One True Religion: One True Symphony

    Early experiences pose questions that it may take a lifetime to answer--

    I was a teenager suffering from the realization that my childhood religion was not based on real evidence—particularly heaven and the blessed assurance of it—when my father said, “I’m a Christian because my father was and he was the best man I’ve ever known.” I listened respectfully but was secretly irate. This was nonsense. How could any sane person imagine that one good person proved the truth of a system of theology? Was Papa Green an infallible seer? I didn’t think so. I was hungry for real evidence, desperate for something to cover the abyss of unknowing I was dangling over like Jonathan Edward’s spider—not suspended by an angry God, but abandoned by an absent one. Papa Green’s exemplary life proved zip. I knew this in the pride of teenage reason, and I was right, at least as I had posed the question.

    A few years later when I was a young adult, my parents took me back to my mother’s old home place, a farm abandoned since her parents died, and, a little way down the road, we came to a tight little Jim Walters house with a light in the window, a TV antenna on the roof, and an old car in front. They said it was Can’s place. I remembered Can from childhood. In exchange for helping out my grandparents, he had lived with a big wife and half-naked children an old shell of a house up the road—the same house where Can’s father Jerry had lived fifty years earlier. Can caught rides to day labor at the sawmill and drank up most of his pay. When I was a child visiting, I recall him at the back door begging for food. He was like family, but a black sheep. “What happened?” I asked Mother ten years later in front of the Jim Walters, and she answered in three words: “Can got religion.” The puzzle is this: how does “religion” explain Can’s doing what any atheist therapist would have advised him to do--quit drinking, get a steady job, and bring home the money. Electric lights, Ed Sullivan, and a Ford were the rewards of piety.

    I recently read a definition of religion that I’ll paraphrase as “a collective means of addressing the transcendent, along with accompanying rituals, customs, stories, and beliefs.” This says nothing about truth in any objective sense (if there is such a thing), and I take particular note of the word collective. If there were such a thing as a purely private religion, we wouldn’t know about it. Even St. Anthony, the great hermit saint, got his inspiration from a scripture read in church and was visited and fed by coreligionists. Essential to the conversion of Can must have been a church of supportive brothers and sisters—something like a rural AA—an extended family where a sense of a higher power gave overarching meaning to the sober life. It’s well and good to know you ought to “do right,” but, without the sense of a meaning bigger than himself, Can must have been powerless before his addiction. He must have for years said (to paraphrase Augustine), “Make me sober, but not yet."

    Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916-2000), a Canadian Islamicist and Presbyterian minister whose observations on the history of religion deserve more widespread attention, describes Islam in a way that may apply to all religious systems. The Islamic world-view, he says, serves as “a pattern for ordering the data of observation, not as among the data to be ordered.” It is structure, not content. “It is in the light of the total system that every word, every proposition, made within it has whatever meaning it has. And not only propositions, but things. Islam is not an item in the pattern of a Muslim’s life. Rather, it is the name of that pattern into which all the items of his life cohere. If a Muslim loses his faith, nothing in his life may change except that the various elements in it no longer cohere into a pattern, are no longer meaningful” (p. 25). 

    To believe is to commit oneself to a grand pattern, to structure your life on the basis of it. Daddy lived a structured and successful life by adopting his father’s religion, and Can similarly recovered from poverty and addiction, but there is a paradox here. It is necessary “believe” in the sense of accepting the system as a life-structuring truth—as true but in a sense that need not involve believing that its elements are individually supported by evidence. A life-preserver that, in fact, supports a drowning man, is clung to regardless of its history and composition. Religious belief, Smith suggests, is an oath of fealty--a heartfelt commitment, not an assertion of fact--and the life-changing benefits of the oath may be accepted post hoc as valid proofs, reasons enough to have sworn the oath and to continue to honor it.

   During senior high and the early years of college, four of us used to gather in Lynn Stalnaker’s finished attic to solve all the world’s problems, and I recall his saying once that, though he still attended Episcopal services, he left out the parts of the creed that he didn’t believe. I think he mentioned the virgin birth. Even at the time, I found this absurd. If you’re going to profess a “God the Father Almighty” who created everything and became flesh as his son two thousand years ago, you’re already in too deep to balk at a triviality like a virgin birth. I mean as an element within the system, that is, not as a historic fact, improbable as it is. If you remove odd parts from an engine because you don't fancy them, it may stop running. The grand old Nicene Creed--product of nasty quarrels with a handful of heresies--is like sausage. You may not want to know how it was made, but it is, after all, a structure that has nourished Western civilization for a thousand years. Play it like a symphony, and you might be able to hear that overarching structure that gave generations meaning but which may have little to do with the piecemeal factuality of its elements.

    Religious systems are at heart figurative, and the figures combine to a grand effect much as notes do in music. A wrong note in one key is right in another. It's all about what comes before or after. As Miles Davis said, "There are no wrong notes in jazz: only notes in the wrong places." Similarly, Wilfred Cantwell Smith says that it is a misunderstanding of language to regard a freestanding proposition as categorically true or false outside of its context, including the ideology and time in which it was written. "No proposition has meaning in itself" but rather "they mean (or have meant) within the system in which they are used" and can only be judged as true or false within that system (p. 26). A proposition relocated to a foreign context is changed.

    If a writer before Galileo references the earth as the center of the universe, that is merely the cosmology of his day--for him, scientific fact going back to the classical Greeks. Whatever his argument is, centuries later he would presumably couch it in heliocentric terms. Classical cosmology is not a personal belief, but rather a "factual" prop to drape the real content over. The geocentric prop is the only prop a medieval theologian has, and it is certainly not a personal error on a his part, not unless we expect him to foresee the future. Within his system, his cosmology is true, and we should make allowance for that, reading his argument in context and not faulting him for not being a greater seer than Nostradamus. It is the height of naivety to expect a writer of the past to transcend his time while we remain trapped in our own.

    The same applies in spades to the creed my friend was reciting, written in Greek by a committee sixteen centuries ago using concepts of pagan philosophy centuries older, translated into Latin and then English, and aimed against contemporary "heresies" that only theology students can name today. It is an antique from a profoundly alien context and cannot be rightly understood outside of that context. In our present era, understanding it requires weeks or years of study. This said, the gist of the creed echoes down centuries like music, and reciting it is clearly something akin to a marriage ceremony, an oath of commitment to a church that was, is, and will be. It is an act of solidarity with the Body of Christ. But such an effect does not reside in the veracity of individual sentences, many of which are couched in such obsolete philosophical terms that--like the geocentric universe--they are nonsense or error today.

    A religious system--particularly one validated by millions of adherents over hundreds of years--is best understood as a whole, as a galaxy of insights, an indeterminate number of them ballast and free-floating metaphors, one part balancing another lest the system wobble apart. Consider the Calvinist doctrine, "once saved, always saved," which is nonsense unless balanced by the proviso that people who seem to have been saved and then later become notorious sinners weren't really saved after all. This throws the question of salvation into an indeterminate realm of "God only knows" (the "saved" may be damned) and in practice it means exactly the same thing the doctrine that the truly saved may "backslide" and lose the gift of grace.  

    Cutting off the top of the blanket and sewing it onto the bottom doesn't change the blanket's length. 1+1=3-1. Two seemingly opposite movements may end up the same place within the context of their systems. A harmonious note in Calvin's key is dissonant in Wesley's, but the two transpose one tune. More radically, Krishna the avatar of Brahman and Jesus the incarnation of Yahweh may be equivalent, a possibility testable only by practicing the two systems--an understanding may entail years of ceremonial and communal participation. Symphonies must be performed, not just looked at.

    I would suggest that two religious systems may both be the "one true religion" in the same sense that two "parity products" may both be advertised as "best." Beer is a parity product. It is sold in many varieties--high or low alcohol, strong or mild in flavor, dark or light in color--but there's no objective standard to determine that one beer is "better" than another. My brother-in-law only drinks Budweiser. I tolerate Bud if it's very cold and I'm thirsty, but I don't buy it except when he visits. I lean toward IPA's and stouts. Some people call Colt 45 "best" because it delivers more buzz for the buck. Best is whatever you prefer. This leads to the paradox that there are as many "bests" as there are products that can't be proved to be "better." If two horses finish nose-to-nose in a race, both are the fastest, but neither of them is faster. Neither is "better," but both are "best." 

    I read "one true religion" (as spoken by an individual adherent) to indicate one of the one-or-more winners of a photo finish. More particularly, it indicates the religion that the speaker has tried and prefers. It works for her. All the others may seem strange and nonsensical. They may repel her as coffee stout repels my brother-in-law. But, with religion as with beer, millions dislike what she adores, and as satisfying as her religious experience may be to her--as one-and-only as my brother-in-law's Budweiser--she is trapped (as we all are) in her own subjectivity. She has no basis for denigrating "one-true" experiences in others. She cannot know that her religion, even if "best" for her, is objectively better.

                     Work Cited

Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. Belief and History. U P of Virginia, 1977.