“Hot Air Gods”
Last week I posted on using NPR’s “This I Believe” series in the classroom. No sooner had I finished reading Eugene McCarrraher’s “Bah Humbug” response to my post than I picked up the December issue of Harper’s Magazine and read Curtis White’s essay “Hot Air Gods.” This paragraph leapt out:
“What we require of belief is not that it make sense but that it be sincere. This is so even for our more secular convictions. Recently, for example, National Public Radio revived Edward R. Murrow’s “This I Believe” program, thus driving the idea of belief to its trite extreme . . . Clearly, this is not the spirituality of a centralized orthodoxy. It is a sort of workshop spirituality that you can get with a cereal-box top and five dollars.”
Apart from the fact that White throws in with McCarraher in dismissing NPR, the essay is otherwise excellent. Here is some more:
“Once reduced to the status of a commodity, our anything-goes, do-it-yourself spirituality cannot have very much to say about the more directly nihilistic convictions that we should all be free to do whatever we like as well, each of us pursuing our right to our isolated happinesses. . . . Our pluralism of belief says both to ourselves and to others, ‘Keep your distance’ . . . And yet isn’t this all strangely familiar? Aren’t these the false gods that Isaiah and Jeremiah confronted, the cults of the ‘hot air gods? . . . And that is the problem that we ought to have at heart: our richness of belief masks a culture that is grotesquely unjust.”
Unfortunately, the article is only available online to subscribers, but it is worth reading.
To me, this brings to mind the dichotomy that religious conservatives often cite between those who “make it up as they go along” and religion as adhering to the true doctrine – which, of course, varies considerably, even within Christianity. The idea seems to be that turning inward as a primary avenue to finding God, in distinction from turning to allegedly definitive answers found in denominational interpretations of scripture, necessarily results in superficial or even dangerous approaches to faith.
I’ve seen this reflected in views of Christianity’s venerable contemplative tradition as superficial – or even Satanic!
Certainly superficial spiritual approaches outside the church abound today. But certainly within the church, now as in the past, superficial spiritual approaches also flourish – people, for example, who see religion as a kind of carrot and stick. It’s all about them getting to go to heaven and avoiding the bad place. Church and ritual is about scoring points with God.
Superficiality and profundity don’t equate with inward vs. external-looking approaches. Some of both, I think, is best: looking to tradition but also pondering such things in our hearts.
Paul – originalfaith.com
Coming back on the shuttle from NY to DC one time, I picked up a new magazine on the rack. It was called “Spirituality and Health.” The first article was on shrines that people construct in their own homes. The first page had a photo and a story about a Russian immigrant who had a beautiful shrine to Our Lord and Our Lady in a corner of his room. I learned how elastic the notion of spirituality was when I turned the page and found a photo and a story of someone who had covered a wall with photos and shelves with icons of–Elvis Presley!
Paul, can you clarify the thesis of the article you mention a bit more?.
I understand do-it-yourself spirituality; I was raised by people who practiced it. But the result was neither nihilistic, nor was the undertaking designed to accommodate an anything-goes lifestyle. In fact, it was a very isolating (and often demanding and exhausting) endeavor to find something worth believing in.
The notion that we can just wave away the whole phenomenon as hedonism wrapped in banality (if that’s what this article IS saying) strikes me as a bit glib, and ignores why conventional spiritual channels (e.g., the Church) fail to speak to large numbers of people.