The R-word

For some time now, I’ve felt a hesitation, a taboo hovering just behind my lips.
A word I resist speaking. Not because it’s false, but because it’s been so deeply misunderstood. It carries the weight of centuries: domination, dogma, crusades, control. To speak it is to risk being mistaken, for a zealot, a fundamentalist, or simply naïve.

In a world where almost nothing is profane anymore, this word remains one of the last taboos. We’ll speak of mindfulness, spirit, myth, mystery, the universe, and meditation. We’ll borrow from saints and sages, quote Rumi and the Tao. But this one word, that once named our binding to the sacred, makes many flinch.

The word is religion.

But what if the sacred is not only about presence and mystery, but it also has structure? Has form? Has architecture? Has laws?

And perhaps, despite everything, it’s time we take it seriously again.

It’s understandable that many still carry the trauma of centuries under institutional religion, systems that often became more about control than connection. For some, the very word religion evokes rigidity, repression, even violence. But like all trauma, the way to the other side is not by exiling or suppressing, but by integrating. And the elephant in the room, the thing few name but many feel, is the function religion once served. The word religion comes from the Latin religare: to bind, to tie, to fasten. Not in the sense of shackles, but of sutures. Not chains, but ligaments.

And what are ligaments? They are what hold us together, literally. Fibrous threads that stabilize the body, that bind bone to bone, giving us structure, coherence, movement. Without ligaments, we collapse. Religion, then, is not first and foremost about belief. It is about binding back: to each other, to the sacred, to a shared sense of what matters most. It is a practice of reweaving relationship in a world frayed by fragmentation.

Seen this way, religion might not be an outdated relic, but a social technology. A cultural organ of coherence, commitment, and continuity. Every civilization has something like it, whether it’s called religion, dharma, ancestral law, or the Dreaming. It’s what allows a people to live in rhythm with each other and something greater than themselves.

So when we toss the word aside, we risk discarding the very logic of binding, the re-ligamenting our civilization now so urgently needs. I’m not pointing to any one tradition here, whether Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or otherwise. What matters for this piece is not the particular cultural form, but the function: to bind people together in devotion to something beyond the self.

That said, the form is not incidental. It carries a biocultural intelligence, a way of rooting spirit in soil, lineage, and gesture. To dismiss it entirely would be to miss the embodied wisdom encoded in song, symbol, and ceremony. But without a living connection to the deeper pattern, a universal grammar of the sacred, form becomes hollow, or worse, coercive.
Form without function is dead ritual.
But function without form is dis-embodied

We need both. But we must begin by remembering the pattern that gives rise to living form. That “something” might be called God, the Tao, Source, or simply, Love.

What matters is that it serves as a hyperprior (shout out to Ivo Mensch for providing this word): a principle so foundational that everything else is downstream from it. A center of gravity that pulls individual lives into collective coherence. And without such a center, the social fabric frays. Because where there is no shared sacred, there can be no shared reality……. literally.

We live in an unbound world.

The social ligaments are fraying. Our institutions are hollowing. Our sense of shared purpose is dissolving into isolated inner work. We scroll endlessly, switching contexts and selves, but rarely land in a coherent we.

And in the absence of binding, something else creeps in: entropy. Not just of systems, but of meaning. When there is nothing larger we are held by, we begin to drift, into nihilism, into performance, into shallow substitutes for the sacred. That drift looks like burnout. Like polarization. Like algorithmic rabbit holes. Like the cult of the individual untethered from any lineage of care.

What we reject in religion, dogma, domination, control, is real. But our rejection has often lacked discernment. We threw out the bathwater and the well.

The elephant in the room is not just that religion once served a function. It’s that this function has been splintered across society, like shards of a shattered whole. In the parable of the blind men and the elephant, each person touches a different part, trunk, tusk, leg, and proclaims it the truth. One says the elephant is a spear, another a pillar, another a snake. Each grasps something real, but partial. None sees the whole.

This is what we’ve done with religion. Today, its once-integrated functions live on, but in fragments:

• Ritual and ecstatic techniques has moved into wellness and performance. Think breathwork, ice baths, yoga, and flow state hacks.

• Myth and symbol have migrated into marvel sequels, self-help, and speculative fiction.

• Ethics and moral teaching have been outsourced to DEI departments, and social media culture wars

• Communal belonging has dispersed into politics, identity groups, fandoms, and loosely held online tribes.

• Reverence has been flattened into new age manifestation language

Each of these touches something true. But without integration, they lack coherence. They cannot bind. This is not meant as a judgment, it’s a pattern, a symptom that points to something deeper. A culture trying to reassemble what it once carried whole. But we cannot reassemble it by denying its name or function. Only by acknowledging the longing behind the word can we begin to meet it with discernment, not denial. In some of his latest episodes, Josh Shrei speaks exactly to this in some of his recent episodes, the forgetting of the beloved, and the wrong-relationship with power.

To say we should abandon religion because it has been abused is like saying we should abandon business, medicine, or government because they’ve been co-opted. All powerful human tools, capital, ritual, language, law, can be wielded in service of liberation or oppression. The misuse of religion by empire does not mean the impulse to bind is itself wrong. It means we have been in wrong-relationship to it.

The same logic applies to markets. Business is not evil. But extractive economics are. Money is not evil. But a culture that worships it as a god is deeply out of balance.

We are not short on seekers. We are not short on spiritual experiences.
But we are short on whole systems of meaning. That’s what religion once offered, and what, in some form, might be worth finding again.

Many today are asking: what is the religion that’s not a religion ? or what is church?
Because all things, culture, economics, governance, flow downstream from this deepest layer of meaning. The great task ahead is not to revive old dogmas,
but to forge new ligaments, structures that bind us back to the sacred
without collapsing into coercion.

And most importantly, to do so in a way that is embodied and immanent, not merely distant or ascendant. In the simplest of terms, we can think of it as learning to live by the organizing principles all around us, the way nature builds and unfolds, the way life coheres. It’s not hidden, its right in front of us in the way forests grow, the way wolves changes rivers, and the way cycles flow. And, in the ways our hearts cohere with the all.

In a fraying world, maybe the path forward isn’t invention, but remembrance. A biomimicry of the sacred, where we realign our systems with the invisible structures that have always held life together. This isn’t about reclaiming religion in its institutional form. It’s about reclaiming the function of the sacred: to bind us into right-relationship. With each other. With all life. With the numinous. With time. And having said all of this, I am reminded of this passage from the Tao Te Ching: “The name that can be named is not the eternal Name”

So in the end, it’s not even about the name or about diagnosing the fracture that is obvious to most people now. It’s about remembering the pattern, the deep structure of belonging, that has always held us.

The only question is whether we choose to align with it, or turn away.