Still Running Off at the Keyboard

Q: We often hear, especially in the Western world, that people now say that they are spiritual, not religious. When describing the difference between the two, they often use the word doctrine, and when they do so, they don't use it in a positive way. It tends to have many negative connotations. Why is that?

Archbishop Levada: Let me say in general, you raise the question as one that is a phenomenon that we look at the idea of spiritual versus the religious.

Let's take cannibalism, for example. What is the spirituality of cannibalism? I would say eating is the doctrine. But is there really a spirituality of it and is it a good one? In other words, is every spirituality a spirituality of good?

You know today is Halloween; there are people who embrace a spirituality whose doctrine is witchcraft. They want to get in touch with a spiritual side, but our tradition tells us that there are good spirits and evil spirits. There is good and bad in the spiritual as well as in the human corporeal realm, so spirituality without doctrine is an amorphous spirituality that can be anything I want to make it.

People want to break out of what they consider are constraints and limits of those religions. So they say: "I am spiritual, not religious." But in effect a real spirituality has to involve religion because religion is about how you order your human life vis-à-vis God. […] There is a kind of popular sense in saying, "Oh well, I am trying to find something that is helping me to be better" -- that's spirituality.

But religion means that you are face to face with some options that you have to make about whether there is a God and what that God may be asking and what kind of relationship he wants to have with you, his creature.

There is a whole sense in which modern man is saying, "I don't want to be a creature." Religion is always going to involve a concrete challenge to us in terms of our relationship to God.