What's Real about Religion Anymore?

This past Sunday, I went with a friend to her Baptist church. I had never been to one before, and she assured me that the people there were quite friendly and wouldn't attempt to proselytize me (which is why I usually give my "Christian" name whenever I go to church). She was right, but I had no idea how right she would be.

What struck me as odd wasn't the rainbow decorations and how LBGT friendly the place was -- it was surprising, but not offputting. It was the language used throughout the entire service. Everything was symbolic. Nothing actually "was" -- but rather represented an idea or ideal. Everything was fluffy. Everything that should have been sweet tasted of Splenda. Ever unable to turn my critical thinking cap off, I began to deconstruct what was transpiring and why the service felt so inauthentic to me.

In my musings I was reminded of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, in which he writes:

"...with their artificial resurrection in the systems of signs, a material more malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences, to all binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation or duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-curcuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself--such is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection, that no longer even gives the event of death a chance."

While deeply abstract and intricate, Baudrillard contends (so far as our example is concerned) that the institutionalization of signification is vaccuous of identity and wreaks of the relativism indicative of our postmodern age. More over, something that signifies rather than simply is cannot be real, for it is nothing in itself. Instead, it only references something else -- an object long gone, far removed and "dead". By seeking to elicit the symptoms of the real by depicting what should be its characteristics, the church offers but a simulation of religion, not religion itself. Of course, this lends itself to Baurdrillard's claim that religion began when God died, so there never could have been religion as we think it to be, but only its ghost, its simulacrum.

I don't mean to debase the church I attended, but I can't help but find Baudrillard's argument compelling. Is it all just ritual devoid of content? Are we just going through the motions, trying to evoke the real that William James confessed or that Durkheim posited? Mystical experience and collective effervescence, without rubrics that seek to replicate experiences but rather originate them, may be the only way to resurrect and access the long-dead real that religion tries so convincingly to depict. A church service is at best an elaborate and habitual homage to a time passed. Perhaps there's truth to Serendipity's quote from the movie Dogma: "You people don't celebrate your faith, you mourn it." But I suppose Baudrillard would say that's really all you can do.