[Paleopsych] Wilson Quarterly: Spirituality in America
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Spirituality in America
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.print&essay_id=146855&stoplayout=true
Autumn 2005 Wilson Quarterly
First, the summary from the "Magazine and Journal Reader" feature of the daily
bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.11.14
http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/11/2005111401j.htm
A glance at the autumn issue of The Wilson Quarterly: 19th-century
roots of today's spirituality
Liberals and conservatives have both deplored many Americans'
preference for a personalized spirituality over organized religion
for, among other things, its "New Age quirkiness and anarchic
individualism," says Leigh E. Schmidt, a professor of religion at
Princeton University. But, he writes, spirituality is actually "an
important American tradition" with long ties to "social and political
progressivism."
The concept of spirituality developed in 19th-century America thanks
in large part to the transcendentalist movement, says Mr. Schmidt. The
transcendentalists, he writes, sought out a "mystical experience" and
believed they could fulfill that aim by living a spiritual life that
was isolated and meditative. In 1871, for instance, the
transcendentalist and poet Walt Whitman wrote that "only in the
perfect uncontamination and solitariness of individuality may the
spirituality of religion come forth at all."
Despite the focus on solitude, the transcendentalists could push for
social change, writes Mr. Schmidt. The second-generation
transcendentalist William R. Alger was a recluse, says Mr. Schmidt,
but he was also a major abolitionist. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who
served as a colonel for an African-American regiment in the Civil War,
was another spiritual transcendentalist who forced change by getting
Americans to be more sympathetic to all types of religion. His
efforts, says Mr. Schmidt, brought about "an ever-widening religious
exchange."
That history, writes Mr. Schmidt, "is worth recovering from the heap
of critical commentary, as both a counterweight to the Religious Right
and a resource for the Left (which is now so often tone-deaf on
spiritual matters.)"
--Jason M. Breslow
----------------------
by Leigh E. Schmidt
America may be polarized, but in one activity its social critics have
achieved a rare unanimity: lambasting American "spirituality" in all
its New Age quirkiness and anarchic individualism. The range of
detractors is really quite impressive. James A. Herrick, an
evangelical Christian author, deplores the "new spirituality" as a
mélange of Gnostics, goddess worshipers, and self-proclaimed UFO
abductees out to usurp the place of Christianity: all told, a
widespread but shallowly rooted challenge to the mighty religious
inheritance of the West. The neoconservative pundit David Brooks of
The New York Times thinks that a "soft-core spirituality," with its
attendant "psychobabble" and "easygoing narcissism," is epidemic.
Observers on the left are no less prone to alarm. One pair of such
commentators warned recently that the rebranding of religion as
"spirituality" is part of corporate capitalism's "silent takeover" of
the interior life, the sly marketing of a private, consumerist faith
in the service of global enterprise.
Even many scholars of religion have jumped on the bandwagon. Martin E.
Marty, the widely esteemed historian of American Christianity and
professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, published an opinion
piece this past January in Christian Century in which he labeled the
"spirituality" versus "religion" debate "a defining conflict of our
time." He made crystal clear that he stood on the side of the old-time
religion of church pews, potluck suppers, and hymnbooks, against the
"banal" and "solipsistic" world of "religionless spirituality." More
recently, in the July-August issue of Utne magazine, Paul R. Powers, a
professor of religious studies at Lewis and Clark College, thumped the
editors for reprinting a "soft-headed" article on spirituality: "Why
American liberals who seem so happy to embrace difference in various
contexts want, when it comes to religion, to sweep it under the rug of
some invented, undefined, supposedly universal `spirituality' remains
one of the true religious mysteries of our times."
Detractors of American religious seeking have been building their case
for a while now. A bellwether was Habits of the Heart (1985), the
best-selling, multiauthored sociological study of the corrosive
effects individualism was having on American civic and religious
institutions. The authors deeply lamented "liberalized versions" of
morality and spirituality and argued that the old romantic ideals of
self-reliance and the open road were now undermining the welfare of
community, family, and congregation. "Finding oneself" and "leaving
church" had, sadly enough, become complementary processes in a culture
too long steeped in the expressive individualism of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Walt Whitman, and their fellow wayfarers. More and more
Americans were crafting their own religious stories apart from the
rich moral vocabularies and collective memories that communities of
faith provided. The social costs of such disjointed spiritual quests
were evident not only in the fraying of church life but in eroding
commitments to public citizenship, marriage, and family.
All this criticism of the "new spirituality" has obscured and
diminished what is, in fact, an important American tradition, one in
which spiritual journeying has long been joined to social and
political progressivism. Emerson's "endless seeker" was, as often as
not, an abolitionist; Whitman's "traveling soul," a champion of
women's rights; Henry David Thoreau's "hermit," a challenger of unjust
war. A good sense of the continuing moral and political import of this
American vocabulary of the spirit comes from Barack Obama, the
recently elected Democratic senator from Illinois. Obama has said
that, despite the results of the 2004 election, it "shouldn't be hard"
to reconnect progressive politics with religious vision: "Martin
Luther King did it. The abolitionists did it. Dorothy Day did it. . .
. We don't have to start from scratch."
Perhaps Obama's most telling remark came in his observations about his
mother's faith: "My mother saw religion as an impediment to broader
values, like tolerance and racial inclusivity. She remembered
churchgoing folks who also called people nigger. But she was a deeply
spiritual person, and when I moved to Chicago and worked with
church-based community organizations, I kept hearing her values
expressed." Obama's invocation of "spiritual" as an inclusive term,
inextricably interwoven with the "broader values" of American
democracy, is important and carefully chosen diction. It not only
conjures up Whitman's ghost but also suggests some of the poet's own
audacity. As a concept of consequence in American culture,
spirituality was born of the romantic aspirations and ethical passions
of Emersonians, Whitmanites, and other religious liberals. Its history
is worth recovering from the heap of critical commentary, as both a
counterweight to the Religious Right and a resource for the Left
(which is now so often tone-deaf on spiritual matters).
In 1800, the word spirituality had little resonance in the evangelical
Protestant vernacular of personal devotion, but during the ensuing
century of transcendentalist ferment, it gradually shifted from being
an abstractly metaphysical term, denoting an attribute of God or the
immaterial quality of the soul, to one highly charged with
independence, interiority, and eccentricity. "The ripeness of Religion
is doubtless to be looked for in this field of individuality," Whitman
wrote in Democratic Vistas in 1871, "and is a result that no
organization or church can ever achieve. . . . I should say, indeed,
that only in the perfect uncontamination and solitariness of
individuality may the spirituality of religion come forth at all. Only
here, and on such terms, the meditation, the devout ecstasy, the
soaring flight." Or, as the Harvard poet and philosopher George
Santayana remarked succinctly in 1905, "This aspiring side of religion
may be called Spirituality."
Spirituality was a hard term to pin down, all the more so once it took
transcendentalist flight. Despite the airy and expansive qualities
that came to be conferred upon spirituality in Emersonian and
Whitmanite circles, it had certain defining characteristics, six of
which were especially prominent:
o a yearning for mystical experience or epiphanic awareness
o a valuing of silence, solitude, and sustained meditation
o a belief in the immanence of the divine in nature and attunement to
that presence
o a cosmopolitan appreciation of religious variety, along with a
search for unity in diversity
o an ethical earnestness in pursuit of justice-producing, progressive
reforms
o an emphasis on self-cultivation, artistic creativity, and
adventuresome seeking
This liberal reimagining of the interior life and its fruits had
sweeping and enduring effects on American religious life, often for
the good. It created a more open and expansive sense of religious
identity; it challenged American Christian claims to supremacy and
exclusivity; and it promoted an "ethical mysticism." Liberals, indeed,
could be rather tendentious about the latter. For instance, John
Wright Buckham, a Methodist, insisted in 1915 on a "social mysticism"
of active service to others, a spirituality that engaged the
industrial crisis and the economic order. Without that component,
Buckham would not count a person's piety under his heading of "Normal
Mysticism."
Of course, spirituality as it was crafted by these 19th-century
cosmopolitans and their heirs always had plenty of idiosyncrasies and
failings. Still, its makers engaged in a sharply self-critical
exchange, in which they anticipated most of the challenges that are
still posed to their vision of religious interiority. Take the
devotion to solitude, for example. These religious liberals prized
serene meditation, romanticized the hermit's life, and longed for
mystical experience in forests and mountains rather than in churches.
Were those emphases not a prescription for solipsism and isolation,
and an ultimately fatal alienation from community and tradition?
William R. Alger, a second-generation transcendentalist who (unlike
Emerson) never left the Unitarian ministry, offered the era's fullest
exposition of seclusion in The Solitudes of Nature and of Man; or, The
Loneliness of Human Life (1866). "The aboriginal woods of western
North America," Alger fantasized, "seem as if they might harbor a
million anchorites, not one of whom should be within a day's journey
of any other." Yet he meditated on solitude precisely because he was
seeking a remedy for the larger social estrangements and self-absorbed
anxieties he found all around him in a market-dominated world of
go-getting success and failure. "This is the malady of the age--an age
of Narcissuses," he claimed. The occasional retreat into solitude that
he recommended was actually imagined as a means of liberating its
practitioners from the increasingly "morbid consciousness of self."
So was Alger merely turning solitude into a form of feel-good therapy?
Was he saying that well-to-do city folk needed a nice summer cottage
where they could refresh their souls before rejoining the capitalist
grind? Certainly he imagined his advice as having a lot more bite than
that. Though he had reverently attended Thoreau's funeral and listened
with solemn attention as the church bell "tolled the forty-four years
he had numbered," Alger was an unusually harsh in-house critic when it
came to the Concord hermit's supposed "pampering of egotism." In a
scornful critique, Alger asserted that Thoreau the writer was
"constantly feeling himself, reflecting himself, fondling himself,
reverberating himself, exalting himself, incapable of escaping or
forgetting himself." As a champion of a liberal and eclectic
spirituality, Alger tried to lead his readers and congregants out of
"self-nauseated weariness" into "God's closet."
Romancing solitude was pivotal for Alger, but it was not a matter of
quietist retreat from the social and political world. Like his
compatriots Theodore Parker and Franklin Sanborn, Alger nurtured
reform commitments, particularly to the abolitionist cause. As
Boston's official Fourth of July orator in 1857, he was, by turns,
hissed and applauded for his forceful denunciation of "the Slave-Power
and its lovers." "The battle between Slavery and Freedom in America is
irreconcilable," Alger exclaimed, dismissing an "ostrich-policy" of
celebrating the nation's independence while evading the crisis at
hand. Taken aback by the furor, the board of aldermen refused him the
usual etiquette of gratitude and publication; the snub launched
Alger's speech into mass circulation and helped make his reputation as
an antislavery agitator.
Alger was also ready, as were many of the transcendentalists, to take
his readers figuratively to Persia, India, and China, and in those
intellectual excursions he displayed the same misconceptions as other
appropriators of "the mystic East." Many of his cultural oppositions
in The Poetry of the Orient (1856) consisted of the usual fare,
pitting "the enterprising young West" against "the meditative old
East." Like the poet Coleman Barks today, Alger was particularly
dazzled by the "electric freedom" of the 13th-century Sufi mystic
Jalal al-Din ar-Rumi, and even proposed that Americans incorporate the
"diversified disciplines" of Sufism into their own lives as a way to
discover spiritual ecstasy and wonder. It was not an uncommon
presumption in transcendentalist circles: Distant religious cultures
offered separable scriptures and "detachable ritual morsels" for the
delectation of North American dabblers weary of their own unenchanted
world. The transcendentalist encounter with Asian religions was often
trivializing and homogenizing, an exercise in reducing cultural
differences to a universal religion that looked uncannily like Concord
writ large across the globe.
But transcendentalist piety offered more than the predictable
shortcomings of Orientalist fantasy. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a
radical abolitionist who went on to serve as a colonel in an
African-American regiment in the Civil War, heralded religious
liberalism's widening vision in "The Sympathy of Religions," an essay
first published in 1871 and extensively circulated thereafter. "I have
worshiped in an Evangelical church when thousands rose to their feet
at the motion of one hand. I have worshiped in a Roman Catholic church
when the lifting of one finger broke the motionless multitude into
twinkling motion, till the magic sign was made, and all was still once
more," Higginson observed, grandly sweeping aside the
Protestant-Catholic antagonisms still festering across the country,
before launching himself further afield. "But I never for an instant
have supposed that this concentrated moment of devotion was more holy
or more beautiful than when one cry from a minaret hushes a Mohammedan
city to prayer, or when, at sunset, the low invocation, `Oh! the gem
in the lotus--oh! the gem in the lotus,' goes murmuring, like the
cooing of many doves, across the vast surface of Thibet." In so
minimizing liturgical differences, Higginson committed most of
liberalism's universalizing sins, but he also imagined a cosmopolitan
piety in which religious identities were open, fluxional, and
sympathetic rather than closed, fixed, and proselytizing. Religious
encounters across cultures were imagined as engaging rather than
threatening; they were seen as occasions for parliamentary gatherings
rather than mission stations. "When we fully comprehend the sympathy
of religions," Higginson concluded, "we shall deal with other faiths
on equal terms."
The radicalism of Higginson and his compeers created the space for an
ever-widening religious exchange in American culture. In 1897, the
Hindu swami Saradananda joined the conversation (and the New England
lecture circuit) with his own discourse on "The Sympathy of
Religions." "By sympathy," Saradananda explained, "the Vedantist [an
adherent of a 19th-century Hindu reform movement] does not mean a kind
of dull indifference, or haughty toleration, which seems to say, `I
know you are wrong and my religion is the only true one, yet I will
let you follow it, and perhaps one day your eyes will be opened.' His
sympathy is not a negative one, but it is of a direct, positive
nature, which knows that all religions are true, they have the same
goal." Hindus, Saradananda insisted, did not reduce the "religious
orchestra of the universe" to mere "monotones." The sympathy of
religions, he assured, would not be purchased at the price of
particularity and variation: "The mission of Vedanta to the West is
not to make Christians Hindus, but to make the Christian a better
Christian, a Hindu a better Hindu, and a Mohammedan a better
Mohammedan." Reaching God required specific paths, not a uniform one
"in the place of the many."
The liberal architects of American spirituality came rather quickly to
realize that their vision of one universal religion was at
cross-purposes with their equally important ideals of cosmopolitan
variety and democratic individuality. Most were not particularly
interested in rolling back transcendentalist notions of spontaneity,
creativity, and spiritual independence for the sake of religious
unanimity. As the conversation among them unfolded, many insisted that
for liberals to be truly liberal, their religious cosmopolitanism
could not become bland and colorless. In an 1895 lecture, the Reform
rabbi Solomon Schindler, after a warm introduction from Higginson
himself, argued that all the talk of unifying the religions or
reducing them to a common core suggested a misguided conformity. "The
happiest state will come to pass," Schindler claimed, "when each
individual will be allowed to formulate his own ideas regarding the
universe and his position in and relation to it. Not one unified
religion is the goal, but as many millions of religions as there will
be individuals." Democratic individuality, not liberal universality,
was the central spiritual value.
The roots of today's seeker spirituality are tangled, but they go deep
in American culture and often prove, on closer inspection, to be
surprisingly robust. It is hard, once one has traveled any length on
the roads forward from Emerson and Whitman, not to be impressed by the
tenacity of this joined tradition of spiritual seeking and political
progressivism in American religious life. Take, for example, the
visionary ecumenist Sarah Farmer, who, in 1894, in Eliot, Maine,
organized her own summer school for the comparative study of religion
and social activism. A genius as a religious and political go-between,
she hosted everyone from D. T. Suzuki, emergent ambassador of Zen
Buddhism, to George Herron, renowned advocate of Christian socialism,
to W. E. B. Du Bois, founder of the NAACP, to Charlotte Perkins
Gilman, pioneering feminist and economist, to Anagarika Dharmapala,
Sinhalese Buddhist critic of British colonialism. One partisan
eulogized her, with some fairness, as "the actual fulfiller of Emerson
in terms of applied influence."
Or consider Rufus Jones, a liberal Quaker who wrote more extensively
on mysticism than any other American in the first half of the 20th
century, and who crucially popularized the notion of the "seeker" as a
modern religious type. Jones also managed, while holding a
professorship at Haverford College and writing more than a book a year
on average, to help lead the American Friends Service Committee from
its founding in 1917. The AFSC was initially organized to support
civil service for Quaker conscientious objectors during World War I,
but with the aid of Jones's internationalist vision, it soon expanded
its domain to relief work with refugees across Europe, for which
service it received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947. Throughout his
life, Jones imagined his Quaker faith as much through the romantic
prism of Emerson, Whitman, and John Greenleaf Whittier as on the basis
of the journal of George Fox, the 17th-century founder of the
Religious Society of Friends.
In our own time, there is the example of Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor
of Tikkun magazine, who speaks of an "Emancipatory Spirituality" and
expressly connects the material work of liberal progressivism to lived
spiritual practice. He is adamant that what the Democrats really need
is a better understanding of religion and "the politics of meaning," a
sturdier commitment to engaging the deeper values and transcendent
hopes of Americans. "The liberal world," he claims, "has developed
such knee-jerk hostility to religion" that it has "marginalized those
many people on the left who actually do have spiritual yearnings."
Echoes of the same idiom can be heard in The Future of American
Progressivism (1998), by Roberto Unger and Cornel West. Unger and West
link "the re-energizing of democratic politics" to "the American
religion of possibility." For good measure, they even point to
Whitman's Democratic Vistas as the bible of that religious-political
amalgam.
When the renowned psychologist of religion William James was asked in
1904, "What do you mean by `spirituality'?" he responded:
"Susceptibility to ideals, but with a certain freedom to indulge in
imagination about them. A certain amount of `otherworldly' fancy."
That is the kind of whimsical, individualistic answer that would have
earned James no small amount of scorn from today's cultural critics
had they heard it from some supposed avatar of the New Age. Yet for
all of James's vaunted privatizing of religion--he defined it, for his
purposes, as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in
their solitude"--he always remained very much interested in the fruits
of faith, the inner resources of saintliness. What kinds of interior
lives produced the energy and dedication of the saints, "their
extravagance of human tenderness"? Without some sense of the spirit's
vast potentialities, James wondered, how would Americans ever confront
their "material attachments" and regain "the moral fighting shape"?
"Naturalistic optimism," he wrote, "is mere syllabub and flattery and
sponge-cake" compared with the hopes and demands that the spiritual
life was capable of fostering. A Whitmanite individualist, James
allowed the churches no monopoly on mystical experience or social
conscience; a wide-awake pragmatist, he also believed that liberals
and progressives turned away from the spiritual at their own peril. On
both points Senator Obama apparently concurs, and there's nothing
"soft-core," "softheaded," or "sponge-cake" about that.
Leigh E. Schmidt, professor of religion at Princeton University, is
the author most recently of Restless Souls: The Making of American
Spirituality (2005), from which this essay has been developed.
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