Trying Very Hard Not to Start a Religion
Kneel
There is a scene in Fleabag where Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s character sits in a confessional and tells a priest — a disarmingly attractive priest — exactly what she wants from life. Not salvation. Not grace. Not even, particularly, God. What she wants is someone to tell her what to wear in the morning.
“I want someone to tell me what to eat. What to like. What to hate. What to rage about. What to listen to. What band to like. What to buy tickets for. What to joke about. What not to joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in. Who to vote for and who to love and how to… tell them. I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far, I think I’ve been getting it wrong.”
The priest,Andrew Scott, who grew up gay and Catholic in Dublin and brought every bit of that history into the role, replies with a single word. Kneel. The scene went globally viral, mostly for reasons adjacent to his cheekbones. But underneath the longing that the scene so expertly scratches, there is a question that the show, in its brilliance, refuses to answer. What Fleabag is asking for is not God. She is asking for a framework. She wants a structure for being alive, a set of rules, a map for meaning. She wants what religion, at its best, has always promised. And she is asking a priest for it because she cannot think of anywhere else to ask.
I find this incredibly relatable, and I say that as someone who has spent a reasonable portion of his adult life pretending he does not.
I was a fairly religious child. Every evening, my grandmother would tell me stories of gods and saints, battles between cosmic forces, the universe being swallowed and reborn. We would sing hymns. We would pray. I adored certain gods with the specific devotion children are capable of, which is to say completely and without embarrassment. Shiva, with his blue throat and the river flowing from his hair. Ganesha , the elephant-headed remover of obstacles, the god of beginnings. Ganesh Chaturthi was my season. Ten days of it. Decorations. Modaks (Sweet dumplings - in theory). Dancing to Ajay Atul songs.
But here is the honest thing: I do not think it was ever, for me, really about religion. What I loved was the “Goodness”. The stories told you who to be. Kindness was right because the universe confirmed it. Honesty was right because the stories showed what happened when it wasn’t. Children have a moral compass early; what religion does is calibrate it, give it a mythology to live inside. The problem comes when you grow up, and the compass and the institution start pointing in different directions.
It is a genuinely difficult time to figure out what you believe, and I do not say that to be dramatic. The landscape is vertiginously complicated. A religion that functions, in one country, as the majority power — shaping laws, politics, the texture of daily life, sometimes wielding that power to restrict minorities, women, dissidents — is, in another country, a minority community fighting for basic rights, facing discrimination, occasionally facing violence. You cannot critique the institution in the first place without appearing to attack the community in the second. And yet silence feels dishonest. This is not a hypothetical. It describes, simultaneously, the situation of Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism in different parts of the world right now, this week, as you read this.
Then there is history, which everyone reaches for and nobody agrees on. Hindu nationalist movements point, not without some factual basis, to centuries of destruction — temples razed, manuscripts burned, millions converted under varying degrees of coercion. The grievance has a real core. But history, consulted honestly and in full, shows that religious violence has never flowed cleanly in one direction, and that historical grievance does not automatically confer moral license — neither for the violence done in response, nor for the selective memory that counts only your own community’s suffering as real.
What I keep coming back to, uncomfortably, is this: if you look closely enough at almost any religious tradition across enough time, you find the same recurring shape. Somebody is using the faith as a reason to harm somebody else. The tradition that markets itself as peace has a militant wing. The oppressed community has its own record of oppression somewhere else. Clean hands are, historically speaking, extremely rare. And the people who are most certain of their clean hands tend to be the most dangerous.
What is less discussed — and, to me, more interesting — is that fundamentalism has historically targeted not just other faiths, but the open-minded, heterodox, inconveniently questioning people within its own tradition. The purges inside are at least as violent as the wars between. This is the part that gets left out of the usual story, and it is the part I find most clarifying.
In Christianity, the Cathars. A dualist Christian movement that flourished in southern France in the 12th and 13th centuries, the Cathars believed the material world was evil, that the Church had lost its way, and that salvation came through rejecting the physical. They built their own parallel church. In 1209, Pope Innocent III launched the Albigensian Crusade against them — Christians against Christians — and the first major massacre, at Béziers, came with a papal legate allegedly telling his soldiers: “Kill them all — God will know his own.” Between ten and twenty thousand people died that day, including women, children, and ordinary Catholics who had simply refused to hand over their Cathar neighbours. The campaign lasted twenty years. Catharism was effectively erased. What we know of its theology now comes almost entirely from the texts written by its enemies to refute it, which is a kind of historical irony so perfect it would be funny if it weren’t so bleak.
In Islam, there is Sufism — the mystical, contemplative tradition, the tradition of Rumi and qawwali and the idea that the divine is not an authority to be obeyed but an experience to be dissolved into. The Sufi mystic Mansur Al-Hallaj was executed in Baghdad in 922 CE for saying “Ana’l-Haqq” — I am the Truth, I am God — which was considered blasphemy, though what it really meant was: I feel the divine so completely that the boundary between us has ceased to exist. This is, philosophically, not very different from what the Christian mystics were saying. It did not save him. He was flogged, his hands and feet were cut off, he was crucified, and then decapitated. Subsequent Sufi thinkers were somewhat more careful about what they said aloud. By the 18th century, the Wahhabi movement had arisen in Arabia and turned Muslim sentiment systematically against Sufi practices, branding them as corruptions. Today, Sufi shrines have been bombed in Pakistan, Mali, Libya, and Egypt. Turkey banned all Sufi orders in 1925. In Saudi Arabia, Sufism is officially prohibited. The tradition survives, but it has been pushed to the margins of its own house, which is exactly where orthodoxy prefers to keep the mystics.
In Hinduism, the story of Charvaka. This is the one I want more people to know about. Charvaka, also called Lokayata, was a school of materialist philosophy that emerged in India around 600 BCE — making it roughly contemporaneous with the Buddha and Mahavira, this extraordinary period when everyone in the ancient world seemed to be rethinking everything at once. The Charvakas rejected the Vedas, rejected karma, rejected the afterlife, rejected the soul, and held that direct sensory experience was the only valid form of knowledge. They were, in short, empiricists and atheists, and they emerged not from some Western Enlightenment tradition but from within Indian civilisation itself, more than two millennia ago. Not a single primary text from the school survives. They were not preserved. What we know of Charvaka comes almost entirely from Buddhist and Hindu texts written specifically to argue against it. By the 12th century, it had effectively disappeared — not because its arguments were defeated, but because the institutions that preserve philosophy chose not to preserve these ones.
Then there is the Lingayat tradition (the community that I belong to), founded in 12th-century Karnataka by the reformer Basavanna, which rejected caste distinctions, rejected idol worship, rejected Brahmanical authority, encouraged the remarriage of widows, and treated women as spiritual equals — all of this in the 1100s, centuries before these ideas became the agenda of modern social movements. Over time, through a slow process of absorption, the tradition was gradually pulled back toward the orthodoxy it had specifically been founded to oppose. The radical gets domesticated. The questioner gets answered. This is, it turns out, more effective than burning them. Today when I read Basvanna’s writings, I cannot tell apart modern Lingaytism from the things that it stood against.
The pattern is the same across all three traditions, which suggests it is not a feature of any particular faith but a feature of institutions: the open, questioning, heterodox current gets crushed — sometimes violently, more often slowly, through neglect and pressure and the steady accumulation of received opinion. Fundamentalism does not only attack the other. It polices the inside with equal, sometimes greater, ferocity.
And then we arrive at the part that I suspect is most relevant to most of us reading this, which is: what do you do about any of it, privately, in your own life, when you cannot trust the institution but you still feel the pull of what it was offering?
Secularism seems like the obvious answer and turns out to be harder than it looks. In the United States it means roughly: you follow your religion, I’ll follow mine, and the state stays out of it. In India it used to mean something warmer — a genuine pluralism, a party to which every tradition was invited, the idea that no one had to hide what they were. Both versions are under pressure now, from different directions, for different reasons. But even if secularism holds politically, there is a private version of the problem it does not resolve. Without a framework, you are left with a set of values — be kind, tell the truth, cause less harm — but no architecture around them. You know what you are trying to point at. You just have no map.
This is where people find their way to something like Advaita Vedanta, the non-dualist philosophy that says the individual self and the universal consciousness are not ultimately separate, that the sense of being a bounded person is a kind of useful fiction the universe tells itself. Or they discover Alan Watts on YouTube at one in the morning and fall, slightly embarrassingly, into Zen. Or they arrive at Buddhism through the suffering entrance and find that it is, refreshingly, the one major tradition that does not ask you to believe anything before you can begin. These are not bad destinations. Advaita Vedanta is, philosophically, extraordinary. Buddhism, stripped of the institutional barnacles it has accumulated over twenty-five centuries, is remarkably practical. The problem is that most people — and I am absolutely including myself — find these ideas compelling as ideas without being able to fully live inside them. They remain beautiful theories rather than operative frameworks. The daily practice required to make them real is demanding, and without the community and ritual and social infrastructure that organised religion provides almost for free, they are very difficult to sustain. So most of us end up oscillating: returning to old practices with a faint sense of guilt, or sliding into nihilism for a while, or pretending that reading about Advaita Vedanta on a Sunday afternoon counts as spiritual practice. None of these positions is stable. None of them is entirely honest.
Here is what I actually think is going wrong, not just in religion but in the conversation around it. At some point, most religious institutions make a transition: from being a framework for how to live to being a framework for who to oppose. The inner life becomes less important than the boundary. The question stops being “how do I become better” and becomes “how do I distinguish us from them.” Once that happens, the institution becomes dangerous — not just to outsiders, but to the questioning, open-minded people inside, who get labelled as corrupted or insufficiently committed. This is how you get the Albigensian Crusade. This is how Sufi shrines get bombed. This is how Charvaka disappears without a trace, leaving only the arguments of the people who hated it.
And I want to be clear: this is not a pathology unique to religion. The New Atheists produced their own version of the same disease. Extraordinary arguments against religious dogmatism that curdled, in their worst moments, into a different kind of certainty-as-identity, where the point was less to think carefully about the world and more to establish that you were one of the smart ones. Dogmatism does not require God. It requires only the conviction that your framework is so correct that it no longer needs to be questioned. An idea is spoiled the moment it becomes an ideology. The moment a philosophy becomes a tribe, the philosophy starts to die.
What I find myself wanting, and I think this is what Fleabag was actually asking for in that confessional, underneath the surface request for someone to pick her outfit, is not rules, exactly. It is conversation. Real conversation about how to live: what matters, what you owe strangers, how to treat people who are frightened and taking it out on you, how to face the thing at the end. Every tradition has something worth hearing on these questions. The Charvaka materialists, now lost to us: the present moment is all you have, so attend to it, because nothing else is coming. The Sufis: the divine is not outside you, waiting to be appeased; it is inside you, waiting to be recognised, if you can only be quiet enough. Basavanna, who built a movement on the idea that any system requiring some people to be less than others is not a spiritual system — it is a political one wearing spiritual clothes.
None of these positions requires you to join anything. None of them requires you to hate anyone. They are just ideas, and the conversation around ideas, even old ideas, even ideas across traditions that have spent centuries in conflict, is more generative than any certainty. More honest, too. The peace that religion promises does exist. I believe that. But it is not owned by any institution, and it has never, not once in recorded history, required you to burn anything down to find it.
I do not know exactly what I believe. I still light a diya sometimes, out of something that is not quite habit and not quite faith. I still find Ganesh oddly comforting — the god who looks improbable but works, which might be the most hopeful thing I know. And I think the not-knowing is actually fine. The conversation is the point. It always was.