Contemporary Religion: Review of Caputos On Religion

Part 1

Caputos On Religion is a review of how religion is experienced in the contemporary world. It does not begin with a contemporary view, but rather a depiction of what religion is, what has happened to religious belief, and how religion is communicated today, particularly in media. The first part discusses the idea of religion as love. This is important because the religious experience is much like that of the experience of lovers who are separated. For example, two lovers who are separated will write or send expressions of love to one another to keep the love alive. They will use their imagination and their energy to reflect, meditate on that love, and act on it in some form of communication. The same is true in religion. God is the recipient of the love from man, and man is the recipient of the love from Godyet both are separated in some way and so there is this distance to cross and that makes the demonstration or act of love so much sweeter.

Once Caputo establishes this basic understanding of what religion is, he next goes on to discuss what happened to religion in the modern world and why it tends to be viewed in such polarizing ways. On the one hand, religion is mocked and scorned; on the other hand, it is seen as the end-all, be-all of life; the point of existence. First, there was the sacral age in which the sacred was esteemed, and the mystery of God was valued in society. Religion was interwoven into the fabric of society and communities worshipped as a whole. It was important that everyone believe in and share the same faith. The Age of Faith was the period of the West when Europe was known as Christendom.

Then came a change in society; the Reformation happened; people began fighting about what to believe; the unity of faith was shattered; and secularists began finding ways to maintain cohesion in the community without religion. Religion itself became anathema. It was seen as the problem rather than as a helping glue. Too many people were fighting over religious issues, and so leaders thought that keeping government focused on secular politics would prevent the wars. The Enlightenment Age and the Romantic Age came out of this move towards secularization. Nietzsche declared that God was dead and that there was no need for anyone to engage in religious belief, which in his view got in the way of self-determination. Nietzsche believed the Christian and Jewish faiths were slave faiths that...

God either existed and that meant everything, or He did not exist and nothing of any importance really mattered. This made the question of religion into something supreme and seemed to suggest that life should either go back to the way it was, if God was true, or it should proceed in its current progressive course, if God was untrue.

Then Caputo discusses desecularization, which is the turn away from the secular back to religious ideas and expressions. This can be seen in the rise of evangelicalism and other modes of popular religious expression. This part of the book is quite interesting to read, and it acts as a foreshadow of what Caputo will talk about later when he discusses the topic of religion and Star Wars. For instance, Star Wars is a film about science-fictionbasically space cowboys and heroes and...

…portion of the book is somewhat difficult to get into because the perspective is a difficult one to follow. If one is in a post-truth world, how does truth even enter into the discussion of anything? So there is a true religion, or no? Truthful religionis that something different? What is the purpose of religion if God is irrelevant? How is truth an issue since everyone has his own truth and it is nothing more than a subjective experience? These are the troubling questions that are raised.

The book overall does well to discuss religion from multiple perspectives and it is worth reading for this point alone. It is not something that is going to appeal to every reader, because it does not really make a point about religion that a lot of people who already have solid thoughts on the matter are going to find appealing. For instance, a strict Roman Catholic might take issue with Caputo referring to Catholicism as reactionary.

Nonetheless, the book does do well at probing what it means to be religious or to have religion. And the book does this best in the beginning, when it discusses religion as something about love and purpose. Love and purpose are so interconnected and important to people, no matter what age they are living in, that it is really insightful to relate this to religion. The idea of religion as being something associated with love is also a good one.

The book does tend to get a little too surreal with its lengthy discussion of Star Wars as religious allegory. I remember seeing that movie and thinking it was a very bad, dull and uninteresting movie. I did not like that Christian allegory in it and it felt completely out of place in the Star Wars film. I did not remember…