Christianity is religion

From the collect for the Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany:

O Lord, we beseech thee to keep thy Church and household continually in thy true religion ...

This is one of three uses of 'religion' in the collects of the Prayer Book tradition, the others being in the collects of the Third Sunday after Easter and the Seventh Sunday after Trinity. It also stands alongside the use in the Prayer for Church Militant: "the maintenance of thy true religion".

'Religion' also underpins the very idea of the Book of Common Prayer, with its services so ordered that we may "be the more inflamed with the love of his true Religion" (Concerning the Service of the Church) and, because it is "a Religion to serve God", it therefore has "Ceremonies which do Serve to a decent Order and godly Discipline" (Concerning Ceremonies).

And, of course, we have the Articles of Religion, given for the purposes of "avoiding of the diversities of opinion", or, in the words of the His Majesty's Declaration, given to keep the Church committed to his care "in Unity of true Religion, and in the Bond of Peace".  Appropriately, the final Article, addressing the obligation of "Christian men" to the peace and common good of the realm, declares that the "Christian Religion doth not prohibit" the taking of oaths at the command of the magistrate.

Religion, then, is what the BCP and the Articles are about.

I have perhaps laboured the point, but that is because contemporary Anglican liturgy seems to be embarrassed about any use of the term 'religion'.  In the collects of the CofE's Common Worship, while 'religion' does appear twice - in the collects for Lent II and Trinity VII - these are contemporary renderings of 1662 collects.  No CW collects which are contemporary compositions use the term 'religion' - and the term is to be found nowhere else in the multi-volume CW.

This is not only the case with CW.  In The Episcopal Church's BCP 1979 even the Rite I collects - those in traditional language - are revised so that only one use of 'religion' remains (the collect for Proper 17).  Similarly in Canada's Book of Alternative Services, 'religion' appears only once in the collects (the collect for Proper 22).

Why the embarrassment with 'religion'?  For progressives, it no doubt holds distasteful Christendom connotations.  'Jesus Movement' is much more preferable to 'religion'.  There is also an evangelical critique of 'religion'.  I noticed last week on Twitter a number of people sharing the following words from the late Michael Green, a theologian whose works contributed much to the renewal of evangelical Anglicanism:

Christianity is not a religion at all, but a revelation and a rescue and an ensuing relationship with God through Jesus Christ (from Green's But Don't All Religions Lead to God?: Navigating the Multi-Faith Maze).

There are two major problems with a rejection of 'religion'.  The first is that it is not biblical.  The above extract from the 1662 collect for the Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany is based on I Timothy 3:15-16:

... the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth. And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness.

It is striking that 1662 retains this rendering of the Greek eusebeias and Latin pietatis 'religion' even when the Authorised Version used 'godliness'.  Hence the NRSV:

... the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth.  Without any doubt, the mystery of our religion is great.

In addition to this, of course, James 1:27 also uses the word 'religion', this time in both AV and NRSV.

Alongside this, however, is the fact the New Testament presents the Church as 'religion' in key ways.  The very use of ecclesia, a word denoting a civic assembly which, in the Graeco-Roman world, was inextricably linked with 'religion'.  Similarly, the words used to denote the offices of bishop, presbyter and deacon are also taken from a civic life which cannot be understood apart from 'religion', that which binds together - religare - a polity. 

Ratzinger makes the point - in a fascinating essay on church architecture - that from the outset "the numerically quite insigificant group of Christians understood themselves, not on the level of private worship associations, as one might easily have supposed, but rather as having the magnitude of the Imperium Romanum ... In this regard, there was an intrinsic reason that led the Christian assemblies to gather in the imperial building called the bascilica, when public law allowed this public self-expression of their claim".  Not a private worship association but a polity, a religion, a public entity.

It is this which embodies the Risen Lord's proclamation "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth", and the Apostolic witness "that in all things he might have the preeminence".  These are not - cannot be - private claims: they are public truth, necessarily embodied and lived out as religion, as public entity, as polity.

Secondly, 'religion' captures the inherent, essential communal aspect of Christianity as tradition which is "handed on" (1 Corinthians 11:23 and 15:3).  In the words of Roger Scruton:

Whence, then, does religious belief arise? How, and in response to what experiences, does it change?  And the simple and straightforward answer seems to be the right one.  Religious belief is received from a community - Scruton, The Face of God, p.19.

We might suggest that part of the reason for the decline of the Church in Europe and across the North Atlantic world has been the rejection of Christianity as religion - as tradition (community, practices, confession, narrative) to be handed on to children.

Related to this, the retreat from Christendom, handing over public square and culture to secularism, is another consequence of the denial of Christianity as 'religion' in favour of "private worship associations", or what John Milbank has described as "Christianity ... thinned out, privatised and separated from a truly Christian social and political project: Christendom".  As Milbank has stated elsewhere, "Christianity is Christendom": it is religion.

Here, then, are the two profound weaknesses associated with the rejection of 'religion' as a term to describe the Church's life, witness and confession.  When the Church ceases to be religion, it forgets to be the polity embodying the public truth of the Crucified and Risen Lord.  When the Church ceases to be religion, it hands over future generations and the public square to other confessions and narratives and proclamations.

In an era when the terms 'mission' and 'evangelism' are repeated ad nauseam by churches and church leaders, perhaps the most missional and evangelistic initiative the Church could undertake would be to rediscover its identity and calling as religion.