Sherry Chandler

Spirituality hard-wired?

A day or two ago, a friend sent me a link to this Paul Prather column in the Lexington Herald-Leader.

My girlfriend, Liz, and I were shopping. As I paid for my merchandise, the woman behind the counter said, “Aren’t you the guy who writes that column for the Herald-Leader?”

I said I was.

“I enjoy your work,” she said. “I’m not religious. But I do consider myself spiritual.”

When we’d left the store, Liz said, “People say that to you a lot: ‘I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual.’ What does that mean, exactly?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’ve never really thought about it.

…

So I’m asking for your help. If you have experience with this — if you think of yourself as spiritual but are wary of organized religion, or if you think it’s hard to be genuinely spiritual without joining a church or temple — e-mail me at the address below.

In my next column, two weeks from now, I’ll print several of the more interesting comments I receive. I look forward to hearing your views.

Paul Prather has been writing on religion for the Herald-Leader for many years and in general I admire his work and his way of thinking. Besides, if I remember correctly, he studied with Guy Davenport and I don’t think Davenport suffered fools.

But to tell the truth, I was a little aggravated at my friend for sending the link. I thought there was a metamessage. I get a little oversensitive sometimes. In fact, s/he was probably more interested in Prather’s take on Falwell:

When I heard the Rev. Jerry Falwell had passed away, I recalled how I used to cringe every time I saw him on television.

It wasn’t that I disagreed with everything he said, although I disagreed with much of it. Still, Falwell was a Christian; I’m a Christian. I shared some of his core beliefs.

Occasionally, it wasn’t what he said that irked me as much as the tone in which he said it. I have no idea how he acted behind the scenes, when he was talking with his family, colleagues and parishioners. He might have been the sweetest guy on earth.

But his public persona was that of a narrow man, tightly wound, and — in my perception — convinced of his own righteousness. To me, he sounded angry, self-aggrandizing and dismissive of those who didn’t share his views.

Thus, even when I agreed with his message, I disagreed with its delivery. I didn’t consider him the spokesman for my faith.

I consider myself Christian because that is my cultural tradition.¹ Insofar as I am Christian, I am Southern Baptist because that’s the church my parents took me to as a child. Falwell, on the other hand, was only a Southern Baptist after the Convention took a sharp turn to the right and became politically useful, but that’s another story.²

As far as I know, I’m still a Southern Baptist in good standing: Once saved, always saved. As far as I know, my name is still on the church roll in the church where I was baptized, the church for which my family donated the land, the church my family has attended since its founding before the Civil War.

But though I consider myself culturally Christian, I don’t go to church. I could tell you a lot of stories about not going to church and if you ask me on Wednesday I’ll give you a different answer than I’ll give you today. That’s the way I am about everything. My friends say I’m complex (or was that “I have a complex”?) My Mom says I’m moody. I think I’m simple but what do I know.

But Falwell and his ilk are only indirectly the reason that I don’t go to church. Mostly, it’s because church is answering questions I’m not asking.

I’m agnostic and pretty comfortable with ambiguity. Also I’m was just born iconoclastic. And if pushed, I have to admit that there’s a certain tone that preachers get, be they Protestant or Catholic, that just makes my eyes glaze over. It’s sort of like a bad poetry reading.

If you want any deeper thoughts, you might find them in my poetry.

So I wasn’t over-interested in Prather’s question and had just planned to ignore it as making much out of people’s general impulse to please the preacher-man. But then I stumbled on this article about brain research in the Washington Post, and I remembered Prather’s question:

The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.

…

Grafman and others are using brain imaging and psychological experiments to study whether the brain has a built-in moral compass. The results — many of them published just in recent months — are showing, unexpectedly, that many aspects of morality appear to be hard-wired in the brain, most likely the result of evolutionary processes that began in other species.

…

The more researchers learn, the more it appears that the foundation of morality is empathy. Being able to recognize — even experience vicariously — what another creature is going through was an important leap in the evolution of social behavior. And it is only a short step from this awareness to many human notions of right and wrong, says Jean Decety, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago.

So if people say they’re spiritual, it may be because they’re wired that way.

As for why they aren’t religious, well, religious is a word with several definitions. Or maybe the church is answering questions they’re not asking.³

¹Which is not to say that I think the United States was founded by Christians for Christians. Nevertheless, the overall culture of the West has been Christian for more than a thousand years. And my little corner of Western Civ is rather seriously Protestant Christian.

²See The Evangelical Surprise at the New York Review of Books for a consideration of evangelicism and politics today.

³Though, on a serious note, I will say that the whole question is probably a bit more complicated than making the pretty lights go off on the fMRI machine and I don’t think spiritual leaders are in danger of being run out of business quite yet. It’s worth reading the whole WaPo article:

Why is it that people who are willing to help someone in front of them will ignore abstract pleas for help from those who are distant, such as a request for a charitable contribution that could save the life of a child overseas?

“We evolved in a world where people in trouble right in front of you existed, so our emotions were tuned to them, whereas we didn’t face the other kind of situation,” Greene said. “It is comforting to think your moral intuitions are reliable and you can trust them. But if my analysis is right, your intuitions are not trustworthy. Once you realize why you have the intuitions you have, it puts a burden on you” to think about morality differently.

In war, of course, the first thing propagandists must do is objectify the enemy. Chris Hedges, in War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, gives many examples of this phenomenon but he also gives many examples of individuals who do heroic kindnesses for other individuals, even though they are officially enemies. He makes many a plea for love and empathy.

Possibly related posts:

Freedom from a State Religion

Bill McKibben

The Emerging Church

Public faith (with Romney)

The Pope and Politics

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.