Gustave Le Bon once suggested that religion is not primarily about gods.
It is about total devotion. If he is right, then almost no one is “irreligious.”

I am a religious man—yes, a real live one. I am not ashamed of it either.

I have known many religious people who insist they are not. They claim to be something beyond religion, something greater than religious, and that is fine. Yet when you ask them what religion means, or what it looks like, they offer glimpses of ideas and opinions, but rarely anything sufficient to explain what I plainly observe.

Maybe the problem is that some fear the term itself. To them, it suggests being reduced to a lesser creature they secretly despise.

So how do these people define religion?

Usually as ritualism, denomination, and something cold or lifeless without the “Spirit” within it. Yet that is not a definition so much as a criticism.

Then there are the atheists who boldly claim to be irreligious, saying so with as much certainty and dogmatism as the opposition they wish to correct.

It is as if one cannot be authentic, spiritual, or in some sort of personal relationship with truth if one admits to being religious. Fine—if that is their opinion, they may keep it. But it has never sat well with me.

Recently I have been reading Gustave Le Bon, the French thinker who had a keen eye for the psychology of crowds. He wrote of how people become swept into collective pursuits, passionately submitting themselves to whatever they find meaningful.

This quote helped me understand the mismatch between what is obvious and what people claim of themselves:

“A person is not religious when he worships a divinity, but when he puts all the resources of his mind, the complete submission of his will, and the whole-souled ardour of fanaticism at the service of a cause or an individual who becomes the goal and guide of his thoughts and actions.”

It is this whole-souled giving of oneself to something that reveals a religious attitude.

Le Bon mentions fanaticism, though not quite in the modern sense we hear it. The emphasis is closer to elevation—to placing something in a position of highest importance.

When we establish a cause as the source of our meaning and purpose, we begin constructing our lives around it.

That is deeply religious, even if no god is named.

Just as idols in the Bible stood in opposition to God, so too modern substitutes arise—material, political, ideological, and secular things that promise meaning while demanding devotion.

I remember the rise of the “new atheist” movement and the passion that flowed from it. The certainty. The rituals. The lifestyle that accompanied the creed. I saw more zeal in some of these folk than in the Christians who feared them.

I also watched some of them drift, over time, toward agnosticism or even spirituality (and some to a strong theism).

Whatever takes the central place of meaning and purpose becomes the object that holds us in its gravity. It captivates us in the obvious, governs perception, and quietly receives the whole self in devotion.

But let us look at this word ‘religion’ and why I am happy to be called a religious man in an age where so many various groups seem to despise the term, though they exhibit the very concept in their existence.

It appears that scholars believe there are probably two root Latin words that our definition came from:

1. Religare: ‘to bind back,’ ‘to bind-fast,’ or ‘to tie together.’
2. Religere: ‘to read again,’ ‘to ponder,’ or ‘to be careful.’

These two ideas hold the sense of diligence, care, attention, alignment, or being bound deeply to something.

Straight away I can see politics, science, schools of thought, nihilism, and even modern secular capitalism within this idea. It does not require a conscious sense of being this or that, merely the binding to it in such a way that it shapes your worldview, or defines what and how you believe in this reality.

Anyone watching modern American politics and the partisan effect built around Trump can see how people bind themselves to a cause without always having real insight into what is happening about them. Once passion grabs hold of a person, well, let us say the crowd is a powerful magnet that buckles rational thinking.

In my own country all I need to do is go back a few short years to Covid and how politics, fear, and uncertainty created a very toxic culture (that I believe still exists). For those who remember being hated for either being or not being vaccinated, people were bound tightly to their views, and passionately committed themselves to the “right side of history” when they made their various stands.

Le Bon puts it succinctly as that which has successfully captured your mind, your will, and your energy. Such a state will order our lives in a significant existential way, and project us into a future at least skewed by that vision of reality.

With the definition of religion being that which we orient our lives towards, and what then seizes us and structures our worldview and sense of reality, we can understand why Le Bon would make the bold statement:

“The crowd demands a god before everything else.”
(Le Bon, Gustave. The Crowd; study of the popular mind, p.38)

Such is the passion of the crowd that it will raise a Hitler, Stalin, or an ignorant popstar to a position that replaces their task of reasoning and personal responsibility.

I have done this myself. I have allowed people’s opinions to define my beliefs without critiquing them, or personally testing their dogmatic value. No one is really free of this potential influence when we engage in the crowd, or with powerful charismatic people, or powerful ideologies.

Once these things hold your mind, block your rational faculties from doing the task they ought, and hold you to account if questioned, then there is most certainly an idol within and a priesthood without.

Le Bon would not allow anyone to think they were not vulnerable, even those who claimed no such belief structures:

“Were it possible to induce the masses to adopt atheism, this belief would exhibit all the intolerant ardour of a religious sentiment, and in its exterior forms would soon become a cult.”
(Le Bon, Gustave. The Crowd; study of the popular mind, p.39)

He also wraps the political into the power of the religious mind:

“The violence of the Revolution, its massacres, its need of propaganda, its declarations of war upon all things, are only to be properly explained by reflecting that the Revolution was merely the establishment of a new religious belief in the mind of the masses.”
(Le Bon, Gustave. The Crowd; study of the popular mind, p.39)

It seems that we are made this way. We seek to know what is worth living for and then, once seized by it, we lean into it and direct our lives towards it above all other possible realities.

I’m not claiming there is no reality, but suggesting that it is something more available to the individual critical mind than a group that is stirred up by powerful people, or by mind-capturing slogans that dull the centres of reason and logic.

Anyway, back to what I said at the start. I am a religious person and proudly so. But I am a religious person who has learnt what I believe is reality. I have been tested. I have let go of what makes no real sense to me. I am skeptical of anyone who claims a truth beyond questions, and I certainly know that faith and growth are organic.

But I still believe in my Christian faith, just not all the presentations of it. This is mine. I own it. I grow in it and develop it as my life’s project. It has seized my imagination, ordered my priorities, and frames reality for me.

Are you religious, or are you merely an avatar of cultured programming that holds strongly to the crowd’s definition of reality, whatever crowd holds you tight?