“To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.” – St. Thomas Aquinas.

Something about a true Christian causes me to pause and listen when they talk or write or preach about the meaning of religion in our lives, communities, and country.

A true Christian believer, in my experience, is apt to value morality, honesty, and compassion more than most of us and, indeed, more than the people we elect to govern us.

As those are my values, I’ve become a follower, not a worshipper of Jesus Christ. More and more, and to my surprise, I find myself strangely isolated and in the minority; there is such a gap between what most say we believe and what we should do and do.

Lying and hatred have become acceptable, even virtuous, to millions of people, many of who say they are religious.

Social media, it seems, has proven a poor substitute for accurate moral guidance, truth,  and leadership.

Much of my work and personal life have become centered on the Christic call to care for the poor, the needy, and the vulnerable. These things bring me meaning, joy and purpose. They have become my faith.

But why do I often feel the world is moving the other way and that people who think this way speak to the wind?

I’m used to being an outlier, but not in this way.

Religion used to be the most potent force on the earth; now, it’s Facebook. See where that has got us.  Somehow, somewhere, I think I must be held accountable for the kind of life I am leading, if not in heaven, then right here.

If there is no church to do it, I’ll do it to myself.

“We must love them both,” said Aquinas, “those whose opinions we share and those whose views we reject, for both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us find it.”

That used to be what religion was about.

I know very few people who call themselves spiritual or religious who live entirely by that guidance, including myself. Like religion itself, we are none of us perfect. But many have given up trying.

But I believe we are accountable for what we do and how we live.

Yet I see a world around me, from Washington to social media, where no one is accountable for what they say, do, or behave. It sometimes feels that we are slipping back into that dark hole before Aquinas where anything goes, any lie is forgiven, any cruelty justified, any hatred for those whose opinions we reject is all right, even noble.

I have long identified myself as seeking a “spiritual life,” but as I follow the news and listen and see what is happening, I wonder if this isn’t simply an easy way to duck and hide behind the truth around me.

It is time to fight for truth and empathy in a non-violent but determined way.

Only organized religion was organized enough and willing to do that in my lifetime.

Hatred makes me sick, whether it is inside of me or coming from others. My stomach drops down to my shoes. I’ll do almost anything to get away from it, even get hateful.

In her thoughtful and compelling book “Why Religion?,” author Elaine Pagels (The Gnostic Gospels), who lost a son and husband a year apart, writes that after her catastrophe, she had to “look into that darkness,” realizing that “no one escapes terrible loss.”

This is so important for each of us to think about. No one escapes terrible loss.

Everything we experience shapes what we believe and how we live, recover, interact with others and try to move forward with our lives.

Is being “spiritual” really enough, I wonder? Or is it just too easy and glib? And what, after all, does it mean?

Pagels, a respected Christian theologist, acknowledges that many of us, myself included, have left religious institutions and have chosen to identify as “spiritual,” not sacred. Like me, she’s done both – joined groups, had faith, lost it, and left them.

Why do we need to do that?

It is because being “religious” is becoming either so remote or offensive and hypocritical that people of good hearts and will don’t want to identify with it anymore? Is it because no person or institution can live up to the crushing expectations of political correctness and social media conventions and wisdom?

Not too long ago, the world’s most profound and most influential thinkers were Christians or Jews, or Muslims who sought to make a better world and wrote and preached in different and radically new ways about a moral life, a vibrant life, and truthful life of compassion.

Christ changed the world by preaching on the Mount about caring for others.

Pagels is very much in that tradition of great religious thinkers – Paul, Aquinas, Martin Luther, Origen, St. Augustine,  Maimonides, Spinoza, Polymath, Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina.

They are rarely angry, hateful, or dishonest, even when wrong. Most often,  they argued for truth, mercy, and learning.

Together, they helped bring love and compassion to a brutal and violent world. And they had enormous influence within their communities and beyond.

They also often supported sexism, antisemitism, racism, war, and corruption. The line between self-help “healers” and wise philosophers has been blurred or obliterated in our culture.

Islam preached the dignity of human beings at all times and in all practices, a new thought in a world ruled by Kings and despots.

The study of philosophy, wrote Aquinas, one of my favorite Christian theologians, is not that we may know what people have thought, but what the truth of things is.

Where might children today go to find the truth of things? Not on the news or from our leaders on either side of things. Just watch the news to see what happens when no one cares anymore about the truth or is held accountable for lying.

Like every human, every faith has great flaws, contradictions, and failures. But I remember – it wasn’t so long ago – when it was almost universally considered wrong to lie or steal or abandon the poor, the immigrant, and the helpless, or to use one’s power for personal gain.

It was once unacceptable for public officials to lie, cheat, steal, philander, or break the law. They were forced to resign in disgrace.

It doesn’t seem to be unacceptable anymore or even controversial, and I can’t help but think that the decline of religion as a moderating and moral force in life has left a great and deep sinkhole when it comes to morality and decency most of all, truth.

The organized religions did not come close to creating or imagining a just and perfected world.

And because they were “organized,” free and independent thinkers (me, hopefully) came to shy away from priests and rabbis and Imams telling people what to think and do.

Women suffered in almost all of these faiths, and the notion of dignity and morality did not often apply to them. That is changing.

An institution calling for morality will inevitably be judged harshly when it acts immorally. Organized religion has no one to blame but themselves. The Evangelic Christians who have forsaken Christ for politics behave in an unacceptable and immoral way. So were the Catholic Church leaders who tolerated the abuse of so many children for so long.

But still, religion has done a lot of good, more good than anything before it.

For the first time in human history, 2000 years ago, it was a sin to lie or hate or be cruel or kill other humans. That was the great contribution of Paul and Jesus, and Maimonides.

Many priests and nuns, and rabbis have given their lives to helping the poor and the persecuted. They should not be forgotten.

To her surprise, Pagel went back to her faith after her significant losses and sought to explore how the stories, poetry, music, and art that make up religious traditions have grown out of specific communities and institutions yet somehow still resonate with many people, no matter what they call themselves.

I realize, and so does Pagel,  that the full embrace of organized religion has fallen out of fashion for many people like me, who are disenchanted with dogma, scandal, brazen politicking, and a willingness to undermine democracy, compassion,   values, and corruption, and the horrendous abuse of women and children.

But all of us are flawed and broken in parts. And we will all suffer terrible loss. That doesn’t mean some parts of us and our history aren’t worth loving or saving.

“Right is right even if no one is doing it; wrong is wrong even if everyone is doing it.” – St. Augustine.

To me, those are words to live by. Contrary to cable news and talk shows, right is correct, and the truth is the truth.

In my case, I found Judaism too dogmatic and ritual-centered. I moved on to Quakerism, a faith I have closely identified with but has become marginalized and struggling to survive and is increasingly irrelevant in a violent, greedy, and hateful world.

I can’t think of any religious institution anywhere more ignored or dismissed than Quakerism’s gentle, honest, and peaceful practitioners. We stood on street corners day after day for years, protesting war and violence. Nobody listened, then or now.

I couldn’t do it anymore, although I still call myself a  Quaker.

“The goal of nonviolence,” wrote Thomas Merton, “is not immediate victory over the adversary but the transformation of human relationships.”

I can’t say where I’m going with this (like Pagels). When times are dark and humans despair, we need something to turn to, something more than us.

I don’t know how to answer these questions either for myself or others.

“What I do know,” wrote Pagels at the end of her book after attending a religious gathering, “is that for moments, during that noisy and joyful ceremony, the pomp and privilege of that scene receded, and the invisible bonds connecting everyone here, and connecting all of us with countless others and with our world and whatever is beyond it, felt stronger than ever, echoing the words of an ancient Jewish prayer: “Blessed art Thou, Lord God of the Universe, that you have brought us alive to see this day.”

However it happens, she wrote, sometimes hearts heal through what I can only call grace.”

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“How is it they live in such harmony, the billions of stars, when most men can barely go a minute without declaring war in their minds.” – Thomas Aquinas.