Every cause, ideal, spiritual movement or soul teaching is about answering the question: Who am I? Fundamentalists of every stripe want this question answered once and for all by an unquestioned authority. They may succeed in quelling doubt for a while, but God has nothing to say and everything to say. I am fond of Thomas Merton’s words: “The search for God consists of arriving at a place and discovering that God has just left.” Which is as it should be. The essence of human nature is to reach beyond what we already know about ourselves.
At this moment we are faced with ferment and potential chaos as outmoded religious beliefs struggle to prove that they are as strong as ever. Psychiatry professor Susan Smalley says, quite realistically, that no one can “let go” of any belief until the void it would leave behind is filled. Those who have already “let go” of God aren’t necessarily better off than fundamentalists. They too have a void to fill.
God won’t leave us alone as long as human beings feel afraid and lonely. God might evolve—so one hopes—into something other than a white-bearded authority figure with a taste for vengeance. In moderate denominations that transformation happened a long, long time ago. But somehow we couldn’t handle a nicer God. Millions of people feel too hollow and afraid, angry and attacked, lonely and disconnected to believe in a benign divinity. This phenomenon is called alienation. It was well diagnosed by Marx and Freud, who pointed out that the human psyche suffers terribly when people are yanked out of a connection with Nature, when traditions stop being a safety net, when dislocation and insecurity are the daily norm.
The reason 87 percent of North Americans tell pollsters they never had a doubt about the existence of God isn’t rock-ribbed faith. It’s fear of the alternative, a cosmos dominated by the void left by an absent God. Whatever our beliefs may be, we all have to fill that void. It would be an act of good faith if the Religious Right could concede that we’re all in this together. It would be an equal act of faith if the enemies of the Religious Right made the same concession. Spirituality would then move forward, and on a global basis we could continue the universal quest, which is to unite heaven and Earth, first in our minds, then in every place our minds inhabit.