Fake emotions in religious life. Nietzsche traced religion to the feeling of resentment. To understand him just recall the sickening facial expression of some Christian – Catholic or protestant, it is the same – imagining others in Hell. Today resentment takes a different form. The bane of religion in general – what transforms a sacred space into a Satanic one – is of course sin. And the form sin takes in this society in the inner life of the devout is sentimentality, a kitsch view of reality.

       Many moderns follow Schleiermacher in describing religion as a feeling, though they so not following him in identifying the religious feeling as one of absolute dependence. Feelings are pure when uncontaminated by narcissism, defined not so much as ‘self-love’, which is ambiguous, but as the damaged ego’s drive to create the world anew so as to protect or elevate itself – often both. It is for the damaged ego – and whose ego isn’t damaged – that Eliot wrote: “Humankind cannot bear much reality.” Indeed, we all know the powerful desire to contain our minds, to limit our experience to a comfortable zone subconsciously created to allow us a chance at living a life without shame, without guilt. We create our reality and thus (in a terrible irony) become part of a mass.

           Sentimentality is the form of relationship to the world taken by narcissism. Like authors of dime store romances, we cut our conscious experience off from heart-breaking reality and live in a matrix of our own making, through the script Capitalism provides. It is not that reality is terrible, and facing the terrible truth would destroy us. In that case, sentimental ignorance would indeed be bliss. No. Even in the face of all that is terrible, life, existence is wonderful as deep down we know. Every person is a soul. Because we are cracked vessels (Donne), we cannot fully experience it as such. We pass on the damage we have suffered to others, to the world. Something in us – call it our soul – cannot live with that knowledge. We cover ourselves up with a fig leaf, fake reality – not to escape what is terrible, but to escape our own damaged reality. We idealize, falsify, re-invent realities in to be able to see ourselves as innocent, good, authentic, real – a fake.

        This can and does show itself most powerfully in religious life. We take the tools religion provides us and enter a world in which we are special, loved – which, of course, as creatures loved by our Creator we are as long as we do not construct a world for the sole purpose of fabricating the counterfeit feeling of being special and loved. A Catholic may experience the Eucharist or a Muslim prayer as a feeling that has no other psychic purpose than to make them feel good, to reinforce their constructed self-image. The danger is perhaps at its greatest when we convert to a faith. Religion can become kitsch, never reaching its telos, imprisoned in the damaged self. I have no words to convey just how abysmal this is. Yet who of us who practice a religion can honestly say that they are free of such damnable feelings? Isn’t this related to the very problem Christ saw in the role models of faith in his own time: the Pharisees?  All genuine religion is a practice of de-selfing – of healing the damage and so again coming into contact with the soul, other people, the Creation, and the sacred.