"Spiritual but Not Religious"? Are You Sure? |
Have you ever come across someone who qualifies her opinions about gender-related issues by assuring her listener that she's "not a feminist or anything"? That comment wouldn't be surprising coming from denizens of the Bible Belt or the MAGAverse who are in favor of women's subservience to men, but it's disconcerting to hear such a disclaimer from reasonably progressive women. One has to assume that what they're distancing themselves from is a strawwoman — a tendentious caricature of feminism as humorless man-hating.
I recently found myself wondering whether something similar might be going on when people who are uninterested in, or even actively put off by, the faith in which they were raised, disclaim labels like atheist or agnostic and insist that, though they're not religious, they consider themselves spiritual.
What exactly does that last word mean? Could its appeal rest partly on dubious assumptions about the first two words?
If you've ever watched Miracle on 34th Street, you'll remember its lesson that people who don't believe in Santa Claus lack imagination. "It's not just Kris [Kringle] that's on trial," one character says. "It's everything he stands for. It's kindness and joy and love and all the other intangibles." All of which, apparently, are unfamiliar to dour, literal-minded skeptics.
That this is a ridiculously false dichotomy is a lesson I learned from my daughter when she was four years........