On Adler’s “Religion," Part I

[Commentary on the essays in Felix Adler, Life and Destiny, "Religion," pp. 17-27.]

¶ Religion is a wizard, a sibyl. She faces the wreck of worlds, and prophesies restoration. She faces a sky blood-red with sunset colours that deepen into darkness, and prophesies dawn. She faces death, and prophesies life.

The poetry of this passage is achingly beautiful.  It provides an apt description of the solace that one’s own religious beliefs can provide in times of trial and uncertainty.  Humans are almost always anxious in their inability to see the future and need hope to survive the present moment.  Adler reminds us that religious belief offers hope when we are most fearful.  Whether the hope is realistic or practical is irrelevant.  The emotional need to believe that things might get better, that the crisis might pass, that harm might be averted is deep.  Without hope we can be paralyzed by our fears, unable to think or act in any productive way.  If we can see disaster and hope for restoration, we are more able then to begin the work of restoring.  

So, too, faced with death--for ourselves or for those we care about--the promise of a new life in some other dimension can ease the passage from one state to another.  We face the loss of a parent, but are comforted that our mother has “gone to a better place,” without pain or suffering.  We can see ourselves without her, ourselves transformed into a new role or status (orphan, adult, bereaved), and begin the work of living in ways that include the certainty that our loved one is now safe, our lives no longer directly intertwined or interdependent, our responsibility for care and protection now ended.

While the hope that religion provides is a positive function, Adler labels religion in magical and mythical terms.  A wizard--a magician--is no scientist.  Rather she (as Adler characterizes her) is a deceiver, who distorts our sense of reality with ritual words and artifacts and actions to see what is not there, what did not happen, at least not by the forces and powers represented as active in the event.  A sibyl--an oracle, a fortune teller--is the product of legend and literature.  Also a deceiver, a sibyl, inspired by some supernatural being while in a trance state, predicts the future.  Religion gives us a certain future as a promise from a higher power, but a future from a point in time when we will no longer be able to report the truth of the prediction.

In elegant images, Adler presents us with a clear understanding of the nature of religion as beautiful, comforting, and false.  One wonders if he got carried away with his rhetoric.  Taken alone, this statement would condemn all religion for all time as a mere crutch for the gullible.  Yet we know that Adler was founding a new religion for a new time--one which could even change as its practitioners changed with new knowledge and new experience.  

Ethical Culture is definitely a religion (although not all Ethical Culturists identify themselves as religious). Even in terms of these glowing images prefaced by the names of charlatans, Ethical Culture gives us “restoration,” “dawn,” and “life.”  Restoration, we know, can come in several forms; Ethical Culture invites us to repair and restore our lives, our environment, our community--to build and make better that which time and recklessness and cruelty have damaged.  We are invited to restore our neighbor in her loss so that our own spirit can be restored by sharing the loss as well as the work of repair and renewal.  Dawn comes with each new day and the new knowledge it brings, the new opportunities it presents, the new experiences it dispenses.  Beyond the literal rising of the sun, there is the dawning of understanding as we commit ourselves to learning more about our world, each other, ourselves.  Ethical Culture invites us to new dawns--to see the day as a rich library for the spirit and the mind and to open each hour, as a book, with a will to discover the insights it can provide.  As for life, Ethical Culture allows us to seek our own answers to the question of “What happens after I die?” while it challenges us to use the time until that moment to live life today--mindfully, intentionally, joyful in the moment.  None of these “gifts” of Ethical Culture come with magic or supernatural sanction.  Instead they come from within ourselves and our connection to community.

Adler did condemn religions that are static, frozen in time, unable to meet the demands of change and progress and any new facts of science.  He did not, however, condemn Religion, seeing the human need for hope and having a practical idea for meeting that need in this world, this life.