RELIGION AS A BUSINESS
IS NOT THE SAME AS THE
BUSINESS OF RELIGION
THE
CHURCH AMERICA has all but gone out of the religion
business. In many instances it has gone into the
business of religion, i.e., instead of attending to religion,
it utilizes religion as a commodity to
be marketed and uses the profits
it gains to maintain the Church as a business.
Instead of
"rendering unto God those things which are God’s and unto
Caesar those things which are Caesar’s" (Luke 20:25, The Holy
Bible), the modern-day church is said to
utilize both that which is God’s
and Caesar’s for self-preservation. It can safely be argued that
the "legal tender" of many
local congregations is the language of psychology
rather than the language of theology.
The seriousness of a
linguistic exchange is that with a new language comes
a new culture and the problems attendant thereto.
Paul Tillich, the
theologian, points out that "Language is a very good
example of the difference between signs and symbols" (1957,
p. 55). Language is made up of words
that take on different meanings in
each context, to each person who hears them, and to each one
who reads them and the meanings are very different from one ethnic
language to another. Although we translate one language into
another, we never completely capture the meaning without understanding
the culture from whence the language is drawn. So it is
with psychology and theology. With lesser emphasis upon theological
language and the prominence of
psychological terms came a crisis
that was not, and still is not, recognized in many churches and
in Western culture. The language of
psychology, anthropology, sociology, and
political correctness has been so subtly and deceptively introduced
into the religious syntax that
most parishioners and many clergy use the terms interchangeably.
However, by so doing, the power of theology is exchanged for the
temporal, "science-based" emotional loading of the social sciences.
That crisis in Western
culture and its churches today is a spiritual one. Morrie was
quoted in Tuesdays With Morrie as having given us these words of
wisdom: "The culture we have does not make people feel good about
themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture
doesn’t work, don’t buy it" (Albom, 1997).
Although Morrie did not
go on to discuss what does work, the rest of his deathbed
conversations made it clear that there are only spiritual answers to the tough
questions of life and death. For many reasons, our culture is not
working. Technology, financial concerns, world power, managed
healthcare, and the problems of ecology and the environment are in
and of themselves just pockmarks on the face of the real problem
— spiritual "dis-ease." Pastoral counselor David Steere, in
discussing Philip Reiff, rightly stated: "… it became no longer
possible to organize our culture around a commonly accepted dynamic of
moral demands and prerogatives of truth exercised by
authoritarian institutions psychotherapy fell heir to the task" (1997,
p. 25). He further stated, still reflecting on Reiff who wrote The
Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966): "Whereas ‘religious
man’ had been born to
be saved, ‘psychological man’ was born to be pleased." He
asserts that "when ‘I believe,’ the cry of the religious
ascetic, lost precedence
to ‘I feel,’" the therapeutic won, and that "when the
therapeutic wins out, surely the psychotherapeutic will become the secular
spiritual guide of the future." There is little doubt that over 35 years
after Reiff wrote those prophetic words that he was correct and
further that the "therapeutic" has won. The latter years of the 20th
century were marked with concern over "lost values,"
"moral issues," and spiritual concerns. Those same issues
are no smaller in the
21st century.
Although religion and
spirituality are not synonymous, it is important to recognize
that the major public agents for spirituality have traditionally been
religious organizations, most notably, the church. Religion has
attempted to address the immediate nature of life, i.e., how to live
today, according to the interpretation of values within the corporate
church. Although each brand of religion, whether a denomination
within Christianity or a separate world religion, would claim
success, there is little if any evidence that the masses of humanity are
any less ill-at-ease with their own brand or organized spirituality
than anyone else. The practice of religion and a sense of personal
empowerment emanate from deep within the person and are of
necessity inextricably intertwined. Empowerment without principle and
righteousness is not only tragic, but also aimless, i.e., empowerment
bestowed by political, ethnic, gender, economic, or any other societal
factor is pseudo-strength and does not stand the test of time.
Such empowerment may make one feel stronger and even have a
kind of "public strength," but we have all seen this kind of power
diminish overnight in the wake of political and social pressures and
changes.
