We live in an age when spirituality is considered good, but religion is considered bad. People want to know God, but find religion getting in the way. Enter Samir Selmanovic. He has written a ground-breaking book called It’s Really All About God: Reflections of a Muslim Atheist Jewish Christian (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009). The book combines serious reflection about God and religion in the context of the author’s own unique and fascinating journey. He grew up in a secular Muslim home in Croatia, converted to Christianity, became a pastor in New York and California and keeps the Sabbath. Life has uniquely prepared him to address the intersection between all three monotheistic faiths (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) and secular, post-modern spiritual concerns. The book has an almost prophetic power to jar the reader into considering thoughts and options that the reader had not imagined before picking up this book. You get a sense of his jarring style in chapter titles such as “Your God Is Too Big,” “The Blessing of Atheism,” and “When My God Becomes Our God.” But this book is no treatise on traditional ecumenism. It is rather a throbbing, personal spiritual quest that points to God as the sole legitimate purpose for religious institutions.
    Why are people rejecting religion today? Because religion is the place where many have experienced division, violence, anger, hatred, manipulation, accusations, judgmentalism, coercion and many other unpleasant things. In the name of God we religious people have made God an undesirable option for many. But this book is not about getting rid of religion in the service of some higher kind of spirituality. Rather the author tries to find the balance between affirming religion when it offers a positive witness of God and critiquing it when it makes God look bad. The author sees religion at its best as crucial to our learning about God in this world. Each religion is a witness to some facet of God’s character that might be missed if that religion did not exist.
    Religion at its core is not a bad thing. Religion is how human beings respond to their perception of God’s presence and revelation. At its best, religion is a human response to a mighty act of God. As such, religion can become a powerful witness to the presence of God among us. But religions that were founded to point toward God too often end up pointing to themselves and perpetuating themselves. Religions too often end up managing God more than extolling Him. Painful as it may be to read, Dr. Selmanovic’s critique of religion sounds a lot like the biblical prophets to me.
    In some ways, this a quintessentially post-modern book. It does not pursue truth with a rigorous, logical, scientific precision. Instead, its prose often meanders from point to story to point, carrying the reader along more like poetry than prose. One comes to the conviction that something important has been said and learned, yet at times it is difficult to put one’s finger on exactly what it was or how to put that truth into a short, summary sentence. Yet I would have to confess, reading this book is a life-changing experience. Having worked with the author over more than one draft, I still found the most recent reading a fresh, moving experience. I recommend the book to everyone whose faith is not so dependent on certainty that any expression of doubt or uncertainty will cost them their faith. If you haven’t changed a religious opinion in a decade, this book is not for you. But if God has made you painfully aware of your own ignorance, this book will be a joy.
    I could write a whole book in response to this one, but I will restrain myself to three fairly brief blogs. In the next blog I will share a few of the most profound ideas I picked up from this book, the stuff I loved about this book. In the third and final blog I will share a couple of concerns or ways I might have written it differently were it up to me.