When I Made My Own Religion

[HKHaugan]

Yes, I admit it. I’ve actually done that, made my own religion. I can kind of pinpoint the way it happened. Before I get there I need you to follow some thinking. It won’t be a life story or some gory confession but kind of an overall look at humanity in need. If I use ‘I’ a lot please forgive the verbal indulgence. Your indulgent time through this would be appreciated.

Like any person who wants to know what makes us tick, what makes other people tick, for that matter, what makes the world tick, we evaluate our experience of taking in what happens in our physical and social environment. It’s a lonely pain/pleasure process of observation, questioning, emotional reaction, analysis, personal insights, a lot of internal and external pressures and the slow emerging development of a belief system to handle everyday experience. Any way you cut it it’s all about me, who I am, where I am, what I am and where I think I need to go and what I need to do to get there. I think all of us have to be honest about that. It’s about how I fit in to the whole environment in which I find myself. I know I’ve said this before but it’s what we do with our aloneness that makes up what we call religion. Believe it or not everyone has a religion. By that I mean everyone has a way to live they believe in. Whether it is an organized system with many people believing the same thing or just what any individual believes by himself, it’s still religion.

I get a kick out of atheists who say they don’t believe in God or any kind of spirituality. They believe in not believing which is as religious as it gets especially considering how proud, aggressive, emotional, determined and activist they become in proclaiming their religion. It’s probably the most prejudiced and fanatical of all religions. In this secularizing society watch out if they gain political power.

OK, back to the point. This lonely give-and-take fitting-in process causes us to construct a self-satisfying religion that is modified with age. As I was growing up I joined and was part of organizations that were relational in nature, churches, schools and clubs. Having left North Carolina and finding myself in the hell of New York City, I also had a teen survival course in gangland, though our group was far from threatening like the other groups in East Harlem.

Why groups? We are created to be relational by nature. When I was hitchhiking around the country after high school I worked on farms, bartendered, lifeguarded, cut timber, cooked and ended up in Jacksonville. All of it was relationally directed, gaining acceptance and avoiding rejection. I would never have made a good hermit.

So where is all this headed? College and seminary put me in the ministry, a natural relational experience. My Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees centered in social and theological studies. My religion at that juncture was to do what all my group experience had formed in me. As an ordained minister I was part of a relational organization, had access to the approval of many people and the entry into a potentially sound career.

As far as I can remember my only sense of spiritual reality was either what other people told me about theirs or the stories of ethnic superstition from parental raising. What I knew about God was strictly from technical theological works, listening carefully and accepting what was the ‘approved’ intellectual assessment. As a clergy visitor to patients and staff at a local mental hospital my pastoral approach was psychologically oriented based on my clinical training required during seminary and pastoral counseling courses heavily therapeutic in nature. The only spiritual activity I performed was to do properly read Prayer Book services and make a good impression as I visited members.

It was during this early time a word, a noun, from the social sciences kept popping up, sensitivity. To be sensitive was to be alert to the mental and psychological state of an individual. It actually became a kind of mantra when I was asked how as a clergyman I could explain spiritual words like grace, righteousness, faith, sin and evil so that we could make the Christian faith relevant to the modern mind. I translated all those words into sensitivity terms. First of all, God is the author of sensitivity and Jesus is a righteous, that is, sensitive person. Secondly, righteousness is being sensitive, faith is active sensitivity, sin is being insensitive and evil is compounded insensitivity. Thirdly, the cure is the realization of this quality as the medium of understanding. The more sensitive we are the more human we are. It was simply becoming more and more sensitive.

The Bible became a pick and choose manual of sensitivity. It was more and more of a psychological text that I could manipulate than a spiritual book explaining salvation. In fact salvation was simply the process of discovering the quality of sensitivity and practicing it. Things like Virgin Birth and Resurrection were merely symbols to explain the importance of being sensitive. I was more than ecstatic in my intellectual accomplishment and how others accepted it even though they never took it seriously. I had an insight that superseded the old time religion. I was in control, the truly fatal flaw. It was no longer about sin, the Cross and redemption which can be symbolized, but rather about preaching a gospel of sensitivity, being more and more sensitive. Anyone can do this I thought.

I was doing graduate work in Norway one summer and part of my trip was to Germany where I was invited to a party of staff from the University of Munich. It was in a conversation I had the chance to share this idea and used the word ‘empfindungsfahigkeit’ (Ger.for sensitivity) as a way of giving modern meaning to my idea. Even intellectuals there could be persuaded. I even had a German word to impress people.

This was so much more palatable than those awful fundamentalist ideas of witnessing and giving a personal testimony to faith in Jesus. I was above that kind of thing. It’s one thing to be religious but that kind of personal display is tacky. Oh, what I would later learn from being humbled by the Lord.

As a chaplain in a New England prep school (my wilderness experience) I made a curriculum based on that theme. I remember one of my psychiatrist friends remarking after he had asked me to speak to his Young Life group about sensitivity, “They didn’t know what you were talking about but they liked the way you said it.” I was excited about this discovery and built my personal religion around its explanation which had to be acceptable since it was covered by my clerical collar and seminary education. After all I was in the Episcopal Church, a denomination considered “the roomiest church in Christendom.” New theories and insights made old religion alive. As long as you kept up the traditional liturgies any thinking was acceptable.

I’ve tried to keep this brief in order to look at the way sin can take an experience, define it with a noun and then make it into a system of belief. I took a perfectly good idea of God, the need to be sensitive to others, separated it from God, made it an ideal and it became my idol. So you see we can make our own religion, hide under the umbrella of an old one and feel good as we flaunt our ego banner in the prevailing cultural winds.

There’ll be more on this process in the next few blogs especially in the light of my meeting Jesus Christ who gave me a relationship to replace my religion.