Context for Comments on Adler's "Religion"

I should have written a context post to explain my commentary on Felix Adler's statements in "Religion," a collection of bon mots from his various lectures published in Life and Destiny in 1908.  Ethical Culture Leader Randy Best is now (December 2020) leading a seminar (Fundamentals of Ethical Culture) focusing on Life and Destiny.  I joined with 20-odd others to participate in the first session this week, and "Religion" was one of the two collections of quotations that we discussed.

The quotations collected are from Adler's early career as an Ethical Culture Leader and do not necessarily reflect his views as he developed as a Leader and philosopher.  These early thoughts were, nonetheless, sufficient to spark a movement that grew both in the US and abroad.  Reading them, I found much to inspire--and some to argue with.  

As a comparative neophyte in Ethical Culture, I have developed some understanding of what EC is about at the same time I recognize that my own experiences and personal history affect and inform that understanding.  I have, while neglecting this blog in the busy-ness of working within my own Society and the American Ethical Union, continued to read and study various writings that reflect the history and development of EC.  

Two things have now converged to inspire me to write again:  This seminar and the resurrection of the Ethical Humanist Study Group.  The seminar has been a pleasure, allowing for discussion among several individuals dedicated to learning more about its topic.  The stimulus of Adler's writing could happily lead us into hours of discussion.  Unfortunately, after two hours, we must part ways and go back to our lives. I found myself reluctant to do so.  I wasn't through thinking about these quotations.  Lacking the opportunity for further discussion in the seminar, I felt a strong pressure to begin writing about what I was thinking.  I publish my thoughts here in the hope of some further dialogue.  

I can't honestly say that I will return to regular blogging now or that I will "respond" to each and every one of Adler's statements in Life and Destiny or even in this particular section on Religion.  I do, however, think that I will try to write as many responses as I can because it helps me clarify my thoughts and is, above all, a means to learn more about Ethical Culture.

EHSG starts on December 20.  I have "challenged" my partner in this work, Jasmine Morris, to write complementary essays on what we learn/discover/think as we go through our syllabus.  She's a fine writer and a keen thinker, so that will be an interesting complement to our study.

Oh, and one more thing.  After four years in Ethical Culture, I look back at this blog, as brief as its existence has been, with some pride.  I am not so thrilled with the title.  I cannot without a great deal of effort change the URL, so I am stuck with "hoedown" for the foreseeable future.  I did change the title to be more reflective of present circumstances:  I am even more of a happy human than ever; I hope I am more Ethical.

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.  

Being in harmony with nature

I'm looking for information about Sustainable Development Goal #1 (End Poverty) to work on a project for small societies in AEU.  As always, when I start dinking around on the internet, I find side paths and assorted rabbit trails that lead me in other directions.  This is never a bad thing as far as I am concerned.

Today I stumbled across Harmony with Nature.  The first thing that struck me was the image of the solar system with the planets in motion.  It's mesmerizing.  It is also humbling to see the scale so graphically and realize how small we are just in terms of our own solar system.  The image label is fairly direct as well:

The solar system reminds us that, just as the Earth is not at the center of the Universe, neither are we humans the center of the Earth.  We, along with the rest of the natural world, are all interconnected within the larger web of life.

Harmony with Nature is framed by the perspective that Nature itself has an inherent right to exist, to thrive, and to evolve.  This requires a non-anthropocentric relationship between humans and Nature, given our "shared existence on this planet."  Earth Jurisprudence, the legal provisions that recognize the rights of Nature, is beginning to point to one of those rights as the right to well-being.

This is a new line of thought for me, but it fits very well into my current study of the relationship between religion and the environment.  It appears to be a secular statement of the way in which our attitude toward the land beneath our feet supports/determines/reflects the way in which we treat that land.

Although I didn't initially find what I was looking for in regard to poverty, serendipity worked in my favor today to move me along the path to a clearer understanding about the relationship between the reality that we humans construct and the reality that is.  We can quibble and argue about how much we, as humans, can really see of reality.  After all, we are limited by our human senses and what our brain then makes of what we sense.  Somewhere beyond the quibble, I believe, there is a concrete reality--a material universe--which we interpret in various ways.

One of the ways we in the Western world have interpreted that reality is to think--and then act as if--the world is ours to do with as we wish.  It is ours to own, to make use of, to modify, to destroy.  Sometimes we justify that with the notion that we were given the right to do so by a deity.  Sometimes we justify that with the sure belief that we have the right of might (and science)--as long as we have the technology to reshape the planet and exploit it for our needs--why not?

Now perhaps we should look at human law (a human construct) and natural law (the final judge of our existence).  Then perhaps we can consider reshaping human law to take into account the strength of natural law--the law that turns rain to acid and wind to destructive storms and green valleys to dust bowls.  As Ethical Humanists we trust in the goodness and respect the worth of all human beings.  We do not base our understanding of what is good, what is right, what is moral on laws given by supernatural hand.  Nature, however, is an immensity that, I think, we ignore and disrespect at our peril.  We won't, after all, destroy the planet, no matter how hard we try, but we can make it uninhabitable for humans.  Perhaps human law should make it clear that violating Nature's laws puts us all in jeopardy.

Holey, holey, holey

That's part of the title of an article by Michael Schulson posted on Religion Dispatches.  The other part is:  "The Problem with a New Study Valuing Religion at $1.2 Trillion Per Year."  Schulson is referring to an article by Brian J. and Melissa E. Grim, entitled "The Socio-economic Contribution of Religion to American Society: An Empirical Analysis," published in Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion.  The Grims' article has made quite the media splash without a great deal of push back on its methodology, its purpose, or its conclusions.  Schulson undertakes some push back on all counts.

The abstract of the Grims' article includes some striking notions:

". . . the first documented quantitative national estimates of the economic value of religion to U.S. society. . . . the revenues of faith-based organizations, is $378 billion annually – or more than a third of a trillion dollars. . . . undervaluation because it focuses on annual revenues . . . Our second mid-range estimate [provides] an estimate of the fair market value of goods and services provided by religious organizations, and [includes] the contribution of businesses with religious roots. This mid-range estimate puts the value of religion to U.S. society at over $1 trillion annually. . . . Finally, we discuss the limitations of this study and suggest several possible lines of research that could build upon and extend this research." [Emphasis added.]

I have chopped away at the abstract for space, but it provides a clear enough window into the Grims' study for our purposes here--to look at and expand on Schulson's analysis.

Here are some thoughts on Schulson's thoughts:

• Word.  Data have been selected.  The methodology may be a step above WAG (wild-ass guess), but it is at least biased.  As Schulson points out, the choice of "businesses with religious roots" seems somewhat capricious. He does not press, however, the emphasis on Abrahamic religions and failure to recognize offshoots of Eastern religions, such as the booming businesses based in yoga.  Perhaps the Grims are guilty of the same myopia that allows the cultural appropriation of yoga for secular fitness programs in disregard of its religious and philosophical origins.  Perhaps some of the choices are related to a bigger agenda which discounts religions with a smaller presence in the US.
• If the purpose of the article is to show the economic value of religion in the American economy, it fails, as Schulson rightfully points out, to balance the monetary contributions with the social and economic consequences of the businesses and religious organizations that should be subtracted from that awesome total before one can say one has truly found the bottom line. Schulson singles out Walmart*, the largest of the "businesses with religious roots" and a behemoth in the American economy.  He points out that Walmart, for all its gross sales, costs the American public in funds spent to subsidize the health and welfare of Walmart employees--enough to whittle down their "contribution" to the economy quite substantially.  Schulson, perhaps for lack of space, fails, however, to point out that Walmart also costs communities where it out-competes the smaller mom and pop businesses that had long anchored the centers of small towns all over the country.  What cost to local economies in jobs and taxes?  What cost to local communities in, well, community?
• Why do this study?  Schulson follows up on some questions regarding purpose, the answers to which largely seem to be on the order of:  Gee, we make a valuable contribution to the American economy!  I think there may be more to the study than simply serving up another version of Little Jack Horner.  When I first encountered reports of the Grim study I felt there was something more ominous, something more in the line of threat implied in the research.  Perhaps it was the copy editor's headline, which I have now lost track of, that gave that sense of oppression, but my first reaction was that this whole study was intended to communicate intimidation.  The implied message--enhanced by the exaggerated "value" that came from adding in "businesses with religious roots"--seemed to me to be that religion, particularly America's favored versions of religion, were so essential to the economy, being practically its very backbone, that any falling away from religious belief (and action) would bring economic disaster for all of us.  It is as if the author's were saying:  "See?  Religion runs this country."

Perhaps I am making too much of this study.  Or, perhaps the Grims do have a devious motive in creating such a grossly inflated statement of the economic relevance of religion-related expenditures.  As it is, I think we would all do well to look for some perspective on how religion should be considered in the context of American society.  Shrilly asserting dominance isn't what I would consider a useful perspective.  Unless, of course, we flip it and argue that everything that is not included in the Grims' study as part of religion's economic contribution to the American economy must therefore be secular and not religious.  $1.16 billion vs $17.9 billion (estimates, of course) is big, but not dominant.  Just saying.

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*  Yes, I am still a Walmart shopper, as I have explained before (see also Comments).