Hats off to Pat Deneen, who flourishes a declaration I've been clinging to for some time now: "I am religious, not spiritual."

Nothing riles like this kind of warmed over, pseudo-oriental, "I'm spiritual, not religious." It's the cop-out of all cop-outs. It's lazy and indulgent, an assumption of piety without any pretense of sacrifice. It aspires to sound enlightened when really it is the mark of a supremely uncultivated mind (or, if we're being bold, soul). It is nothing more than a thoughtless retreat to the habits of early humans, whose anxieties and desires manifested in the worship of gross objects or a sort of prostration before an abstract, panentheistic godhead.

Many in the west have been tricked into thinking that this shapeless mysticism is revolutionary, a swell advance, praiseworthy. "Yes," they cry, "now we are free of the mean priests with their wagging fingers, free of the rabbis with their judging eyes, free of heavy books of prayer and prejudice!"

This is a sure sign that egalitarianism has utterly infected not just our political discourse but also our existential practices. (I prefer "existential" to "spiritual," as it connotes a more objective, philosophical approach to these obscure anxieties and desires that seem to animate all people and defy easy empirical explanation. The term is explicitly neutral on the potential of dualism, that is, matter and spirit coexisting in the same form.)

I don't value so much the twitching of my inner self, its fear of oblivion or hope for salvation. So humans are oriented, perhaps, toward another world, even if it's one of our own making, so what? What I do value are the stabilizing, clarifying institutions related to these existential utterances. If there was no god, religion would be more necessary than ever before.

The church is to me not some symbol of repression, ignorance, and backwardness, but rather an impressive sophistication of manners. The church signals the maturity of the human spirit, its adulthood not its infancy. It is one of the great products of the human heart, intellect, and imagination.

With its bizarre fabric of rules and admonitions and commandments, the church forces man from his comfort zone, forces him to deal a little more honestly with the darkness within and without. This process humbles, it makes us prudential and modest, while the cheap ecstasy of contemporary spiritually encourages megalomania, delusions of grandeur.

"Organized faith" (horrible term), despite its many abuses, provides a basis for existential discipline neither required nor really even possible in the lax DIY realm of individual spiritually. In this sense, formal religion is supremely liberating while spiritually (as a distinctive popular "practice") is supremely confining, amounting to little more than solipsistic devotion to the fear and trembling of one inner-self.