“spiritual”
Now I am filled with the Holy Ghost, that is the promise in the Bible the Church will not talk about, because this secret would mean the fall of the religion.
—Lisa Gerrard, in a 2013 interview
What exactly is Gerrard talking about, here? The Church seems to take the Holy Spirit pretty seriously. Although Gerrard is referring to the Catholic Church, to which her family belonged, there are plenty of churches that centre the experience of being “filled with the Holy Ghost.” But this would seem not to be what she means. She means: the living Spirit contradicts the dead letter.
Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God; Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. But if the ministration of death, written and engraven in stones, was glorious, so that the children of Israel could not stedfastly behold the face of Moses for the glory of his countenance; which glory was to be done away: How shall not the ministration of the spirit be rather glorious?
—Paul, 1 Corinthians 3:5-8
I reckon most “spiritual but not religious” people wouldn’t recognise themselves as Pauline, nor would Paul, yet that’s what they are, in an extreme sense. For Paul, the “letter” is the old method of interpretation, one that is literal, material, and carnal, whereas the new hermeneutic of the spirit is regenerative, metaphorical, and vital. Explains Augustine, in On Christian Doctrine (bear with me through the long quotes, this is the last hard one!):
For when what is said figuratively is taken as if it were said literally, it is understood in a carnal manner. And nothing is more fittingly called the death of the soul than when that in it which raises it above the brutes, the intelligence namely, is put in subjection to the flesh by a blind adherence to the letter. For he who follows the letter takes figurative words as if they were proper, and does not carry out what is indicated by a proper word into its secondary signification... Now it is surely a miserable slavery of the soul to take signs for things, and to be unable to lift the eye of the mind above what is corporeal and created, that it may drink in eternal light.
The “spiritual, not religious” stance looks at this line of thought and sez: we can go harder. Augustine’s examples of the “letter,” such as “when [someone] hears of a sacrifice, [but] does not carry his thoughts beyond the customary offerings of victims from the flock, and of the fruits of the earth,” can be taken further. What if the entirety of the Bible can be spiritualised, deliteralised, to the point that only the most abstract Spirit-God remains, a void to be filled with secular ideals? All religion is the letter, destroyed by the subjective Spirit. The most convenient possible God has to be the true one. Again, this is not a Pauline thought that Paul would recognise, but it is indubitably an unexpected, secular offshoot of Pauline Christian thought.
This convenient, respectable God can only be totally spiritual, which is the acceptable kind of God for the secular world. “Wispy matters of the spirit are all well and good as long as they remain immaterial,” as Ana Levy-Lyons describes the viewpoint of the secular gaze.1 One can describe the perfect God for the secular world with the same words by which a Hermetic writer in Late Antiquity described his God: “the invisible God to whom one speaks in silence.”2 God should not be taken as intruding into the world; religiosity should be unobtrusive in public life. That’s not what the Hermetic writer meant about his God, but his words ring true for the atheist-friendly, eminently respectable God of convenience.
respectability theology
Initially, the term “respectability politics” referred to a strategy among Black Americans to gain acceptance in white-dominant society in the wake of emancipation. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham describes the idea in her analysis of Black Baptist women’s thought from the late 19th to early 20th centuries: “Their assimilationist leanings led to their insistence upon blacks’ conformity to the dominant society’s norms of manners and morals.”3 However, Higginbotham also writes that her subjects “combined both a conservative and a radical impulse,” promoting respectability politics “while simultaneously asserting traditional forms of protest, such as petitions, boycotts, and verbal appeals to justice.”4 So, per Higginbotham, these early advocates of respectability politics were not totally devoid of interest in protest.
Today, though, the term “respectability politics” refers more broadly to a strain of assimilationist thought within various social justice movements. Is being loud and proud the right thing to do, or is it more effective to show that the minority group in question can be just like the average Joe or Joanne in the majority, aside from their minoritising trait (e.g., being gay)? Respectability politics is the latter option, although it’s usually an accusation to sling at opponents, not a neutral label like Higginbotham seems to be going for. And I won’t try to answer that question here! It’s a big split, though, between radicals, liberals, and conservatives among minority or minoritised groups seeking rights or acceptance.
Respectability theology here refers to the way that theology bends and breaks under the falsely neutral gaze of secularism. Religion retreats to the home, hypostatised as something separable from “normal” life. We wouldn’t want to seem weird to onlookers, right? Sarah Hurwitz describes the effects of this drive for respectability early in her life:
And I feel compassion for my younger self — for the lost, deracinated soul who, for so many years, anxiously assured everyone around me that I was “just a cultural Jew,” that “social justice is my Judaism,” that I was just like them and not in any way like those other Jews who are so… well… Jewish.5
Dara Horn has been harshly critical of the selectiveness with which secular society doles out compassion to Jews. Hasidim are too weird, too Jewy, while “nice Jews” who assimilate merit respect, for they’re just like everyone else.
Sorbie, at her newsletter Miss Apprehension, provides a useful, sharp, but not damning perspective on respectability-striving she’s observed within liberal Christianity:
It’s my observation that socially progressive churches, like the one I grew up in and the one I go to now, often seem to be catering to the side-eye of our secular milieu. We are so sorry for the harm We have caused, they seem to be saying. We are so bad, but we swear We can do better. We swear we aren’t like those bad guy Christians. We are Listening and Learning, we swear. See, we ordain gays! We say “siblings in Christ”! We have a Land Acknowledgement! We know that Black Lives Matter! We are just so humble. We mean, we are striving toward humility so hard. We have to decenter and unlearn so much. As if the secular milieu can absolve us.
I can’t reasonably comment more on the Christian angle, so I’ll let the quote speak entirely for itself. The quest for respectability can be primarily to do with behaviours and appearances, as is the case in Hurwitz’s and Sorbie’s examples; but it can also manifest as a defacement of theology.
Respectability theology throws the Divine under the bus if it’s aesthetically inconvenient. If theology, like any aspect of religion, does not hold up to the cold, pseudo-neutral secular gaze, it must be sanded down to smooth spirituality, at best, and perhaps even apologised for. Lofi God to not feel judged by.
Respectability theology is a theology that shifts according to the preferences of the secular world. Levy-Lyons points out that “religious cultures today are evaluated and constructed through a secular way of seeing.”6 The secular gaze becomes neutral; a religious viewpoint becomes an other. However, “where the secular mind sees neutrality and even-handedness, the religious mind can often detect a specific theology[.]”7 This is why I can get extremely frustrated by atheists’ attempts to reform religions according to secular ideas of what they should be, and why secular interlocutors are sometimes equally frustrated at my perspective that religions aren’t just “spiritual technologies” that exist to serve therapeutic purposes and should be amputated if they cause practical discomforts. Levy-Lyons cites Christian Smith’s concept of “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,” which is “a diluted version of Christianity,” and which “includes beliefs like, ‘The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself,’ and, ‘God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when needed to resolve a problem.’”8
Respectable, spiritual-but-not religious, atheist-lite, hyper-Pauline theology declares that all religion is a dead letter while unproblematic Spirit, in its comfortable individualism and lack of real demands, is the acceptable truth. The Spirit in “spiritual, but not religious” is an open wound left by the amputation of the Divine. Secular, personal values can be used to soothe that wound — they can be dubbed “spirituality,” then replaced when they stop “working.”
“theism”: the god of the atheist
In the town of Berditchev, there was a proud, self-proclaimed atheist who shared with anyone who would listen his problems with a cruel, uncaring God. The great Chassidic Master Rebbe Levi Yitzchak approached him. After the atheist vociferously explained why he doesn’t believe in God, Reb Levi Yitzchak turned to him and said, “You know, the God you don’t believe in, I don’t believe in him either.”
Many of us have likely heard a variant of this story. I’ve heard Christian apologists repeat the Rebbe’s line, loosely. It’s a handy line for some in the wake of “New” Atheism. Oh, you don’t believe in a bearded man sitting on a golden throne above the clouds? Wow I don’t either, isn’t that craycray!!!
Clearly I have some disdain for this line of argument. The rabbi here is only speaking about the idea of an evil God, but to the Christian apologists who I’ve heard adopt the phrase, I might reply: My God is not immaterial. My God is not changeless. My God did not make the Law. Most non-Christian “theists” don’t believe in an incarnate God.9 That could cause some struggles for an apologetics debatebro or two whom I’ve known, because they prefer to cede ground, not hold it. And eventually they run out of ground.
It would seem that the “I don’t believe that implausible God either!” line has its limits. And I’m being pedantic here, but I think it’s telling that the line has had such enduring appeal. Taken far enough, ceding enough ground to the atheist, God becomes diminished to the point of utter vagueness, a non-thing that need not exist, a higher IQ version of the “God in the gaps” error. Having lopped off any limb of God that does not suit the atheist’s sensibilities, a faith becomes theism.
The term “theism” has always bugged me. The so-called atheism vs. theism arguments, which is almost always to say atheism vs. Protestantism arguments, usually entail both sides knowing almost nothing about religion, but I’ve gone on about that elsewhere. Anyway, the term “theism” annoys me because arguments are made against and for it that apply to one God, which is not mine.
Setting aside YouTube and campus debatebros and moving into more serious thought, we can often find something like what “theism” ostensibly refers to, elsewhere — this impossibly non-specific belief in a generic deity. Interestingly, this deity never resembles Hekate, Hashem, or any god almost anyone has ever believed. It’s store brand divinity, or like a dress I buy off Amazon that doesn’t even have a brand name. This theist divinity is a metaphysical construct as weightless as most dresses I get off Amazon.
Voltaire, predictably, was one of the proudest promoters of this kind of theism, a term he apparently used synonymously with his own deism. (No surprise there, and keep in mind Smiths’ concept of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Try out Moralistic Therapeutic Theism. Either way.) It should give us pause to see that this store brand theism is the main variety of religion of which Voltaire approves, the same Voltaire who attacks whatever strikes him personally as superstitious/pre-Enlightened. He writes of a “true theologian” that “[t]he more truly learned he became, the more he doubted all he knew.”10 There is no room for faith in Voltaire’s smug deism. In his Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire makes frequent use of sarcasm, but it’s hard to read his account of theism as anything but a proposed antidote to the superstition he scorns. I’ll chop up his description of theism but must still quote it at some length:
The theist is a man firmly convinced of the existence of a supreme being as good as he is powerful, who has created all… who punishes crimes without cruelty, and benevolently rewards virtuous behaviour. The theist does not know how god punishes, how he encourages, how he forgives, for he is not rash enough to flatter himself that he knows how god acts, but he knows god does act and that he is just… United in this principle with the rest of the universe, he does not embrace any of the sects, which all contradict each other… To do good, that is his cult. To submit to god, that is his doctrine… He laughs [at the Christian and Muslim], but he helps the poor and he defends the oppressed.11
The atheism-approved believer is a man firmly convinced of something religious, who rejects the foundations of the religions whence he derives his belief in god — the Bible, after all, describes a lot about God. On the Jewish side, the Zohar urges that one cannot get into heaven without having learned about God in this life. Whence, after all, does Voltaire derive his idea of the good God? Out of the ether? Even as he kicks the epistemological foundation of his religion from under himself, he sticks to the few comforting parts. Moralistic, therapeutic. This is a theist, who is not “rash” enough to stake a claim that might upset Voltaire’s delicate nerves; that God is good appeals secularly, so it can stay, even if it has no further reason to stick around. The theist rejects any religious idea of justice, but presumably holds to an atheistic account of justice, then projects it back onto his god. He is a man who scoffs at “sects, which all contradict each other,” while being a sect of one, who contradicts everyone else, just the same. Voltaire wants to think this modern (a)theism is the universal norm but that’s plainly dishonest.
Voltaire also describes a least-bad religion thusly:
Would it not be the simplest? Would it not be that which taught much morality and very little dogma? that which tended to make men just without making them absurd? that which did not order one to believe in things that are impossible, contradictory, injurious to divinity, and pernicious to mankind, and which dared not menace with eternal punishment anyone possessing common sense?… which taught only the worship of one god, justice, tolerance and humanity?12
I realise a lot of agnostics/atheists likely perk up at Voltaire’s description of what he wants believers to be. And that’s fine, I’m just going to be blunt from now on. There’s no sense in pretending to share remotely the same view, as they don’t pretend to share mine. I have no interest in evangelising for my non-evangelical faith, either, obviously.
Most importantly, I have no interest in living down to Voltaire’s condescending prescriptions.
By the time all pretence to knowledge of God has vanished, where are we, those of us with scriptures, in which the prophets so rashly reveal divine reality? in which God saves us from terror, and punishes injustice, and truthfully promises us the glory of redemption? in which God expresses humility, descending with us, walking with us, loving us, and asking in return for love? I could never love the theistic moot-god, nor worship it, just as I do not pour my soul out to gravity, or kneel for the almighty electron.
I would be insulted if Voltaire respected me.
My plea to the faithful: Do not see Voltaire’s castrated god as “neutral” and your God as strange, just because Voltaire would say It is. Voltaire’s notion of “theism” is actually quite bizarre! Nevertheless, his preferred wispy, long-distance god is tempting because it’s socially comfortable, and because we can fill it with our values; we can revise Voltaire’s god as we see fit. The worshipper of the “invisible God to whom one speaks in silence” will become whatever the Nations want. The god of your respectability theology will become whatever is left of yourself.
I often recall the words of Gottlieb Wehle, one of the last of his community of Believers, who wrote in his will: “Do not be ashamed of this happy faith of your great ancestors. Say with pride that you feel the germ of this eternal life in you.” Wehle passed away in 1881, may his memory be a blessing. He knew, even then, that his sectarian Jewish faith was one of the most reviled of all faiths, and hatred toward it has since only grown through generations of evil lies. Nevertheless, or therefore, he would still say, be proud of Her spark within you: this dis-respectable, disrespectful promise we hold, he and I.
disrespectful theology
I must, or at least want to!, quote Levy-Lyons again. “If there is one cardinal rule in liberal religious and secular leadership, it is this principle: Never make them feel guilty; never make them feel judged.”13 Oftentimes, I believe respectability theology comes down to both not wanting to feel judged and not wanting to seem judgy. I don’t want anyone to be unduly disrespectful of others on a personal level, but I also don’t want our theology to bow to personal respectfulness. I’ll make two points on the topic of judginess before I wrap up.
Firstly, many people need to get over the rage they seem to experience at feeling “judged” by random people. The popular YouTuber Innuendo Studios made a video some years ago that still often comes to mind, which sets out to explain why people get mad at, for instance, vegans. He points to the rage people can feel at witnessing others engage in difficult or unconventional lifestyles on behalf of their own sense of morality, and gives some examples of when we might have experienced our own such rage: if we offer someone food, but she turns it down, explaining that she’s vegan; if we invite someone to a Christmas event but he declines because of his atheist beliefs; if we offer someone a drink, but the person (e.g., me) declines, explaining that she’s sober… The turners-down are likely just explaining their reason for denying an offer, but as Mr. Studios is aware, such statements come off to some people, inevitably, as judgment.
Why do these statements piss so many people off? Why do they read like judgments? Because they’re not, not necessarily… But the thing is that these people have made some bold decisions about how they live their lives, bold and inconvenient decisions. At first glance, their lives look less enjoyable than yours, and it seems they live their lives that way because they feel it’s the more rational, possibly even more ethical way to live, prompting the question, “If they’re right, what does that say about me?” That’s never a comfortable question to ponder.
If you, hypothetical reader, thought I was just going after “don’t judge me” cries from atheists, I’m not. I’m mostly going after respectability theologians. Just stop caring. Stop feeling bad because of some smug pop nonfiction book by a guy who sounds smart because of his British accent, or whatever. Your fear of judgment leads you to sand down your God. That way, you won’t feel judged by others who might also feel judged by you. Convenient! But hollow. Instead, I hope you’ll stand your ground. Be personally respectful but theologically disrespectful.
Secondly, I feel judged by my faith. That’s the point. I face One Judge. Simple — not easy, but simple. If someone feels judged by my faith, which they don’t even hold, and which they don’t need to hold, so be it; if someone judges me for my faith, so be it. They are—quite seriously—not the judge of me, when it comes to matters of ultimate reality. They don’t create my Judge, nor can I concoct another.
I will destroy your idols
And the sacred pillars in your midst;
And no more shall you bow down
To the work of your hands.—Micah 5:12
This post continuously grew in scope across the months I’ve mulled over the topic, and I’ve ended up cutting it drastically. So, expect at least two other posts on adjacent topics—how Hellenisation, the ultimate respectability theology, came for Judaism at last; and why not to “debate” atheists, for everyone’s sake—soon.
Ana Levy-Lyons, The Secret Despair of the Secular Left: Our Fraying Connections with Our Communities, Our Bodies, and the Earth (Broadleaf Books, 2025), 45.
The Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth, translated by Marvin Meyer, in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2007), 415.
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Harvard UP, 1993), 187.
Ibid.
Sarah Hurwitz, As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame and Try to Erase Us (HarperOne, 2025), 15.
Levy-Lyons 33.
Ibid 36-37.
Ibid 10.
For those who don’t know what Judaism is, as a specific example, few Jews have ever believed that the Messiah will be God and human; the standard idea of the Messiah is that he’s a dude descended from Solomon, who will rule like a human dude, die, be succeeded by a son, and so on. Think Moses, or David, but better (except not as great a prophet as Moses, of course). That’s not my view but it’s the standard one. I lately heard some major Christian Nationalist pastor mention offhand that Jews expect to worship the Messiah, which is a funny way to show he doesn’t know anything — especially given most Jews don’t anticipate a Messiah of any sort anymore.
Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, translated by Theodore Besterman, (Penguin, 1974), 387
Ibid 386.
Ibid 357.
Levy-Lyons 25.