healthyreligion.com

Peter Berger, in The Sacred Canopy, writes about humans as “world-builders.” Our societies assign meanings to the various elements of the world we live in, and in this way we end up with culture. Human beings also assign cosmic and sacred meaning, and we do this through religion. All of this activity results in cultural and religious worlds that people experience as objective realities - prefabricated whole worlds that were created by humans, yet which exist before our birth, so that we come to encounter them as objective realities “outside” ourselves. Cultures and religions are then taught to children systematically, and children (and later, adults) learn to develop an active dialogue with them.

Some people may accept the cultural or religious world they are raised to be part of without question. Others may reject that world and search for a different way of ordering meaning in their lives. Berger argues that we are hard-wired to “build a world” and impose meaning on reality through choices we make about culture and religion, whether we choose to live in the cultural and religious world given to us by our family or origin or whether we choose to live in a different world of meaning. He says that whatever each of us decides to do, we each make a choice. We aren’t passive recipients of a “world” even if we choose to refrain from questioning it. Here’s how he describes this choice (go ahead and substitute the word “religion” for the phrase “social world” in this quote, as Berger later goes on to say the same thing applies to one’s experience of religion):

…the social world (with its appropriate institutions, roles, and identities) is not passively absorbed by the individual, but actively appropriated by him [or her]. Furthermore, once the individual is formed as a person … [she or] he must continue to participate in the conversation [with the social world] that sustains him as a person [with an] ongoing biography. That is, the individual continues to be a co-producer of the social world, and thus of [him- or her-]self. - The Sacred Canopy, p.18

Here’s where it gets more interesting to me as I think about what makes an approach to religion healthy or unhealthy.

Berger writes that “All socially constructed worlds are inherently precarious (p. 29).” Events happen that contradict previously held beliefs. Neighboring peoples introduce alternative “worlds” that are more appealing to some people. Religions compete for followers. Children ask “why” and aren’t always satisfied with the answers that worked for their ancestors. Times change. Chapter 2 of his book is called “Religion and World-Maintenance,” a title that points to one of the key activities religions engage in - attempting to stave off threats to the world they have constructed.

A couple thoughts this brings up for me:

Without the ability to control the access to so many “worlds” that humans now experience, it is not surprising that fundamentalism is such a powerful force on the world stage. The perceived threat to the certainty of these fundamentalist worlds must be enormous. Perhaps many of these true believers are trying to account for these many potential challenges to their respective worlds by describing the time we’re living in as a time of siege against them. For some, the world they live in makes more sense if this siege is seen as an indicator that a final, apocalyptic battle is immanent. There’s comfort in co-creating a world in which the rising up of all these other threatening worlds is merely a prelude to the final victory of one’s own world. But how frightening that so many around the globe - members of different religions - are actively choosing such a world of religious meaning. People living in such worlds are in many cases inflicting violence on others or hoping for a cataclysmic war. The final battle should start already - what a relief it’ll be - so much better than this sinking, unspoken doubt that our world (ie. our religious sect) might be replaced by a different one.
The theologian, Sam Keen, writes like a person who has become aware of Berger’s observations about how we tend to build worlds of meaning through culture and religion. He has sought to articulate a theology - or a “world” - that acknowledges that we can’t know for sure a whole lot of things about ultimate reality. I like how he puts it here:

In truth, we cannot know enough to be either theists or atheists. We have no alternative except to decide whether to trust or mistrust this encompassing mystery. It seems to me that the best theological position is one that combines agnosticism with trust. I choose to trust the surrounding mystery out of which I emerged and into which I will disappear in death and to rest secure within the darkness of the unknowable One. -Hymns to an Unknown God, p. 69

To me, one of the cardinal elements of a healthy approach to religion is a healthy not-knowing. If Berger is right, then this choice may require us to do a certain kind of resisting of our impulse to have a well-defined “world” that we inhabit. We choose to co-create a religious world in which we acknowledge our act of creation, refraining from over reifying that world, and incorporating into it a healthy dose of not knowing.