This is my reflection on Peter Rollins’ Insurrection, which I summarized here.  (Disclosure: I was given a free copy of the book to review here)

As a biblical scholar, I try not to dabble in theology too much.  But rather than critique Rollins’ hermeneutic, I will try my hand at an cultural-theological look at Chapter 3 (“I’m not Religious” and Other Religious Sayings).  I admit that this is part semantic argument (over the definition of “religion”) and part critique of culture.  Once religion is defined my way, I am not sure that I will be critiquing Rollins’ argument anymore, and in fact our arguments may be compatible.

For me, religion is a social category, that both binds some people together and bind those people back to an earlier tradition.  I used to be one of those people who said, “I’m spiritual, but not religious.”  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that everything that I thought was only spiritual, was actually religious.  So, I’m still unable to find a definition of “spiritual” that is not in some way religious.  In fact, I can openly admit, I really have no idea what “spiritual” means, now.  Prayer? Personal relationship with God?  Charasmatic experiences?  De-Institutionalized faith?  Against the physical?  Feel free to help me out here, but I get the sense that “spiritual” means private, and “religion” means institution.

Rollins suggests something similar, critiquing both the spiritual and religous, when he says of private belief:

Because it is not our beliefs that provide power here, but rather the beliefs bearing down on us from others.  It is the beliefs of the magazines and television advertisements that hold the operative power, beliefs that we have internalized but refused to acknowledge.  We continue to believe through the unconscious affirmation of the others’ beliefs, thus allowing ourselves to reject, ridicule, and renounce the very things that continue to dictate our material actions.

This is the very problem with the social–with the religious.  Even when the individual is cognitively and rationally convinced of something, their lived existence still contradicts this belief, because we see the objects of belief through the eyes of other individuals within our communities.  But clearly, since the individual sees so-called ‘truth,’ and yet the individual’s behavior is still not changed, the answer cannot be more “privitization” (spiritualization) of belief.  Instead, it seems the individual cannot be ‘fixed’ in isolation, but only through a critique and reform of religious institutions.  The system must be checked.  But the community must also remain intact, in connection with a tradition, at least in its broadest sense as a long discourse over time.  For example, as Christians, we must remain in the existential crisis of what it means for the Christ to have died and to have been resurrected.  We may not all answer it the same, but that existential question forms the tradition around which Christians gravitate.

For me, ‘spiritualized belief,’ is simply a product of Western Culture and of the glorified “choosing individual.”  While it might stand as a corrective for the hegemonizing power of institutions, it creates more problems than it solves, and as Rollins’ points out, does not really correct hegemonizing institutions.  Only religious communities in constant reflection and reform can do that.  And even the proper ‘Insurrectionist’ must be part of an intentional and theological community that experiences God through loving others.  Thus, in my opinion, the Insurrection is part of a system that binds us together and binds us to a tradition–Insurrection is religious, not spiritual.

And so am I.

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