One of the things Joe and I discussed on this week’s show was redeeming the word ‘religion’, helped by a listener who wrote in that ‘I’ve actually started to use the word ‘religion’ again… At its best, religion and religious communities can teach and empower us to become truly human and leave behind our selfish survival traits.’
I think this is absolutely true. ‘Religion’ is a tarnished word, stained by centuries of abuse, hypocrisy and cruelty. But human beings are religious beings to their core. We love rituals, feasts, ceremonies and we look for symbols and meaning everywhere. Even if we have no professed faith, we are, in the broadest sense, deeply religious.
The etymology of the word ‘religion’ is obscure, but it is probably connected to the Latin ligare - to bind. 1 ‘Religion’ in that sense, is something which connects us to each other, certainly, and, perhaps, to our wider society and culture. But it also connects us to something greater than ourselves: to mystery, to wonder, to God.
Here’s a bit from my book on Christmas:
The oldest man-made structure in the world is . . . well, actually, it’s a bit of a wall somewhere in Greece, but the oldest man-made structure that is more interesting than a wall is a temple in south-eastern Turkey, at a place called Göbleki Tepe, which means, rather wonderfully, Potbelly Hill. Between eleven thousand and twelve thousand years ago - six thousand years before Stonehenge - human beings worshipped there, had feasts there (archaeologists have discovered caches of animal bones) and found their thrill at Potbelly Hill. So we have a long relationship with worship. Religion and ritual keep us in touch with the mysterious, whether you’re talking about a prehistoric hunter-gatherer hoping that the sun will come back, a Christian kneeling at the communion rail at midnight mass, or an atheist preparing the traditional Christmas roast and wearing his new hilariously tasteless Christmas jumper. 2
We are wonderfully and marvellously made. There is mystery at our core.
Every day, everywhere, all around the world people do terrible things in the name of religion. They also do wonderful things as well. Banning the word won’t change that. And the idea that we will ever be non-religious beings seems to me to fly in the face of literally thousands of years of history.