On Being Spiritual But Not (yet? ever?) Religious

In 2005 A. J. Jacobs, a cheerfully agnostic New York Jew, embarked on what he called his "year of living biblically."¹ A writer whose previous venture in self-fashioning had been to read the Encyclopaedia Britannica from A to Z, Jacobs set out this time to probe our fascination with biblical literalism.

The Year of Living Biblically is, in the words of People magazine, "both laugh-out-loud funny and enlightening." As long as Jacobs sticks to the Old Testament, his resolution "to follow the Bible as literally as possible" inspires some wholesome habits and others that are just plain odd. He tries to forgive debts, observe the Sabbath, tell the truth, avoid his wife during her period, and append "God willing" to every promise. Seeking to obey the ban on mixed fibers (Leviticus 19:19), he finds a specialist who travels about New York with a microscope to help Orthodox Jews keep that commandment. And for the amusement of his public, he dons a white robe and sandals, grows a beard that would have done Samson proud, sacrifices a chicken, and follows a bizarre ritual concerning mother birds, described in Deuteronomy 22:6. When he gets to the New Testament, however, literalism falls by the wayside. Jacobs does not pluck out his right eye, make himself a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven, or sell all that he has and give to the poor. Nor does he follow St. Paul's injunctions about the behavior of Christians in and as the church. Since he has no intention of converting, he veers into religious sociology instead, visiting the most exotic Christian groups he can find—an Amish community, a conservative gay Bible fellowship, an Appalachian snake-handling church, the headquarters of Jerry Falwell. This shift away from literalism shows up the highly selective Old Testament Christianity of some who purport to "follow the Bible literally" year in, year out.

Jacobs' comic yet thoughtful memoir belongs to an American genre that goes all the way back to Thoreau's Walden.² Combining self-improvement, political message, and publicity stunt, the memoirist undertakes for a limited period of time to achieve some extraordinary feat, be it living with the least possible environmental impact³ or preparing every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking.⁴ The genre has been around long enough to have its own conventions—the moments of anguished self-doubt, the aggrieved but tolerant spouse, the amused response of skeptics. If the author has any talent, such memoirs make delicious reading, for they appeal to our voyeurism and, more profoundly, our American belief that the self can be endlessly improved and reinvented. Like training for a marathon, the yearlong experiment promises both short-term rigor and long-term relief; as arduous as the course may be, the end is always in sight. Sooner or later we can lay aside our Bibles, our cookbooks, our workout routines, and go back to business as usual.

© Ryan Bush

Jacobs fulfills his self-appointed task with goodwill and good humor. Though still an agnostic at year's end, he is a wiser, more empathetic one after his tour of duty, like a Peace Corps volunteer returning from some exotic land. But is his experiment really as radical as he thinks it is? Shorn of its comic extremes, it seems to me that his pragmatic, provisional approach to spirituality—"let's try this for a while and see if it works"—is the quintessential attitude of American seekers. Most of us, to be sure, have to do it without publishers' advances or spiritual advisory boards. But consider Uncle Gil, whom Jacobs describes as the inspiration for his project:

If the rest of my relatives are ultrasecular, Gil makes up for it by being, quite possibly, the most religious man in the world. He's a spiritual omnivore. He started his life as a Jew, became a Hindu, appointed himself a guru, sat for eight months on a Manhattan park bench without speaking, founded a hippie...