Christianity and the Non-Affiliated in America: A Changing Mix

The 2018 General Social Survey found the proportions of Roman Catholics, Evangelical Christians, and people not affiliated with any institutional religion to each being within the margin of error around 23 percent of the American population.[1] To be sure, to claim no institutional religion does not necessarily mean not being religious, or at least spiritual. Where the heart is concerned, religious institutions, or organizations, do not monopolize religious or spiritual sensibilities or sensitivities. In fact, I contend that a spiritual or even religious instinct exists in humans that can differ among individuals in salience or force. To be sure, people in whom the instinct is pressing may tend to belong to religious organizations, but this is not to say that the latter are necessary for feeling and manifesting the instinct. This is particularly true, I submit, where programmed worship is unwittingly formulated in a way that actually interrupts or thwarts outright the experience of transcendence, whether in sustained prayer, worship, communion, or meditation.

In regard to the Christian rites of Communion, the laity's experience after the Body and Blood are ingested is typically attenuated, especially when the Eucharist comes at the end of the liturgy. In Roman Catholic churches, for instance, the time for transcendent experience while the congregations are kneeling in the pews is typically just long enough for the “dishes” to be done at the table. Some priests give more significance to the washing itself than to the laity’s spiritual urge for a transcendent experience found in yearning for communion with the unknown divine, which, according to St. Denis, is beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion. It is understandable, therefore, that people can be seen heading straight for the doors once they have received Communion. While I have not observed this "walking out" tendency in Protestant sects that regularly include a Eucharistic rite, the same holds concerning the lack of emphasis on the experience of transcendence after the two species are consumed. Excepting "high church" Episcopalian (e.g., the Oxford Movement) and Lutheran congregations, perhaps the laity sitting rather than less ordinary kneeling, and less ritualistic emphasis on the sacrality of the consecrated Body and Blood themselves (i.e., the species) by the clergy conducting the rites reduces the efficacy of ritual as a prep for religious experience. 

To be sure, the reverence paid to the two species themselves may have become overdone, and even invented. One early Christian book, the Didache, reports that crumbs of the concentrated bread could be found on the floor after Sunday liturgies in halls. Whether in sermons or ritual, the increasing focus on the sacredness of the species could divert attention from the experience following the ingesting of them. Hence, once the species are gone, the presumed high point of the liturgy can be assumed to have passed; the experience of transcendence can thus be treated as an after-thought, practically speaking. Of course, adoration of the Host (i.e., the consecrated bread) does not include ingestion; the experience of transcendence lies in yearning for the divine essence through focusing on the specie. Both in this respect and in offering a sustained experience following the Eucharistic rite, Roman Catholicism and "high church" Protestant congregations have the potential to more fully satisfy the urge for transcendence. 

It would be highly reductionistic to suggest that the percentage of Catholics in the U.S. falling 3% from 2014 to 2018 was exclusively due to expedited Communion, and that the percentage of mainline Protestants (excepting Black churches) falling 10% from 1991 to 2016 was exclusively due to watered-down (i.e., less sacred), truncated Communion. I contend that in all of those sects, the programming, even including announcements before (or during!) the service/Mass, breaks up a sustained buildup for and experience of transcendence. The latter is not something that can be quickly turned on and off like a light switch, and yet this is precisely the operative assumption in a typical Christian service or Mass.

Of course, other factors doubtless apply to the respective percentage losses, which, by the way, do not necessarily mean fewer people as the U.S. population was increasing during the respective periods. Generally speaking, the extant secular societal cultures in the West could have provided for a softer landing on the non-affiliated turf. Less shame or defensiveness could have been felt in "coming out" as, or becoming a humanist or other sort of atheist. Atheists could more easily find each other through social media on the internet while the presumed default for being a theist continued to be belief in an intelligent being based outside of the material realm (i.e., Creation).[2] 

Indeed, the sex-abuse by Catholic priests and related cover-ups by bishops, cardinals, and even popes may have sullied the reputation of the Roman Catholic Church and even institutional religion itself. In the cases of the 3% drop in the percentage of Catholics from 2014 and another 3% drop before that, from 2007 to 2014,[3] it is probably no coincidence that reports of child-rapes by priests and related cover-ups by bishops and even at least one cardinal were hitting the press. The film, Spotlight, which centered on the reporting by the Boston Globe on over 90 priests who had molested children, came out in 2015. Bernard Law, an American cardinal in Boston, with other local church officials, had moved one priest around rather than going to the authorities even though that priest had raped or molested 130 children over decades. Weeks after Law resigned in Boston, he went to Rome, where Pope John Paul II appointed Law as Archpriest of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, a sinecure with only ceremonial duties. The post conveyed citizenship in Vatican City, so it may have been made to shield Law from the law. As if this were ironic, a cardinal claiming to be a believer in the teachings and way of Jesus moving a child-rapist around rather than reporting him is a far deeper irony. Any Catholics who subsequently left their Church out of a sense of disgust even at the lack of justice in the Vatican, not to mention the heinous acts themselves, could be thought to have gained divine favor, and the Church to have earned divine disapprobation and in the future perhaps divine retribution. In 2014, 13% of all U.S. adults were former Catholics. No other religious institution in America experienced a greater net loss due to religious switching.[4] In retrospect, given the gravity of the crimes and the hypocritical leadership, that the percentage drops (and switching) were not greater may be perplexing in its own right.

Given the 10% drop in the percentage of Americans who identified as mainline Protestants from 1991 to 2016, the Catholic switching seems pale. Apparently a duty-felt urge to make a change on principle or faith (i.e., as a disciple or follower of Christ) is not as strong as the inertia of convenience in human nature. 

 
At any rate, it doesn’t seem much of the Catholic "switching" landed in mainline Protestant sects. The elephant in the room both concerning the Catholic and mainline drops was non-denominational evangelical Christianity. The percentage of mainline Protestants had dropped appreciably in the first half of the 1980’s just as the percentage of evangelical Christians was increasing. In 1979, Ronald Reagan had boosted the societal footprint of Evangelical Christianity by highlighting that segment in his base as he campaigned for the U.S. presidency. This only made the novel form of Christianity more visible, however.

In terms of liturgical expression, whereas the Catholic Mass and mainline services had become (or always were) rather sober (except for the wine) and staid, an evangelical service, such as those in the emerging megachurches, sported rock bands and emotional sermons that could energize Christians in their faith. More importantly, the instrumentals and even vocal repetitions that often extended beyond a song’s regular length provided a platform for sustained transcendent experience. It was not only possible, but encouraged. 

On Easter 2019, for instance, I visited a small evangelical church to observe external indications of sustained transcendent experience. Above and beyond the congregants who were standing and waving their arms (and in two instances, flags) in the air as the instrumentals and repetitioned vocals continued, a 21 year-old man at the front near one of the side walls caught my attention, for the indicators of sustained transcendent experience were "off the charts." That is, I had the impression that I was observing a considerably more intense and sustained experience of transcendence. In this case, it was through worshiping and praying seamlessly and thus in a temporally sustained manner. The man's experience was not short, as it could have been from being interrupted by programming that did not give adequate time for such sustained experience (e.g., by an organized prayer, a sermon, or even announcements!). 

Regarding the empirically observable indicators themselves, his eyes were closed except for when he was singing from the monitor directly in front of him. Even then, he seemed to be looking beyond, upward. This looking beyond is a good indicator of transcendence beyond this realm (i.e., beyond our "world"). He held his arms up above him or put his hands in a prayer pose directly below his chin while he was singing or praying. Most of the time, his eyes were closed. Occasionally he would dance, but more often rock from the leg in front to the one behind. Most interesting of all, he would periodically pray in a pose known as child's pose in yoga. His face was against the carpet while he held his arms back along the floor. His back faced up like a turtle's shell. The position alone, which Muslims and Sikhs use in prayer, intimated the subservience of a creature to the Creator. That the man's eyes looked as if he had cried or been sweating suggested to me that he had put intensity into the experience. This was how he differed so much from his co-congregants who were sitting at tables or standing (even those standing who held their arms up and closed their eyes). Yet even such a sustained experience could explain the draw from Catholicism and the mainline sects. In any event, the young man's sustained and intense experience would not have been possible in a Mass or mainline service (although toward the end of the 2010's, some mainline congregations were adding services akin to the modern evangelical ones). 

Whereas the Catholic Church and mainline Protestant organizations were truncating and even eclipsing transcendent experience, evangelical Christianity was providing an opening. This is not to say that the opening was sufficiently open to take in morally or liturgically dissatisfied Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants.

The doctrinal and moral rigidity, for instance, considerably narrowed the gate—unnecessarily so if transcendent experience is the litmus test. For example, it is typically expected in evangelical churches that a Christian has a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Catholicism does not make this assumption, and in fact tries to avoid it. This is not to say that rigidity does not apply to Roman Catholicism. For instance, even a pope, Francis, urged the priests and bishops to stop obsessing on the moral issues of abortion and homosexuality. After all, Jesus in the Gospels is silent on both. In fact, the obsession as a point of attention may have come at the expense of an alternative focus on sustained transcendent experience as facilitated by liturgy. In the liturgy itself, considering the consecration of the bread and wine to be the cleric's high point, and that of the Mass itself comes at the expense of the communing experience as the high point. 

I suspect that the non-affiliated category benefited most from the moral obsession spread across several Christian sects, such that institutional religion itself could come to be associated with a "holier than thou" attitude and even moral hatred. Hate the sin, love the sinner may be too much to ask even of clergy who preach love thy neighbor. The hypocrisy alone from this and the raping of children (as well as the cover-ups) has a bad odor, which likely prompted some Catholics to find higher ground even as the herd animals used to the stench continued to graze; hence the percentage drop was not greater. Interestingly, the clergy including those in the Vatican did not seem to realize the depth to which their religious institution was losing credibility, and yet they themselves, as if with the blood still on their hands, had committed the act! Like the light from a distant star that has not reached Earth, news of the act had not yet reached them. Nevertheless, priests stressed loyalty to the church hierarchy no matter what. Observing a Mass in 2018, I heard a priest say this to a congregation during his homily: "You must obey the hierarchy!" When credibility is finally seen to be crumbling, the weak who seek to dominate by  Thou Shalt Nots instinctively do not stop at moral interdiction, for they are desperate.[5]

Generalizing beyond Catholicism exclusively, other factors probably played into the percentage changes for the three religious segments. Perhaps it can be concluded that people affiliated with religious institutions tend to walk more to something exciting than away from something sordid. Moreover, self-interest, whether moving to or staying with something deemed beneficial (or convenient), has a greater instinctual force than does moving on principle, whether moral or religious. As for the astounding rise in the percentage of Americans who did not identify with any religious institution or group, I suspect that the way in which Christian sects have gotten caught in the controversial thicket of social ethics even at the expense of an alternative focus on transcendent experience, the many scandals regarding ministers and priests, whether in terms of personal hypocrisy or criminal acts, and the bad way in which liturgies have treated or accommodated transcendent experience are relevant. To be sure, different liturgical styles are natural, given all the different propensities of the faithful. Even so, the liturgical programming has in many cases come at the expense of religious experience, so it makes sense that even people with a spiritual or religious propensity would not affiliate themselves. 

Indeed, if humanists had cause to look at the distant planet of religion with disgust, it may have been from that planet’s own doing rather than just an inactive religious instinct or, in contrast, a lack of desire for transcendent experience. For enough cleric inhabitants of that planet had committed (and were still committing) atrocities as if with impunity from human law and even divine judgment, and/or had desiccated  liturgies  while enough of the laity stood by, hence enabling the culprits or the incompetent, that the planet's luster diminished. In other words, the planet itself had gained a reputation for being human, all too human, and thus with such a thick, darkened atmosphere that sustained experiences of transcendence came to be stifled rather than facilitated.  

On transcendent experience, even as impacting work, see Spiritual Leadership in Business: Transcending the Ethical.    

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1. Neil Monahan and Saeed Ahmed, “There Are Now as Many Americans Who Claim No Religion as There Are Evangelicals and Catholics, a Survey finds,” CNN.Com, April 13, 2019.

2. Prof. Louis Dupre of Yale suggested in a lecture in the mid 1990's that, based on St. Denis's writings, it is enough for a theist to believe that God transcends the limits of human cognition and perception rather than going further to say that God is an intelligent being. If so, the commonly held view that a theist must believe the latter too be one reason that people identify themselves as humanists or atheists more generally.
3. “America’s Changing Religious Landscape,” The Pew Research Center, May 12, 2015.

4. Ibid.
5. In this paragraph, I am applying Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy regarding the "new bird of prey," the ascetic (i.e., weakened) priests who nonetheless have a relentless urge to dominate even the strong. See Nietzsche's text, On the Genealogy of Morals. The second essay is on the ascetic priest figure. I have written a book applying this figure to business ethicists and managers. See On the Arrogance of False Entitlement.

Experience of Transcendence: The Core of Religion and Spirituality

Transcendence beyond the limits of human cognition, and thus reason and even religious beliefs is notoriously difficult for the human mind to grasp; even if as I suspect the human mind has an instinctual urge to yearn to go beyond cognitive and perceptual boundaries (i.e., beyond our ordinary experience), that same mind also has a dogged proclivity to cloth wholly-other religious objects (e.g., a deity) in familiar garb. Transcendent experience itself is immune, hence focusing on the experience itself is superior to getting caught up with the presumably certain divine attributes of a religious object, yet even such experience can be held back, or unduly circumscribed, when the transcendent reference-point is rendered conveniently familiar. Hence the dictum against graven images.  

As “an emotional and sensuous being,” a human being, Feuerbach suggests, “is governed and made happy only by images, by sensible representations,” including those that are fabricated by the imagination.[1] In other words, we have “an instinct, an internal necessity, which impels [us] to think, to perceive, to imagine.”[2] This instinct sees nothing wrong with applying itself to religious objects, essentially robbing them of their rightful transcendence.

The Son, is, therefore, expressly called the Image of God; his essence is that he is an image—the representation of God, the visible glory of the invisible God. The Son is the satisfaction of the need for mental images, the nature of the imaginative activity in man made objective as an absolute, divine activity.[3]

Feuerbach must have read Hume, for he too laments how inherently difficult it is for the human mind to hold onto the divine as a pure, incorporeal spirit for long;  the mind automatically sets about clothing it in anthropomorphic attributes because they are familiar, which is in itself is “so agreeable to the mind.”[4] In other words, “an invisible spiritual intelligence is an object too refined for vulgar apprehension,” so we “naturally affix it to some sensible representation.”[5] By means of the instinct described by Feuerbach, the human mind tends to render the transcendent perceptual by our senses, and thus firmly within the limits of perception. In fact, Hume goes so far as to define idolatry as the portrayal of the invisible divine, which the human mind has trouble holding onto, in terms of “some sensible representation.”[6]

Is worship of a god-man, as in God made flesh, therefore an instance of self-idolatry? The very structure of man worshipping a god-man would suggest so. Furthermore, God made flesh in the Incarnation as Jesus Christ renders worship of the eternal Word, the Logos, surreptitiously susceptible to actually being worship of the human form idealized.[7] Augustine points to the significance of the human form of the second person of the Trinity:

[Jesus] was a baby, he grew as a man, he walked as a man, he hungered, thirsted as a man, he slept as a man, then at last he suffered as a man. . . . In the same form he arose, in the same form he ascended into heaven. . . . When, therefore, you think about the form of the servant in Christ, think of his human shape, if there is faith in you.[8]

Faith is tied here to Jesus Christ having a human shape (i.e., a human body).  It is not as if Augustine were unaware of the risks involved, for he warns against associating the form of the human body with the divine, which inherently transcends finite forms or embodiments:

(L)et every human configuration vanish from your heart; let there be driven from your thought whatever is limited by a bodily boundary, whatever is confined by the extent of a place or is extended with any bulk whatsoever; let such a fictitious image disappear from your heart. . . . Now, O man, if you cannot see your wisdom with the eyes of the flesh, nor think of it with such imaginings as bodily things are thought of, do you dare to impose the form of the human body on the wisdom of God?[9]

Hume stresses that the human brain cannot help but create such perceptual imaginings of bodily things to render the transcendent familiar at the expense of being wholly other and thus transcendent. Feuerbach points out that “the relations of humanity are not excluded from God” in that “God has a Son; God is a father”[10] Sensing that such relations render the deity too humanlike at the expense of being wholly other (as transcendent), Augustine strictly warns his readers that “no carnal thought creep up” in interpreting Jesus’s expression, “As the Father has taught me” in terms of a human father teaching his son. To liken the Trinitarian relationship to a (merely) human one would be, Augustine writes, to “fashion idols” in one’s heart.[11] Unfortunately, such idolatry is a danger even in spite of this warning, for “it is only natural that our own experiences or observations of father-son relations would mold how we view Jesus’ relation to his Father.”[12] In other words, our minds are susceptible to rendering the transcendent in familiar terms even to the point that the religious object is, as Feuerbach contends, actually human potential without our limitations as individuals.

Augustine exempts the case of Jesus Christ, however, on account of divine revelation attesting, albeit by faith alone, to the truth of the Incarnation; Jesus Christ is not just human potential, as divinity is something more even if it manifests as a Son in human form. Yet does this mean that the godhead tempts us mere mortals into self-idolatry by clothing the divinity in such brazenly anthropomorphic garb? At the very least, Feuerbach suggests, understanding repudiates the application of anthropomorphisms to God.[13]

Not so, Kierkegaard would undoubtedly reply, for the eternal coming into history through the Incarnation transcends human understanding, and thus cognition itself. Larger principles, in other words, are involved than the anthropomorphism. As Kierkegaard points out, “faith is not a knowledge, for all knowledge is either knowledge of the eternal, which excludes the temporal and the historical as inconsequential, or it is purely historical knowledge, and no knowledge can have as its object this absurdity that the eternal is the historical.”[14] Absurdity and paradox, which stress transcendence beyond human cognition, are two terms that Kierkegaard uses to describe distinctly religious phenomena.

In Fear and Trembling, for instance, Kierkegaard places the absurd above even human morality. The divine command given to Abraham that he sacrifice Isaac is not in a religious sense murder.  In other words, the religious sacrifice is above the moral verdict of murder—yet another indication that religion does not reduce to morality, and thus spiritual leadership is not really just ethical leadership. The absurd, unlike a moral system, lies beyond the clutches of reasoning. In Fear and Trembling, the absurd is Abraham’s faith that God would not break the promise that Abraham’s offspring would go on to fill nations even though that same God has commanded the old man to sacrifice his only child. This makes no sense, and yet for God all things are possible. Similarly, the eternal in a historical person, albeit historical in a faith narrative, is a paradox that can only be taken on faith.

The paradox is “the god’s planting himself in human life.”[15] This is no trivial point in historical Christianity, for, as Kierkegaard states, “(t)he heart of the matter is the historical fact that the god has been in human form.”[16] Christianity, he explains, “by means of the historical . . . has wanted to be the single individual’s point of departure for his eternal consciousness.”[17] Unlike Socrates, a teacher is needed who can occasion a re-birth of sorts in a person. The condition must be so significant that the person would never forget it.  “(I)n order for the teacher to be able to give the condition, he must be the god, and in order to put the learner in possession of it, he must be man. This contradiction is in turn the object of faith.”[18]

Feuerbach admits that “out of the need for salvation is postulated something transcending human nature, a being different from” human beings, yet “no sooner is this being postulated than there arises the yearning of man after himself, after his own nature, and man is immediately re-established.”[19] Therefore, “the contemplation of God as human,” with love as the unifier of the two, is “the mystery of the Incarnation.”[20] “In the Incarnation religion only confesses” what theology will not admit, “that God is an altogether human being.”[21] That which is supposedly “mysterious and incomprehensible” (i.e., suggesting of transcendence) about the notion that “God is or becomes a man” is actually “nothing more than the human form of a God, who already in his nature . . . is a merciful and therefore a human God.”[22] Neither the human form nor the idealized human qualities of mercy, goodness (benevolentia), power (omnipotentia), and knowledge (omniscientia) are particularly transcendent, as they pertain or come out of our realm and are very much within the limits of our perception and cognition, respectively.  Even in terms of human sentiments, a religious person “unhesitatingly assigns his own feelings to God; God is to him a heart susceptible to all that is human; . . . feeling can appeal only to feeling.”[23] Hence, petitions through prayer appealing to God’s goodness and mercy. Even in such a momentous condition in salvation history, therefore, the human mind leans toward seeing the transcendent through heavily-tinted anthropomorphic sunglasses such that the god is essentially rendered as human at the expense of transcendence.

Even though Kierkegaard considered the mystery of the Incarnation—the absolute paradox, in other words, as an object of faith rather than knowledge—to be beyond the limits of cognition, even his paradox may not reach transcendence in a religious sense. Generally speaking, the ultimate paradox of thought is “to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.”[24] The mind, in other words, paradoxically seeks to go beyond itself. So far, the understanding evinces the notion of transcendence. In “its paradoxical passion,” Kierkegaard writes, “the understanding does indeed will its own downfall.”[25] Likewise, cognition and reasoning fall before the Lord.

Yet if the eternal in history—in a human form no less!—is merely a species of the human imagination borne out of instinct rather than begotten by a godhead whose existence is not just idealized human qualities as Feuerbach suggests, then the absolute paradox is not beyond thought. For that matter, I could imagine a unicorn standing on the moon even though the actual science defines reason. Just as my imagination is not bound by the strictures of science, religion is not bound by science, or even metaphysics (i.e., what is real?) Even Feuerbach’s own notion of God holds back from transcending cognition, for “God is thy highest idea, the supreme effort of they understanding, thy highest power of thought.”[26] In other words, “God is what the understanding thinks as the highest.”[27] Religious yearning, on the other hand, goes beyond the point where understanding ends.

 Kierkegaard too holds back, as he is content to remain on the cusp of the unknown, where it collides with the understanding, rather than pushing further. “The paradoxical passion of the understanding,” he writes, “is continually colliding with this unknown. . . . The understanding does not go beyond this; yet in its paradoxicality the understanding cannot stop reaching it and being engaged with it, because wanting to express its relation to it by saying that this unknown does not exist will not do, since just saying that involves a relation.”[28]  The understanding does not go beyond the edge of the unknown that can be made known, and Kierkegaard is satisfied to remain there rather than to venture into the unknown, and thus to God beyond cognition. “But what, then, is this unknown, for does not its being the god merely signify to us that it is the unknown?”[29]  In other words, the unknown is the god. Yet the unknown to understanding is none other than ignorance, and the god, as omniscient, is hardly that. God extending beyond human understanding does not necessarily mean that the god is just the absence of understanding. Furthermore, that the god is mysterious, and thus not fully known, is not to say that it is simply the unknown.

In short, the understanding stops at the beginning of the unknown—arriving at it—whereas religious faith, and thus experience, extends into the wholly other, or absolutely different.  “To declare that God is the unknown because we cannot know it, and that even if we could know it we could not express it, does not satisfy the passion,” Kierkegaard states, “although it has correctly perceived the unknown as frontier. But a frontier is expressly the passion’s torment, even though it is also its incentive. And yet it can go no further. . . . What, then, is the unknown? It is the frontier that is continually arrived at . . . it is the different, the absolutely different.”[30] To arrive at something is not to go past its border into it. To be sure, it is not the understanding that can venture so. “Defined as the absolutely different, it seems to be at the point of being disclosed, but not so, because the understanding cannot even think the absolutely different; it cannot absolutely negate itself but uses itself for that purpose and consequently thinks the difference in itself, which it thinks by itself. It cannot absolutely transcend itself and therefore thinks as above itself only the sublimity that it thinks by itself.”[31] This is why it is so difficult for the human mind to conceive of God as wholly other; it is in the very nature of thought to conceive of objects in terms that bear some familiarity to the mind, which “cannot absolutely transcend itself and therefore thinks as above itself only the sublimity that it thinks by itself.”[32] To even try to think of something absolutely different involves an arbitrariness, and yet we affix such certainty to our knowledge of the divine attributes. Consequently, Kierkegaard points out that “at the very bottom of devoutness there madly lurks the capricious arbitrariness that knows it itself has produced the god.”[33] Hence the nature of the god—the religious object—may not be the basis of religion. Religious experience, on the other hand, is felt on our side of the line, within the known, and yet crucially its object or aim transcends even the border to the absolutely different that cannot be known, sensed, or perceived. The nature of the experience is thus unique. As such, it is part of the native fauna in the religious garden. In fact, being in itself immune from anthropomorphism from within our realm, the sui generis experience is, I submit, the defining characteristic of religion and spirituality. We can indeed transcend even the masks of eternity that we hold as ultimate. In achieving such transcendence, a person enters religion’s inner sanctum—that which religion really is.

The essay pertains to chapter 3, "Spiritual Leadership Revised," in Spiritual Leadership in Business: Transcending the Ethical, which is available at Amazon in print and as an ebook.

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1. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, George Eliot, trans. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), 75.

2. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 78.

3. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 75.

4. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, sec. 5, in Principal Writings on Religion including Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and the Natural History of Religion, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Ox-ford University Press, 1993), 150.

5. Hume, Natural History, 152.

6. Hume, Natural History, 152.

7. Worden, God’s Gold, 338. See John 1:14.

8. Augustine, Tractates on John, 127.

9. Augustine, Tractates on John, 127.

10. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 56.

11. Augustine, Tractates on John: Books 28-54, 40.4, trans. John W. Rettig, Fathers of the Church: 

A New Translation 88 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1993), 126.

12. Skip Worden, God’s Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth (Tucson, AZ: The Worden Report, 2015), 339.

13. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 35.

14. Soren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments or A Fragment of Philosophy, Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, eds. and trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 62.

15. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 107.

16. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 103.

17. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 109.

18. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 62.

19. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 45.

20. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 50. See also p. 48.

21. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 56.

22. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 51

23. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 55.

24. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 37.

25. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 47.

26. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 38.

27. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 38.

28. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 44.

29. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 44.

30. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 44.

31. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 45.

32. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 45.

33. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 45.

Is Humanism a Religion?

Is Humanism a religion?  I contend that Humanism does not qualify, but it is compatible with religious experience. Beginning with how religion was defined in ancient times, I argue that the element or aspect of transcendence is vital. I then look at whether transcendence is and could be in Humanism.

Religio, religionis (f, Latin) is translated principally as "supernatural constraint or taboo" or "obligation," in line with the verb religare (to bind). Secondary meanings of religio include "sanctity" and "reverence, respect, awe." In short, the etymology of religion indicates that the phenomenon is based on the binding nature of a religious object that is transcendent (i.e., not based in our realm, including Nature), hence the supernatural attribute or manifestation associated with the nature of the binding, or obligation. So religion is not based on feeling obliged to respect Nature. Hence the ancient nature religions had as a core belief the notion that deities, which are not based in our realm, control various features of Nature. For example, Zeus controls lightning, and Poseidon causes storms on the seas. Somethings (i.e., deities) were premised to exist that transcend Nature. Therefore, Nature itself not get us far enough in referring to religion even in the nature religions. In theism, too, a religious object is believed to exist that is "other-worldly" and hence supernatural.

I submit that the most determinative aspect of religion—indeed, I would even say its essence—is transcendence, an orientation whose reference-point lies beyond the limits of human cognition, sentiment, and perception. Transcendence is something that a person does; it is experiential even as it is not experience as we know it. Technically, transcendence does not require a belief in religious object, such as a deity (i.e., an intelligent being with a personality based beyond our realm—that of Creation). On a bare basis, the focus can be to a focus-point that is beyond the limits of human cognition, sentiment, and perception; as a point, which by definition has no surface-area, the referent operates as a non-attribute-holding place-holder that engenders “deep” transcendental yearning or striving.  Such an undertaking, I contend, serves as the foundation of religion and spirituality. Accordingly, the binding is ultimately applied to the yearning or striving, rather than to normative strictures ensuing from a religious object (e.g., the Ten Commandments).

It follows that respecting human potential, such as exists within Nature, does not get us to religion. Nor does Nature itself get us there. Feuerbach errs, I submit, in attributing divine status to Nature, and, more specifically to the potential of our species (i.e., our better instincts). He points to the case of nature religions, which he claims involves the “worship of nature as a divine being” because “nature is primary and fundamental, and cannot be derived from anything else.”[1] Yet having such a placement within Creation, for example, does not render something divine for lack of a transcendent extension. Even as representations of “the world in a mode differing from sense perception” rather than “a being different from the world,” the original conceptions of gods fell short.

Feuerbach can ironically be drawn on to attest to the shortfall. “I do not look on nature as a god, as supernatural, supersensual, remote, recondite, and One; [Nature in contrast] is a manifold, public, actual being which can be perceived with all the senses.”[2] There being “nothing mystical, nothing nebulous, nothing theological” in his use of the term, Nature, it falls short of being divine because it is based and confined to our realm without a transcendent dimension.[3] So too does his conception of God as “abstracted from the world”—God being “only the world in thought.”[4] Such a god cannot, by definition, extend beyond the world. Feuerbach’s characterization of the word divine as “beneficent, magnificent, praiseworthy, and admirable” also falls short in accounting for the term’s distinctly religious connotations; a political ruler, for example, could be praised as being beneficent, magnificent, and admirable without any hint of anything religious or even spiritual.[5] Similarly, Feuerbach’s claim that spiritual means “intellectual and abstract” falls short, as these descriptors could apply to the orientation of a secular scholar whose trade is theory.[6] Feuerbach, being such a scholar, also characterizes "divine" as "supreme”—his reference here being to Nature itself. The religious connotations of the word, divine, are not satisfied, however, for something can be supreme and yet not transcendent.[7] Life, for example, “is the supreme good.”[8] In fact, Feuerbach maintains that God, as a supreme being, “is in its origin and basis nothing but the highest being in space, optically considered: the sky with its brilliant phenomena.”[9] Being the highest being in Creation may be impressive by our standards, but this does not get us to religious transcendence, which is qualitatively different than even infinite space and time.

In his ascension in his resurrected body into Heaven, for example, Jesus goes up skyward, but not simply up and up into the sky. Rather, he becomes engulfed in a cloud, which signifies the inherent mysterium of a transcendent divine object (i.e., God) that inherently goes beyond the limits of our ability to think and see yet not in the sense that the infinite space in the sky lies beyond our conceptual and visual abilities. Feuerbach rejects this sui generis transcendental dimension of religion, claiming that all “religions of some imagination transfer their Gods into the region of the clouds . . . all Gods are lost at last in the blue vapor of heaven.”[10] The transcendent to him is merely the fiction of human imagination; God’s goodness is “merely the utility of nature, ennobled by the imagination.”[11]

So Feuerbach tries to secularize religion, claiming it “is merely the art of life and simply expresses the forces and drives which directly govern the life of man.”[12] Accordingly, he misapplies religious terms to “earthly” objects—which in religious terms is idolatry.  In fact, in claiming that “man has in himself the measure, the criterion of divinity,” Feuerbach can be said to be engaging in self-idolatry.[13] Hence, he posits, “if a being’s worthiness to be worshipped, hence his divine dignity, depends solely on his relation to human welfare, if only a being beneficial and useful to man is divine, then the ground of divinity is to be sought solely in human egoism.”[14]

Feuerbach thus hails Nature as sacred, for example, because we are so dependent on it.[15] “All the strange and conspicuous phenomena in nature, everything that strikes and captivates man’s eye, surprises and enchants his ear, fires his imagination, induces wonderment, affects him in a special, unusual, to him inexplicable way, may contribute to the formation of religion and even provide an object of worship.”[16] Just because something is captivating or enchanting, even special or unusual, does not render it sacred—which is to say, with significance that transcends our realm. Yet Feuerbach attacks the attribution of the sacred to transcendent religious objects. Such “an object first takes on its true intrinsic dignity when the sacred nimbus is stripped off; for as long as a thing or being is an object of religious worship, it is clad in borrowed plumes, namely, the peacock feathers of the human imagination.”[17]

Humanism, moreover, also falls short of religion and even spirituality in eschewing the sheer existence of any transcendent religious object(s). Put another way, Humanism limits itself to recognition only within the limits of human cognition, sentiment and perception. Yet Humanism can be religious or spiritual, I contend, on account of the human (instinctual) urge to undertake transcendent yearning. Given the salience of religious experience both cross-culturally and through human history, the human brain may have an instinctual urge—admittedly stronger in some people than others—to engage in transcendent experience whose orientation or focus is curiously beyond the capacities of the human brain.  If transcendence is simply one of many human qualities or abilities, pursuing its potential is consistent with the aims of Humanism: to develop human potential.

The key for Humanists whose transcendentalist urge is ardently felt lies in distinguishing the experience—the yearning itself—from whether religious objects exist beyond the limits of human cognition and perception. No such objects need be presumed to exist in order to engage in the human yearning whose focus lies inherently beyond the capacity of the brain; it is enough—and indeed, crucial—for the focus to be beyond. This is what enables Humanism to be religious without having to believe in God. Put another way, God for the Humanist may be the transcendence itself, rather than a transcendent entity. Both Augustine and Calvin stress that the Christian god is love; God is the love between people that issues out in universal benevolence. Yet such love, having a divine basis, cannot merely be moral in nature; transcendence cannot be of own kind, or sui generis, and yet reduce to morality. So a religious Humanism cannot simply be human morality; a unique way of being human hitherto assumed to be conditioned on belief in particular conceptions of religious objects (e.g., God) must be uncoupled for the Humanist to admit to his or her own human religious nature.

In summary, Humanism in the limited sense that it is commonly "understood" does not qualify as a religion for lack of transcendence. To niggardly hold to the ideologically constrained common view and presumptuously erase and replace the default meaning of religion does not do justice either to Humanism or religion. Like the "other shore" in Buddhism, the very existence of the abyss that Humanists and Theists alike insist separates Humanism and religion is, I submit, an illusion foisted by narrow-minded, partisan thinking. Humanism is not, but could be, religious.

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1.  Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion, Ralph Manheim, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 89.

2.  Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion, Ralph Manheim, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 91.

3. Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion, Ralph Manheim, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 91.

4. Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion, Ralph Manheim, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 114.

5. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Religion, trans. Alexander Loos (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004), p. 7.

6. Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion, Ralph Manheim, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 116.

7. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Religion, trans. Alexander Loos (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004), 4.

8. Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion, Ralph Manheim, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 53.

9. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Religion, trans. Alexander Loos (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004), 11.

10. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Religion, trans. Alexander Loos (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004), 11.

11. Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion, Ralph Manheim, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 111.

12. Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion, Ralph Manheim, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 53.

13. Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion, Ralph Manheim, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 53-54.

14. Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion, Ralph Manheim, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 62.

15. Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion, Ralph Manheim, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 37.

16. Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion, Ralph Manheim, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 45.

17. Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion, Ralph Manheim, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 38.

On the Paradox of Transcendence and Self-Idolatry on Human Dynamics

Ironically, a focus on a transcendent religious object, or even on the experience of transcendence itself, can engender or bring about more humane human relations than may ensue from humanism.

See "On the Paradox of Transcendence and Self-Idolatry."

Realive: Lazarus Reanimated!

In 2016, Robert McIntyre, a graduate of MIT, became the first person to freeze and then revive a mammalian brain—that of a white rabbit. “When thawed, the rabbit’s brain was found to have all of its synapse, cell membranes, and intracellular structures intact.”[1] The film, Realive, made that same year, is a fictional story about a man with terminal cancer who commits suicide to be frozen and revived when his illness could be cured. In the context of McIntyre’s scientific work, the film’s sci-fi demeanor belies the very real possibility that cryogenics could realistically alter fundamental assumptions about life and death even just later in the same century. What the film says about the life and death is timeless, however, in terms of philosophical value.

The full essay is at "Realive."

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1. Candace Sutton, “Human Bodies Frozen in Desert Facility Waiting for Science to Wake them Up,” News.com.au.