c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Recent criminal indictments of a prominent congressman led immediately to partisan posturing. Meanwhile, the rest of us should ask, How can this be?

In a heavily churched nation, where worship attendance exceeds that of other nations and where personal and public morality dominate public debate, how can political life be so sleazy? How can we be so bitterly divided, so unaccustomed to honesty and repentance, so mired in greed and corruption?

Yes, these are aspects of human nature. Religion, however, was supposed to amend human nature, draw people into oneness with God, lead to newness of life. How can so much religion be having so little impact on our common life?

I have wondered this before. Then last weekend I had one of those homespun experiences that turned a lens for me. I met a friend’s mother for the first time. Now I understand her daughter better.

It was an intuitive process: looking from one to the other, sensing similarities and differences, hearing each speak. No data-driven conclusions, but rather, “Aha, now I see.” Stories were a lens into lives. Details mattered less than signs of character and personality.

Unlike history’s linear progression through time, stories blurred and yet informed, as past and present flowed together and facts blended with affect. I doubt that I could recount many details, but I know that five people connected.

This process might sound familiar to you. It is how friendships normally are built. Romance happens this way, too. Nonrational, nonverifiable, and yet life changing.

This is how faith happens, too. I think we want faith to be more rational, more linear, more a logical consequence of details, proofs, words and promises, all leading to firm and defensible conclusions. Hence our catechisms, creeds and doctrines. Hence our insistence that faith lead one way and not another. Hence our concern about getting it right.

In fact, however, faith seems to flow from an intuitive, imprecise and non-linear process like romance. We listen, we speak, something clicks, an “Aha” occurs, a connection is made, we draw closer. Rather than define God, we experience God. Rather than remember specific experiences, we remember being moved. Rather than try to replicate being moved, we trust that connection can occur again. Rather than articulate connection, we relax into connection.

Institutional religion seems to go about it differently. Religion is concerned with defining God and measuring our experiences of God against the orthodox and verifiable. Religion wants to show cause and effect, so that tomorrow can be tested against yesterday. Religion stresses orderliness and boundaries, because spontaneity, intuition and mystery cannot be controlled or trusted.

Institutional religion insists that this is what God wants: order, obedience and precise meanings. Getting it right matters to God, says religion, and getting it wrong leads to decay and evil.

These tendencies aren’t a matter of conservative or liberal, orthodox or progressive. Though each branch does it differently, the common quest is to define acceptable ways of talking about God, to control entry points to the religious community, to manage the institution, to name truth and to punish untruth.

This quest makes religion a paradox: able to inspire loyalty but less able to transform lives, able to start wars but not to resolve them, able to coexist with state and society but not to make either significantly better, able to define ethics but not to promote ethical behavior, able to draw people together on Sunday but less able to build life-changing communities.

The difference between faith and institutional religion is like the difference between wisdom and test scores. Faith looks beyond itself and trusts, institutional religion looks mainly at itself and controls.

I think people are hungry for faith _ not its partisan expressions _ and are hungry for the ethical and just society that faith can nurture.

MO/JL END RNS

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, consultant and leader of workshops. His book, “Just Wondering, Jesus: 100 Questions People Want to Ask,” was published by Morehouse Publishing. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C. His Web site is http://www.onajourney.org.)

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