I just finished up The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity by Slavoj Zizek, the so-called wildman of philosophy. And I keep going back to a passage on the very first page of the intro.

In it, Zizek says that religion in our current day of global empire is limited to two functions, the therapeutic and the critical. Therapeutic religion strives to help people adapt to the stresses of living in global empire. The feel-good prosperity gospel of Joel Osteen seems a classic example. But any spirituality that accepts the global order as it is and helps people find happiness within it goes the therapeutic route.

Critical religion points out what is wrong with the global order, and it may even take on the role of heresy. I wish Zizek had gone into this more, but all he gives us is half a paragraph. If you use the link above, click on “Look Inside” and search for “therapeutic,” you can read the passage for yourself. (My copy of the book is at home or else I’d blockquote it.)

What I keep thinking about is what critical religion operating as a full blown global heresy would actually look like. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are probably examples. The Latin American base communities of liberation theology fame, if they’re still around, are another. I’m thinking of groups connected to specific locales with nonstandard practices and beliefs that interrupt the regular goings-on of global empire in those locales.

What I can’t keep from asking is which of these is Unitarian Universalism—therapeutic religion, critical religion, or full blown global heresy? I think we can rule heresy out. We’re just not that severe or different.

With our anti-oppression work, critical religion seems the next place to jump. But I don’t think Zizek would go along with that. He regularly skewers liberal academics for how they do liberal politics as a way to hide from themselves their complicity with and privilege in the global system. Writing a paper doesn’t do much to actually alleviate oppression, and neither does shopping at Whole Foods. Joining a commune or a co-share community feel much more critical. Picketing safely in a government-recognized protest is therapy masquerading as critique. If a bunch of politicians are there too, it’s probably not critical religion at work.

Which isn’t to say something delightfully critical—and transformative—can’t happen at that protest. Anytime a gift economy or community of reconciliation arises, no matter how small, we’re encountering successful critical religion providing an alternative to empire. Without those two markers—gift and reconciliation—we’re doing the middle-class liberal version of therapeutic religion. And I’d like to think we’re called to more than that.