An Excerpt from In Praise of the Secular
Religio, and hence religion, basically meant conscientiousness, and in particular ‘a conscientious concern for what really matters’. This is what Paul Tillich was recovering for the word when he defined religion as ‘the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of the meaning of life’. Carla Della Casa, an Italian scholar of modern religion, put it even more simply: ‘Religion is a total mode of the interpreting and living of life’.[W Cantwell] Smith suggested that in the current confusion we should stop talking about ‘religion’ and ‘religions’ and instead fasten our attention on the capacity of people to be religious. In this sense an atheist like Richard Dawkins, who is sincerely and passionately protesting against the traditional understanding of God out of a concern for truth, is to be judged more religious than those nominal Christians who have at best a half-hearted commitment to the God they claim to believe in.
Further, Smith asserted that we should stop thinking of religion as a ‘thing’ – something consisting of beliefs, rituals, holy scriptures, moral codes and so on – that we may choose to embrace or reject. He called such a complex of individual and shared elements the ‘cumulative tradition’ of a particular path trodden by people on the religious quest. As but one of many routes, it is not to be confused with the quest itself, for it is simply the collective behaviour of people who walk a particular pathway of faith. Being a product of the inherent religious dimension of human existence, it must always remain secondary to the continuing religious quest itself.
Humans show themselves to be religious whenever and wherever they take the questions of human existence seriously, and then create a common response to whatever they find to be of ultimate value to them. The only truly non-religious person is one who treats human existence as trivial or meaningless, for ultimately the religious phenomenon arises out of human experience as we reflect on the fundamental nature of human existence. With but rare exceptions, people everywhere and at all times have made some kind of response to the demands of human existence. They have tried to make something of life. They have looked for meaning and purpose. They have hoped for some kind of fulfilment. For such reasons humankind has in the past been universally religious, and there is no good reason to suspect that in the future people will cease to be religious. And this is true even though an increasing number have grown dissatisfied with the religious forms of the past, having found them to be irrelevant in the new cultural age we have entered.
From In Praise of the Secular by Lloyd Geering, 2007, pages 10 and 11.