“Spirit Wars: American Religion in Progressive Politics”
Key West, Florida
Speaker:
Dr. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Professor, Department of Religion, Princeton University
MICHAEL CROMARTIE:Leigh has written a very important new book that has been called to our attention. It’s calledRestless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality from Emerson to Oprah. We’re delighted that Leigh Eric Schmidt could be with us. Thank you, Leigh.
DR. LEIGH ERIC SCHMIDT:I want to begin with two groups of questions that I’ve asked myself as I’ve been working on American religion, spirituality and liberalism.
The first group of questions are: what are the historical sources of contemporary juxtapositions of religion and spirituality? Once juxtaposed, what are the consequences of their oppositional rendering, as in the now-popular notion of American seekers self-identifying as spiritual but not religious? Is spirituality, in effect, being used to designate good religion, a term that suggests creative individuality over institutional constraints, or borrowed experience over creedal formality, ecumenical flexibility over doctrinal fixity? Or is spirituality taken to be a bad word, shorthand for narcissism, fashionable dabbling, unmoored individualism, therapeutic blather and New Age kookiness?
What accounts for how loaded spirituality has become as a construct in contemporary culture, attracting the suspicion of pundits from the right, left and center? To give a specific example, how could an otherwise level-headed and long-eminent interpreter of American religion, Martin Marty, declare in the pages ofThe Christian Centuryearlier this year that the spirituality-versus-religion debate is a defining conflict of our time? What made him think that the world of “religionless spirituality,” as he called it, poses such a threat to the old-time faiths of liberal Protestantism that he ostensibly represents? That’s the first group of questions.
The second group of questions I put to myself: are American liberals too wedded to secularism? Does the political left need to get religion in order to compete more effectively with the moral-values crowd on the right? How central have religious elements been to the formation and perpetuation of American progressivism? That is, have liberals forgotten or even intentionally obscured their own religious roots? What kind of future do faith-led progressives have in American culture? Is Reverend Jim Wallis’ hopeful prediction that spiritual progressives are on the rise and that they will ultimately wrest the values debate from both the religious right and the secular left mere wishful thinking, more naïve optimism from a cohort that should have learned the lesson of political and religious realism long ago?
And if the spiritual left were to grow in influence, where would its ranks come from? Where besides Wallis’ modest evangelical constituency atSojourners? Are there really enough Unitarians, Quakers and Reform Jews around to have a go at Karl Rove’s legions? Or, put differently, was Senator Barack Obama being another liberal innocent when he suggested in the wake of the 2004 election that, in his words, “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,” he said.
What I plan to offer is a series of reflections that allow us to move back and forth between those two groups of questions and the larger issues of how Americans imagine spirituality relates to progressive politics. I’ve organized these reflections around four points or propositions. Proposition number one: Don’t let the baby boomers fool you. They, or should I say, we, are not the archetypal generation of seekers. They did not invent the cultural turn to spirituality as opposed to religion. The plot line for stories on spirituality, in other words, need not be about the 1960s having gone to seed or come to flower. They do not need to be organized around notions of a new cultural trend or a surprising transformation of the religious landscape. Granted, news stories cannot be organized around a theme; the same old thing is happening again. Still, it seems to me that the discussion of the current American interest in various spiritual practices, whether meditation, yoga, centering prayers, silent retreats, or even channeling, have been hampered by the trend-spotting impulse.
A little historical perspective on the current American infatuation with spirituality helps, I think, to complicate the sociology of a generation of seekers thrown into a newly-dynamic spiritual marketplace. As a term of consequence in American culture, spirituality was initially born of the romantic aspiration and ethical passion of Emersonians, Whitmanites and other religious liberals of the 19th century. In 1800, the word “spirituality” had little resonance in the evangelical Protestant vernacular of personal devotion that then enthused much of the American religious landscape. The word showed up in the title of only one American publication before 1800, and even in that case, spirituality fronted a collection of hymns, in which it referred to a quality of corporate Christian worship, not the interior lives of individual pilgrims.
During the ensuing century of transcendentalist ferment, spirituality gradually shifted from an abstractly metaphysical term denoting an attribute of God or an immaterial quality of the soul to one highly charged with independence, interiority and eccentricity. Spirituality was a hard term to pin down, all the more so once it took transcendentalist flight. Despite the airy and expansive quality that came to be conferred upon spirituality as an idea in these Emersonian and Whitmanite circles, it had certain defining characteristics.
First of all, there is a tendency to redefine spirituality in terms of mystical experience or epiphanic awareness. There has always been a mystic tradition in Christianity, but what happens here is that the term mysticism is more of an 18th century creation and the category before that time is always mystical theology as a branch systematic theology within Christianity. In the 19th century there is more and more of a sense that mysticism is a global, universal phenomenon, something found in all religions. It is not just Christian. You’ll find it if you read Sufi texts or Buddhist texts. There is more and more of a cosmopolitan notion of what this experience might be and awareness might come from. There are some universal practices that tend to be valued above others — practices of silence, solitude and sustained meditation. There is a belief in the immanence of the divine. There is a perverse enshrinement of the Quaker inner life-ism that happens in the 19th century. In the 17th century in New England, the Quakers were executed for their obduracy as missionaries. By the 19th century, Emersonians were saying the Quakers were the greatest people in the world.
As I suggested, another crucial component is their cosmopolitanism. Seekers deeply want to appreciate religious variety. They’re not content, as one of them says, to have one religion. They want to have a little bit of all religions. They want the piety of the world. They want the gems of sacred wisdom wherever they can gather those gems. But even as they’re appreciating that diversity, there’s also a sense that they’re looking for the underlying unity in all religious traditions.
Another characteristic of this tradition is their ethical earnestness in the pursuit of justice producing reforms. There is no doubt that this is not simply a turning inward, that there is also an act of political commitment, which I’ll talk about shortly. And the final element of this is an emphasis on self-cultivation, artistic creativity and adventuresome seeking. Their understanding of religious identity is shaped around this posture of seeking as much as finding. There is much more of an emphasis on the seeker’s curiosity than the finder’s clarity as a kind of posture that one takes into the religious world.
So this liberal re-imagining of the interior life and its fruits had sweeping and enduring effects on American religious life. We are still reaping the fruits of 19th century religious liberalism in current debates about religion and spirituality.
A second proposition after that mixed first proposition is: don’t trust the cultural critics who dismiss this conjunction of liberalism and spirituality as twin forms of banality and narcissism. The liberal or progressive redefinition of the spiritual life carried important social and political weight in the 19th century, and it still does. The effort among 19th century spiritual progressives to distinguish the subterranean fire of spirituality from the temporary journeys of all religions carried a prophetic task: regularly hammering away of social, economic and religious inequities.
Take the political import of the liberal redefinition of religion to emphasize mystical experience as religion’s ultimate form of expression. This would often be seen as one of the prime examples of the way in which religious liberals privatized religion and drained it of public consequence. They start emphasizing mystical experience, an epiphany you find sitting on mountain heights rather than by going to church in a solid, steady way. This emphasis on mystic experience is often seen as the way in which this romantic tradition runs into excessive self-expression, and in that way plays havoc with civic and religious connections.
Almost invariably though, that emphasis was joined to social ethics. In theory and practice, religious liberals vowed an ethical mysticism. Progressives indeed could be rather tendentious on this point. The Methodist, John Wright Buckham, for example, 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.” In many ways, that conjunction remains a guiding theme in current spirituality literature on the left. An obvious case in point would be the Quaker community in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, Pendle Hill, which has been around since the 1930s, where they still use the slogan of ethical mysticism borrowed right out of the late 19th and early 20th century and carried on through certain Quaker intellectuals who have been associated with that community.
I think you can hear echoes of this sense of ethical religious experience from the University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Richard Davidson, who is connected with the Dalai Lama and who runs various studies about the effectiveness of meditation. What is interesting about these studies at Wisconsin that he’s conducting is that they are not content to prove these monks or hermits are better, in the Dalai Lama’s phrase, at “calm abiding.” That’s not enough. But rather, what they’re really interested in is a more sustained compassionate affect — of “loving kindness” that it really produces; meditation produces compassion, sympathy and loving kindness, not just calm-abiding.
One of the things this result suggests is a liberal hopefulness about human nature — that somehow, in studying meditation, deep in the mind are these reservoirs, a potential for compassion. Deep in human nature is this reservoir of compassion that one can draw out through this spiritual practice of meditation and that is the kind of liberal sensibility I take from that.
Proposition number three: Thomas Jefferson may have been right about the Unitarians after all. In a moment of irrational exuberance all his own, Jefferson predicted in 1822 that Unitarianism of the newly-minted denomination of Liberal Christians in New England would come to dominate American religious life as a great force of Enlightenment. “I confidently expect,” he wrote from Monticello, “that the present generation will see Unitarianism become the general religion of the United States.” That ascent, of course, did not come close to happening, and now it sounds downright laughable as a prediction. In a nation of about 150 million church members, there are just over 150,000 Unitarians.
Looked at another way, say, from the far reaches of romantic and liberal influences within the current spirituality boom, disaffected Unitarians and their varied kin have had a sweeping effect on American religious life and the spiritual aspirations of vast numbers of Americans. Almost by definition, religious liberals are not good at belonging to churches, so the numbers often look paltry, whether you’re looking at Unitarians or Quakers or the thinning ranks of liberal mainline Protestants, dwindling numbers of Episcopalians or Hillary Clinton Methodists — as opposed to George Bush Methodists. Church membership statistics are a notoriously tough way to gauge religious influence. For example, at the time of the American Revolution, by almost all accounts, church membership levels were no higher than 15 percent. So one consequence of that is to say well, it was a terribly unchurched religious environment with almost no religious influence, yet very few historians would say , just based on the low level of church membership, that somehow religion wasn’t of much consequence in 1780 or 1790. There have to be other ways of thinking about these kinds of numbers.
And I think this is especially true of religious liberalism. The diffusion of religious liberalism as a set of cultural sentiments and political affinities seems especially hard to measure by formal membership numbers. Crucial in that regard is this growing demographic of seekers who are by definition fluid in their sense of religious identity and affiliation. The popular image of the U.S. as a wildly religious country is true enough, at least by comparison to Western Europe. But there has always been a robust unchurched or unaffiliated population, at least 35 percent of the population now, and at least that much through most of the 20th century. That is a major pool for religious seekers, questioners and freethinkers.