Question: Isn’t, “I’m spiritual but not religious,” saying something like, “I love communication; I’m just not that into language?”

I realize that this is probably going to unnecessarily hack off some people who ordinarily like some of the things I say. But, it seems important to talk through anyway.

Talk. This is an apt place to begin. Talking, after all, occupies a central role in human social life. We can live in <em>community</em> because we <em>communicate</em>. It is perhaps literarily inelegant of me to point to the etymological connection between the two words–both come from from the Latin, <em>communis</em>, meaning common–but elegance is sometimes a casualty in the pursuit of intelligibility. In order to live together, we hold certain things in common (e.g., language systems, expectations of social relationships, the knowledge of a hierarchy of basic human needs, etc.).

Signs and gestures, for instance, must exist within a system of signification that relies on common understanding for society to function. Put more simply, if everybody gets to pull up to a stop sign and interpret its meaning, the act of driving will have been rendered impossible. Or, if you smile and pat my toddler on the head, and I interpret that as a threat, my attacking you will put a serious tear in the social fabric. We hold certain expectations that our gestures, our words, will be, if not immediately unambiguous, then at least within an acceptable and bounded range of possible interpretations. It would be difficult to imagine a scenario, for example, in which I interpreted being flipped off at a stoplight as an invitation to take tea.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, who famously drew attention to language as a central feature of our knowing, argued that there could be no such thing as a private language:
<blockquote>Why can’t my right hand give my left hand money? My right hand can put it into my left hand. My right hand can write a deed of gift and my left hand a receipt. – But the further practical consequences would not be those of the gift. When the left hand has taken the money from the right one, etc., we shall ask,“Well, and what of it?” And the same could be asked if a person had given himself a private definition of a word; I mean, if he has said that word to himself and at the same time has directed his attention to a sensation (<em>Philosophical Investigations</em>," #268, G. E. M. Anscombe).</blockquote>
Spirituality, as it functions for many people in the phrase “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR), is thought to be an intensely private experience. But if spirituality is to be accounted more than just a sensation, it has to be named and described–if only to myself. Otherwise, how do I distinguish it from the myriad sensations I feel throughout the course of the day? How do I know this peace is a “spiritual” peace, and not just the sort of peace I might feel after the kids have gone to bed and my life quiets down for a moment? How can I tell if this euphoria is elicited in response to some mystical experience and not the euphoria that falls upon me, seemingly from out of nowhere? Where do I come to know that spirituality is even a taxonomical possibility? The answer is that I cannot “know” any of this without talking to myself about the experience, giving it a name, categorizing it as <em>this</em>rather than <em>that</em>. But the very act of talking to myself about spirituality is, at its heart, impossible without the language I inherit from some community. In other words, I can’t<em>know</em> much of anything beyond my basic animal needs (hunger, thirst, sexual desire, etc.) until I receive the words to name things–my inner life included. In fact, it is arguable whether there is anything like an “inner life” without the language necessary to make it intelligible to myself.

I would like to suggest, then, that religion functions as a language system for spiritual experience. Religion, of course, is much more than that; and I suspect it is the “much more than that” aspect of it against which people who claim to be SBNR react. My sense of people’s negative reaction to religion is that it has more to do with the way religious people sometimes act or with the way religious groups organize themselves (or fail to organize themselves) than with the language those religions seek to apply to experience of the divine. SBNR is often a response to hypocrisy (viz., the feeling of disillusionment upon witnessing one person's failure to live out what that person proclaims) or a response to something perceived to be static or overbearing (e.g., tradition or dogma).

Point taken. Religions repel, often as quickly as they attract.

Religions at their best, though, attempt to offer a common vocabulary, a community of interpretation by which people can make sense of the spiritual; they are a way to organize experiences that would otherwise manifest as sensations or urges, and in the process to offer language through which to make those experiences intelligible–both to others, as well as to one’s self. In other words, religions function like language systems.

And if I’m right about the similarity between religion and language systems, it occurs to me to press the case further by applying Wittgenstein to spiritual experience: In the same way that there can be no such thing as a private language, there can be no such thing as a purely private spirituality.

Notice I said that “there can be no such thing as a <em>purely</em> private spirituality.” I don’t want to be misunderstood to be suggesting that spirituality isn’t an intensely <em>personal</em> thing. Spiritual experience is most decidedly a personal thing–by which I mean, spiritual experience cannot <em>but</em> be filtered through the many layers that make up who I am. However, because the very layers that make up who I am were not necessarily chosen by me in isolation, but were formed communally, by its very nature my interpretation of spiritual experience is, if only indirectly, a communal achievement. That is to say, by definition my interpretation of my spiritual experience can never be hermetically sealed off from the repository of communal interpretative language that allowed me to identify the experience (from a list of other experiential options) as “spiritual” in the first place.
<h2 id="sowhat">So what?</h2>
Ah, yes. So what? Do I honestly think that someone who self-identifies as SBNR is going to read this and come away convinced that “Lone Ranger” spirituality is an epistemological red-herring?

No. I realize that people are going to believe what they believe without seeking approval from me.

So, why make a big deal out of it–since mostly what you’re doing is making people mad?

Here’s why: I want to encourage people who find themselves already in the framework of a religion, but who feel somehow like they have to apologize for it. Religion has become (and often for very good reasons) a dirty word.

When I teach <em>Introduction to Religion</em> in the university, I sometimes begin one of the classes with the question: Would you consider yourself a) Spiritual but not Religious, b) Spiritual<em> and</em> Religious, c) Religious but not Spiritual, or d) Neither?

Students typically answer with a), b), or d); nobody ever chooses c). Interestingly enough, however, they often claim to <em>know</em> a lot of people who are “Religious but not Spiritual”–which they believe equates to a sort of dead ritualism. There exists in our culture a spiritual/religious binary, in which spirituality is always privileged over “organized” religion. As I’ve argued, however, this binary is a false one inasmuch as it relies on a definition of “private” spirituality versus “organized” religion, which fails to understand the linguistic relationship of interdependence between the two.

So, my purpose in writing is to rehabilitate the notion of “Religious but not Spiritual” as a communal alternative to the potential solipsism of SBNR. Religion, on my account, is a necessary precondition for spirituality to be intelligible, to be named and known.

Now, I wouldn’t want to be in the position of defending every form of organization, or every tradition, or every scrap of dogma. My criticisms of each of those things are extensive. However, those things, in and of themselves, aren’t antithetical to spirituality. Indeed, if I’m right, spirituality can’t properly exist without them.

So, if you’re on the inside of a religion, be vigilant against the things that give people such a bad taste in their mouths about religion, but don’t apologize for belonging to a community that provides the very words people need to talk about spirituality.

I think Wittgenstein would approve.

<em>Photo Credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/faceme/" target="_blank">FaceMe</a></em>