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Restless Souls. Leigh Eric Schmidt
Читать онлайн.Название Restless Souls
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isbn 9780520954113
Автор произведения Leigh Eric Schmidt
Издательство Ingram
To consider the nineteenth-century transformation of “spirituality,” as Whitman's free-associated litany suggests, is also to track a host of related terms, practices, and ideas. Much of the time “mystical experience” and “mysticism,” for example, ran in advance of “spirituality” as the keywords in this liberal lexicon for denoting religion at its best, but the mystics, too, served as romanticized stand-ins for the broader Transcendentalist reevaluation of the churches as sources of community and authority. “The people do not believe any longer in churches,” an editorialist in The Radical—a masthead for post-Protestant liberals—opined in 1868. “And they have no faith at all in ‘organized religion.' That for them has been played out. Religion does not bear such fumbling with in our day. It has a private office…. We need not run to church, nor exercise ourselves so in efforts to be spiritual.”5 In excavating how “spirituality” was transformed in the nineteenth century, it quickly becomes clear how much else needs to be excavated as well—in this instance, the very way in which religion became equated with “organized religion,” an obverse formulation without which spirituality as creative individuality and pure interiority could not take wing. Indeed, religion gradually became so thoroughly associated with system and structure that the very adjective organized came to be superfluous; for today's seekers, it is implied in the term religion.
As Laura Ingraham's cutting remarks suggest, the notion of being “spiritual but not religious” has now become the favored way of describing America's metaphysical preoccupations. Of relatively recent vintage as a labeling device, the spiritual-but-not-religious tag emerged initially within the world of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) in the middle decades of the twentieth century.6 That recovery group, originating in the seeker culture of the 1930s and 1940s, found multiple sources of inspiration—from evangelical devotional guides to the experimental quests of such figures as Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard. Tellingly enough, among the most prominent wellsprings for AA founder Bill Wilson was William James's Varieties of Religious Experience. Taking James's account of conversion, mysticism, and healthy-mindedness to heart, Wilson built a small-group therapy around disclaiming any ties to institutional religion, while simultaneously accentuating the importance of spiritual experience for self-transformation. Through the 1960s and 1970s the spiritual-but-not-religious distinction was being invoked mostly in relation to AA's popular twelve-step program, but the construct soon gained much wider currency. By the 1990s it had become the coin of the realm, a paradigmatic expression used in everything from personal ads to academic monographs. On the cusp of the new millennium, the Gallup organization even decided that the concept had gained enough cultural traction to ratify it with a question in a public-opinion survey; the poll presented Americans with three options for describing their beliefs: religious, spiritual but not religious, or neither. Thirty percent chose the SBNR option.7
The ascent of the spiritual-but-not-religious identification was immediately seen as an important sign of the times, the most conspicuous indicator of a “new spirituality” that had come into vogue among baby boomers and post-boomers. To be sure, the descriptor's growing usage represented an impressive flowering: from the recovery literature of AA, it had burgeoned into a well-nigh ubiquitous designation. Notwithstanding its relative novelty as a piece of shorthand, the SBNR epithet was also the latest condensation of a post-Protestant sensibility that had initially taken shape among a particular set of nineteenth-century religious dissidents—Transcendentalists, radical Unitarians, Whitmanites, progressive-minded Quakers, and their sundry allies. These liberal religious currents, almost by definition, were never containable within denominational bounds, and eventually they flowed into any number of new rivulets—from AA to Burning Man to channeling to Druidic nature worship to Esalen.8 Despite the ever-growing profusion of metaphysical options, it is not an overreach to maintain that familiar liberal, romantic notions—about personal experience, organized religion, serenity, solitude, sublime surroundings, artistic self-expression, and cosmopolitan piety—continue to structure this spiritual-but-not-religious disposition. The cachet of this latest appellation should not disguise its recognizable historicity, the ways in which it serves as a discursive variation on deeply embedded cultural themes. The SBNR diction sounds anything but new once it is set alongside the vernacular of nineteenth-century religious liberalism, a dialect that was spoken with increasing frequency and fluency from the 1830s forward.
Recognizing those long-term commonalities still leaves the million-dollar question hanging in the air: What were the social consequences of imagining religion this way? Did this Emersonian turn—the sense that religion was fundamentally about the sacredness of the individual, not the institution of the church—represent self-reliance run amok? Did spirituality, once reimagined in the private and intimate terms of nineteenth-century religious liberalism, have any public face or political weight? It was a commonplace among religious liberals to insist that their open-road spirituality necessarily circled back to an ethic of social compassion and progressive reform. That proposition amounted, indeed, to liberal orthodoxy by the turn of the twentieth century. When Earl Morse Wilbur, president of the Unitarian seminary in Berkeley, sketched in 1916 one of the first historical portraits of “the Liberal Movement in American Religion,” he claimed that the tradition effectively combined two qualities: On the one hand, the “inner significance” of religious liberalism was defined “in terms of Mysticism,” “a mystical attitude of the soul”; on the other hand, it was an “ethicized and socialized religion,” a faith insistently applied to public life.9 This, at least, was the talk that religious liberals talked, but how they walked that talk has, of course, always been harder to assess. Restless Souls examines any number of wayfarers who attempted to join their spiritualized individuality to social practice, whether embodied in Thomas Wentworth Higginson's ecumenical sympathies and abolitionist activities or Rufus Jones's humanitarian labors through Quaker relief networks. Still, the social import of this American-made spirituality was necessarily messy, diffuse, and plural. Its architects commonly insisted that their social ethics and mystical absorptions were inextricably linked, but they hardly had a fail-safe blueprint for establishing that combination or for making it effective.
That the liberal highlighting of spirit over authority, individuality over institution, produced mixed results in social practice is no surprise. Just as religious liberals championed critical suspicion of any and all orthodoxies, they were also quite cognizant that their own bromides required recurrent scrutiny—not least their adoration of the mystical, the meditative, and the solitary at the expense of community and fellowship. Few of the criticisms that skeptics aim at today's religious seekers would take these nineteenth-century forerunners entirely by surprise. Religious liberals, after all, were nothing if not self-questioning on matters of faith, and their in-house misgivings still reverberate:
1. What keeps self-cultivation from turning into self-doting? Is “the crisis of self-surrender”—to borrow a phrase from William James—something that the self-reliant seeker can afford to dispense with as part of the religious life? Why should the solitary individual be taken as so definitive for religion?
2. What prevents liberal openness to religious variety from becoming flatly universalizing—as if the whole religious world could be made over in the singular image of a cosmopolitan New Englander? Are the interfaith practices and ideals that emerge from these liberal circles useful for bridging religious differences, or are such aspirations their own kind of missionary artifact?
3. Were these traveling souls really an emancipatory vanguard, or were they—as often as not—lost souls whose tramping seemed only to lead to more bewilderment and melancholy? Whether life has any meaning and even whether life is worth living—such questions were posed with blunt directness in these post-Protestant circles, but did the very asking of them suggest that doubt and unbelief had already prevailed, that the spiritual was a weak lifeline in a sea of disenchantments?
4. Was the market in the saddle, after all, and riding these