Evolution

For one of my courses I've been reading the book "Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age" by Robert Bellah.  Although the title seems weighty, and the contents sometimes denser still, it's a gem of a book that has a lot to teach me about some of the most prominent theological questions of today.   It's a common question for those in my generation to wonder about why religion is relevant, and where it came from, and why there are so many religions.  This books sets up religion as an evolution through three basic stages, paraphrased as follows.  First, there is the ritual and non-verbal stage.  Then, the narrative stage.  Lastly, we are in the theoretic, or more abstract stage.  These are not exclusive categories, but instead build on each other.

Put simply, religion isn't simply belief, or action.  Religion isn't even a dirty word.  It's simply a way of recognizing that humans long before us have found ways to come together to tell stories, to dance together, and to wrestle with intellectual questions.  Even as this shifts and changes, as anyone who has been in the mainline protestant church for example can tell you, the core of what brings us together in religious settings isn't vanishing.

Bellah writes in his book,

Yet one of the first things to be noticed about the world of daily life is that nobody can stand to live in it all the time. 

This is extraordinarily evident in our technological times.  We retreat to screens, to hours of mindless video games that require little skill or attention.  We sit in darkened movie theaters to lose track of our own life.  This is worrisome to many people, as our increasingly "connected" society feels a growing sense of disconnection.

Enter church.  Or whatever new word you want to put on it, so you can be "spiritual, but not religious." We can transcend our daily life in ways that don't just involve a computer, but when we see there is a God bigger than us.  There is a community full of love greater than what we could imagine on our own.

Churches have no need to fear the word "evolution" or the prospect of religious change.  There will always be people who want to be noticed and want to be connected and just want to find something more than the mundaneness of their daily life, and who are fed up with trying to find that in other mind-numbing pursuits.  We just have to be able to show them how.