Religion and Identity

Richard Ostrofsky
(May, 1996)
Religion has always been a main pillar of personal identity. As last month’s
column suggested, the lively interest in books on religion, art, history and
philosophy at Second Thoughts evidences continuing dissatisfaction with
the self-definitions offered by this commercial civilization, which defines us
– and prompts us to define ourselves – primarily as workers and consumers:
earners and spenders of money. This is all the more true today, in “the nasty
nineties”, when earning the money to spend has become so much more
difficult than in the recent past.
Now, the consolations of religion are clear enough. At the very least, it
offers a firm personal and cultural identity, the sense of a sacred dimension
transcending day-to-day banalities, and an assurance of participation in a
world-historic destiny. In a word, religion responds to our need for meaning
– if only one can embrace its narratives in a trusting spirit . But this is not
wholly comfortable today. Scientific knowledge embarrasses literal belief in
the Biblical cosmology, and in every other mythical world-view.
Embarrassing too is the Marxist gibe that religion is an opiate – a slave’s
consolation for his condition of slavery. Finally, there is the embarrassment
of relativism: All systems of religious belief are equally valid – but then, by
direct consequence, equally invalid. Seen with the anthropologist’s
impartial eye, all religions are equal as culture-derived and culture-
constituting fantasies – that certainly cannot deliver on their promises of
universality, whatever else they do. So we need to ask: what intellectual
weight (if any) do religious teachings carry, once tribal myths are
recognized as such?
I think it’s important to understand that religious ideas are formative
rather than descriptive. It is meaningless to ask whether they are true or
false, because they create their special life-worlds; they do not describe
worlds that pre-exist. One does not really believe a religion; rather, one
subscribes to it. One chooses to see and feel and live inside the system that
it posits.
Like tinted sunglasses, religious categories give a certain coloring to
experience interpreted with their aid. To the extent they seem to enrich life,
they attract attention and use; to the extent they impoverish it, they become
increasingly suspect. By their fruits ye shall know them, as the apostle says
(Matthew 7:16); they can be known in no other way.
Religious ideas circulate in art, in literature, through practice, and by
word of mouth. They can be crude or highly elaborated, superstitious or
philosophically sophisticated. They can be humane and easy-going or
unbelievably harsh and oppressive. Some ask to be believed; others present
themselves first as rituals or exercises whose meanings will emerge only
very gradually, after many years of repetition. Some direct themselves to
the individual spirit; others are more social in nature, and aim at the
establishment of communities of the faithful. Several have been so
imperialistic as to envision, and enjoin upon their followers, a conquest of
the earth.
Religious ideas need not be embraced on a full-time basis; once
articulated, they can never be wholly rejected. I become Ta’oist and Zen
Buddhist when I step on the mat for an Aikido class. I am Christian when I
listen to Handel’s Messiah, or Bach’s B Minor Mass. When I make love, I
am a pagan, offering my passion to the Goddess.1
I think the demand for religious vision is perennial in the sense that Man
can scarcely live without some sense of a cosmic order and his place within
it. Certain analytical minds have found it convenient to divide this order
into three parts: First there is some physical and metaphysical order that
pre-exists humanity and life itself. Second, there is a social order of law and
right relationship, partly deriving from the physical order and dependent on
it. Third, there is in in each individual mind a kind of psychic order that
reflects and seeks a harmony with its external world. Somehow, these three
levels of order seem to be logically distinguishable, yet one and the same. I
can recognize this trinity, and am to that extent a Catholic. I remain very
much a Jew in my sense that the cosmic order is one – whole, indivisible,
and beyond graphic or verbal representation – to be questioned, and
wrestled or negotiated with, rather than met with submission or taken on
faith.

1 I am quoting here from my own essay The Gods at Play, at the beginning of this
collection.