Should You Be Loyal to a Religion?

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I once wrote a newspaper story about a man in his mid-80s who cared for his wife who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease at a young age. She was mostly unresponsive and could not feed, bathe or dress herself.

The man cared for her at home, doing almost everything for her, and he had been doing so for over 10 years. He carried around an old-fashioned, wind-up alarm clock, which bulged from the pocket of his sport coat. It rang every four hours, day and night, to remind him to give her her meds.

Meeting him was a powerful reminder of the lengths some people go to care for others. An expression of love, obviously. Or you might call it dedication to duty. Or it could be called by a name that is seldom used today, loyalty.

Little Sense of Loyalty

Many evidently consider the word old-fashioned. But it’s not just the word, but the value itself that has lost favor. Fewer employees appear to be loyal to their employers, and vice versa. People feel little sense of loyalty to institutions, such as churches, and leave them easily to follow their whims. Even family loyalty is daily put to the test.

Part of the reason, I believe, is that, in the past, many trusted institutions – including government, church, corporations – made loyalty the ultimate value, trumping love, compassion and especially, honesty.

The book and movie, “The Godfather,” was a powerful illustration. It was among the first of its kind to show how perverted loyalty can be when it is isolated from other values, when loyalty to “the family” trumps everything else.

The famous baptism scene was especially compelling. It alternated between shots of mob boss Michael Corleone attending his nephew’s extravagant church baptism, presided over by a bishop, and the brutal murders of his rivals by his henchmen.

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(Some bishops, it seems, have continued to place loyalty to the institution above other values in their cover-up of the abuse of youth by priests. And as for corporations, the first move for many that want to cut expenses is to lay off employees, choosing loyalty to stockholders and their financial return over compassion for employees.)  

David Brooks, the New York Times columnist and public television commentator I quote frequently in these blogs, recently wrote about two philosophers (How many media people pay attention to philosophers instead of politicians and celebrities?). The philosophers are William James (d. 1910), a leading proponent of pragmatism who is especially admired by Americans. The other is the much less known Josiah Royce, (d. 1916), who rejected pragmatism without idealism.

“James’s influence is now enormous — deservedly so,” writes Brooks. “Royce is almost entirely forgotten. … And yet in an age of division, fragmentation and isolation, I would say that Royce is the philosopher we need today.

“Royce argued that meaningful lives are marked, above all, by loyalty. Out on the frontier, he had seen the chaos and anarchy that ensues when it’s every man for himself, when society is just a bunch of individuals searching for gain.

“He concluded that people make themselves miserable when they pursue nothing more than their ‘fleeting, capricious and insatiable’ desires.’ So for him the good human life meant loyalty, ‘the willing and practical and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a cause.’”

The Pitch for Religion

This is where I make my pitch for religion as a worthy cause. No segment of society, perhaps, has taken a greater hit from the current climate of opinion. But if you examine religion closely, does it deserve it? If you look at what religion teaches, not how some of its adherents behave, doesn’t it make people’s lives better and contribute to a society that is kinder, more compassionate and more equal?

As a practicing member of a religious community, I know of no group of people who are more loving and generous than my fellow parishioners. They are ordinary people, similar to their non-religious friends and family members, but their loyalty to a flawed – but ultimately divine – institution has brought them untold benefits.

They know that the universe is not the random, cold, impersonal entity it appears to be. They know they’re part of something much bigger than themselves, experiencing a communion with the living and the endless generations of believers who preceded them. Their loyalty is to a cause, but more to a person – the ultimate Caregiver who prompts us all to be caregivers.