Dilemmas of living in a world less religious
Was 2023 a good year? I suppose it depends on what we mean by the word. A good year must be part of a good life, yet the question of what makes a life good, meaningful and whole is an increasingly challenging one — implicating as it does all the big categories: religion, family, love and politics. What makes it harder is that these categories increasingly blend together, for better and worse.
Over the holidays, I was home in Pennsylvania with my parents and brother. Visiting the place where I grew up, along with the unhurried pace of the days, lends itself to a certain kind of remembrance. You can let your memories unspool with help from the people there and better view the sweep of life. Some families avoid talking about the past or of emotions that either indict or favor it.
Our family is different. We like remembering, and we like thought experiments. Could my brother and I have turned out differently? Could we have ended up more religious? What would have happened had I gotten married in, say, my 20s? Presumably, the rest of my life would have turned out differently. Marriage — if it’s with the right person, a big if — is associated with higher levels of life satisfaction. And if it’s with someone who shares your religious practice, it can also make you more religious (which in turn can also make you happier).
As my parents have grown older, they have had more time to consider how they raised my brother and me, and whether they found the right balance of strictness and latitude. It was an experiment for them and so many others in how to raise children who could become American while staying recognizably Muslim — and to do this in a society that was rapidly secularizating. As I get older, influenced no doubt by my parents’ worries, I wonder what alternative versions of me might have looked like and whether I would I have liked them.
I can imagine being both more religious and religiously conservative, but I suspect it would have required an upbringing that was less encouraging of education, ambition and intellectual curiosity. It doesn’t work this way for everyone, but I have often felt a certain tension between the comfort of religious rules and ritual, and the excitement and wide-openness that comes with the removal of constraint. I got older. The more I learned, the more I knew. And the more I knew, the more I had doubts about what I had known before.
This trade-off might have been worth it, but it was a trade-off, nonetheless. Once you are exposed to the secular world — a world where personal autonomy and experience eclipse tradition — it becomes harder to return, even if you wish to. Modern liberalism is alluring, even if it might not always be good for us. As the political scientist Patrick Deneen notes in Why Liberalism Failed, by dismantling traditional structures, liberalism encourages “privatism.” The individual becomes society’s most important unit, and the state’s role is somehow both reduced and expanded to the task of removing limitations on the individual’s ability to pursue their personal desires. This ability — fairly novel in human history — can prove overwhelming.
As the hold of religion weakens, it becomes harder to understand whether our choices have been the right ones. Our standards and judgments no longer refer to traditions; they become self-referential. This sense of endless choice injects into our lives an undercurrent of nearly perpetual panic, of never knowing whether we’re living as we should. Yet we become so used to our freedom to choose that we insist on retaining it regardless of the consequences.
In other words, we are trapped. If spiritual or religious traditions have largely disappeared from our lives, we can work consciously and deliberately to reintroduce them or strengthen the ones that we have held on to. I hope to do some of this in the coming year. Constraints can be liberating. But no matter what we choose, we make a choice. This is a weight but also a blessing. Because in the end, the choice is ours alone.