Why is Religion so Taboo?
The One Topic We Avoid
I often suffer boredom at the hands of the usual suspects of conversation: sports, politics, gossip. What is, unfortunately, supremely interesting to me is why people believe what they believe. This is unfortunate for the would-be conversationalist, because belief and what others find truly meaningful often treads through the realm of religion, and as the old adage goes: “there’s two things you never bring up over dinner… religion and politics.” Except as mentioned above, politics are among the more acceptable conversation topics, to the point we tend to self-segregate more along the lines of our political rather than religious affiliations. Politics, after all, is the real American religion. And so a more appropriate phrasing of the adage would be “there’s only one thing you never talk about at dinner or anywhere else: religion.”
In American Southern culture, it’s uncouth to ask “what are your most deeply held beliefs,” or “what is your religion? What’s it about?” If it can be asked, one is usually careful to phrase it as a sort of trivial probing, not any consequential assessment. To probe so deeply with such blunt instruments would surely cause some damage to the transmission’s transparency. You’re unlikely to get further than a milquetoast diplomatic answer.
Religion is very seldom discussed in everyday conversation. It’s thought of as a mere addition to someone’s list of interests or characteristics, rather than a guiding worldview or essential to the formation of their identity. And to be fair, there is a great deal of variance in the depth of the average American’s religious affiliation inwardly; to some it is deeply informative to their self-identity, and to others totally inessential. Outwardly, it is more seriously considered whether one is a fan of the right college team. The manifold reasons for this we will discuss, but it’s enough to realize that for the vast majority of people, speculation or greater still devotion to things unseen is thought utter foolishness at worst, and ancillary at best, in comparison to concerns of the stomach or leaky roof. Because of all of this, getting at the root of someone’s belief is almost always serendipitous, usually the result of some current event causing indigestion in the belly of a confidant.
The Source of Taboo in Religious Discourse
Two of the main reasons why religion is taboo as a topic of conversation is because:
Most do not possess a deep understanding of religion, including their own.
Talking about it implies being about it.
These two concerns swirl into a swell of fears which compound on one another, creating a dense ball of considerations it is very difficult to untangle. In turn, they produce a number of other fears and concerns which lead to religion becoming a largely taboo and unspoken topic: a) fear of being contradicted or exposed as unintelligent, bigoted, or mistaken, b) fear conversation will necessitate a growth in understanding, which requires discomfort and/or learning and change (i.e. “ignorance is bliss”), c) fear of being held to a higher standard on account of what we know or profess to know, d) fear of offending others or posturing as somehow superior, e) fear of being exposed as not truly aligned with one's group, either due to a lack of understanding, commitment, or orthodoxy, and suffering alienation thereby, or f) just plain fear that by laying one’s belief bare, we expose ourselves to attack and a greater sense of doubt. There are perhaps far more reasons, but for our sake these will suffice to illustrate the depth of the concerns involved.
As you can see, there are a variety of reasons for which one may rightfully conclude that religious discourse risks more than is possible to be gained thereby, and so is rightfully segmented away as something both not necessary to discuss in order to get along, and also more importantly too dangerous to discuss if one’s goal is to simply get along. A self-fulfilling prophecy occurs in which we do not discuss religion because it is mysterious, difficult, and dangerous, and because of a lack of discussion becomes more mysterious, difficult, and therefore dangerous. Conversation threatens to reveal just how thin the ice of belief really is in most cases.
The Profane Become Sacred
With this cultural taboo erected, an invisible, artificial partition forms in which we believe in a divide between the sacred and the public sphere. This is specifically exemplified (and perhaps rooted) in our belief in a “separation between church and state.” We have somehow convinced ourselves our public, political, profane lives are in some sense totally unattached, uninformed, and divorced from what is sacred, transcendent, even eternal. The problem is precisely due to the fabricated nature of this partition– it is in many ways demonstrably more fictional than the religious ideals it seeks to sequester. But because of our adherence to this legal fiction, the very aspect of our worldview which ought to be informed by our religion– our political worldview– is instead determined in the reverse order. As a result, when it comes to a conversation about politics and the orientation of our laws, we grasp onto the idea that we can have objective political models which do not “legislate morality” and are divorced from any metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, necessarily religious basis. In short, our political worldviews float atop unexamined, unquestionable religious foundations.
Deafening Silence and Historical Inversion
Incoherent substitutes begin to percolate within the culture as a result of this strange cognitive dissonance. We have deemed the topic of religion too unimportant (read: important) to discuss, and so we end up playing word games in order to dance around the necessity of religious understanding and clarity. The traditional objects of worship are made null, an idea of god replacing the person. “Do you have faith?” is answered in the affirmative: “I have so much faith!” Faith in what exactly is still a mystery– perhaps faith in faith itself. Keir Starmer, the Fabian Socialist and self-proclaimed atheist prime minister of Britain, even said that he “did not believe in God, but can see the power of faith, how it brings people together.”
The object of worship, in this new orientation, is a secondary concern. It’s not as important as to reaffirm again and again that you are worshipping something, anything at all– faith, god, reason– it could even be yourself.
Stranger still: people boast of themselves as essentially nonreligious in their worship, resulting in a totally perverted expression of the essentially religious impulse in man. The so-called “faithful” brag about having a “relationship over a religion.” Even atheists, in an ironically religious fashion, prostrate themselves at the altar of “reason,” and dogmatically assert that it (reason) is proof of itself and needs no justification, and that if you question the reasonableness of reason then you are excommunicated. But we can’t seem to find a reason for our reason, and we have faith in faith. Spirituality is made more vague, identity itself is made political, and language begins to break down. Anything but the dread fate of having to believe what we believe.
In pagan antiquity, religiosity was considered virtuous– it essentially meant to have beliefs on which you would stake your life, and to carry on the traditions of those before you. Cicero defined piety as “justice to the gods.” It was very similar to filial piety. Even if someone did not believe in the gods of their ancestors, they at least were cordial enough to pretend, for the sake of themselves and others, to believe what they professed to believe. Now to be fair, the ancients held a distinction between what they considered “religion” versus “superstition,” which Cicero succinctly explained by stating “Superstition, however, is… not caring for the gods, but regarding them with fear and dread for our own sake.” It would not be until the Christian’s had come along that the difference between deference and reverent love would become fully realized.
But in the modern world, we appear to have lost the distinction between the two; anything religious seems superstitious to us. Not only that, but two sides of the same coin emerge as dialectical overreactions: pietism and natural theology. The result is that God becomes more of an idea of something, rather than someone upon which all things continually subsist. We are now haunted, each in our own solipsistic American dream, by a vague, unspoken, fetishized idol– a purely personal conception of the deity, the exclusive property of its owner and nowhere else to be found in the world in any imminent sense. Even among the so-called “faithful,” to be religious is to be a fanatic; someone dangerous on account of their conviction.
What Is Sincere Belief?
Wouldn’t it be strange, though, if we actually believed our beliefs, not to try and discuss them constantly? There’s a joke from Dan Cummins in which he explains that he, an atheist, is a little bit offended at the fact his Christian friend has never once tried to convert him, knowing that in his friend’s religious view, Dan is certainly going to be “burning in hell for all eternity.” The punch line is that his friend is a “heaven hogger.” Have we all become heaven hoggers? Because again, I find myself at a holiday family gathering, and the pretext of my being there is that I at least love these people enough to share a holiday meal with them. We bow our heads in prayer, though it’s pretty obvious many of us, despite being politically monolithic, possess a wide variety of religious viewpoints. But instead of an earnest conversation about this, we brush it under the rug for the sake of avoiding discomfort. But if I really believed in at least the idea we can all get behind– that ignorance or misunderstanding about things unseen can have serious consequences– in what sense am I loving them by saving myself from momentary discomfort? Them from momentary discomfort? Do I really believe in my beliefs if I’m not willing to sacrifice that? But then there’s also the view that by being tactless and inopportune, I could cause more harm than good to them. Maybe being heavy-handed about our beliefs won’t help anyone, and instead risks driving them away. Maybe I ought to affirm them where they are– but then, who knows if they or I will live to see tomorrow? In which case, holding my tongue for fear of the opinions of men will be received as virtueless cowardice, and short-sighted heaven hogging.
