can be sure, traditional religions will slowly erode, and new ones—shaped around more up-to-date boundaries of knowledge—will rise in their place.

Modern America is a difficult place to remain sheltered from modernity. Religion-as-culture, deeply interwoven into many families and places, is a powerful thing, and will continue to keep millions of people attached to religion for a long time. I suspect, though, that the portion of religious Americans who actually believe that stuff is far smaller than the three-quarters of Americans who identify themselves as religiously affiliated. The intellectual isolation necessary to sustain true belief in holy books and prescriptions handed down from God grows ever harder to sustain. Reasonably smart people with even modest educations and access to modern communication systems cannot, really, be genuinely “religious,” except as a purposeful act of rebellion against modernity. You can choose that, if you want. But do you believe it? All of it? Really and truly? I don’t think so. Not most of you.

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There is a new Pope. As chief administrator of a religion that claims a billion adherents, he is an important man. He is important politically. He is important culturally. He is important as celebrity, as boss, as one who wields influence over many. He is, however, just a man. A man from Chicago. A man selected by his peers, in a political process, to occupy a seat of power. He is not infallible. He is not god’s representative on earth, whatever that means. The fact of his appointment to a high position does not grant him any particular mystical powers. He is a man from Chicago who has succeeded in an internal election. Good for him. Let’s not overdo it.

It is funny to watch certain people who say that they embrace the Catholic faith—let’s just name JD Vance, as an example—become upset and petulant when they disagree with a Pope’s pronouncements. Hey buddy, you’re the one who says that you embrace a religion in which this guy is supposed to have some special ability to make holy judgments. If you don’t agree with his judgments, there is an easy solution: Don’t be Catholic. Why would you be? It is, like all religions, riddled with clearly absurd assertions. It is, obviously, pretty goofy to turn an extremely threadbare outline of knowledge about a two-thousand-year-old Jewish activist named Jesus into a set of rigid ideological claims to absolute truth. I do not for one second believe that—just for example—Yale Law School graduate JD Vance, in his heart, rejects the totality of his elite education in favor of all the stuff that the Bible and the doctrines of the Catholic Church say. If he did, he would not whine about the Pope’s decisions. That’s not part of the deal, brother.

Religions have great significance. They have had great impact on world history, on cultures, on wars and conquests and politics and economics. They should be studied by anyone who cares about the affairs of the world, because they influence those affairs. And they should be understood for what they are: Institutions that have grown up around popular mythologies, that derive their power from their willingness to provide answers to questions that cannot be answered, to satisfy the basic human yearning for certainty in an uncertain world. There is nothing disrespectful about saying these things out loud. It would be more disrespectful to deny them, because it would imply that there is some special class of people who are incapable of absorbing the normal building blocks of human knowledge that are available to the rest of us.

Come on, now. You may enjoy the cultural trappings of religion. You may appreciate its history, its great cathedrals, its art and poignant turns of phrase and specific moral teachings. It is fine—preferable, in fact—to feel all of these things, without declaring that you are, in fact, “religious.” Because I don’t think that you really believe all of the made-up stuff. I have too much faith in you.

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Also

• Related reading: We’ve Given Religion Too Much Respect; Seeing Things For What They Are; Onward, Christian Soldiers—To War!

• This week, I spoke to Lithub’s Fiction/ Non/ Fiction podcast about writing opinion journalism. I thought it was an above average conversation, by podcast standards, and you can listen to it here. I also did an online People’s World forum about the labor movement last night with some cool union people, which you can watch here if you like.

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