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Morning Meditation
August 18, 2026
Excerpt from Religion is Not About God by Loyal Rue:
If religion is not about God, then what on earth is it about (for heaven’s sake)? It is about us. It is about manipulating our brains so that we might think, feel, and act in ways that are good for us, both individually and collectively. Religious traditions work like the bow of a violin, playing upon the strings of human nature to produce harmonious relations between individuals and their social and physical environments. Religions have always been about this business of adaptation, and they will always remain so. This is not to say, however, that any particular religious tradition will remain adaptive. Religions sometimes outlive their adaptive utility and occasionally become positive threats to human survival.
Meditation-Rebecca Northington
This book is fascinating on so many levels and the opening paragraph of the introduction posits the question Rue will spend the entire book exploring: Is religion about God? Because if it’s not, what is it about? We can all point to those traditions, or “start-up” churches that appear to be manipulating our brains, such as the Branch Davidians in Waco Texas. We can also point to some well-established churches that have been around for centuries and continue to “adapt” and change their rules to attempt to keep up with the changing world. Are their adaptations really about God, or more about control?
The Grand Inquisitor in the novel Brothers Karamazov very clearly tells Jesus that his fictional return is unwanted and unhelpful. The Grand Inquisitor is overseeing a version of Christianity that he believes keeps society in check, and Jesus’s message of love just confuses everything. He is playing the bow upon our strings and would like to keep our world harmonious and productive.
Is this what Jesus came to tell us though? My understanding of Rue’s book is that these ancient texts, like the Bible, are really mythology perpetuating this human need to control collective societies designed to be happy and productive. This understanding feels like it dismisses the idea of free will, and the importance of making choices not towards the collective good, but from the necessity of being internally good ourselves so that we will not die from the inside out from sin. Free will asks us to choose hope over fear, resulting in community that is founded on love and service, not because of the rules, or even the mythology. This also means there isn’t one charismatic person who can tell us what God wants. There really isn’t even a leader who can act as the fictional Grand Inquisitor, overriding Jesus, and offering their version of God’s word. Listening to ourselves and trusting ourselves, shouldn’t mean we are anti-religious. It means we are all made in the image of God. It means we must trust ourselves and do the work of understanding what God wants for us, sometimes in spite of the “rules.”
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