To the Spiritual but not Religious

I think Fred from England was speaking for millions of the “spiritual but not religious” when he wrote: 

I think my wife and I are in a very similar place to you - with one significant difference:  We are not Christians.  We cannot see any way that Christianity can be ‘progressed’ or ‘reimagined’ given its core commitment to its sin management theology, plus the deification of Jesus and the distortion of him, a Jewish man, into the founder of the Christian church that has persecuted the Jews at differing levels down the centuries.

I label myself as 'a human being', no more, no less.  If pressed I would add ‘a panentheist’ or more non-theologically ‘a spiritual humanist’.”

It's fascinating that you feel so confident, Fred, that Christianity just can't be reimagined.  I say that because that's just where all this began for me.  I too felt that it was just irretrievable... before it wasn't.  I was a diehard spiritual but not religious type, a meditator of many years and definitely a panentheist.  My first books included talk about panentheism.  While everything you say is true of elements of church history, what I've found in the more liberal wing of the churches is a reasonably liberal community home, one that doesn't talk at all about sin, doesn't deify Jesus, isn't anti semitic and all the rest.  A sane world indeed!  

Christianity Reimagined notes just your response early on.  It says right up front, "I am very conscious that I’m swimming against a powerful cultural current. Among educated people—especially the liberal and perhaps the “spiritual but not religious”— respect for Christianity has plummeted. With all the misogyny, pedophilia and antisemitism of much of the institution, with all the judgmental, anti-intellectual and self-righteous “Christian Nationalists’” and with all the institution’s crusades, witch hunts and heresy trials, one can’t help but wonder how anyone could explore such an institution without gagging?"

So I write to folks like you, knowing how deep and well-deserved is your antagonism towards religious institutions, especially the Christian one. 

I know first hand how difficult it would be for you to even consider exploring any of it.  But once I saw my way clear to doing so, I have found that it has been a great adjunct to my panentheistic meditative worldview, experience and life.  It has lent me an emotional welcoming of other people, a nearly kinesthetic sense of the Vast Panentheist Reality, and a more visceral sense of "something more" than my meditation life ever brought.  While I have had deep emotional reactions to the Episcopal ritual, even tears week after week, I never once wept with my meditative life nor in any of my spiritual gatherings.  My brother in law, a Quaker, tells me that their gatherings, while settling and sometimes interesting, also tend to be emotionally quite dry.  Whereas the church experience has been for me quite "wet!" and satisfying, both in terms of mutual support and its reminders to notice gratitude and to feel love.  I think we threw out an enormously important baby when we tossed the bathwater of the institutional "religions."   

We've all learned about the failures of the tradition.  God knows they've been legion!  The one thing I'd ask you to consider is that the tradition is 2000 years old.  Any tradition of that length will inevitably go through age after flawed age of man's inhumanity to man (or women), changing notions of science (many ridiculous and flawed) and very different  ideas of what's psychologically therapeutic.  Any tradition of such longevity will inevitably have a pockmarked history!  Perhaps we can forgive it some of its history. 

Fred, you asked for a book recommendation for a non Christian.   Honestly, if you're willing to look at your well-practiced animus towards this 2000 year old tradition and be just a smidgeon willing to reconsider that, I'd ask you to read Christianity Reimagined.  It is written, as the subtitle says, both for those who doubt, and for people like you who are dubious of the whole enterprise.