Deep Religion and Unitarianism

MS

Today at Fox Valley Unitarian Fellowship the senior pastor Roger Bertschausen spoke briefly today about how his mother’s adoption might have affected him.. and he mentioned in this regard his embrace of “liberal religion.” I’m not sure I’ve ever heard that phrase used in that stand alone way. The import would seem to be that Unitarianism and other similar denominations are just one example for this more general thing called liberal religion.

Thinking about the phrase today I connected it to the conclusion of Jan Assmann’s Of God and Gods. For a few pages he speaks outside the usual range of academic thought and discusses something he calls “deep religion”:

Deep religion focuses on a point beyond the Mosaic Distinction between true and false religion. Surface, or concrete, religions always exist in the plural. There is no “one religion” any more than there is “one civilization” or “one language”—and the extant religions must acknowledge their status… although there will always be an irreduucible plurality of human religions, there is only one common human capacity for religion and one common search for universal truth. [140]

I can almost accept this way of formulating religion. What I like is the association of “deep religion” with the act of searching, which would seem to mean that there is not an absolute reality but a universal human striving. In other words what we share are certain needs and our search to fill those needs. Different religons are then imperfect ways of meeting universal human needs.

The danger in talking about universals has always—for me—outweighed the benefit. One early post for this blog was about the kind of universal language about religion that I encountered at a Quaker fellowship in Atlanta. It bothered me to hear religions watered down to become simply different ways of saying the same thing. But Assmann doesn’t do that, and he maintains the separateness of religious experience. The ancient Egyptian and the modern American Protestant operate with completely different operating systems in their minds, and value and understand experience differently. Nevertheless both operating systems were fulfilling human needs to belong, to order experience, and to guide actions.

I wonder if “liberal religion” means something similar to what Jan Assmann did with “deep religion”?