Alan Godlas

Religion, any religion, including Islam, can be practiced at many different levels and can fulfill many different human needs, including various exterior and interior degrees. There are virtues for such a diverse tool-kit, virtues to having so many different tools in one toolbox. Nevertheless, there are problems caused by such diversity. Most likely, the most significant of such problems is the fact that certain religious tools are now increasingly seen as being dehumanizing (such as exclusivist and/or triumphalist approaches to religion as well as particular oppressive social customs, in spite of their having been sufficiently advantageous in pre-modern contexts for them to persist).

In spite of religions’ problems, one of the great virtues of the sometimes contradictory appearing aspects of such religious tools is that when one has a different need in one’s life, the appropriate religious tool is often not generally outside one’s toolbox, traditionally.

In modernity (and post-modernity), however, the comprehensive religious toolbox has even fallen apart for many religious adherents. Especially the interior tools (those of a psychological and spiritual nature) tend to be thrown out or have simply fallen out of the toolbox (although in some cases, the exterior tools become thrown out instead). In Islam, one example of this is that many Muslims today (not merely Salafists and Wahhabists, but those who see themselves as mainstream) out of ignorance, see Islam’s Sufi tools as not being truly Islamic. While it is true that there were pre-modern Muslim opponents of Sufism, these were in the minority, since, in general, they were unsuccessful at reaching people’s hearts. The great tragedy of not having access to the complete religious toolbox is that when people’s lives are hit by crisis, then they lack the very tools that could help them.

In modern secular culture (both for modernist and post-modernist orientations) the coherence of exterior and interior tools has largely collapsed and broken up. Tools for human needs similar to those provided by religion in pre-modernity are present in modern secular culture, except that to gain access to them a sufficient degree of material prosperity and, in some cases, adequate intelligence are necessary conditions. On the one hand, for the middle and upper classes, a degree of material comfort provides a castle, or at least walls and tools, that largely keep the threats of the world at bay. On the other hand, for the lower and underclasses, the dream of becoming middle or upper class, together with the numbing cocktail of the daily grind of work and family responsibility, entertainment, and in some cases drugs and/or a dose of religion, dulls the pain enough to get through another day.

It is only with great effort (or the inherited fruits of parental effort), however, that certain secular elites, on their own, have the luxury and privilege of constructing a coherent and fulfilling life in which, to a sufficient degree, they have met their needs, having synthesized a comprehensive, eclectic melange of tools rivaling the religious toolbox. Such a secular toolbox can consist of many of the following: a successful career, family and social life, a degree of scientific and philosophical knowledge, medical sufficiency (combining degrees of self-care and care by medical experts), psychological wisdom, entertainment, socio-political identity, political activity, material wealth and financial acumen–and, for some folks, even a sprinkling of old-time religion–to name a few such tools.

In our globalized world, to varying degrees, the choice of how we live is up to us. So, what are you choosing?