David Brooks writes approvingly of what he calls the quasi-religious life (emphasis mine):
Quasi-religious people attend services, but they’re bored much of the time. They read the Bible, but find large parts of it odd and irrelevant. They find themselves inextricably bound to their faith, but think some of the people who define it are nuts.
Whatever the state of their ambivalent souls, quasi-religious people often drive history. Abraham Lincoln knew scripture line by line but never quite shared the faith that mesmerized him. Quasi-religious Protestants, drifting anxiously from the certainties of their old religion, built Victorian England. Quasi-religious Jews, climbing up from ancestral orthodoxy, helped shape 20th-century American culture. * * *
The problem is nobody is ever going to write a book sketching out the full quasi-religious recipe for life. The message “God is Great” appeals to billions. Hitchens rides the best-seller list with “God is Not Great.” Nobody wants to read a book called “God is Right Most of the Time.”
Why is this? Here’s a possibility: Many of these quasi-religious folks instinctively sense —
- that there’s Something there, but we don’t (yet) really know what;
- that by living ‘good’ lives, we seem to contribute our infinitesimal bit to building something bigger than we are — but we’ve barely scratched the surface of how that all works;
- that, in the very, very long run, things are going to work out unimaginably well.
Some religious folks love to entertain themselves with impassioned, angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin debates about what God supposedly is and wants. Those folks will always find each other and band together against “outsiders” (while piously claiming that the outsiders are always welcome to join them). Quasi-religious people have better things to do with their time.
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