Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in a sermon in Barcelona: “Both the most grandiose and the frailest of all human attempts to reach the eternal out of fear and unrest in the human heart is religion.”
To which, Jeffrey C. Pugh adds,
A cursory glance at humankind provides us with ample evidence that this is true, [that humans tend to create God, the gods, in their own image]. So much of what we label with the term ‘religion’ appears to be the hopeless attempt to root ourselves and all the extensions of self found in family, nation or state, within the absolute. Once religion is rooted there anything becomes possible in the name of God, even the death and annihilation of others who do not share our particular idea of the absolute. The gods are seldom found on the sides of our enemies after all.
Religion creates the conditions not only for individuals to wear the cloak of self-righteousness, but entire cultures to don it as well. Then everything becomes justified on the basis of transcendent command. God is easily employed for privileging my tribe, my community, my culture. Thus my society acquires the authority of the ultimate where life is rooted not in the vagaries of history, but in the solidity of the absolute.
In this sense, religion has the potential to construct the deepest part of myself, the core of my identity, for my identity is shaped and formed by the host of social arrangements I find myself within. The depth of this is so deep, the power of this so vast, that we accept the constructs of our culture as self-evident truths. When sociologists write of religion as constructing a ‘sacred canopy’ over society they are indicating that all the dynamics that go into shaping culture are shaping our deepest identities as well, and tying those identities to the transcendent. This identification can be so deep that any questioning of those identities of culture or self, either from within the culture, or outside of it, will elicit the strongest possible response, even unto violence and death. When we begin to question the most fundamental aspects of our lives, the ones that are so deeply held they are not even conscious to us, the resultant anxiety does spawn significant resistance.
But the question still remained:
“In this, he can agree with religions critics, but the issue for Bonhoeffer is can he find a way to escape this gravity? Is there a way he can secure his faith from the truth of this critique? . . . Was there any hope for a religion that had become so vacated of anything resembling the spirit of Jesus Christ? If there was such a hope it was going to emerge only when Christianity freed itself from religion.”