** Religion Is as Dangerous as It Is Important**
But if we are, in a sense, attempting to get you “go to church “ and be part of a community of faith, we also want to warn that you had had better be careful once you are there. In describing religion as a community of people living out their convictions about what matters most in life, we also want to insist that the “community” aspect of religion must always be blended and balanced with the “individual” aspect.
Religion is always a mixing, a unifying, of community and individual; but in this mixing, the ingredient, as it were, is the individual’s faith and experience. Here we find the heart of religion: the person’s own experience of God, the person’s own freedom and commitment to live out that experience in a way that he or she deems best.
In the preceding paragraphs we laid out reasons why the individual’s experience cannot really be owned and lived out by one’s self individual experience must be integrated into a community. But in this integration, the community can never take the place of the individual’s experience. It cannot make itself more important than that which takes place in the individual’s heart and conscience. As we shall see in the last part of this chapter, the community aspect of religion brings not only necessary but also unavoidable dangers. These dangers and abuses are all too real on the contemporary religious scene, as we have already seen. So, if faith needs a community of faith, the community must never take the place of or become more important than the individual’s faith. There is, in other words, a difficult but creative tension between the individual and the community within all religion. It would be a mistake to try to resolve that tension either by not taking the community seriously or by blindly obeying everything it dictates. If some people can claim that “I can’t live within a religion,” we are suggesting that “Neither can you live without it.” The tension between individual and community that is part of religion can sometimes be painful, but it can also be creative and exciting. So far we have been saying that faith needs community. We should also add, if only briefly, that from the perspective of sociology, one can also say that community or society needs faith Sociologists and anthropologists recognize that every society or nation must understand itself within a “larger picture” of meaning and purpose if it is going to function and grow and respond to challenges. Not just individuals, but nations also need to believe in something that grounds their self-understanding and nourishes their- dreams. A nation/society must understand its own story within the context of a larger story. As sociologists such as Emile and Clifford Geertz have pointed out, religions have such “social meaning” for tribes and nations. Especially past, religions have helped societies understand where they come from and where they can go, why the ideals they hold up are reliable.
Every nation, in other words, needs some kind of “faith. And, if today religion has fallen out of the picture for some people and nations and no longer provides this faith, some other kind “faith” will have to take the place of religion and provide a larger picture or story within which the society can understand itself. For the Germans under National Socialism, this larger picture was based on “faith” in the Third Reich. For Marxists, it may come from their “faith” that history operates according to certain innate principles moving it toward a “classless society” For many capitalists countries, the larger picture is tied into an unexpressed belief that technology, and free enterprise will bring about the “Great Society” None of these visions can, strictly speaking , be proven like Religions; They depend to a great extent on faith and trust.
So society needs something to trust in. Every society needs form of faith, religious or secular Community, therefore need, faith, as faith needs community. This helps understand the relationship between individual and community that is part of religion. It also explains and justifies the desire of religious people that their religious faith, their vision of what is true and needed to improve this world, might make a contribution to the faith or to the “larger picture” that guides their country’s political policies. Although it is never to be identified with a political party, religion does have something to say to the world of politics. As a community of faith, religion is also a community of action and involvement in the world.
Wouldn’t you like to know to the Baby when he grows up and has to leave his mother’s lap.?
Please see the next chapter