I was the guy in college who was a little bit too into spirituality. I took the try-anything approach and would show up for just about any kind of meditation class or alternative spirituality event I could find. Then I’d come back to my dorm room and talk my roommate’s ear off about it.

My friend Jim down the hall was more of the practical sort, a psychology student who was consistently on the dean’s list. One day when we were hanging out, he threw into the conversation—presenting it as a statement of fact—that there was nothing more dangerous in the world than organized religion.

Panic swept through me when he said that. Could my smartest friend be talking about the kind of spirituality stuff that I was so obsessed with? But then I remembered one of my own guiding principles: I was spiritual but not religious. Jim was talking about something totally different: religion. So, I affirmed his point and moved confidently along with the conversation.

The word “religion” is a dirty word in many people’s vocabularies today. When you say the word to secular-minded folks, you can often see them become physically tense and only relax again when you say something negative about the subject.

This is not at all surprising given religion’s track record in the past. Being a Gentile Christian with European heritage, I will only speak about my own group and say that there are many deeply uncomfortable truths about the past actions of our communities. Many of the most painful of those have to do with the history of antisemitism.

On a smaller scale, religion in individual communities can also become a system of overbearing rules and meaningless activities. It can function as a set of motions you go through because some authority figure says you have to—or because you want to twist God’s arm into blessing you.

Certainly, my friend Jim was correct in his assessment.

But even aside from all that, people today take issue with religion because of the way it clashes with so many modern values. We like to style ourselves as free thinkers who deal in facts (the fresher the better), rather than receiving our opinions from ancient dogmas. To the modern secular mind, religion seems like a group-think club for people who can’t let go of outdated beliefs and customs.

So naturally, those of us who are still open to believing in transcendent reality will often start our spiritual journeys by rejecting those old religious ideas of the past. That is what I very studiously tried to do in high school and college. I put together a highly personalized set of beliefs and practices that were drawn from a wide variety of sources—everything from New Age to existentialism to pop philosophy (there is no spoon?).

Religions can feel stodgy and oppressive—and as boring as watching paint dry.

In contrast to this kind of personal spirituality, the word religion usually refers to a more institutional approach to faith. Religions have established doctrines, traditions, buildings, symbols, and even the professional credentialing of leaders. They can feel stodgy and oppressive—and as boring as watching paint dry. Spirituality, it would seem, is far simpler and more engaging.

So, I understand the problems with religion. And I know well the promise of spirituality as an alternative. But (much to my own consternation) I’ve slowly discovered over the last 20 years that a truly spiritual life is not possible without religion. Let me show you why.

When Spirituality Falls Short

My journey toward embracing religion (of the organized variety) came in the context of two seasons of upheaval in my life.

The first came during college when I hit rock bottom in my quest for a New-Age-style spiritual awakening. After what had seemed like a good start in my freshman year, the next two years were rocky. My spirituality-for-one beliefs and practice were not bringing me closer to the transcendent.

Spirituality is not an anything-goes discipline.

Part of the problem was intellectual. Even though spirituality explores things that are mysterious and sometimes paradoxical, it’s not an anything-goes discipline. It still needs to have some coherence to meet the basic standards of a belief system. But the deeper I got into alternative spirituality, the less consistency I found.

I noticed that although my spiritual friends, teachers, and I were quite studious in seeking new ideas out, we never submitted those big ideas to rigorous cross-examination. We didn’t stop to notice that the big idea we just gleaned from Buddhism this week was fundamentally at odds with the idea we’d poached from Existentialism the week before.

The other key part of the problem was moral. I prided myself on being a deeply moral person. I would even humble brag about my moral integrity and the deep personal spirituality that informed my worldview. But all that supposed morality was no match for the usual temptations of American college life.

After an escalating series of moral failures, I could no longer maintain my illusions of spiritual uprightness. Somehow my stated beliefs had been no match for my hidden heart desires.

These realizations opened me up to going in a very different direction. As the shine wore off of my spirituality-for-one worldview, the big bad wolf of organized religion started to look more like a sheep dog. It was dangerous still, but dangerous because it had something to protect. And if I came into its fold—specifically the Christian fold that I had assiduously avoided—it might protect me too.

Through a series of unexpected events and a powerful spiritual encounter with Jesus in reading the Gospel of Matthew, I was shocked to find myself as a new Christian at the start of my senior year of college.

In Jesus and the Bible, I found the intellectual consistency and credibility that my previous spirituality had been missing. And I also found a new connection with God that was unlike anything I’d ever felt in my most transcendental moments of meditation. Not only was it a potent experience, but it had a traction in my moral life that my earlier spirituality never had. I saw myself being slowly shaped into the better kind of person that I had always known I ought to be.

The New Anti-Religious Idea

Suddenly, I was becoming both more religious and more spiritual than I’d ever been before. But in the culture of the first church I landed in, I also found a new kind of anti-religion sentiment.

Religion was defined as the outward trappings humans do to try to earn God’s favor.

Our church was a very weird place, made weirder because everyone in it seemed so normal. We were a racially diverse group of mostly college-educated professionals in West Los Angeles. There were artists and lawyers and doctors and a few too many aspiring screenwriters—everyone hiply dressed in the casual LA fashion (trying-really-hard-to-look-like-you-didn’t-try). We were the kind of people you might run into at the Starbucks on Wilshire. But here we were in a rented high school auditorium happily digging into hard-hitting Bible teaching about sin and repentance and singing catchy rock songs about Jesus (each with an obligatory sick guitar solo).

For our community, religion was defined as the outward trappings that humans do to try to earn God’s favor. We were set right with God by trusting Him alone, so any attempt to try to earn that for ourselves would be not just fruitless but counterproductive—the antithesis of true faith.

And so naturally, we treated the more obviously thickly religious parts of historical Christian practice (like liturgical prayers or communal fasts or anything that was redolent of Catholicism) with a high level of suspicion.

Merely thinking about what Jesus had done for me didn’t get much traction.

The problem was that after a few years under this teaching, I found the fires of my initial excitement about Jesus were fading. I was trying to grow a robust spiritual life with God through intellectual study of the Bible and the simple faith prayers of my heart—but it wasn’t working. Merely thinking about what Jesus had done for me didn’t get much traction with my distractible mind or my tendency to fall back into old bad habits.

Finding My Religion

At that time, I was in the midst of a master’s degree program in biblical studies and learning a lot about the traditional practices of Gentile Christian religion and also ancient Judaism. I discovered things like daily prayer liturgies, fasting, Psalm meditations, and resting on Shabbat. These practices involved the body as well as the mind, and they helped to corral and direct my thoughts toward God and experience His grace.1

Eventually, I jumped into a new denomination, the Anglican church, where many of the old ways of doing Christian spirituality are still practiced. There were ceremonies and images, smells and bells, and a liturgical calendar (a yearly rhythm of holy days and seasons somewhat like the Jewish calendar). And as I cautiously embraced these layers of religion, I found that I was growing in a deeper spiritual connection with God than I ever had without them.

Gradually it dawned on me that my anti-religion attitude just didn’t fit my experience. I had waded into the deep end of being religious, and I was now far more spiritual than I had ever been before!

How Do You (Actually) Become Spiritual?

If what I’m saying here sounds crazy to you, I am very sympathetic. And please know that I’m not suggesting that everyone needs to jump into the deep end of the religious pool as I have. But just consider this question:

How do you become spiritual? Like, what do you actually do?

When I was in my spiritual-but-not-religious phase, I experienced my spirituality through things like:

• Meditation
• Taking a class in Tai Chi
• Attending a neo-pagan religious event (it had a drum circle and everything)

And when I was in my Protestant, faith-without-religion phase, I experienced my spirituality through things like:

• Prayer
• Sunday worship
• Studying the Bible

In both phases, all the activities that I engaged in for my spiritual experience were (sorry to say) 100 percent religious.

You can certainly do religion without an ounce of real spirituality.

Is there any spiritual activity that is not an essentially religious activity? The answer seems to be no. Spiritual activities cannot be distinguished from religious activities. Though you can certainly do religion without an ounce of real spirituality, you can’t do spirituality without the methods and practices of religion.2

Maybe you just want to lie in your bed and think about the divine. Good idea. But monks and saints have been doing that for millennia (e.g., Psalm 63:6).

The Bureaucracy Problem

“OK, fine,” you might say. But the practices are not the problem. The problem is organized religion.

Yes, that seems to be the rub, doesn’t it? Religious practices, which should bring us closer to God, are hobbled by the introduction of an established bureaucracy. They become tools for self-congratulation and ways of controlling others—or even attempting to control God.

Interestingly, Jesus himself would seem to agree with us about this problem of religion.

The New Testament biographies of Jesus are full of incidents where Jesus came in conflict with the religious establishment. This often happened when he did a miraculous healing of an injured person on a Shabbat or when he accepted followers from among parts of his Jewish community that most religious leaders would shun.

This really rubbed these leaders the wrong way. But Jesus did not mince words in responding to them. “Blind guides,” he called them.3

If even Jesus had problems with organized religion, wouldn’t our spiritual health be better off without it?

The issue for Jesus was about the heart motives behind what we do.

Well, no. Jesus told people not to do their religion in a showy way.4 But he didn’t tell them not to give up on religion altogether. The issue for Jesus was about the heart motives behind what we do.

The mistake that we make in rejecting all religion is in not recognizing where the problems with religion truly come from. They come from the same place that the problems of any human organization come from: the human heart. And each of us has one of those.

So, the person who throws off the shackles of all outside religious authorities will end up shackled by a new authority, one who may be far less forgiving than any clergy: i.e., themselves.

A Better Way

Maybe, just maybe, I’ve challenged your thinking a little bit here. But the real proof for my argument would be if we could identify what a religious community that promotes a healthy spirituality should look like.

That, I think, is not so hard to do.5 The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in one of his most moving speeches, talked about reaching the mountaintop. And I think the mountaintop is a wonderful metaphor for religion done right.

First, a mountaintop allows you a broader view of the world and a closer view of heaven.

Second, a mountain is established. It’s rooted and ancient, and it arrived at its place in the sky through a long and enduring struggle.

Third, in order to stay on a mountaintop, you have to stay balanced. The pitfalls of religion come when we fall off balance in one way or another (e.g., you become either too rigid or too loose in your theology or practices).

Finally, the mountaintop points us to the extreme importance of particularity. Unstated within Dr. King’s metaphor is the assumption that there is one mountaintop that is the special place for meeting God. Dr. King wasn’t talking about “God” in the abstract, but the particular person of God Himself, the intelligent and (using a philosophical term here) personal being who created the universe.

There might be other mountaintops out there in the world, other places where people seem to have real spiritual encounters. But this mountaintop is special, above the rest, the place where the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has chosen to reveal Himself.

When God Finds You

I have gone further than most people down the road of the build-it-yourself spirituality for one. But the idea of trying to be my own guru, cobbling together ideas from various spiritual, philosophical, and religious sources, and trying to create my own thing wasn’t a winning formula. It was a formula for getting lost in the wilderness.

God can meet you anywhere.

But when God found me in that wilderness, He brought me into a community that had established beliefs and a variety of shared practices. But to my surprise, that did not take away my intellectual freedom. Rather, it gave deep foundations for my spiritual understanding, along with a framework in which to do much more fruitful exploration of new ideas.

It also gave me a huge toolbox of practices and source texts with which to grow. And it gave me a loving and thriving community in which to experience and know God together.

God can meet you anywhere. You don’t have to find and climb to the right mountaintop to reach Him. He reaches us. But He doesn’t then leave us on our own to do our own thing. He draws us into a community that is learning together how to love and follow Him.

 

Endnotes

1 The concern that religion can become a way of earning God’s grace or an idolatrous attempt to control God is very valid. The problem is that if we shun all traditional Christian religious practices out of the fear, the shunning itself often becomes a new kind of “works righteousness.”

2 Someone may ask about James 1:27, which says, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.” That sounds like James is saying the only important part of religion is charity toward vulnerable people in your community. He doesn’t say anything even about holding a specific set of beliefs or reading Scripture. But there, the word translated “religion” had a narrower meaning than our English word does. For the Greeks, it referred to the formal, outward practices associated with honoring the gods. But for first-century Jewish thinkers like James, it had a somewhat expanded meaning that also encompassed tzedakah, the ethical and moral behaviors associated with faithfulness to God.

The English word as I’m using it in this article is meant to convey the much broader modern sense of the concept of a religion—i.e., the full set of beliefs and practices held in common by a religious community. I take James to mean that true piety is expressed in love of neighbors (especially those who have great needs) and a lifestyle of moral uprightness—following the ways of God, not the world’s. He obviously did not mean to endorse that at the expense of things like corporate worship, prayers, communion meals, reading/hearing Scripture, etc.

3 Matthew 15:14.

4 Jesus said that we should not say our prayers, hold our fasts, and practice our good works to perform before others (Matthew 6:1–21).

5 The Torah gives us a clear picture of how that would be structured. And the New Testament gives us a clear picture of what it would look like in practice (Acts 2:42–47).