Public and Private Religion

Regardless of the reality of any kind of deity, the religious instinct itself is a brute fact of human existence. As we are rational, artistic, social and political, we are also religious.

But how do we relate to the divinity we all seek? Every culture has an answer. The interesting thing is that if we look at a distance, patterns emerge from these answers. One of these is the distinction between the public side and the private side of religion.

The private side of religion is often tied to personal experiences of transcendence, ilumination, inner peace or tremendous power. It is about how a person gets in direct and unmediated contact with the divine. Because of this unmediated aspect, the private side also tends to be mystical, magical, outside of rationality or anything that belongs to “our world”. By definition, it transcends that.

The public side is generally associated with mediated ways of contacting the divine realm. This is normally done through ritual and tradition. Some very specific procedures become associated with divinity, through dense layers of meaning that transliterate them into something much more profound than what those mere physical gestures would be, if outside of the context in which they are done.

The public and the private sides of religion correspond fairly well to the well known distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric religions. This is precisely because the private religion, because of being private, is not communicable. The public, on the other hand, by being communicable, necessarily needs to become “objectified”: it needs some sort of physical medium through which it can be communicated. And the quality of the communication is relyant on the quality of the medium — which, as we know, can never be perfect.

There actually seems to be a certain paradox in the communication of unmediated experience that public religion attempts. If our religious instinct is an earning for something beyond this world, something completely transcendent, then nothing of this world can scratch that itch.

If some such experience is at all possible, then, it is an experience that falls completely outside of the things of this world — it is completely beyond words, beyond images, thoughts, things, time and space. It can only be, by definition, if it falls outside those things. Those who experience it firsthand are subjects of a private and unmediated experience.

But if this experience falls outside all those things, then of course none of them can ever be enough to communicate it. One cannot simply syllogism one’s way into direct access of God. One will never find God under one’s table or bed. Nor will one find God in any other place in space and time. If divinity is anywhere, it is also everywhere, to the point that looking anywhere in particular will never actually do the trick.

Trying to find a medium among the things of this world to communicate about something outside it is like looking for fire in the deep ocean.

The thing is: nothing can be more important than these experiences. They give us meaning in the most profound sense. Their worth is literally uncalcullable. So we just have to find a way.

Some say that having direct access to God is as dangerous as it is powerfull. Only those who spend their lives getting ready for it might attempt such a hubristic endeavour as trying to face God — and at their own peril. Us people, after all, belong to this world.

Following this reasoning, trying to mediate the experience in the things of this world, trying to find a mascarade that will give hints but not really expose too much, is actually very beneficial. It may be a way of only letting out as much light as our eyes are ready to take, so to speak. This way, we have enough light to know the way, but not enough to make us blind.

The problem with this, as was said, is that mediums are never perfect. They are, in a sense, a sort of lie. In “reality”, they belong to this world — not the transcendent. Corruption in religious symbols is as innevitable as it is in anything else that belongs to our world of imperfect things — the same very world that, precisely by its imperfection, impels us to find its opposite.

So, to survive, religions must strike a balance: they must have, at their base, a real experience of divinity and transcendence; as they must have mediums that make this experience accessible to people who just would never be able to or even bother looking for it if it came in its unmediated form.

If the experience is real but never communicated, there is no religion — just a forgotten monk. If there are very well desinged rituals and mediums but no true experience of transcendence that they reach for, there is no religion — just charlatanism.

Some religions focus much more on the public side. Some focus more on the private side. This distinction in very evident between the two biggest religions in China: confucianism and taoism.

Confucianism is very focused on external behaviour and the following of a very rigid and structured social code, where one finds belonging in one’s role in society, mainly towards family, friends, masters and state. If one reads Confucius’ Annalects in search of spirituality, disappointment is likely.

Taoism, on the other hand, couldn’t care less about rules, codes of behaviour, anything of the sort. The whole thing is about giving up one’s internal sense of “striving”, which creates internal conflict, and “stop acting” — exist simply flowing as everything else in the universe, without attrition. If one tries to find actual concrete advice in taoist texts, on the other hand, disappointment is certain.

One is all about what to do and when (giving a lot of “security” to those who follow it), while the other is all about the spirit in which to do anything at all (without mention to anything in particular). If confucianism is too constricting, taoism is too freeing.

A funny addendum to this story is that taoism only survived throughout history because it later became “sedimentated” into a set of rituals and got associated with social hierarquies and communities. Temples were built and sacrifices were made to the Tao and folkloric deities associated with it. Without these more concrete behaviours, people would literally just forget about everything, and a lot more quickly than we would imagine.

Another example of this same pattern is the distinction between catholics and protestants in christianity.

The Catholic Church survived as an institution for millenia now, preserving the same rituals and social hierarchy all along, vowing that the line of continuity between the current Pope and Peter, the Apostle, is precedent for papal authority. Of course, throughout this time, the Church has corrupted itself — this is just a fact. But still, despite the corruption, it remains the main carrier of the christian message. I think this is because of the strenght of its medium.

The Protestant Reformation, on the other hand, criticized the Catholic Church for its abuses of authority. The main point of the Reformation was that the Church cannot mediate between any person and God, and that we must be saved by faith alone. This is a refocusing on private religion. And the problem was the same: quickly the Reformers decided to Reform the Reformation, and create a New Reformed Church. And this happened literally more times than can be counted, as of right now. There are literally hundreds of protestant denominations. And if we go farther, there are actually as many denominations as there are people of faith — since everyone is free to “experience” God as they see fit.

It is no wonder that the “new age” movement of “spiritual but not religious” people, all the “seekers” who wish to find God, but outside of the corrupt and constricting realm of the Church, have their theological origin in the Reformation. Somatics, Prosperity Gospel, The Law of Attraction, even the weird doomsday cults that are so common in America, all of these are born out or para-protestant groups. Dissidents from some branch of protestantism who thought they were the ones who had gotten it right. Even the western attraction of the 60s to eastern forms of religion, that perceived to be “more spiritual”, was a consequence of protestant focus on private religion and active slander on public religion.

The problem with this approach, as well intentioned as it might be, is that it dilutes the message. If even very rigid structures eventually become corrupt, imagine how quickly something fluid can become something else and lose its essence. If the only basis for enlightenment is one’s personal experience, then everyone is enlightened if they think they are — and this is clearly not the case.

On the other hand, obviously the only basis for enlightenment is also not belonging to a certain privileged social class or being considered holy by others. One is not made holy by one’s holy cloak. Rather, one wears the holy cloak if one is holy. But it is hard to know who is holy and who is not.

We must try to strike a balance.