The human race has had somewhat of a love/hate relationship with religion. Some people find their deepest sense of identity, meaning, and purpose in religious belief, while others reject religious belief as mere superstition, infantile projection, wish-fulfillment, etc. It turns out that at least some of the reasons for these polarized reactions to religion are revealed by the etymology of the word “religion” itself.
Several different derivations for the word “religion” have been proposed over the centuries. Cicero suggested that the word was derived from the Latin word relegere, meaning “to treat or consider carefully”: “Those who carefully took in hand all things pertaining to the gods were called religiosi, from relegere.”
But the more likely derivation is from the Latin word religare (with “ligare” meaning “to bind” or “to connect” and “re-” meaning “again” or “back”). This was the derivation suggested by Lactantius, who wrote, “We are tied to God and bound to Him [religati] by the bond of piety.”
St. Augustine, after first proposing and then rejecting an alternative derivation, eventually came to agree with Lactantius’s claim, noting, “Religion binds us [religat] to the one Almighty God,” and Lactantius’s derivation is the one that is listed in many contemporary dictionaries.
Thus, the term “religion” most likely derives from a word that meant to “connect again” or to “bind again.” The idea of being connected appeals to many of us but being bound? Not so much. Many of us want to be connected to God, to a transcendent source of goodness, blessing, power, and eternal life. But for some people, the concept of being bound to God carries with it the negative connotations of being tied down, having limits placed upon their freedom, and having obligations imposed on them, and they tend to bristle at such perceived restrictions.
In fact, it is precisely this idea of “binding,” interpreted in the sense of restricting or limiting human freedom and blocking the fulfillment of our human potential, that has led some thinkers to reject religion out of hand.
Individuals, and society as a whole, cannot survive and thrive in the long run without a sound moral code to guide their actions.
Ludwig Feuerbach thought that the Christian God was a mere illusion onto which human beings projected both their deepest needs (e.g., love, protection, consolation) and their highest ideal attributes (including, once again, love, as well as wisdom, justice, and knowledge). Feuerbach claimed that religious belief functions as an obstacle to what he called our “species being,” by which he meant that religion blocks the fulfillment of human potential.
In Feuerbach’s estimation, religion makes human beings dependent on God rather than themselves, diminishes their confidence in their own abilities, and distracts them from focusing on this earthly life and on efforts to improve earthly society. He believed that man had the power to bring about his own salvation. Feuerbach’s claims exerted significant influence on several subsequent thinkers’ attitudes toward religion, including Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Jean-Paul Sartre, all of whom rejected religion and caused many other people to reject religion as well.
Roger Scruton, the British philosopher and cultural commentator, disagreed with Feuerbach and these other thinkers in regard to their rejection of religion. He argued that rather than being an obstacle to our “species being,” religion stems from our species being. Human beings, according to Scruton, have an innate need for religion: an innate need for connection to each other, to our forebears and to our progeny, and to the transcendent, and religion helps to facilitate those connections and those relationships.
But Scruton also valued the “binding” aspect of religion in the sense that religions typically impose a moral code upon their adherents, a code that often encourages such qualities as the assumption of personal responsibility for one’s actions, accountability to other people and to God for those actions, and a spirit of self-sacrifice, all of which are conducive to the formation and flourishing of human communities and of individual human beings.
Scruton was on the right track with his focus on both of these aspects of religion: the personal and societal benefits of the moral codes propounded by various religions, and also the experience of connection and relationship that is provided by religion. But we find a much deeper and more explicitly Christian explanation of and justification for these aspects of religion in the thought of Pope Benedict XVI.
Pope Benedict XVI certainly agreed with Scruton regarding the fundamental importance of the moral code provided by religion; on numerous occasions, he spoke out strongly against the moral relativism that is rampant in contemporary society and the damage that this relativism has done, both to individual people and to society. Individuals, and society as a whole, cannot survive and thrive in the long run without a sound moral code to guide their actions.
But Pope Benedict also emphasized that the purpose of the Christian moral code is not merely to conduce the flourishing of individual persons and of society; that code is meant to conform each of us to the image of Jesus Christ, the God-man (Rom. 8:28—30; 1 Cor. 15:49). The Christian moral code is meant to align our hearts, our minds, our actions, and our very being with the essence of God, who is goodness itself, so that we might participate as fully as possible in the divine life.
Rather than cramping our freedom, as is claimed by some opponents of Christianity, the Christian moral code expands and elevates human freedom, enabling us to share in the infinite freedom of God, which is the freedom of self-giving love. It is actually in being “bound” to God that we find our deepest freedom.
The Christian moral code is meant to teach us to love as God loves, so that we might be connected as closely as possible to God and to our fellow human beings. This leads us to the other and more profound meaning of the term “religion”: connection and relationship. As Pope Benedict so eloquently described, life is all about relationships. Relationship is a fundamental aspect of life, a fundamental aspect of existence itself, because relationship is a fundamental aspect of God, as is revealed in the Trinitarian nature of the Christian God. Relationship is not just an aspect or a characteristic of God; relationship is of the essence of God. Relationship is central to who and what God is. And since we human beings are made imago Dei, in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:26—27), relationship is fundamental to who we are and who we are meant to be. We are hard-wired for relationship: relationship with our fellow human beings and relationship with God. That is one of the reasons why religion has been such a pivotal element of human culture and human history. The Christian faith, in particular, intimately links us to God—who is both our source and our intended destination—and to our fellow human beings.