Lillian Daniel - When Spiritual but Not Religious Is Not Enough: Seeing God in Surprising Places, Even the Church

A MAN RECENTLY TOLD ME something about his faith life, as people are wont to do with ministers. He said, Im spiritual but not religious, and I want to give you my testimony, if you will, about why I do not attend church.

Now, can I just vent for a minute? When I meet a teacher, I dont feel the need to tell him that I always hated math. When I meet a chef, I dont need to tell her that I cant cook. When I meet a clown, I dont need tell him that I think clowns are all scary.

No, I keep that stuff to myself. But everybody loves to tell a minister whats wrong with the church, and its usually some church that bears no relation to the one I am proud to serve. So I braced myself.

Like so many Americans, he had made many stops in the new American religious marketplace, where we no longer have to stay in the tradition we were born in. Today, Americans shop for churches. Ive moved from one church to another, and some of you probably have too.

So he was raised in the Catholic faith. He came to feel injured by that tradition, let down by it. His questions werent answered or welcomed. The worship, the rituals, the preaching it all felt pretty irrelevant.

So later, after college, he was drawn as a young adult into a conservative Baptist church. He had joined that church because of the great people, and even accepted Christ as his personal savior during a service. But later, after joining, he realized the church held all sorts of strict beliefs he could not contend with, the worst of which was a prohibition on dancing, not to mention a prohibition against sex before marriage, which as you know, often leads to dancing. What kind of God would not want me to use my body to move? He wondered, about that, and about the dancing. He drifted from that church.

Later, after marrying, he joined the church of his wifes upbringing, an open-minded liberal Protestant church in my own denomination, a church he described as a big warm hug. There, dancing and drinking were not frowned upon, and neither were his theological questions. In that intellectual environment, he was encouraged to use his mind to study the biblical narrative, to consider the history of the day and think critically about scripture. His questions, even his doubts, did not shock anybody, and in fact he was told all those questions actually made him a very good mainline Protestant.

But the marriage ended, and now that church really felt like his wifes, so he found himself spending his Sunday mornings sleeping in, reading The New York Times, or putting on his running shoes and taking off through the woods. This was his religion today, he explained. I worship nature. I see myself in the trees and in the butterflies. I am one with the great outdoors. I find God there. And I realized that I am deeply spiritual but no longer religious.

He dumped the news in my lap as if it were a controversial hot potato, something that would shock a mild-mannered minister never before exposed to ideas so brave and different and daring. But of course, to me, none of this was different in the least.

This kind and well-meaning Sunday jogger fits right into mainstream American culture. He is perhaps by now in the majorityall those people who have stepped away from the church in favor of what? Running, newspaper reading, Sunday yoga, or whatever they put together to construct a more convenient religion of their own making.

I was not shocked or upset by the mans story. Naturally, I have heard it a million times before, so often that I almost thought I could improvise the plotline along with him. Let me guess, you read The New York Times every Sunday, cover to cover, and you get more out of it than the sermon. Let me guess, you exercise and where do you find God? Nature. And the trees, its always the trees during a long hike, a long run, a walk on the beach. And dont forget the sunset. These people always want to tell you that God is in the sunset.

Like people who attend church wouldnt know that. Like we are these monkish people who never heard all those Old Testament psalms that praise God in the beauty of natural creation, like we never leave the church building. God in nature? Really? Its all over the Bible that we hear every Sunday, but these folks always seem to think they invented it.

But push a little harder, on this self-developed religion, and you dont get much, at least much of depth. So you find God in the sunset? Great, so do I. But how about in the face of cancer? Cancer is nature too. Do you worship that as well?

You see God in the face of your children, when they are saying loving things, or looking just like their grandmother, or saying something cute and winning about God.

Have you ever noticed that these spiritual but not religious adults, so averse to hearing about God in church, where adults have actually spent some time thinking about these things, never tire of hearing about it from their own children? These are the people who keep the cute things kids say about God chain e-mails in business.

Let me tell you what my kid said the other day: Mommy, I think God is like the rainbow.

Can you believe the wisdom of that? says the proud spiritual but not religious parent.

Have you ever noticed that these peoples children are always theological geniuses? They amaze their parents with their wisdom. What are the odds? I presume it is because, like most children, they are parroting back their parents values. So the children also see God in nature but, because they are children and have bigger eyes, large heads, and high voices, they generally do so in much cuter ways. I think there will be doggies and birdies and candy in heaven. Awww

But lets take that a little further, junior. Will there be sharks and snakes in heaven too? Ewww. How about blood-sucking vampire bats? Now thatll keep you up at night, junior theologian.

These kids, teaching their parents with homespun aphorisms, are actually being poorly served. If they went to Sunday school they could ask about bats and scorpions in heaven. They could ask about cancer when a grandparent gets sick. They would have a place, a spiritual community, in which to go deeper.

But their parents, so afraid that the church is a place where they force you to accept their answers, have set up a vacuum in which the answers get invented without any formation or guidance. So when there are rainbows and happy kids it all works, but its not so successful in the face of temper tantrums, selfishness, and dare I say it, sin. Because most self-developed Sunday morning ritual has little room for sin.

Or for disaster, for that matter. Suffering is seldom accounted for in these self-made spiritualities, other than as something we might overcome, by hard work, exercise, and reading the op-ed page. But worldwide disaster, how do you wrestle with that?

Well, heres how the man I told you about did it. Realizing that as a pastor I was desperately in need of reeducation, he went on to explain that his own little junior theologian, now a teenager, had bowled him over with another great insight, a brilliant thought exchange between father and son that made the dad realize his choice not to attend church was the right one, for his son had truly embraced the values he had always hoped he would.