Hybrid Religion

As a young boy, my parents instructed me “do not forget that you are a Jew” and be a good American.  They did not tell me how to do that.  They brought me up to accommodate the Jewish and the American parts of my identity, to negotiate, every day in all sorts of ways, between these two aspects of my life. Without saying so, my parents were bringing me up to engage in “hybrid religion.”

Hybrid religion is figuring out how to be religious when you are surrounded by a different religious culture. If you are religious in America, you do so under the umbrella of American culture.

Some of us are not happy about this so we ty to isolate ourselves and avoid the culture as much as we can; others love American culture and have made their peace with it, but most of us are in the middle constructing our own hybrid religion.  Many of us, including me, are committed to building a bridge between our religious tradition and American culture. We are not sure how to do that.  We struggle between accommodating the parts we like and resisting the parts we find offensive.

Here is the secret:  This is what religious people have always had to do.

Each day we balance our religious commitments against the overbearing culture in which we live.  What do I accept, what do I embrace, what do I resist?  This is what we do each day. Of course, there will always be somebody to your right who will complain that you are not merely accommodating; you have capitulated to the culture.

The key is to be wise enough to know what is required for our hybrid religion to have integrity. Here is where the true argument is and has always been.  Religious people have had to figure out how to have integrity “while still participating in the culture that surrounded them.”

As a Jew, I decide what parts of my tradition to embrace and what parts to let go. Christians and Muslims face the same situation.   God’s expectations are, in all of this, at best arguable.  Such is the dilemma of hybrid religion.