Having a form of godliness,
but denying the power thereof
from such turn away
II Timothy 3:5
I have a latent post somewhere about the evils of the oft repeated: “I have a relationship not a religion”. In our day that mantra, that catechism we might say, brings more problems than it is worth. But the idea it was intended to guard against, is the point of this verse. We all understand that religious institutions can become hollowed out in the middle. The form remains but the Spirit is gone. Today we are met with a lot of claims of Spirit with no form. In fact form is thought to be bad, gnosticism as it used to be called. Neither of these is particularly good on their own. Gnostics attacking Catholics and other dead established churches is more of a sad joke than anything. We can admit that having the form only is a bad thing. But can we also admit that it is not just religious institutions which suffer from this problem? Or perhaps we just need to realize that there are only religious institutions. Culture comes from the ‘cultus’ the ‘cult’. What we act out is what we believe and that belief system is religion, by any name.
Can we just put he Spirit back in the Body and get on with it?
Illustration by Luigi Schiavonetti. Etching. c. 1808.
The more I mess with establishments the more I find nothing there. The lights are on, but no one is home. The form is there but there is no power. Which generally leads to defensiveness. One of the starkest examples is taking place in our airports every day. It’s security theater. The TSA has a 98% failure rate. That means that 98% of weapons get through their security, in test runs. But everyone puts on their TSA costume every day and pretends they are accomplishing something. And we the people put up with it for some reason. Because the sad reality is we like dead religion, it makes us feel better to go through the genuflection of taking off our shoes, the penance of bowing to the scanners and the prayers we utter, “please don’t let me be picked for a ‘random’ screening”. So we let this dead religion continue.
The rubric of theater is so apt for so many things. We have security theater in our airports and safety theater in our workplaces. As government drones force us into religious services known as safety meetings. All with less life than the ascetic monk who died weeks ago and had just been thought to be going for extra credit. Safety is a combination of skill and intelligence and has nothing to do with government statistics forced upon the masses like the rules of indulgence. But put on your orange vests and get out your lumbar support and standup desks, and put your faith in the mighty OSHA. Everyone is doing it.
We could lump in the rest of the alphabet soup of government agencies. EPA worship has cost countless millions of dollars and even killed thousands with encyclicals like CAFE standards. The same could be said for the EPA, FDA, or even the FAA. Recent groundings of 737 MAX planes now appears to be an attempt by Boeing to comply with environmental regulations and FAA regulations and still turn a profit. There is no power, does anyone even know what the original intent of any of these religions was? What was the spirit of them for? Who knows. There is no spirit. We bow down with no heart in it. No sense of a better world, or of pushing frontiers in the name of our Creator. Just lemmings whose parting words are no longer ‘godspeed’ but ‘be safe’. Be safe for something, I forgot what.
More sinister yet is the death of our legal system. This the heart of our turning from the real God to false ones. The once great edifice founded on the British common law system which traces its roots back to Alfred the great, who got it from the Old Testament, in service of his God. Today everyone is still there in their costumes, the judge wears a robe, the lawyers wear monkey suits. In England the garb includes a powdered wig. But for something that should be so important can you name your local judges? Do you care at all what goes on there? Do you care about the spray paint graffiti on this great edifice like, no fault divorce, complete lack of due process, and laws written merely to get someone we don’t like rather than to serve an actual standard of justice? Even worse we created the home game, like the personal dashboard Jesus, we militarize millions of cops with their pocket judge and jury to go around accusing people of ridiculous traffic violations. And just like the endless rules of the Catholic church, written in an unknown Latin, our rules are written in lawyer-speak, and number more than any man can count. In the New Testament Jesus regularly mocks the Pharisees for their dead religion, more correctly their wrong religion. But we shouldn’t separate them from their real task, they were the people’s lawyers. And lest we think that was a theocracy and our system is so intelligently separate, church and state. What exactly is a law? It is imposing morality on someone, that’s how it works. There are no laws which do not have moral backing. Our Pharisees are lawyers and they have forgotten the purpose of law just like those whom Jesus ridiculed. The hoops they create and then collect millions for navigating, are just as sinister. And one day Jesus will damn them to eternal fire as well. They mock the poor as they make their careers exploiting them, climbing ever further up the greasy pole, to President or behind-the-scenes-government-lawyer. Don’t put your faith in this system with David French, be Andrew McCarthy, come to the light. Don’t get caught up in years and years and piles of money required to get to the end of any trial. Don’t show them respect, seek Church arbitration as Paul counseled.
And even worse, we forget that politicians are the lawyers who write all these crazy rules. Politicians, who are usually the most disliked group of people on the planet. Yet what we the people demand of them has less to do with character and statesman ability, and more to do with outward trappings. Speech codes, dress codes, focus group driven everything. This reached it’s height under Obama, who not only had to be clean and articulate with properly ironed pants, he had to have the right skin color. The next diversity qualification is searching for a woman or half-pseudo-sexual-deviant. And what happens when you don’t follow this religious creed? Ask Trump. It is fair to say that his supporters are the brave few who want relationship and not religion. They like him, and they don’t care about D.C. dogma.
And finally the most prevalent form without a soul, is science. The scientific method was a simple organized way of testing the real world. It had rules for ensuring that experiments could be conducted and repeated. A peer system was created to ensure that truth was discovered, with no manipulation. This system became so successful among the applied sciences that every field of study wanted in on the action. And so these sacraments were adopted in all of academia. And as Satan ate out their heart with deception and evil, men didn’t want to face the truth they were discovering. Science begun by faithful Christians serving their God, became a framework for lies and manipulation. Men in white coats need only utter the sacred word ‘science’ and the masses bow down, casting their money upon the alter. That’s not a baby, it’s a mass of cells, a priest of Science says so. Macro evolution is real despite having no scientific evidence, just put your faith in the institution. Chromosomes no longer matter, gender is a social construct, professionals said so. Sex for fruitful procreation, can be ignored, we have a study. Discipline of children can be ignored, we have a study. Oh and also the planet is dying because humans drive cars. Despite a fossil record containing 98% of species before humans tuned the first carburetor. Despite volcanic activity venting more gas than all the cars ever. Just put your faith in science, and you can gratify your sexual urges and go to paradise with 72 virgins. Excuse me, I get my false religions mixed up. The form and the respect for Science and academia remain, but the power is gone. Sure some mechanistic ends are still met, machines move, buildings are built, diseases are cured. But no one knows why. And soon, they will give it up, white robes and all, because woke, racism, patriarchy.
But I don’t really like this cathedral of the West in ruin, I want to turn away as Paul commands Timothy. Can’t we have both form and Spirit? Can’t we have religion and a relationship? We Christians have the power of God, we can move mountains, why do we let the church die in exchange for all these false religions? What is wrong with you people? I think I know, you want a relationship with the world and not religious devotion to the One True God. You want religion to be handled by all these dead systems. You don’t like the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob, who brought you out of Egypt, he embarrasses you in front of all these false priests. And you hate his son Jesus the Christ despite claiming to feel something about him. So knock it off and put the Spirit back into this incredible form, built by the faith of our ancestors, before it’s too late.