Restless Souls - Leigh Eric Schmidt

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American sojourns, Martin Kellogg Schermerhorn, an industrious Unitarian minister from Poughkeepsie, was promoting, with the backing of the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, various collections of hymns, scriptures, and prayers for the celebration of “universal worship” services. For Schermerhorn as much as Khan, modern religious identities would be regrounded only through an undoing of ethnic, racial, and religious tribalism, including Christian and Muslim exclusivism. Hence Schermerhorn busied himself in compiling the liturgical materials for the universal religion as he imagined it would find expression in new “Cosmopolitan Churches” and within the private devotions of eclectics like himself and Khan. Just this quickly, then, Elizabeth Lesser's recent seeking can be resituated in a century-long perspective: not so much a rootless baby-boomer quest, but instead a more deeply grounded and complex exploration of a cosmopolitan spirituality.10

      Anecdotes aside, the argument offered in these pages about the centrality of religious liberalism may seem at best counterintuitive. At least at an institutional level, conservative Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants dominate the current scene. The Christian Right and its high-profile allies in Washington grab the headlines and occupy the public square with confidence and flair. At the same time, new immigrants—whether Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, or Korean Christians—lobby with growing effectiveness for a fuller voice in civic life. The so-called liberal or mainline denominations have over the last half-century fallen on very hard times, suffering an almost staggering erosion in membership and public influence. Meanwhile, beyond the thinned ranks of liberal Protestants, New Agers have been so satirized as quirky crystal gazers, left-over hippies, and self-absorbed spiritual shoppers—David Brooks, a pundit for PBS and the New York Times, has called them “vaporheads”—that even neo-pagans and Wiccans feel compelled to disown the New Age epithet.11 Why would anyone beyond the hallways of Harvard Divinity School or the streets of Santa Monica think that liberalism still explains much of anything about American religion?

      Few commentators would dare to wear liberal Protestant blinkers anymore, let alone raise a paean to the foundational importance of America's liberal tradition. In theology, as in politics, liberalism is the hobgoblin of orthodoxies, possessing a fearsomeness for conservatives and traditionalists little removed from John Henry Newman's mid-nineteenth-century conjuration: “The more serious thinkers among us…regard the spirit of Liberalism as the characteristic of the destined Antichrist.” Perhaps given the endless polemics and the very slipperiness of the term, liberalism is a label best retired. Perhaps it would be less contentious, if more cumbersome, to refer to this larger religious impulse, under William James's rubric, as “the personal and romantic view of life.” Or perhaps it would be better to think of this as the rise of “cosmopolitan,” “eclectic,” or “ecumenical” perspectives on spirituality. Yet, as a term of considerable resonance in nineteenth- and twentieth-century religious thought, liberalism allows an array of movements, within Christianity and beyond it, to be considered under the same umbrella. However difficult, it is still possible to use the liberal epithet in contextual, evenhanded ways without necessarily launching another theological or political Last Judgment in which fundamentalist sheep are separated from modernist goats (or vice versa).12

      Liberalism had intellectual progenitors from Baruch Spinoza and John Locke to Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, but, as a distinct religious and political ideology, it was an invention of the nineteenth century, not the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A broadly diffused movement, it was always as much a religious vision of emancipated souls as a political theory of individual rights and civil liberties or an economic calculus of the beneficence of free markets. In the United States, liberalism cohered first in the 1820s as a radical form of Protestant Christianity that then over the next few decades readily edged beyond Christianity itself. It was the volatile currency of religious innovators and critics of orthodoxy who, though spanning a wide spectrum of allegiances, remained convinced of their own essential affinities. Individualistic in their understanding of authority, religious liberals were generally contemptuous of creeds and scorned uncritical submission to scriptural texts as ignorance or even idolatry. Moving beyond mere toleration as an ideal, they led the way as eager sympathizers with other faiths. With a grand sense of human freedom and potentiality, they were committed to progress in the domains of spiritual consciousness, social organization, and scientific knowledge. For religious liberals, unlike their secular cousins, a deepened and diversified spirituality was part of modernity's promise. Materialism and scientism might challenge this unfolding religion of the spirit from one side and reactionary pieties and politics from another, but, to its proponents, those perils only made the inward dimensions of liberalism more important. Religious liberalism, with its motley bedfellows of romantics and reformers, led the way in redefining spirituality and setting out its essentials.

      Getting a handle on “liberalism,” of course, is no easier than pinning down “spirituality.” The Harvard-educated metaphysician Horatio Dresser, one of the many architects of the “more spiritual phase” of American progressivism around 1900, dubbed the nineteenth century “the epoch of religious liberalism.” He saw it as a momentous movement that affected one denomination after another and that decidedly opened up the spiritual life to Emersonian self-reliance and therapeutic well-being. He quickly added, though: “The history of liberalism is so comprehensive that it is always a question nowadays what we mean when we use the term.” Then, as a succinct definition, he offered: “To be liberal is to be of the new age.” It was not a bad effort, but the basics of religious liberalism require at least a few more brushstrokes. The rudiments, at least for spiritually inclined progressives like Dresser, included

      • individual aspiration after mystical experience or religious feeling;

      • the valuing of silence, solitude, and serene meditation;

      • the immanence of the transcendent—in each person and in nature;

      • the cosmopolitan appreciation of religious variety as well as unity in diversity;

      • ethical earnestness in pursuit of justice-producing reforms or “social salvation”;

      • an emphasis on creative self-expression and adventuresome seeking.

      An interlocking group of precepts and practices, these could pass under various names—from the Transcendentalist Newness to the Universal Religion to the New Spirituality. Religious liberalism remains particularly serviceable as shorthand for this conglomeration.13

      Imbued to varying degrees with these principles, emancipated souls set out less on a pilgrimage toward otherworldly salvation and more on an individualized search to imbue this life with spiritual meaning and depth. Liberal pilgrims still made progress, but they did so not through the perilous landscape of damnation in John Bunyan's seventeenth-century representation of the journey to the Celestial City. Instead, they traversed an increasingly disenchanted and divided terrain that they sought to reanimate and make whole through a universalized religion of the spirit. That new topography had its own hazards, of course—mires of alienation, lost identity, and nihilism—that sometimes made hell seem more real than the spewing of any fire-and- brimstone evangelist. As Whitman observed in Leaves of Grass,

      Down-hearted doubters dull and excluded,

      Frivolous, sullen, moping, angry, affected, dishearten'd, atheistical,

       I know every one of you, I know the sea of torment, doubt, despair and unbelief.

      In opening up new roads for traveling souls, religious liberals regularly confronted those psychic risks and sometimes even overcame them.14

      In a moment of irrational exuberance all his own, Thomas Jefferson once predicted that Unitarianism, as a newly minted denomination of “liberal Christians” in New England, would come to dominate American religious life as a great force of reason. With its emphasis on Jesus as moral exemplar more than divine being, its optimism about human nature, and its refined educative vision, Unitarianism would, Jefferson believed, set the tone for the new republic's unfolding improvement and advancing knowledge, its freedom from superstition and intolerance. “I confidently expect,” he wrote from Monticello in 1822, “that the present generation will see Unitarianism become the

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