Religion always gets a bad press. It seems everyone’s ready to talk about spirituality, especially their own, but religion remains in the rhetorical dog house.

Right now, I’m reading a Christian bestseller from a couple of years back, Blue Like Jazz (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2009), and I notice its subtitle, Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality. The author, Donald Miller, grows up as a church-going Texan who “started to sin about the time I turned ten.” He found religion to be helpful in alleviating his guilt feelings. “For me, however, there was a mental wall between religion and God. I could walk around inside religion and never, on any sort of emotional level, understand that God was a person, an actual Being with thoughts and feelings and that sort of thing” (p. 8). Later, Miller says, “I believe that the greatest trick of the devil is not to get us into some sort of evil but rather have us wasting time. That is why the devil tries so hard to get Christians to be religious” (p. 13). He does get converted before too long, not to any particular religion, even Christianity, but to “Christian spirituality” (p. 59).

Another recent read goes after religion even more aggressively. ReJesus: A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church (by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch [Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2009]), as its subtitle implies, portrays a thoroughly outsider Yeshua who, for example, “plays fast and loose with the legalism of Sabbath keeping. In fact, he subverts the whole religious system. . . . He is antireligious . . .” (p. 28-29).  

An attentive Messianic Jewish reader will start to get a bit nervous over all this religion bashing. Often enough, the religion that gets bashed in contrast with Yeshua’s non-religion is Judaism. Or, to put it in ReJesus’ terms, real Christianity is not a religion at all, but real Judaism still seems to be. (I have to note that despite my disagreements with these books, I really liked them, gained a lot from them, and even recommend both of them. Ah, the joys of reading.) Despite drawing repeatedly and positively from the works of Jewish writers like Martin Buber and Elie Wiesel, and including a whole chapter based on the Shema, ReJesus consistently pictures Yeshua as overturning the Judaism of his day. “As the true prophet of God, he totally radicalizes the kingdom by negating and bypassing the religious institution that has inadvertently begun to block its operations and activity (Matt. 23:13ff.) . . .” (p. 78). The religious institution here, of course, is the “Judaism of Jesus’ time” which is “degenerate and in need of renewal” (p. 73).

Much of what distinguishes Messianic Judaism, however, is our religious practice. It’s hard to imagine a real Messianic Jewish movement without such religious traditions as the weekly Torah reading, recitation of the Shema, lighting the candles on Erev Shabbat, or sitting down for a ritual meal on Passover to remember the exodus from Egypt. I’d argue that religion isn’t the problem, but religiosity. Religion is like money—neither good nor bad in itself, but good or bad depending on how you use it. I call misused religion religiosity. A Pharisee in one of Yeshua’s tales displays religiosity when he glances up from his prayers to check out a tax collector praying nearby, and says, “God, I thank you that I am not like other men—extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I possess” (Luke 18:11-12).

To be fair, ReJesus does sometimes distinguish between religion and religiosity, and even notes that religious institutions are necessary, because they provide the essential “stability and order” that help a religious movement “survive and prosper.” The challenge, it rightly states, is for the institution to be continually renewed through “a return to the original ethos and the power of its founder” (p. 77). So religion has its purpose and needs to be revitalized, not scrapped. I don’t think the Messianic Jewish community would disagree with that statement. I also think the statement reveals a pendulum swing in the religion vs. spirituality discussion. Indeed, the Messianic Jewish community may be ahead of the curve, or perhaps I should say, ahead of the pendulum swing, on this one, as religion is getting a second look.

Recently a colleague told me that a Jewish acquaintance expressed an interest in attending services as his synagogue. “I’m a spiritual person,” she said, as almost everyone says nowadays, “But I think I need some religion.” A couple of years ago I attended a continuing education seminar in counseling led by Harold Koenig, a prominent authority on faith and healing. (His most recent book is Medicine, Religion, and Health: Where Science and Spirituality Meet [West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2008].) Koenig cited multitudes of studies that show a positive connection between religious practice and good health—lower rates of depression and heart disease, quicker recovery from operations and illnesses, greater life expectancy, and so on. When one of the attendees asked him why he didn’t speak of spirituality instead of religion, Koenig said that religion can be measured in actions like regular church or synagogue attendance, Bible reading, or prayer, and spirituality can’t be. You can’t do research projects on spirituality, but you can on religion. And measurable religion, it turns out, is good for you.

This measurability, of course, is both a benefit and bane to religion. Yeshua said that we’d know real prophets by their fruit (Matt. 7:15-20), but he also warned that we can misuse our own good fruit, meager though it might be, to out-religion someone else, as the Pharisee does with the tax collector. The remedy: religion that expresses a heart of devotion to Messiah. Yeshua wasn’t impressed with the Pharisee who tithed everything he had, but he was really impressed with the religious devotion of the widow who gave “two small copper coins, which make a penny” (Mark 12:41-42)—a much smaller measure than the Pharisee’s, but one that equaled all she had to give.