In a recent podcast interview, Senator Elizabeth Warren said: “Education is our new secular religion.” It may have been the NYT Book Review podcast, I can’t find the source.
It’s a powerful sentiment – one that she expressed in a matter of fact, almost bored, way. And it’s true not just in America – where college admissions is an intense battleground from the minute kids begin to earn grades – but also around the world. Look at how obsessively Chinese students prepare for the 高考: the test is a rite of passage, and being accepted into one of China’s top universities is no less than a religious conversion for the lucky ones.
In his speech to Maharishi University, Jim Carrey asked the graduating students, “What is your ministry?” At a young age, he decided that his ministry was to free people from concern, and he evangelized his beliefs through comedy and entertainment. He urged the students to find and express theirs.
Secular religion. Your ministry. All religious things, but all spoken of in the context of secular, non-religious activities.
What’s going on?
For starters, what is religion? Definitions are as plentiful as denominations. But a simple and powerful definition, and one that works well for our purposes, is the 3 B’s: Believing, Belonging, and Behaving. You believe in a story or set of propositions. You belong to a community that shares these beliefs. You behave in ways that act upon your beliefs, and often with your community.
Seen this way, a whole lot of “religions” qualify. Hence Senator Warren’s belief about modern education. And Carrey’s mission to free people from concern.
The convenient and widespread narrative in most developed countries, particularly in America and across Western Europe, is that religion is dying. The narrative goes something like: With the rise of science and technology and liberal education, religion is increasingly outdated and out of touch. Fewer and fewer people go to Church, or pray, or study the Bible. More and more people are identifying as atheist, agnostic, or simply “none”. Eventually, religion will become a quaint, niche practice, and one that will slowly fade into irrelevance.
But this simply isn’t true. Globally, religion is growing. Even in America, religious belief is stronger than ever. Religion – as we can see using one definition of the 3 B’s framework – is simply shifting. We might believe less in God, but we believe more than ever in free markets and capitalism. We may not belong to churches and monasteries, but we belong, obsessively, to sports teams and corporations and even to cryptocurrencies. And the way we behave? Well, just look at Apple fanboys and Star Wars fanatics. Religion is alive and well.
I am beginning to think that for all the religions of the world, however they may differ from one another, the religion of The Market has become the most formidable rival, the more so because it is rarely recognized as a religion – Harvey Cox
This realization is important for many reasons, only a few of which I can articulate below.
It means that most people who say they’re not religious are actually very much so. Salman Rushdie says “atheists are obsessed with god.” But it goes beyond atheists. I think it’s more like “non-believers are actually believers in denial.” Hundreds of years ago, if you knew a person was Roman Catholic, you’d have a reasonable starter’s grasp on their animating values and personality traits. Today, we need to look more deeply to identify a person’s “religion”.
A more or less similar point is made by Yuval Harari says in his book Sapiens: Institutions upon which we build civilization are just a bunch of agreed upon fictions. Religion is one such fiction. So are “free” markets. So is celebrity-dom. And so on.
We need to better identify these fictions in others, and more importantly, in ourselves. Which brings me to my last point: You.
You should think deeply about what beliefs animate you. What is your ministry? What is your secular religion? Because if your life is not guided by Buddhism or Islam, then it’s guided by something else. And this something else is often worse. David Foster Wallace expressed the thought beautifully:
Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. – DFW
Thanks for reading. I’m spending a lot of time lately reading and writing about religion. It’s been satisfying as a personal endeavor, and I hope to create some project (like a website, or a book) out of it eventually. If you can help, or simply want to chat more about it, please message me.