What If It Doesn’t Matter So Much? Part Two

What if it doesn’t matter as much what our individual moral makeup is, or the ethical acts we engage in, in terms of our spiritual identity? Many religionists in the West today, especially within liberal religion in general, and Unitarian Universalism in particular, assume that it does, especially if someone proposes, as we did in a previous post, that “beliefs” no longer can be considered primarily, or exclusively, as the source of religious identity. Without beliefs as that “definer,” the fallback position is usually morals and ethics. My beliefs may change, or I may not be able to communicate them meaningfully, but I am searching for “the good” or to be a “good” person, and/or I want to be right and not wrong on key issues of our times. Faith traditions may not be able to say with certainty what it is they believe in common, or have adherents who can faithfully toe the line consistently in terms of beliefs, but still pursue with cause and determination a conception of what is good and/or what is right. The characteristic of our time relative to religion, morals, and ethics, is that all three seem to have collapsed into political positions and policies such that the political is what religions, and individuals, are really wrestling with in terms of a search for the good and the true.

It is impossible to be good or right, bad or wrong, alone. It requires a relatedness to entities larger than self, and thus one is ushered immediately into the political. You can individually hold beliefs about God and act on those beliefs without others present or in mind. Lord, help thou my unbelief, is an example. But morals and ethics are different. They involve politics, and how relationships between people and matters amongst groups are to be governed and adjudicated. So, while morals and ethics cannot be reduced to politics, they involve the political to some degree because all are social. It’s just that at our time in history, politics dominates our collective point of view regarding these things. Today, we collapse them all into the political.

But, suppose we tried to extricate religion and the religious. So, how could we conceive of “the religious” or “being religious” or “expressing my religion” or “the spiritual identity of an ‘us’” that does not involve the moral or the ethical primarily or exclusively, any more than it would put forward “beliefs” in that same way? Hopefully, this question stretches the mind to see religion, the “religious,” and “spiritual behaviors” and "spiritual encounters and experiences" as something more than beliefs, morals, and ethics; and, in fact, as something from which are derived beliefs, morals, and ethics, as secondary yields. They are important. But, they are derivative.

What could that something more be? Let’s let that question “percolate” a while, and be something that is mulled over and turned over, again and again; in part because it requires us first of all, to engage something in addition to that part of our brain that urges we categorize in ways that are currently set, though maybe no longer as useful because they are recognized in their narrowness. We are seeking some kind of unified view, and thus will categorize at some time in order to understand, but not yet. Right now, suffice it to say, that the old ways of seeing just aren’t adequate, as they had been more. We are more and differently religious than what beliefs, or the moral thing to do, the right action, lead us to see. We don’t need more vision, but a larger and wider view.

What kinds of things does homo religiosus engage in, do, contemplate, is surrounded by, seek, yearn for, and is a participant in? How does homo religious behave when being “religious” or “spiritual”? What activities does homo religious engage in and is a part of? What forms mark homo religiosus as being religious as opposed to when not?

And then, what are the ways homo religiosus is “distinctive” such that we categorize as one kind and not another, and give it a name, like Christianity, and further categorize with Protestant, Liberal, and then, Unitarian Universalist (my particular interest)?