Socrates or Buddha?you belonged. Credal beliefs were incomprehensible aside from
that way of life, and theology was the attempt to distil and
discern the spiritual experience: a theologian who didn’t pray
would be as debilitated as a writer who doesn’t read. Similarly,
the meaning of saying you believe in such and such was much
more like saying you trust it, or are committed to it: ‘I believe in
you’, is closer than the propositional, ‘I believe that’.
Now, though, to be religious means, most commonly I think,
an individual affi rmation of metaphysical beliefs, rather than
a way of life that is practised. So when individuals today refer
to what historically is a religious practice, they tend to use the
description ‘spiritual’. Beliefs will, of course, emerge within
and from that experience. But out of a desire to own beliefs –
to affi rm that they spring from one’s own experience, and are
not sprung upon one by a tradition or church – being called
religious holds little appeal. I’ve noticed that even individuals
who go to church prefer to talk about being ‘people of faith’,
not religious. To be religious may, in fact, be seen as antithetical
to being spiritual, an inauthentic because inherited confession,
which an individual of integrity would resist and, quite possi-
bly, reject. We don’t want to submit, to recall the origins of the
word ‘religion’ from the Latin religare, to bind fast.
Sociologists call this process secularisation. It is a complex
phenomenon and one that is hotly contested. But it adds to an
understanding of the agnostic age.
Karl Marx is in one corner. Religion, he famously observed,
arises as the ‘opium of the people’, a palliative against the
horrors of alienation in society. It is the ‘sigh of the oppressed
creature, the heart in a heartless world, the soul of soulless con-
ditions,’ as he also said of theistic belief. What’s interesting
about Marx is that though avowedly atheistic, he did not believe
that simply arguing against religious belief would be enough to
throw it off, should that be thought desirable. Only when the
material realities of humankind’s alienation had been addressed
would religion disappear, for it would then be no longer neces-
sary. It would become redundant, like ink in an age of LEDs.