The Church We Need Now

Yesterday's Lake Chalice looked at some aspects of Europe. Jeremy Rifkin's description of Europe -- a continent imbued with ecospiritual wisdom where almost everyone is a part of Civil Society Organization that functions like the best possible church -- is provocative. It's a picture worth looking at, even as we must also recognize its distortions. Europe does have strands of the sort of orientation that Rifkin describes, and those strands are a bit thicker than in the US, yet much of day-to-day life is essentially similar. As the US frets about immigration issues, so does Europe -- and European xenophobia about Muslim immigrants is not so different, qualitatively or quantitatively, from US xenophobia about Hispanics. It's not clear that Europe is terrific at celebrating cultural diversity while mitigating assimilationist pressures, nor that the US is much worse at either. Moreover, what Rifkin sees as homey and congenial emphasis on community relationships would feel to many Americans -- as it does to some Europeans -- like a stifling pressure to conform. If honoring and celebrating cultural diversity is a desideratum, what is the optimal level of cultural mobility (the ability of an individual to choose a cultural, or any, identity other than the one they were born into) for a society?

The European example does not, alas, provide us with a final answer on the best way for our postmodern world to address human needs for faith community and spiritual fitness. Given Europe's very low attendance at traditional Catholic and Protestant churches, any of several different hypotheses might be argued:

• Europeans are not meeting their faith community and spiritual fitness needs -- and that's good. Europe is doing much better than the US on measures of social health, which shows that faith community and spiritual fitness aren't really all that important.
• Europeans are not meeting their faith community or spiritual fitness needs -- and that's bad. This failure is connected with various social problems and anomie in Europe. (Or: Europeans' civic lives partly meet their religious needs, but a more robust attention to communities and practices cultivating the spiritual values would do them good.)
• Europeans are meeting their faith community and spiritual fitness needs through a spiritually imbued civic life -- and that's good. That's why Europe is doing so well on measures of social health.
• Europeans meet faith needs through civic life -- and that's bad. This kind of community formation is harmful to what Europeans most need -- more respect for individual autonomy and less tribal loyalty.

(And what are "faith community and spiritual fitness needs"? See the earlier posts in this "Ecclesiology" series, as well as the "Spiritual Practice" series that begins here.)

Religion came to early humans as both a blessing and a curse. Faith community provided a feeling of connection, of at-home-ness, of being with our people, and in a world that made sense, just where we belonged. This blessing made early communities cohesive, and that cohesiveness proved essential to survival. At the same time, the US-ness of tribal identification also entailed a THEM-ness of antipathy toward those outside one's community. We need the blessing today as much as ever: overcoming alienation with community belonging and overcoming stress and greed with greater spiritual awakening. At the same time, we need forms of religion that minimize the concomitants of tribalism: intolerance and distrust of outsiders. The situation in Europe offers us some clues, but no ultimate blueprint.

Religion Must Now Transcend Its Origins

"Ecclesiology" is the branch of theology that deals with the origin of the church, the church's proper role in human life, what it is needed for, and what form it should take (governance, leadership, organizational structure) to best meet its purpose. This Lake Chalice series on ecclesiology has been looking at the light that anthropology and evolutionary psychology shed on the purpose and challenge for "the church" -- broadened to include any form of faith community -- in the 21st century. From the standpoint of biotheology -- that is, an approach to religious questions grounded in and integrated with our understanding of ourselves as revealed in the biological sciences -- what sort of ecclesiology is called for? A relatively new clarity is available to us now about the need and value of faith community, but we are just beginning to discern some clues about what forms of faith community best amplify religion's blessing and best mitigate its curse.

Seeing the origin of religion, it’s easy to see how religion can become evil – how the yearning for a shared story becomes a commitment to absolutes. But the future holds to us the possibility of expanding the circle. We can learn to take our sense of US-ness that evolution wired into us, and keep expanding it until it takes in . . . well, everything. And there is no THEM left.

Just as nature wired into us a need for faith community, so it wired into us a propensity for going further with that capacity. Our inherited structures that made us able to bind together for war are available to be appropriated to connect us to live in peace and justice, without domination, or mastery, or hegemony. What evolution created for one purpose can now be put to a new purpose. This is nature’s method of transcendence, and the history of life on this planet is full of examples.

Mammalian forelimbs turned into bat wings – or, going another direction, into dolphin fins. Insect antennae turned into mandibles. A jaw bone in dinosaurs, fish, and reptiles was appropriated and made into an auditory bone in mammals. An ancestor of wasps and bees had an ovipositor (egg-laying tube) that was appropriated and made into a stinger. Before there were land animals, certain fish developed a swim bladder, which they could fill with gas, usually air. This allowed the fish to stay at a given depth without expending energy on swimming. The swim bladder probably was, in some species, also helpful for stability, and maybe also as a resonating chamber to produce or receive sound. The swim bladder evolved into the lung of the earliest lungfish – and from there into the lungs of land animals. Something that evolved for one purpose or set of purposes (buoyancy, stability, sonic resonance) was appropriated for a very different purpose (breathing air). A device for staying at a given depth in water turned into the essential step for moving onto land!

Structures that served one purpose get put to very different purposes. Happens all the time. The fact that we evolved with a given structure or tendency does not obligate us to continue the purpose for which that structure or tendency evolved. Genetic evolution is under no such constraint; if it were, then swim bladders would never have turned into lungs, and we’d all still be fishes.

Building upon its inheritance, the lungfish transcended that inheritance and became a new thing on this earth. Bats and dolphins, mandibular and stinging insects, mammalian auditory systems -- and, one way or another, ultimately every complex feature of every species -- built upon its inheritance to transcend that inheritance and become a new thing on this earth.

Let us do likewise. Transcend our inheritance: put the wiring that enabled cohesive war-fighting to a new use, building peace. The wiring that finds such comfort and delight in the company of friends, the wiring that gets active during spiritual experience, orients us to live in peace within our group. That same wiring is available for being universalized beyond our group. With a little training of the neural structures of social orientation that are already there, we can keep expanding our perceived circle of "us" until there is no “them.” Building upon our inheritance, we can transcend that inheritance and become a new thing on this earth.

Our spiritual perception can plumb more deeply, can see more than just what selective pressures once needed our ancestors to see. My awareness can be trained to know, more thoroughly than cognition alone can know, that all humans are I, all sentient beings are I; all bugs and plants, all amoebas, paramecia, bacteria, and fungi are I; all rocks and dirt, rivers and oceans; air and fire; sun, moon, and stars are I.

Church, huh? What is it good for? “Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free.” And strength that joins our strength to do the work of building “a land that binds up the broken, where the captive go free, where justice shall roll down like waters, and peace like an everflowing stream.”

What is it good for? Absolutely everything.

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This is part 5 of 5 of "Ecclesiology: What Is Church Good For"
Previous: Part 4: "How's Europe?"
Beginning: Part 1: "Church! Huh! What Is It Good For?"

Audio (with some nice slides) of an edited excerpt of an earlier version of "Ecclesiology." Thanks to Shelby Havens for putting together the slides and creating this Youtube video:

How's Europe?

Jeremy Rifkin

The emergence of religion was a vital functional adaptation that met necessary human needs. We need community, connection, and contexts of accountability, all bound and held together by ritual (because the mind believes and better remembers what it sees the body doing) and narratives of purpose and meaning. We need faith community.

Our world, however, is no longer the one for which religion was originally such a crucial adaptation. Many of us belong in various ways to a number of "tribes" -- and our survival does not depend on cohesive loyalty with just one. High levels of religiosity now correlate with low levels of social health and well-being by such measures as homicides, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD rates, teen pregnancies, abortions, and imprisonment rates.

Europe scores lower than the US on measures of religiosity and higher than the US on measures of social health and well-being. In Europe, a lot fewer people are in prison and a lot fewer people are in church. This begs the question: How do Europeans meet the need for moral and cohesive community, interconnection, and transcendence?

Jeremy Rifkin's book, The European Dream, contrasts Europe's with America's dream of unbounded consumeristic indulgence.

“The European Dream emphasizes community relationships over individual autonomy, cultural diversity over assimilation, quality of life over the accumulation of wealth, sustainable development over unlimited material growth, deep play over unrelenting toil, universal human rights and the rights of nature over property rights, and global cooperation over the unilateral exercise of power.” (Rifkin 3)

Wow. That's my agenda. Those are the values I try to preach, with my lips and my life. It's a very Unitarian Universalist agenda. Rifkin's book gives the impression the whole continent of Europe is like one big Unitarian Universalist congregation with 455 million members.

Rifkin says the European dream is to

“connect the human race to a new shared story, clothed in the garb of universal human rights and the intrinsic rights of nature – what we call a global consciousness.... What becomes important in the new European vision of the future is personal transformation rather than individual material accumulation. The new dream is focused not on amassing wealth but, rather, on elevating the human spirit. The European Dream seeks to expand human empathy, not territory...For Europeans, freedom is not found in autonomy but in embeddedness. To be free is to have access to a myriad of interdependent relationships with others.” (7, 8, 13)

Rifkin's language is ecospiritual. He speaks of re-participating in the body of nature, of the Earth as an organism consisting of interdependent relationships. This is spiritual, theological talk.

“We are on the cusp of the third great stage in human consciousness – the stage where we make a self-aware choice to re-participate with the body of nature....European intellectuals, scientists, and visionaries...increasingly view the world as an indivisible living entity deserving of respect and care....The Earth is a living organism made up of interdependent relationships and...we each survive and flourish by stewarding the larger communities of which we are a part. The solution to our dilemma lies in integrating the life instinct and death instinct in a new unity....We can't really begin to live until we first accept the fact that one day we will die. How do we come to terms with our own death and make the choice to live? By making a self-aware decision to leave the death instinct behind, to no longer seek mastery, control, or domination over nature, including human nature, as a means of fending off death. Instead, accept death as part of life and make a choice to re-participate with the body of nature. Cross over from self to the other, and reunite in an empathic bond with the totality of relationships that together make up the Earth's indivisible living community....The life instinct can be rekindled only by really living life, and living life means deep participation in the life of the other that surrounds us.”

If religion is, as Unitarian Universalist minister Forest Church says, our response to the twin realities of being alive and having to die, then Rifkin is describing a religion when he speaks of learning to live by accepting the fact of death and seeking not mastery or domination, but re-participation with nature, reuniting in an empathic bond with the totality of relationships. Truly “living life,” he said, “means deep participation in the life of the other that surrounds us.”

That's what we Unitarian Universalists preach, and what we try to practice. It's our faith.

Relatively few Europeans darken the doorstep of their local church or synagogue. They form other CSOs: Civil Society Organizations: not-for-profits and non-governmental organizations. Civil society is a third socio-political force, co-equal with market commerce and government. For Europeans, it seems, CSOs are basically church.

“The civil society is the meeting place for reproducing culture in all of its various forms. It is where people engage in 'deep play' to create social capital and establish codes of conduct and behavioral norms....In a globalized economy of impersonal market forces, the civil society has become an important social refuge. It is the place where people create a sense of intimacy and trust, shared purpose and collective identity. The civil society sector is the antidote to a world increasingly defined in strictly commercial terms.” (Rifkin 234-35, 238)

Members of such a CSO share a faith. They come together in community, generating social cohesion through shared practices and stories, and maintaining a moral order of “codes of conduct and behavioral norms.” There seems to be a spiritual ethic there of re-participation with nature as a means of interconnection transcending ego and personality.

In Europe, there seem to be ways of doing Unitarian Universalism without calling it that. In the US, however, Unitarian Universalism happens to be the place to be to affirm our connectedness, feed our spirits, and build a land of peace, justice, and reverence for earth.

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This is part 4 of 5 of "Ecclesiology: What Is Church Good For?"
Next: Part 5: "The Church We Need Now"
Previous: Part 3: "When Religion Goes Bad"
Beginning: Part 1: "Chuch! Huh! What Is It Good For?"

When Religion Goes Bad

We Have Religion Because We Had War

Religion gives us a sense of US-ness. The dark side is that it also gives us a sense of THEM-ness – a feeling that those who don’t participate with us in our rituals and story-telling are different, are other, and dangerous. In other words: We have religion because we had war.

War, whether you're attacking or defending, places a premium on group cohesion, and “religion” is our name for the rituals and sacred story telling that produced what was needed. War! (Huh!) Church! (Huh!) What are they good for? Each other, apparently.

Thus, human history is filled with wars over religion. This fact once seemed to me, as perhaps to you, strangely and deeply perverse. Why do people have wars over religion, when the religion on both sides teaches peace? In the light of recent thinking in evolutionary archeology and psychology, religious warfare is exactly what we would expect. It's hardly surprising that an adaptation for succeeding in war would play a role in prompting us to go to war.

When Religion Goes Bad

Faith community meets real human needs. It feeds people spiritually. But people can be fed by way of fortifying them for destructive activity. We see that in the active religiosity of some terrorists. In fact, what goes by the name of religion these days is more often unhealthy than healthy.

A recent study in The Journal of Religion and Society did a large-scale cross-cultural comparative analysis, taking into account key indicators of societal well-being for 800 million people in the U.S., Japan, and western Europe. The study found that higher levels of religiosity correlated with lower levels of social well-being. The U.S., where church attendance is high, has had more school shootings than all of Europe and Japan combined. The study found:

“in general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion. The most theistic prosperous democracy, the U.S., is . . . almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so. The view of the U.S. as a ‘shining city on the hill’ to the rest of the world is falsified when it comes to basic measures of societal health.” (Gregory S. Paul, “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies,” The Journal of Religion and Society, 7, 2005. View complete article: click here.)

Moreover:

“...Spending on health care [in the US] is much higher as a portion of the GDP and per capita, by a factor of a third to two or more, than in any other developing democracy. The U.S. is therefore the least efficient western nation in terms of converting wealth into cultural and physical health.” (Gregory Paul)

Religion reinforces a moral code, binds members into community through ritual and story, and triggers our brains to perceive a transcendent, interconnected whole beyond and more deeply satisfying than the concerns of personality and ego. But sometimes it does so in a way that is counter-productive to other values.

What the researchers in this study counted as “religiosity” is apparently not the form of faith community that the 21st century needs. We do need to meet those human needs for moral and cohesive community, for interconnection and transcendence. But the Protestant or Catholic church, in the forms that were typical through the 20th century, appears not to be the best way to do it.

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This is part 3 of 5 of "Ecclesiology: What Is Church Good For?"
Next: Part 4: "How's Europe?"
Previous: Part 2: "Gossip, Agency, and the Lesson of Communes"
Beginning: Part 1: "Church! Huh! What Is It Good For?"

Gossip, Agency, and the Lesson of Communes

The Origin of Morality

Religion has always been intimately connected with the promulgation of moral systems. In a context of competition between bands and tribes, the survival of a complexly social primate species depends on communicable rules that function to keep most of the members more-or-less in line. If too many members of a group are lying, cheating, stealing, or murdering within the group, then that group won't be unified and able to defeat the pack on the other side of the hill.

These selective pressures turned our ancestors into the sorts of beings with a facility for learning moral rules. Language allowed us to keep tabs on more and more of each other, which let us maintain a larger group, which allowed a more cohesive and larger fighting force and a better chance of defeating rival groups.

Our ancestors learned a technique that we readily recognize and still use, though sometimes we say we don't like it: we call it gossip. That is, our ancestors met in small groups to monitor others' behavior and moralize about it. Gossip emerged among early humans because it worked. Through gossip, a group kept track of who was trustworthy, reinforced both the social ties of the gossipers and the moral rules of the tribe. There are good reproductive reasons why we humans are attracted to gossip and gossiping. It’s a part of the system of maintaining the social order.

There is, however, a limit to how far gossip can go. Researchers find that moral rules reinforced through gossip can maintain unity up to about 150 members. Larger groups need to be held together with something else. That's where religion comes in.

Religion, argues William Irons, anthropologist at Northwestern, facilitates cooperation among a group's members by serving to reinforce commitments to each other in a recognizable way. Participating in a group's rituals psychologically reinforces your actual commitment to the group and also lets the group know you're committed to them.

Eugene Aquili's research shows

“participation in a ritual tends to alter individuals' brain states and to cause them to feel emotions of identity with a group more strongly and to hold this feeling more firmly in memory.” (The Spectrum of Ritual, 1979)

Reciting and listening to sacred stories works the same way.

“People who frequently participate together in religious rituals achieve a feeling of community that enhances their ability to cooperate and avoid conflict. Even though they may not be conscious of it, they also are able to monitor one another for the sincerity of their commitment, thus making participation in religious rituals a credible signal of commitment.” (William Irons, 2001, 364)

That's where religion comes from.

Why Communes Last or Don’t

The power of religion to develop and maintain group loyalty is illustrated in our experiments with communes in the 19th and 20th centuries. Richard Stosis studied communities that hold property in common. If you were a young adult in the 1960s, you may have some direct experience of this: communes often do not last long. They tend to fall apart because the level of trust and cooperation required is just so difficult to maintain.

Stosis found that “communes that base their existence on religious ideals tend to last roughly four times as long on average as do those that base their existence on a secular ideology.” Groups with shared rituals and sacred stories cohere better.

"Supernatural"?

The previous sentence characterized religion as composed of two elements: shared rituals and shared sacred stories. There's a third element of primal religion. If I asked you to guess it, you might guess belief in supernatural beings and forces. That's close, but I don't think that's the best way to put it. Early peoples  didn't have the distinction that has come to be so central to modern religious thinking: the distinction between an account of reality that includes "the supernatural" and one that denies "anything supernatural." Modern people are divided on whether there are any supernatural forces or entities, but both sides tacitly regard the natural-supernatural distinction as coherent. The two sides each assume they know what they are disagreeing about. Those who affirm as well as those who deny the existence of "the supernatural" assume that "supernatural" is a meaningful, coherent concept (or else why would anyone bother either to deny or to affirm that there was such a thing?) Early humans made no such conceptual distinction between "natural" and "supernatural." It is, then, a kind of conceptual anachronism for us to speak of the role of "supernatural beings" in the religion of early humans: they didn't have a concept of "supernatural" as distinct from "natural."

While "supernatural" is a vague and probably ultimately incoherent concept, I think "agency" will do the job we want. Rather than saying, "they believed in supernatural forces and entities," let us say early humans attributed a stronger sense of agency than most modern humans do to trees, rivers, mountains, animals, sky, and, perhaps, "reality as a whole." They understood these features of their world to have beliefs, desires, and various means for effecting their desires. Trees and rocks and sky, in their understanding, were watching them. This probably triggered the same parts of the brain that account for gossip's effectiveness. Feeling watched made them more likely to "stay in line." Early human "religion" (what we would call "religion," and which, for them, was not separable from the kind of knowledge we'd call "factual," "empirical," or "scientific") provided the feeling of a relationship of accountability even when no other humans were around.

Why, then, do communes based on "religious ideals" last much longer than those based on "secular ideology"? What do a group of Christians or Muslims have that a group of Marxists or Skinnerian Behaviorists don't have? The religious group has:

1. Shared rituals, including music, drumming, and dance, and a variety of ritual behaviors to perform and watch others perform.
2. Shared narratives that support the group's moral code and reinforce the group's identity.
3. An understanding of extra-human agency to which members stand in a relationship of accountability even when out of sight of people.

These are powerful factors in generating group loyalty and conformity. Religion is an adaptive strategy fostering group cohesion in larger groups than gossip can manage. After all, the very word religion is from the Latin verb, religere, meaning to bind together.

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This is part 2 of 5 of "Ecclesiology: What Is Church Good For?"
Next: Part 3: "When Religion Goes Bad"
Previous: Part 1: "Church! Huh! What Is It Good For?"

Church! Huh! What Is It Good For?

Absolutely Nothing?

In 1970, in the midst of the Vietnam war, Edwin Starr made the charts with a protest song: “War (What is it Good For?)”

“Absolutely nothing,” was the song’s answer.

Suppose we ask the question about church. For what is it good? Might the answer be the same? As we shall see, there are some surprising connections between war and church (or synagogue, mosque, temple, sangha, vihara – faith community in any form).

What Yency Said

For what is church good? In 2005, when we were living in El Paso, I asked Yency that question. Yency’s church is Pentecostal. He said church helps you feel better. You feel happy. You feel better with God, he said – which one might interpret as meaning better adjusted to life’s conditions. He said, “You don’t have to be all the time alone in your house.” Wise words.

What Religion is About

Religion is not about what you believe. Your religion is about three things:

• How you live: the ethics and values that guide your action; 
• Community: connection with others by and through sharing of practices and rituals;
• Experience: the "direct experience of transcending mystery and wonder."

Faith communities are for bringing these three functions together, presenting and awakening them in such a way that each of those three functions reinforces the other two. As the old “Cheers” theme song said:

“Sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name,
And they're always glad you came.”

Or, as Starhawk said:

“Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats.
Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us,
eyes will light up as we enter,
voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our power.”

We have a need for some way to come together so that “I” can become “we”; “me” can become “us.”

Getting Wired for Religion: Competition Fuels Cooperation

We are wired to have this need. Religion has always included stories that told us things like where we came from, what is our role in the universe – and why we get together with others to practice our religion. If we draw on evolution for our story, then we begin with the emergence of society itself among early primates.

The process begins with reciprocal altruism. My survival chances were enhanced if I did favors for associates who would later do favors for me – although, if I went too far, allowed myself to be taken advantage of by doing favors for associates who would never reciprocate, then my survival odds diminished. In order for a reciprocity system to work, we had to have brains

“capable of carefully tracking the behavior of the other organisms with which [we] interact.” (William Irons, “Why Are Humans Religious? An Inquiry into the Evolutionary Origin of Religion.” Currents in Theology and Mission 28: 3-4, 2001, 359)

The selective pressure to develop cooperation networks was made much, much greater than it otherwise would have been by competition between groups. It may seem paradoxical, but competition fuels cooperation. Individuals had to cooperate to form a group that could out-compete other groups. Bands of primates, generally males, competed violently with other bands for food, for territory, for access to females. We see that going on in chimps today – and on campuses. This group-group competition, as Richard Alexander has detailed in The Biology of Moral Systems, was a powerful force driving us toward formation of larger and better-united groups.

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This is part 1 of 5 of "Ecclesiology: What Is Church Good For?"
Next: Part 2: "Gossip, Agency, and the Lesson of Communes"