Spiritual, but Not Religious

Kierkegaard's Profound Joke

The fight was ugly in 1840’s Copenhagen. Many were following a nasty debate between antagonistic writers sniping and snarking among themselves. Johannes Climacus (John of the Ladder) was a slacker goofball, snarkily attacking Christianity from the outside. This sparked a response from an uptight devout opponent who felt the need to defend the Church and simply labeled himself as Anti-Climacus.

Johannes di Silentio (John the Silent) was faithful from a non-institutional perspective and argued that being religious did not make you moral but required rejecting the moral. Vigilius Haufniensis (The Vigilant Overseer) was a neurotic who contended that a state of spiritual anxiety awaited anyone who thought deeply about God. Nicolaus Notabene (Nicholas Take Careful Note) was married to a woman who threatened to divorce him if he ever wrote a book, so he only wrote prefaces that mercilessly mocked those who commented on the works of the others.

Few Danish readers realized that they were all written by the same person, Søren Kierkegaard. To him, the whole thing was one big joke, but only because he believed that humor and irony were necessary steps toward the most profound truths of philosophy and religion. In this way, it was Kierkegaard who gave us the concepts many today use when they make the oft-heard claim that someone is “spiritual, but not religious.”

When someone says this, they are drawing an important distinction between belief and institution.

It is undoubtedly true that we all get beliefs from institutions. Think of the multiplication tables we memorized in elementary school. Why do we believe that 8x7=56? Not many of us have taken eight groups of seven things, put them together, and counted them all out to see if we actually have exactly fifty-six things in front of us. We believe this fact because we got better grades if we did and worse grades if we didn’t. We knew that our futures were in part determined by our grades. Thus, we learned reflexively what the teacher—the nexus of power from the institution—told us to believe.

But we can choose to break away from institutionalized belief. Doing so, of course, comes with a social cost. You will be seen as a weirdo because the institutions establish the social expectations by which normalcy is defined. Indeed, it is so deeply ingrained in us that we often don’t realize that we have the option, and when we do, the angst we feel about the results of stepping out on our own can be frightening.

This is what Kierkegaard was writing about. He thought that in a time when the Christian Church dominated the culture of Europe, it made it almost impossible to actually be a Christian. It was hard not to be a member of a congregation, acting as you were expected to, but that is not what it is to be a real Christian. To do that, Kierkegaard held, you had to move beyond the institution and into your own mind.

But for this, there was no logical deduction, no scientific theory to lead you there like a map. This is not to say that there is anything wrong with logic and science. Kierkegaard thought these were the correct tools for a particular set of truths. Where he thought the unspiritual erred was in the assumption that the set of rational truths is the complete set of truths. There are others, he argued, that the human can only access by moving beyond reason.

It is here that he radically redefines what we ought to mean by God. God is not a magical, invisible man in the sky. God isn’t Santa God. God is the boundary between the rational and irrational truths. As scientists discover more and more abstract realities, they move closer to, but will never reach, God. God is the boundary that leads us to the other truths, the profound understandings that exist beyond reason.

We can go as far as reason will take us and look for these other truths, but it is like peering over the edge of a cliff into a bottomless abyss. Think of how dizzy and scared that will make you. The natural inclination is to recoil back to where it is safe. But if we want the deeper truths, we will have to venture out, stare at the endless darkness beneath us, and take, according to Kierkegaard’s famous phrase, a leap of faith.

But the mind must be made ready for that. Here is where we need to again consider jokes. Think about how a joke works. “One atom says to another atom, ‘I just lost an electron.’ The second atom says, ‘Are you sure?’ The first atom says, ‘Yes, I’m positive.’” There is the setup where you create a picture in your mind of two atoms talking to each other. Then you get the punchline.

At first, it makes no sense. “Why is the first atom positive? How can it be so sure?” Then the lightbulb goes off, you get the joke. “Oh, electrons have negative charge, so by losing one…I get it.” That moment is transcendental because you can see the two completely different meanings and figure out how to accept them both simultaneously. The result – getting the joke – is a lived experience. We feel different at that moment. A laugh bursts out of us on its own because of it.

It is that lived experience, that moment of transcendental feeling, in which Kierkegaard contends true religion exists. It is not a question of whether there is empirical evidence for or against the existence of God. Is God a necessary being or a first cause? Does Big Bang theory do away with the need for a supernatural origin of the universe? None of that matters.

It is about the ability to experience the truth that comes from reconciling incongruities that reason will not allow. And no one can argue with you about your experience. If you feel in love with someone, you are. If chocolate tastes better to you than vanilla, it does. Facts and deductions are irrelevant. Kierkegaard makes religiosity purely internal. It is a matter of your mind, that is to say, your spirit. That is why we say “spiritual” even if we have rejected the institutional system, that is to say, “religious.” If you are able to understand the profound upshot of the seemingly conflicting elements of reality, then you are ready to take the leap and become what Kierkegaard calls a “knight of faith.”

But no one can explain to you how to do that. They can only explain what is logical. They can get together and create a system and build schools to teach that system and hold services with rituals within the system with symbols that have meanings within the system, but that is to institutionalize religion.

Religious truths cannot be taught, Kierkegaard argued; they can only be experienced. It is here where people historically begin to value individual experience. Think how often we now hear, “In my experience...” You may thank Kierkegaard for that.

So, the next time you hear someone say—or say yourself—that “I am spiritual, but not religious,” just know that Kierkegaard will be laughing because he gets the joke.