Religion, Solidarity, and My Need for Approval

I worry about myself sometimes.

As the proprietor of this blog in which my intention has been to explore ways in which we might all come together with regard to religious belief, I am suddenly aware that I have been acting all along with an ulterior motive. I woke up yesterday morning with one of those occasional profound insights I suppose we all are prone to from time to time. In my case, the profound insight was that I have a near-obsessive need to gain the approval of others.

Or is it that I have a near-obsessive need to avoid the disapproval of others?

Either way, my search for "solidarity" could be seen as a stealth technique of disapproval avoidance. After all, if there truly exists a set of religious views that all could agree on — which is highly doubtful — then my seeking it and finding it, and then leading others to it, would be a surefire way to inoculate myself against disapproval.

The strategy could work in multiple ways. It would put me on the same theological page with all my peers, all of us singing from the same hymn book. Ditto, philosophy: we could all agree on the same (God-centered) worldview. Even more important, such a "universal" belief system with God squarely at its center would necessarily (so I hope) be "correct" or "true" and would therefore put me in the best of favor with the Man Upstairs.

Problem is, when my prime motivation is disapproval avoidance, controversy becomes the enemy. Any imagined version of the truth that raises anybody's hackles gets short shrift. And where religion is concerned, every version of the truth raises somebody's hackles.

It seems pretty clear that, whatever you may think is the correct belief about who Jesus of Nazareth was, he was not afraid to raise the hackles of those around him. Ergo, I'm wrong to claim to be a Christian while really, mainly, being an avoider of disapproval.


I must admit to being somewhat astounded to realize just how strong my need to gain approval and avoid disapproval is these days.

It was not always thus. As a youth and young man, I had if anything an overly cavalier attitude toward the opinions of others about yours truly. Let's put it this way. I didn't go out of my way to curry favor, by any means.

Looking back, that all seems to have started changing with my mother's death when I was 38, then my father's three years later. It's as if as long as they were around, my ego aways had a safe harbor to return to if buffeted by high sea winds.

At my mother's passing I reacted by developing what seem to have been psychosomatic symptoms of perennial dizziness and malaise. After struggling along for a couple of years that way, I suddenly "found God." (What a coincidence!) Then Dad died, and my religious commitment just got deeper. Now it seems that I was unconsciously trying to relocate my safe harbor at a super-cosmic level.

Over time that psychological strategy has worn thinner and thinner, and as it has I have grown increasingly desperate to shore it up by "proving" that there really and truly is a God whom we can all believe in ... and that therefore I ought to merit his approval and that of everyone else too.

Of late, these attempts have grown more and more bankrupt, at least from the perspective of my near-obsessive psychic needs. I have now gotten to the point where I feel my judgments about my own ideas are so impaired that any hope of being objective about them is in jeopardy.

So I fall back on an inner recognition that, like Bilbo Baggins after too many years of hoarding the One Ring, my own soul has grown "thin and stretched." What good is being "right" about religion — if I am right — if it doesn't nourish the soul? If my being "right" is a secret way to serve a false God — my own approval needs — then it isn't right at all.