The film “Chocolat,” currently showing in movie theaters around the country, has turned up on the lists of some critics as one of the year’s ten best. It has even been said to be a potential Academy Award winner. So clearly, this film comes highly rated.

The story it tells is set in a small picturesque village in France. There, people live under the rigid management of both church and state. The mayor and the parish priest show themselves rigidly determined to maintain law and order.

At a crucial point in the story, this strict regimen is threatened by the arrival of a single woman with her young daughter. The woman opens a chocolate store and reveals the power of chocolate to relax people and make them more receptive to the sensual life.

Other details and the twistings of the plot I will not reveal here. The film is not to be taken entirely seriously; strong doses of fantasy are meant to stir the imagination of viewers.

My only reason for mentioning “Chocolat” here is because it strongly contrasts spirituality with religion, much to the disadvantage of the latter. Religion as centered in the parish church appears as rather dehumanizing.

The priest standing in his pulpit high above his parishioners preaches a gospel of social conformity to rigid rules of behavior. The townspeople hear nothing of the liberating power of religion at its best; instead they submit to dour, forbidding precept.

Spirituality, on the other hand, looks a whole lot better. The chocolate shop proprietor knows how to loosen people up and to bring laughter out of even sour looking townspeople. She does not judge people on the basis of their behavior; rather she shows herself open to everybody, ready to help them find some joy and happiness in their lives.

So the contest between religion and spirituality has a clear outcome. Spirituality is going to win, hands down. One is largely negative, lacking the qualities that make human life enjoyable; the other has those assets in abundance, as the conversion of some townspeople shows.

It all makes for entertaining film viewing. But what about the reality of the two approaches?

The kind of religion shown here depends on stereotypes. Not a few people in this country have grown up in churches that were both narrow and rigid. For them, religion became the source of obligation rather than of liberation and joy. The spirituality that is at the heart of true religion was strangled by the unfeeling requirements of institutions.

Nowadays it is fashionable to feel something like what Monica Lewinsky told Barbara Walters: “I’m not very religious; I’m more spiritual.” This implies the superiority of the latter over the former, as if there is something lacking in religion.

The big difference between the two, of course, is that religion is connected with institutions and most people feel mixed about institutions. Institutions have problems; spirituality does not.

But maybe there’s some merit in the way Huston Smith, a scholar of world religions, looks at the issue. In his new book, “Why Religion Matters,” he suggests a more subtle reason for the current bias that many people feel against religion.

“Because it challenges the prevailing worldview, it has lost some of its respectability,” Professor Smith claims. He means that religion dares to take issue with scientism, the assumption that everything can be explained by science. And that inevitably makes religion look irrelevant to those who believe in science as the last word.

As the title of his book suggests, Huston Smith holds that religion does matter because it addresses the deepest questions of life. These are the questions that Paul Gaugin asked in a famous painting: “Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going?” For answers to these simple but most profound questions, people have always turned to religion, over the long history of the human world.  

Spirituality, without institutional underpinnings, does not represent the same threat to vested interests. It tends to float freely the way it does in the movie “Chocolat.”

But allied with religion, with its resources of legacy, community, and wisdom, spirituality can become its best self.

Richard Griffin