Religious, Spiritual, Both, Neither?

In this interesting opinion piece on the BBC news service, Tom Shakespeare talks about a new demographic religious category, SBNR: Spiritual But Not Religious. He generally categorizes that group as having "New Age" spirituality, ie sort of non-specific, uniquely personal, touchy-feely, and goes on to quote James Martin when he says that "spirituality without religion can become a self-centered complacency divorced from the wisdom of a community". I realized that even with a very specific spirituality, going the very modern individual route can end up in that self-centered complacency.

I came to believe in the living reality of Jesus and His Father, the God of Israel, a long time ago. I surrendered my life to Him and went on to experience fellowship with other Christians in various groups for the next few years. These groups were virtually unstructured, as we all sought to be led by the Spirit of God, and I, for one, had a very strong dislike of "organized religion" believing it to be full of hypocrites, unbelievers just going through the motions, perpetuating all kinds of erroneous and self-serving ideas about themselves, oppressing women, ignoring the poor, masking their love of worldly goods as God's blessings.

I still believe there are plenty like that in the Christian churches, but after about 20 years being on my own, a sort of christian hermit as I thought, I discovered a church of people that, while not perfect any more than I am, showed me how much I was missing by not having anyone to talk with and pray with, not having anyone push me to help to poor, or otherwise engage the world. Just by being who they are, they remind me that everyone has a different point of view, even those of us who are trying to follow Jesus. We all see Him from where we are, and while the Scriptures put important boundaries on who He is, we can all challenge each other to re-examine the details, if not the core, of our faith in Him, as iron sharpens iron. We can push each other to act on our beliefs and thereby strengthen them.

So while Mr. Shakespeare recommends trying religion even without spirituality, I suggest that religion is a false comfort at best, until you get your spirituality straight, but then don't fail to add religion to that.