A Religion of One’s Own is a confusing book. While its stated purpose is to guide readers in “creating a personal spirituality in a secular world,” I found it to be more of a manual for self-analysis and self-therapy. It is composed of the typically eclectic “cherry-pick your beliefs” advice that seems to dominate modern spiritual guidebooks.
While there is much to agree with in Thomas Moore’s rejection of legalism and his encouragement to find the sacred in everyday life, his methods are unsettling—and sometimes utterly antithetical to orthodox theological practice. Encouraging people to decorate their homes with shrines containing images of random gods is … unsettling, to say the least.
But it was a footnote that put the capstone on my concerns about this book: “… I see no evidence that Jesus ever intended to create a formal religion and that he wasn’t talking about the afterlife or another life. He was teaching how to live at a higher level in this life.” (page 173) Any half-trained Christian apologist or theologian could poke dozens of holes in this conclusion, with multiple quotes from the gospels to prove the point. Characterizing Christianity as a “members-only religion” and saying that crucifixion art leads us to “think too much about the person Jesus” is both wrong and heretical in the extreme.
While there is much to be praised in a book that encourages people to explore their religious beliefs, test them, and be willing to learn from the traditions of others — to allow art, music, and historic artifacts to speak to our souls —these are good things. What is not good is to encourage people to turn God into a sort of self-serve delicatessen from which one picks the rituals, observances, and concepts that one likes and feels comfortable with from all of the religious and pagan traditions of the centuries, while leaving the rest on the counter.
Many of the sacred writings of various traditions condemn this sort of practice, notably the condemnatory statement in the book of Judges (from the Jewish and Christian traditions), which states that at the end of the period of the judges, there was no king in Israel, so everyone did what he or she thought was right. (Judges 21:25) It is also interesting to note that in the same traditions, it was when men chose to worship God in their own way that they got in trouble. (See Numbers 10:1–2, Genesis 4:3–7.)
I agree with Moore that we should focus our religious efforts more on the pleasure of relationship with God than on the pain of wrongdoing, that the common religious pattern of “rules, punishment, fear, submission, authority, and male dominance” is an unfortunate devolution from the religion of love, peace, compassion, and mutual respect taught by Jesus and other religious figures. But I do not agree with his methods for abandoning the old traditions and creating new ones.
In the end, Moore speaks like Pilate at the trial of Jesus, “I recommend giving up the word ‘truth’ altogether. It only gets you in trouble. I would suggest that the precise opposite is is true. While we ought not fight about the truth (as Longfellow said, “Who dares to say that he alone has found the truth?”), I submit that it is crucial that we recognize that there is truth, it is not relative or subjective in nature, and it is neither negotiable nor self-defined.
While Christians may be able to glean some useful ideas for spiritual practice from this book, they should read it with great caution. It is too accepting of heresy and paganism, and it does not make the proper distinction between gleaning truth wherever it is planted and accepting all doctrine as “true” for some, if not for all.
As C.S. Lewis says in Mere Christianity, “If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. … you are free to think that all these religions … contain at least some hint of the truth. … But, of course, being a Christian does mean thinking that where Christianity differs from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong.”
Moore fails to make this critical distinction and seems to embrace whatever one finds spiritual value in as “truth,” regardless of what the Bible says about it. And while he intimates that one need not leave one’s cherished traditions behind, his methods contradict this idea. Ultimately, and with a frightening lack of humility, he rejects the clear teaching of Christianity with his final statement: “I don’t want anyone telling me why I’m here, how to live and what to expect at the end of my life. I have enough information in my own experience. Who else can speak for me? For this reason alone I need a religion of my own.” This is hubris, pure and simple. And hubris is the greatest of the cardinal sins.
(I received a review copy of this book through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.)