Can you be religious without knowing it?

When the Pope questioned whether people like Donald Trump who build walls are actually Christian, the candidate snapped back that no one gets to question his religion. Not even the world’s most revered religious leader. In such a moment, author David Dark says, religious people would do well to note that “we’re in the presence of a catastrophically unexamined concept.” In Life’s Too Short to Pretend You’re Not Religious, Dark argues that the word “religion” gets a bad rap these days. But we shouldn’t just stop using it. He writes, “If what we believe is what we see is what we do is who we are, there’s no getting away from religion.” Religion, in his view, is the way one views and understands the world. So all of us–even atheists and the infamous “nones”–are religious whether or not we know it. Here, Dark and I discuss how he defines religion and why it matters for all of us.

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