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inheritance.⁴

      If it is not particularly fruitful to ground the history of American “spirituality” in early American Protestantism, then what about the iconoclastic religion of the American Enlightenment, the intellectual world that produced the religious and political ruminations of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and James Madison? Certainly, these American founders as well as their British and European colleagues offered crucial formulations of religious privacy and voluntaristic freedom. “My own mind is my own church,” the revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine insisted with plenty of bravado, but little overstatement. It would be hard to find a more important taproot of anticreedalism and anticlericalism than the enlightened ideology that these cosmopolitan statesmen both embodied and broadcast. Still, these freethinking leaders were not religious seekers, but natural philosophers. Their sense of religious privacy was a matter of political principle, not devotional solitude; their God was a distant technician, a watchmaker, not an immanent spirit, an intensifier of feeling. As deists, they viewed God as the supreme architect of nature's laws, not an intimate listener to outpoured prayers. Only when Enlightenment freedom, happiness, and autonomy were refracted through a romantic prism did the life of the spirit come to matter experientially to rational souls. Only then did the absence of religious enthusiasm seem a graver peril than its presence. “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,” Emerson would insist.⁵

      But what about the Enlightenment's shadow, the esoteric world of Freemasons and gentlemanly inquirers into the occult, the alchemical underside of both the Renaissance and the Age of Reason? Surely, the secret sources of modern American spirituality are to be uncovered in the mystery-shrouded world of Western esotericism. That kind of claim, in actuality, is often little more than a distraction. It serves two purposes that are particularly at odds with good history: First, it is used to reinforce an orthodox perspective on history that imagines an ageless battle between the truths of Christianity and the false claims of occultists and heretics. New Age spirituality, from this perspective, becomes little more than the latest instance of ancient deviations from orthodoxy, which early modern adepts transmitted through clandestine brotherhoods and which now need to be fought against as they have always been fought against. The second purpose is the inverse of the first: ancient esoteric sources, carefully tended for centuries by secret societies and elite initiates, make contemporary searches seem venerable, even timeless. That certainly appears to be the point for the famed literary critic Harold Bloom when he announces that he is a latter-day Gnostic and that indeed the American religion at its best is a Gnostic gospel of divinized souls, each imbued with a “spark or transcendental self that is free of the fallen or created world.” It is a lot less grandiose—and a lot more accurate—to admit more immediate and mundane sources than to mystify origins with tales of ancient magi and esoteric lore. Equating the “new spirituality” with the persistence of occultism or the revival of Gnosticism is all too often either heresy-hunting or mythmaking. Much less often is it light-bearing.⁶

      All right, enough negations: what really counts in the invention of modern American spirituality? The history that matters the most, by far, is the rise and flourishing in the nineteenth century of religious liberalism in all its variety and occasional eccentricity. Seeker spirituality—excitedly eclectic, mystically yearning, perennially cosmopolitan—is an artifact of religious liberalism, especially in its more radical stripes. Included in that company of nonconformists were Transcendentalists, romantic Unitarians, Reform Jews, progressive Quakers, devout disciples of Emerson and Whitman, Spiritualists, questing psychologists, New Thought optimists, Vedantists, and Theosophists, among sundry other wayfarers. Many of these newfangled pilgrims traveled several different religious paths in succession; some traversed more than one simultaneously; more than a few expressly saw themselves as the makers, immodestly enough, of the religion of the future, a universalized spirituality. Almost from first to last, they charted a path—at least, so they imagined—away from the old “religions of authority” into the new “religion of the spirit.” From the democratic vista of religious liberalism, a much clearer and more precise history of American spirituality comes into view.⁷

      Even with that specified point of departure, getting a grip on spirituality is hardly an easy task. John W. Chadwick, a New England minister close in outlook to Emerson, already felt “helpless” in pinning the term down in 1891, sounding a little bit like the desperate judge trying to define pornography: “You call upon me to explain what I mean by ‘spirituality.’…I seem to know spirituality when I meet it in a man or book, but if I should attempt to define it, my definition might be as vague as that ‘kind of a sort of something' which the hard-pressed obscurantist offered as his definition of the Trinity.” When Chadwick did try to make sense of what “spirituality” had come to signify, he referred back to Transcendentalists like Theodore Parker and Emerson who had led the heady revolt against New England's established religious order in the 1830s and 1840s. It is a strategy pursued in these pages as well, and one can only hope that it is done with less feebleness and greater clarity here than Chadwick mustered in this halting moment of perplexity.⁸

      In a recent article called “A Seeker's Guide to Faith,” the magazine Real Simple provided a helpfully concrete illustration of the historical threads pursued here. The connection came in an interview with Stephanie Jones, an artist living in Brooklyn, who had grown up attending the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Gradually she has moved away from the intermittently observed Christianity of her youth into an everyday practice of Buddhist chanting, prayer, and meditation. In calling her daughter Emerson in honor of America's paradigmatic nineteenth-century seeker and liberal dissident, Jones witnessed to her own spiritual journey and tugged on the twine that ties twenty-first-century quests to nineteenth-century emancipations. “Emerson was the prophet of spirituality,” an admirer wrote already in 1882, a sentiment that Jones has effectively incarnated through her daughter's given name. To paraphrase the Concord sage himself, the here and now is intimately tied to the there and then.⁹

      Or take the story of Elizabeth Lesser's search, which she relates at the outset of The New American Spirituality: A Seeker's Guide (1999). There she tells of a concerted quest for meaning and community that takes her through a series of religious affiliations in the 1960s and 1970s. Trading off between Thomas Merton's contemplative Catholicism and the meditative practices of a Zen center, Lesser eventually settles upon a westernized version of Sufism after meeting the guru Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan in 1972. It is through this encounter and the ongoing workshops of the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, that Lesser gradually finds her spiritual longing for “mindfulness,” “heartfulness,” and “soulfulness” satisfied. Could there be a more paradigmatic tale of a new generation of seekers?

      It does not take long, though, to see beneath the surface of the contemporary in Lesser's search for “a new kind of spirituality.” Among the devotions she undertook with Pir Vilayat and her fellow travelers were “universal worships,” in which “each of the major world religions, and many of the minor ones as well, were honored with scripture and practice. In one Sunday service we might read from the Koran, Hindu and Buddhist texts, Sufi stories, and the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, and then chant mantras, do traditional Jewish dances, and wash each other's feet in the spirit of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples.” Those services, however trendy they might sound, were not a recent experiment of the counterculture. Pir Vilayat's father, Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882–1927), who first brought his message from India to the United States in 1910, was actually responsible for introducing the practice. Marrying a near relation of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, in 1912, Khan quickly attracted his own eclectic circle of American inquirers into Sufi music, dance, and devotion. At the outset of one of his lecture tours in 1925, the New York Times offered an account of Khan's “spirituality” in an article entitled “Indian Mystic Offers One Religion for All.” “My ancestors were Moslems,” Khan explained to the reporter. “I have no religion. All places of worship are one to me. I can enter a Buddhist temple, a mosque, a church or a synagogue in the same spirit. Spirituality is the tuning of the heart.”

      In his lectures in New York and elsewhere across the country, Hazrat Inayat Khan justified his innovations through an appeal to the increasingly pervasive ideals of religious liberalism: spiritual liberty, mystical experience, meditative interiority, universal brotherhood,

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