Today's Cultural Mantra: "I'm Spiritual But Not Religious"

Have you noticed that in our contemporary "secular" society the word "spirituality" has been steadily displacing the word "religion" in popular culture. People (often unthinkingly) repeat the cultural mantra: "I'm spiritual but not religious."

For many people today this cultural mantra means: "Today in our liberal secular society we finally have a choose to say "no" to all forms of established religion, and I don't choose to subscribe to any single or exclusive historical religious tradition, (especially the western "theistic" religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam). I don't choose to subscribe to the external authority of any set of canonical scriptures, mythic narratives, historical truth-claims, doctrinal beliefs, community rituals, established clergy, institutional structures or political agendas (whether left or right)."

I think what many within the growing "spiritual but not religious" sub-culture are saying is, "What's left for me after the demise of traditional institutional religion is "the spirituality of no religion...and of all religions." I can appreciate the desire to find a "meaningful and personal spiritual path" but without the "baggage" of historical and institutional religion. I think we can see a search for "individuation" and "authenticity" at work here - two important modern secular cultural values.

Unless one is predisposed toward hostility toward all forms of the "spiritual but not religious" option, one cannot help but be impressed by the sheer imagination and creativity of those "contemporary spiritual seekers" who are putting their own globally eclectic forms of "spirituality" together by combining and integrating diverse elements not only of the world's religions (Shamanic, Vedic, Asian, and Abrahamic), but also of the full spectrum of university curriculum, including philosophy, history, literature, poetry, music, art, as whell as the physical, natural, cognitive and social sciences.

It seems to me that this shift toward the "spiritual but not (exclusively) religious" is almost inevitable for those today who live consciously in the modern (and post-modern) secular pluralist society and electronically connective emerging global civilization. There is no way to segregate the religions - either geographically or culturally - from each other any more. Their spiritual eco-systems are cross-pollinating each other as never before in human history. Conversation is continuous, and many people are looking for new possibilities to turn contraries into complements, to overcome ancient conflicts through creative dialog and mutual transformation.

Nor is there any way to segregate the knowledge of the world's religions from the other vital domains of human knowledge and experience. Religions have always been influenced and shaped by the surrounding cultural and social milieu, and this means that to some extent all religions are at least partially "syncretistic," picking up and integrating elements of the surrounding culture. In our modern age many of us in the western secular world take for granted the nearly universal access to general education, including the liberal arts and sciences. As millions of people are given the opportunity to study the humanities, arts, natural and social sciences, and to make this knowledge an integral part of their understanding of the world, any view of faith and religion that they may hold will likely be evaluated and scrutinized through the lenses of these intellectual and cultural domains.

One glaring fact that is often overlooked today is that modern public education - from elementary school through college - is overwhelmingly dominated by the assumptions and methodologies of an essentially closed naturalistic (anti-transcendent) world-view that rejects as incredible, archaic, irrelevant (and possibly immoral) any animistic, theistic or idealist world-view interpretation of the universe in which we live. This default stance of "philosophical naturalism" is part of the "hidden curriculum", to borrow Erik Erikson's phrase.

The contemporary "spiritual but not religious" movement is not unlike the 18th Century's Romanticism and Transcendentalism that reacted against the 17th Century's Deistic Rationalism and Scientific Positivism. There are strong affinities. Just as enlightenment secularism was a necessary reaction to oppressive forms of institutional religion, in the say way "the new spirituality" is a reaction to oppressive forms of secular materialism and nihilistic consumerism.

The "traditionally religious" - and those whose spiritual search has led them to return to more traditional and historic forms of religion - will view "the new spirituality" as itself empty and vacuous, solipsistic and narcissistic, making an idol of the autonomous self and the unhinged imagination. But this judgment, while no doubt exposing a real weakness of free-floating "spirituality without religion" - is probably too harsh.

Is it possible that the traditionally religious, the secular humanist, and the "spiritual but not religious" might actually learn something new about themselves and each other through attempting a critically reflective but deeply respectful and constructive dialog that avoids demonizing and stereotyping the other points of view? Probably, but such a dialog seems extremely difficult and even improbable in the culturally polarized climate in which we live today. What do you think?