Crash Course Religions #18: Religion, Spirituality and The Supernatural - Smorgasbord Anyone?

Most important question to answer related to this video is, yes, they are still making “Christmas“ movies such as the action/adventure/comedy film, Red One (2024), featuring a very buff J.K. Simmons as a no-nonsense St. Nick, Duane “The Rock” Johnson as his security chief and Chris Evans, continuing to try to distance himself from his Captain America/squeaky clean persona, playing a less-than-moral fugitive tracker. So, John Green can update his holiday movie references to something made during the current century.

The “Spiritual but not Religious” moniker tends to imply that one believes that there are unexplained phenomena that are real but that one doesn’t adhere to or believe in religious institutions. One may also be moral but not dogmatic, that the universe is more than the materialistic stuff, that there is more out there than can be explained with pure science. It is interesting that as followers of institutional religions decline, the number of people who believe in ghosts and the supernatural/paranormal remains about the same.

It was during one of the papal visits to the US, maybe in 1993, when John Paul II was struggling a bit with the US College of Cardinals about issues such as gay rights and the conservative end of the Church was speaking out against something called “Smorgasbord Catholicism,” which they said was particularly an American trait, where American Catholics felt completely at ease agreeing or disagreeing with Church doctrine, particularly on social issues such as gay rights or abortion. I guess this would be what Green is calling “Lived Religion” as far as ones authentic beliefs and practices that may or may not go with ones religious affiliation, such as Christians practicing yoga or tai-chi or crystals and finding nothing wrong with that. Unlike my evangelical friend who blanched every time I would say something about an acquaintance’s misfortune as “well, that’s Karma,” and she would retorted, “I don’t believe in that stuff!” Right. But at the same time, whenever difficulty would befall her, she’d say that it was God angry with her because she was in the process of divorcing her husband. Got it, that’s God and not Karma.

As for ghosts, I know that I mentioned this last Crash Course Religions post, but I’m taking a course at the Biblical Studies Academy on Ghosts and Demons in the Bible, and except for the reference to the ghost of Samuel chatting with King Saul there is very little in the official Biblical Canon that talks about ghosts, but there is a bunch in texts that were rejected by the Jews and later the Christians when they were deciding on what books belonged in the official canon. And as I mentioned before, it’s almost as if some of the writers of the accepted texts didn’t fill in the gaps of information because they were assuming that we would be familiar with these other texts that would later be excluded for the official texts. It really does make you wonder sometimes about what we are really missing from the stories. If anything, it shows that, in this case the early church, it was by no means a unified institution that spoke with one voice and was not entirely consistent about a number of things, including the role of ghosts and the spirits of the dead and what we would later called supernatural and paranormal phenomena. Looks like Smorgasbord Christianity was the default setting at the beginning and not just an American variant in the 1990s.

I know plenty of folks who reject formal institutional religion precisely because they feel like it interferes with genuine personal spiritual living. That would have been the way I understood things as one raised Roman Catholic who had a religious experience as a 15-year-old and found that I couldn’t fit that experience into any of the Christian boxes that I experimented with over the next 15 years and beyond. Having studied at a Jesuit university, earned a B.A. in Biblical Studies a conservative Christian university and attempted a Masters in Theology at Fuller Seminary, it’s not like I didn’t try to make it work. I have a friend who had a similar experience and has rejected traditional Christianity and just holds on to his experience with what he calls the Divine Mystery and that’s basis for his “Lived Religion.” Again, it looks like the Looks like Smorgasbord approach is much more than a modern American variant, or as John Green likes to say, “It’s complicated. Enjoy. Where do you agree and disagree with your religious affiliation or heritage?