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Avoiding Religiosity

+ tom's take leadership Jan 13, 2025

Religiosity is it be avoided in preaching and teaching. Religiosity is defined as “the quality of being religious; piety and devotion.” Now those sound like good things... so let me qualify that I mean more the connotation of the word more than the denotation. I mean the unhealthy religious spirit that separates faith from our day-to-day life. It makes faith seem ephemeral or impossible to attain. It’s tough to describe because it can be subtle.

You can spot religiosity when a presentation includes a lot of “shoulds” ...as in you should do this and you should do that and you must do this, layering burdens upon people.

Another sign of religiosity is when a speaker lays guilt on people and makes them feel bad. If you really loved God then you would…fill in the blank. Or it talks about saints who lived long ago and lived at a level of piety that is unrelatable. Religiosity can also be spotted when there is lots of spiritual talk but none of it really lands in people’s lives or doesn’t address the real felt needs of an audience.

Let me tell you why I hate religiosity: 

  • It is a huge turn off to unchurched people. It makes church look like a club for the convinced. (Since I should love God with all my heart and I don’t then I guess I don’t belong in Church.)
  • Religiosity fails to really connect people to God and help them know the love of the Father. (Since God has such high standards and I fall way short, I guess he doesn’t love me.)
  • It gets in the way of the abundant life Jesus wants to give people and gives the impression that you have to clean up your act before coming to God. ( Since I can’t measure up to those standards, I might as well keep pursing an abundant life in my career, through money or pleasure or something else.)

Religiosity represents one of the greatest challenges to Catholic preaching and teaching to truly change lives. For us to be effective, we must make sure we drive the religious spirit out of our communication. Below are a few personal principles and tools that fight against the religious spirit and aim towards Spirit filled communication.

Preach to yourself. We noted in our book Rebuilding Your Message that the number one person to be changed from a message should be yourself. (Yes, I recognize I used “should” but one is ok) When you preach to yourself, it keeps you out of all the “shoulds” because you quickly realize you are not doing everything you should be doing. It helps you to be authentic and real before your community when you recognize the gap between where you are and where you should be.

Keep your own relationship with God real. We reproduce in our ministry, preaching and teaching our own relationship with God. If we keep our connection to God strong, then we will naturally share that with others and not something fake and artificial that seems spiritual or religious. As John Tyson notes about prayer, “Stop trying to make your prayers sound spiritual and sophisticated. Take your cues from the psalmists. They are not filled with polite sanitized prayers, but raw honest cries from the depths of human experience.” Real, authentic prayer will help our preaching be real and authentic.

Find your burden. Your burden is what you absolutely want to get across to others. It is that one thing you feel you need to share with your audience for their benefit. When you have a burden to communicate a message, you will not as easily fall into spiritual platitudes.

Give concrete examples. The spirit of religiosity lives in vague details. The concrete examples drive it away. For example, think about the prophet Jeremiah. In Jeremiah 13, God tells the prophet to grab a loin cloth and bury it in the ground then after some time dig it up. The analogy is that God wants to be as close to us as our underwear. It’s hard to have a religious spirit when you talk about underwear. Identifying concrete images saves us from false piety. I used to think using concrete examples was pedantic and kind of shallow until I realized they are all over Scripture, Jesus used them all the time and they always track with an audience.

Write down what you want them to feel as a result of your communication. So often preaching can become guilt laden or start to feel very heavy. However, I would guess that if you asked, most presenters wouldn’t say, “I want the listeners to feel so guilty that it ruins their day and they wallow in their own sin.” I don’t think it is intentional, it just happens. In preparing a presentation, name how you want people to feel as a result. Some options include: convicted, inspired, encouraged, curious, challenged, motivated. When you think about how others are going to feel after a message, you are less likely to give a presentation that lays burdens on people or is way too ephemeral.

The role of Church communicators at every level is to share the practical good news of God’s great love for us and draw others into a relationship with him. We can only do that through communication that comes from an authentic faith that connects with our audience.

Rooting for you,
Tom