Free-Religion, an evolutionary religion for the world of tomorrow
It will come as no surprise to readers/listeners for me to say that I am a committed advocate of the kind of “free-religion” practised by the Japanese Unitarian, Imaoka Shin’ichirō, and the Czech Unitarian, Norbert Fabián Čapek. Taken together, I think they give us a way of being religious that seems to me properly to honour the historically continuous inner spirit of the Unitarian movement: a free-spirit movement that can help us move away from Unitarian-ism and towards a genuinely universal, liberative religious way of being-in-the-world that is beyond any kind of -ism.
Of course, this is a claim that needs to be backed up, and chief part of my evidence for this is this: free-religion is an example of what the Canadian philosopher J. L. Schellenberg calls an “evolutionary religion” — and, in a moment, I’ll sketch what he means by that.
But first, it helps to be clear that both Imaoka-sensei and Čapek’s free-religion were always closely tied to ideas of evolution. Imaoka-sensei’s connection particularly came through the influence of the French thinker, Henri Bergson, whose most famous book, Creative Evolution, was published in French in 1907 and in English in 1913. Borrowing Bergson’s language, Imaoka-sensei wrote that “the quintessence of religion lies in grasping the meaning of the Great Life of free and unobstructed creative evolution” (自由で無碍な創造的進化の大生命) (What Kind of Church/Kyōkai is Kiitsu Kyōkai? [1959]). Likewise, Čapek also often spoke positively about creative evolution and this causes him to write: “Our
understanding of the Truth must be a living process—a creative religion
that evolves alongside the human mind, shedding the husks of the past
as we climb toward the light” (Chapter 2 of The Way to Humanity (Cestou k lidství, Svobodné bratrství, Prague, 1928).
With all this in mind, let’s now see how Schellenberg’s account of an “evolutionary religion” develops these same kinds of ideas.
He begins with one unsettling change of scale. He asks us to place everything — human life, human thought, human civilisation, even the history of religion — inside the unimaginably long story of time. On that scale we are, quite obviously, beginners: a very young species on a very old planet, with (perhaps) a vast future still ahead. And that makes one thought hard to resist: if our knowledge and cultures have only just begun, then our religious and philosophical understanding has only just begun too. It would be rash, even arrogant, to assume that the best religious possibilities are already behind us, or that the final word has already been spoken.
From there, Schellenberg draws a lesson about how we should think: we need a properly evolutionary modesty. In the sciences we readily accept that later work may overturn today’s best theories. In religion, though, people often do the opposite, treating a present tradition as the finished answer. An evolutionary perspective makes that look premature. If future centuries — even millennia — might bring new moral insight, new ways of thinking, and new kinds of experience, then we should be cautious about speaking with hard certainty in matters of ultimate reality. In short, evolutionary religion must stay deeply open to “new light and truth” that has not yet emerged.
But this is not the same as empty vague openness. Schellenberg thinks religion, if it is to be religion at all, must have a clear kind of vision: a view of the Divine, or of ultimate reality, with enough substance to guide a religious life. He suggests three broad marks of what such an ultimate reality would need to be like.
First, ultimate reality would have to be deeper than the physical world: more basic than anything we can describe as simply part of nature. It would not be one item among other things in the universe, but something deeper than the whole collection of things.
Secondly, ultimate reality would have to be greater than nature in worth: surpassing anything nature alone can offer in terms of splendour, excellence, and value. Religion is not merely curiosity about an unseen cause; it is a response to what is perceived to be supremely worth shaping one’s life around.
Thirdly, ultimate reality would have to be greater than nature in what it can make possible for us: being connected to it would open up a kind of well-being, fulfilment, or wholeness beyond what can be reached by natural means alone. Without this, religion risks collapsing into mere abstract thinking without any real change in life.
At our present stage, however, we cannot responsibly claim to know whether these marks are true. So evolutionary religion rejects two temptations at once: 1) dismissing such claims as impossible, and 2) treating them as settled fact.
The first temptation often hides inside a crude “science-has-all-the-answers” attitude that treats today’s science as final and complete. But the long story of time undermines that confidence. If we are still early in human existence, it is far too soon to close the door on undiscovered depths of value, or new forms of wholeness. Yet it is also far too soon to declare that such things certainly exist. The honest stance is what we might call a disciplined “we don’t yet know”.
But how can an evolutionary religion be more than simply this? Here Schellenberg makes his most practical move. He distinguishes belief from faith — or true entrusting. Belief aims at settled claims about what is true; whereas faith or true entrusting is a way of living that commits oneself without pretending to have final proof. Sometimes the only way to find out whether something is trustworthy is to take it seriously enough to live with it.
In that spirit, evolutionary religion proposes an imaginative, try-it-and-see commitment to those three marks I mentioned earlier. It lives on imagination rather than belief: it tries out, in an actual life, an orientation towards an ultimate reality that is deeper than the world, greater than nature in worth, and greater than nature in what it can make possible — all while staying open to revision, correction, and deepening as human (or even post-human) understanding develops.
An evolutionary religion, then, will be patient, non-dogmatic, and turned towards the future. It will cultivate practices and moral disciplines that fit this possibility, without claiming to have reached the end of the story. It will prize intellectual modesty and moral seriousness together: sceptical about premature certainty, yet committed enough to explore. It is religion scaled to our actual place in evolutionary time — not the last religion, but a religion that keeps the door open for what may come.
Now, surely, this is exactly the kind of religion Imaoka-sensei sets out in his “Principles of Living”, and then expands in many of his others essays. Listen here to just a few words of his from a talk called “Religion for the World of Tomorrow” given to the International Association for Religious Freedom in Tokyo, April 10th 1964:
“A religion of tomorrow is not necessarily a new religion. Almost all established religions will survive as a religion of tomorrow if they only follow the footsteps of Jesus who was himself a man of religion of tomorrow in his own days.
Naturally Čapek also sets out a religion that keeps the door open for what may come, and we see this clearly in his “Ten Advices” and in his other writings.
So I want to end simply by saying this: since the only responsible kind of religion today is an evolutionary religion, a religion for tomorrow; and since the free-religion of Imaoka-sensei and Čapek is an evolutionary religion, for those of us standing in the Unitarian tradition, free-religion is clearly the most responsible religion for us confidently to promote and diligently practise.
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