Why we need religion

Facade of demolished church in Dover, NH (2017) 

In this new age of extreme individualism, we are abandoning religion in order for each of us to pursue independent paths, locked in the iron grip of consumerism. This isn’t going to work because, as William Butler Yeats warned in his iconic poem The Second Coming, “the center can’t hold.”^⁠1

I’m going to make a surprising – and perhaps rash – argument for a person like me who doesn’t go to church: I believe that our root problem is the demise of religion as a vital institution in America.

While writing this piece, I encountered an unlikely ally in Russell Moore, Editor-in-Chief of Christianity Today. In his book Losing our Religon, he has similar worries about the fate of his faith community as millions of younger Americans leave his church: “Can American Christianity survive?”^⁠2

Undeniably, our vibrant religious myths have withered way, opening up a dangerous void which, I fear, will be replaced by Yeat’s approaching ogre: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”^⁠3

As a former sociology graduate student, I am aware that religion has been an indispensable part of every human society in history. However—and this is the controversial part—I hope to demonstrate why every human in history has lived in a myth, not reality.

We can easily see this truth when accepting the strange myths that primitive tribes practice, but challenged to acknowledge that our current cultural myth is science and rationality. As the old saying goes, if you are a fish, you don’t know you are swimming in water.

If you are willing to accept my premise, at least for the sake of reading this essay, I want to explore alternative myths that might be capable of replacing religion’s former role. I have adapted some of these from Bernardo Kastrup’s book More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth, and Belief^⁠4 and the Academy of Ideas^⁠5.

Consumerism: Consumerism is an all-encompassing myth that overvalues the accumulation of wealth and material goods. People who are successful discover they are no happier and often more depressed than before; meanwhile, we are destroying our environment.

Nationalism: According to Kastrup, “Those who look at the world according to the statist myth view all social problems as requiring political solutions…. But the more people in a society that adhere to this myth, the closer society moves to totalitarianism.”^⁠6 A tragic consequence that is taking root in our country as we speak!.

Science and rationality. Kastrup suggests that one of the primary reasons that religious myths are being abandoned is because we have become “too literal, too rational, and too scientific.” Viewed through the prism of science, many of religion’s literal claims may look absurd, yet symbolize a greater transcendent truth.

Transcendental myth: We know when we are living a transcendental myth because it will resonate at the core of our being, changing a banal existence into one of genuine meaning. According to Kastrup, such a myth can anchor our experiences in a larger, more profound reality, “offering purpose and direction amid life’s inevitable challenges and suffering.

Transcendental myths can serve as a unifying bond in a culturally disparate country..

Carl Jung wrote, “The religious myth is one of man’s greatest and most significant achievements, giving him the security and inner strength not to be crushed by the monstrousness of the universe.”

According to Kastrup, language is too limited to convey profound truths about human life and the universe. Religion goes beyond words to connect with what Jung called the unconscious mind, the arbiter of our primal needs.

In conclusion, if one examines a myth from the standpoint of cold rationality, Donald Trump’s transactional business model makes sense—but only to machines, robots, and ultra-rich people like Elon Musk. Meanwhile, it is an abomination to all of us regular folks whose highest duty is to honor our sacred bonds to family, friends, and community—not some sleazy transactional deal.

xxx

Photo Credit of church:  CC Jean Stimmell

Footnotes:

¹ https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/william-butler-yeats/the-second-coming

² https:

//www.amazon.com/Losing-Our-Religion-Evangelical-America/dp/0593541782

³ Ibid.

⁴ Kastrup, Bernardo. More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief \

⁵ 

⁶ Ibid

xxx

Holding on to hope

 “Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender,

A power you don’t have to throw away–

Rebecca Solnit^⁠1

Holding on to hope

“Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender,

A power you don’t have to throw away–

Rebecca Solnit^⁠1

How do I remain hopeful despite the travails of old age, mounting infirmity, and the ransacking of my country by the Attila the Hun of the 21^st century, along with his Machiavellian savant sidekick?

I think being old is a plus, a topic I explored in my recent column, “Meeting at the Edge.” M. Gessen suggests much the same thing in a recent  NYT piece exploring how Ukrainian poets have kept the faith during their country’s agonizing three-year war with Russia:^⁠2

One of the oldest of these poets, Maria Galina, 66, has posted daily updates since the first day of the Russian invasion. She begins her dispatches with the hopeful salutation: “New day, new morning.” 

Galina attempts to convince Gessen that she can envision a hopeful future because she used to write science fiction. However, Gessen contends that she can envision a hopeful future because she is a poet practicing “the art of intimations and intuitions,” which enables some writers to foresee what has not yet happened.

Gallina remains ever-hopeful, but don’t mistake her stance for optimism. As Rebecca Solnit points out – another supremely gifted wordsmith  in her sixties – hope has nothing to do with optimism:

“Optimism says that everything will be fine no matter what, just as pessimism says that it will be dismal no matter what. Hope is a sense of the grand mystery of it all, the knowledge that we don’t know how it will turn out, that anything is possible.”^⁠3  And she is right.

Knowing that anything is possible fuels my hope. I agree with Buddhists who are aware that the future is fundamentally uncertain because life is constantly changing. It is inescapably true: None of us knows what will happen in the next second, let alone in the next year. 

Nevertheless, we are in deep denial about how uncertain our lives are.

We have spent our whole human evolution doing the opposite: chasing absolute certainty that we are safe from danger. The impulse is understandable. Life used to be brutal, going to sleep at night terrified that a sabertooth tiger would eat us before morning. Ukrainians have similar fears that a Russian missile attack will blow them up in their sleep. 

In those circumstances, psychologically speaking, it makes sense to yearn for a safe harbor free from mortal danger.

But for most of us in the U.S., we face no such peril. Yet that doesn’t stop politicians from creating such primal fear by scaring us with false existential threats: attempting to get us to vote for them to fix horrific situations that they concoct out of whole cloth. For instance, it’s pure propaganda that an army of illegal aliens is invading our country, intent on raping and killing us. It’s false, no matter how many times Trump repeats it.

In today’s world, our quest for certainty is so over the top it’s become pathological, limiting our horizons, creating irrational anxiety, and – worst of all – destroying our ability to have hope for the future. Here’s a  famous quote that says it all, attributed to Erich Fromm, a wise psychologist and philosopher from the  middle of the last century, whose work I adore:

“The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.”

Among the few who understand uncertainty today are artists like the poet from Ukraine, who practice the arts of intimation and intuition. These creative individuals understand that uncertainty should be embraced, not feared. “They remind us that grappling with the unknown, navigating uncertainty, and embracing change can unlock our full potential and help us find deeper meaning in our lives.^⁠4”

We should all aspire to follow in the footsteps of the seasoned Ukrainian poet Maria Galina,  who can never lose hope because every rotation of the earth is a  “New day, new morning.”

xxx 

¹ https://www.amazon.com/Hope-Dark-Untold-Histories-Possibilities/dp/1608465764/?tag=braipick-20

² https:/www.nytimes.com/2025/02/22/opinion/ukraine-war-poetry-poets.html

³ https://www.guernicamag.com/rebecca-solnit-the-arc-of-justice-and-the-long-run/

⁴ https://elevatesociety.com/the-quest-for-certainty-blocks/

Photo  Credit CC Jean Stimmell

Why we need religion

 

The facade is all that is  left as church in Dover is demolished
 CC Jean Stimmell: 2017

In this new age of extreme individualism, we are abandoning religion in order for each of us to pursue independent paths, locked in the iron grip of consumerism. This isn’t going to work because, as William Butler Yeats warned in his iconic poem The Second Coming, “the center can’t hold.”^⁠1

 I’m going to make a surprising – and perhaps rash – argument for a person like me who doesn’t go to church: I believe that our root problem is the demise of religion as a vital institution in America.

While writing this piece, I encountered an unlikely ally in Russell Moore,  Editor-in-Chief of Christianity Today. In his book Losing our Religon, he has similar worries about the fate of his faith community as millions of younger Americans leave his church: “Can American Christianity survive?”^⁠2

Undeniably, our vibrant religious myths have withered away, opening up a dangerous void which, I fear, will be replaced by Yeat’s approaching ogre: “And what  rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”^⁠3

As a former sociology graduate student, I am aware that religion has been an indispensable part of every human society in history. However—and this is the controversial part—I hope to demonstrate why every human in history has lived in a myth, not reality. 

We can easily see this truth when accepting the strange myths that primitive tribes practice, but unable  to acknowledge that our current cultural myth is science and rationality. As the old saying goes, if you are a fish, you don’t know you are swimming in water.

If you are willing to accept my premise, at least for the sake of reading this essay, I want to explore alternative myths that might be capable of replacing religion’s former role. I have adapted some of these from Bernardo Kastrup’s book More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth, and Belief^⁠4 and the Academy of Ideas^⁠5.

Consumerism: Consumerism is an all-encompassing myth that overvalues the accumulation of wealth and material goods. People who are successful discover they are no happier and often more depressed than before; meanwhile, we are destroying our environment.

Nationalism: According to Kastrup, “Those who look at the world according to the statist myth view all social problems as requiring political solutions…. But the more people in a society that adhere to this myth, the closer society moves to totalitarianism.”^⁠6 A tragic consequence that is taking root in our country as we speak!.

Science and rationality. Kastrup suggests that one of the primary reasons that religious myths are being abandoned is because we have become “too literal, too rational, and too scientific.” Viewed through the prism of science, many of religion’s literal claims may look absurd, yet symbolize a greater transcendent truth.

Transcendental myth: We know when we are living a transcendental myth because it will resonate at the core of our being, changing a banal existence into one of genuine meaning. According to Kastrup, such a myth can anchor our experiences in a larger, more profound reality, “offering purpose and direction amid life’s inevitable challenges and suffering.

Transcendental myths can serve as a unifying bond in a culturally disparate country..

Carl Jung wrote, “The religious myth is one of man’s greatest and most significant achievements, giving him the security and inner strength not to be crushed by the monstrousness of the universe.”

According to Kastrup, language is too limited to convey profound truths about human life and the universe.  Religion goes beyond words to connect with what Jung called the unconscious mind, the arbiter of our primal needs.

In conclusion, if one examines a myth from the standpoint of cold rationality, Donald Trump’s transactional business model makes sense—but only to machines, robots, and ultra-rich people like Elon Musk. Meanwhile, it is an abomination to all of us regular folks whose highest duty is to honor our sacred bonds to family, friends, and community—not some sleazy transactional deal.

xxx

¹ https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/william-butler-yeats/the-second-coming

² https:

//www.amazon.com/Losing-Our-Religion-Evangelical-America/dp/0593541782

³ Ibid.

⁴ Kastrup, Bernardo. More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief (Function). Kindle Edition.

⁵ https://theacademyofideas.substack.com/p/why-religious-myths-alleviate-existential?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=341427&post_id=156621912&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=ktp62&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

⁶ Ibid