Whitehead does not deny the importance of religious community. Shared worship, institutional forms, and doctrinal traditions all have their function in preserving and transmitting religious insight. But he insists that they are secondary — they arise from prior individual experiences of something that cannot be delegated to the group. A person can belong to the most elaborate religious institution without having any genuine religious experience at all; conversely, a person in complete isolation can have an experience of ultimate depth. The institution can nurture or distort the individual encounter but cannot replace it.
Solitariness, for Whitehead, is not mere loneliness. It is the moment when a person faces, without the protection of social convention or communal noise, the question of what the universe is and what their own existence means within it. This is the moment of genuine religious possibility — the moment when a person is either seized by something beyond themselves or finds only emptiness. Religion at its root is the positive response to that confrontation: the discovery that the universe is not indifferent, that there is something in it that calls to the highest possibilities of human experience.
The movement from individual experience to communal form is natural and inevitable, but it carries a risk: the original experience becomes a doctrine, the doctrine becomes a formula, and the formula is eventually repeated without any connection to the experience that generated it. Whitehead calls this the "dogmatisation" of religion — the substitution of inherited propositions for living encounter. Genuine religion must repeatedly return to solitariness, repeatedly risk the encounter with ultimacy, or it becomes mere cultural inheritance.
The definition of religion as solitariness appears in the opening lecture of Religion in the Making. Whitehead was careful to distinguish this from individualism — solitariness is an encounter with what transcends the self, not a retreat into it.
