Religious v. Religion | August 10, 2025 | Rev. Hassaun Ali Jones-Bey

I affirm my need for a growing understanding of all people as children of God, and I seek after a vital experience of God as revealed in the sacred stories of Jesus, Muhammad, Moses, Buddha, Krishna, Lao Tse, Orishas such as Obatala, Orunmilla, and Yemonja, and other great religious spirits whose fellowship with God is the foundation of their fellowship with humankind.

I desire to share in the political growth and ethical awareness of people of varied national, cultural, racial, and creedal heritage united in a religious fellowship.

I desire the strength of corporate worship through membership in The Church for the Fellowship of  All Peoples, with the imperative of personal dedication to the working out of God’s purpose here and in all places.

I have broadened the statement of commitment above for a reason. I believe that all of the great religious spirits say the same thing but in different ways. Empires obscure this by creating a noun—religion—for each of the different ways of saying the same thing. Each way effectively becomes a separate, usually competing, religion. But there is much more to what was said in each way than just the words. Words may conflict, especially when taken out of context, which they essentially have to be in order to create a religion….

This actually suits the modus operandi of empires. It associates, to the point of identifying, a religious “why” with the imperial “what.” Whatever the empire decides to do, whomever it decides to conquer, becomes not just an imperial mandate but also becomes a divine command—a word of God. Even the slightest hesitancy, much less questioning or even disagreement becomes an infidelity, instead of just the good sense questioning that promotes healthy moderation—a healthy check on the proliferation of ultimately self-destructive greed….

Seeing the self-destructiveness is actually the religious essence that is lost in the creation of religion. A religious love of self overflows, naturally and ultimately universally, into a universal community—a universal self, an unconditional love that excludes no one. Empires seek to exclude no one as well, but the unconditional means for overthrowing as opposed to overflowing is power not love—not the power of love but the love of power.

The former comes from a healthy love of self. The latter comes from what is often called love, but is actually a hatred of the universal self—and actually the individual self as well—which is why it takes a religion to justify. Otherwise religious people would question it, refuse to do it, recoil from it.

So if religion is a misnomer, a misuse of the word religious, what is it that actually makes a person religious? I would suggest that a religious person asks, “why?” Such a person asks, “why,” out of a strong feeling, or perhaps a deep conviction, or maybe even an absolute certainty that “why” matters—that the universe cares; that the universe loves because the universe is love. Thus individual and group purposes are simply to align increasingly with—to grow into—the universal purpose, which is love.

Howard Thurman had a very early, critical, and gripping introduction into “why?”He describes it movingly in the first chapter of his autobiography:

My father had died seventeen years earlier, in 1907. Those moments in the hospital [seventeen years later] had rekindled the new memory of the hurt and fear of a seven-year-old boy.… Every summer there would be a regular death toll of typhoid victims. The course of the disease was as familiar as the distant but steady roar of the Atlantic Ocean, sounding across the Halifax River…

            My father, Saul Solomon Thurman, was a big man with a large frame. He worked on a railroad crew, laying the track of the Florida East Coast Railroad from Jacksonville to Miami, and would come home every two weeks. He was quiet, soft-spoken, and gentle. Sometimes I would pass the barbershop and look in. There he would be, getting a haircut and a shave before coming home from his two weeks’ absence. He never wanted us to see him with his hair long, his face unshaven.

            Suddenly one day, in the middle of the week, I heard him coming up the steps of our little house. The door opened and he fell inside. My mother and I struggled to get him to bed. He could hardly breathe and his body was racked with fever. He had pneumonia. Five days later he died. On the last day of his life, we could hear the death rattle in his throat. I sat on one side of the bed, Mamma on the other.

            My young mother was a devout, dedicated praying Christian. My father was a good man, but the church was not for him. Even now I remember him sitting on the front porch, his legs crossed, looking into the distance, often with a book in hand that I could not read or understand. Sometimes I would crawl under the porch and lie on my back so that I could see his face without him seeing me. I wanted to see if he ever batted his eyes.

            In the final moment before he died, my mother said softly and with utter tenderness, “Saul, are you ready to die?” Between great gasps for air, he managed to say, “Yes, Alice, all my life I have been a man. I am not afraid of death. I can meet it.” With that, his body put forth one last great effort to breathe while we held him down in the bed as best we could. Then death. The long silence was broken only by the sound of our anguished weeping.

            I helped my mother and grandmother bathe his body and “lay him out.” In those days there were no Negro undertakers. There was one white undertaker in town, but the two races could not be embalmed or prepared for burial in the same place. Any embalming for us would have to be done in the home and, of course, it was almost never done….

            The burial and funeral arrangements were a serious problem, for in the eyes of the church he was a sinner. In the language of the time, he died “out of Christ.” Our pastor therefore refused to permit him to be buried from the church, and naturally was unwilling to take the ceremony himself. But to have it otherwise was unthinkable, hurtful, and also impractical, because there were no funeral parlors, and our homes were all too small to accommodate a group of any size. What were we to do? My grandmother, who took charge of the situation, did so in her customary manner. She went to the chairman of the board of deacons. “You cannot make the minister take Saul’s funeral, but he has no right to keep him from being buried from the church. We hold the deacons responsible for this decision. Ministers come and ministers go, but the deacons stay here with us.” Of course, he read her meaning quite clearly. At length, he agreed that my father should be buried from the church.

            Our next hurdle was to find someone to preach the funeral. By chance—if there is such a thing—there was a traveling evangelist in town, a man named Sam Cromarte. I shall never forget him. He offered to preach Papa’s funeral. He did not need to be persuaded. We sat on the front pew, the “mourners bench.” I listened with wonderment, then anger, and finally mounting rage as Sam Cromarte preached my father into hell. This was his chance to illustrate what would happen to “sinners” who died “out of Christ,” as my father had done. And he did not waste it. Under my breath I kept whispering to Mamma, “He didn’t know Papa, did he? Did he?” Out of her own pain, conflict, and compassionate love, she reached over and gripped my bare knees with her hand, giving a gentle but firm, comforting squeeze. It was sufficient to restrain for the moment my bewildered and outraged spirit.

            In the buggy, coming home from the cemetery, I sought some explanation. Why would Reverend Cromarte do this to Papa? Why would he say such things? Neither Mamma nor Grandma would answer my persistent query. Finally, almost to myself, I said, “One thing is sure. When I grow up and become a man, I will never have anything to do with the church.” 

[With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman (pp. 4-7) Kindle Edition]

Thurman observed religion effectively creating differences, racial and otherwise, that should naturally fail to exist, or at least quickly dissipate amongst religious people. He wrote:

There is an amazing incongruity in the fact that in peripheral matters there is fellowship, there is community, but in the central act of celebrating the human spirit in the worship of God, the lines are tightly drawn and a man goes before God with those only who believe as he does. The experience that should unite all men as children of one Father becomes the great divider that separates a man from his brothers. [Footprints of a Dream p. 137]

Despite—and also motivated by—all of this, Thurman became a minister anyway. Owing to his mother and grandmother, he “grew up in the church sharing deeply in its life.” And he

found that the more I turned to prayer, to what I discovered in later years to be meditation, the more time I spent alone in the woods or on the beach, the freer became my own spirit and the more realistic my ambitions to get an education. Here at last was something I could do with my own life. But it would call for a different emphasis in the religious life and experience from that which I saw around me in the community. [Footprints of a Dream p. 16]

Thurman became “convinced that it is possible to develop a religious fellowship which is so unifying in its quality that the barriers originally separating its members one from another will gradually disappear, leaving in their stead a new sense of community.”

This was partially due to Thurman’s observation that “for the first time in its history, the church in America is on the defensive.” He wrote:

This defensive attitude quite paradoxically tends to create a climate in which it may become more and more reasonable for people to have experiences of unity in religious fellowship that are more compelling than the concepts, the prejudices, and the fears that divide. [Footprints of a Dream p. 137]

Today that defensive attitude has been replaced by an offensive one, and religious people are being driven away from churches of “religion” for that reason. But that doesn’t change the potential for religious unity of which Thurman was convinced. It remains a potential and in fact placed the churches of the empire’s religions on the defensive in the middle of the twentieth century to the degree it was being achieved. So if anything, Thurman’s conviction has been proven. The only question is whether we in successive generations continue to raise the standard of Thurman’s generation, to pursue and ultimately achieve the religious goal of universal love.