No going back
I don’t read New York Times columnist Ross Douthat very much anymore, but when I do I can usually count on him to say something to make my blood boil. He accomplished that again last weekend.
It isn’t clear to me what commentary niche Douthat fills for the Times. Most of his topics fall under the categories of culture, politics, and religion, which is a pretty broad front. Religion, however, seems to be his special interest. Douthat, after a swing through Pentecostalism, became a convert to traditionalist Roman Catholicism. In other words, he leans much more toward JP II and Benedict than Pope Francis.
This weekend’s offending column was titled, “Is the World Ready for a Religious Comeback?” One of Douthat’s favorite topics is the decline of religion and the need to revive it. As he does here, he talks often about the sad consequences for society of religion’s shrinking importance.
Despite that concern, Douthat dismisses most movements for religious reform, whether from progressive Catholics or Protestants. And while he talks a lot about what society has lost with religion’s decline, rarely does he talk about that decline’s causes, like the sex abuse scandals, oppression of women, intransigence on moral issues, politicization, and generally clinging to an outdated premodern worldview. Douthat often gives the impression he would be very happy to return to the 1950s, if not much earlier.
There is so much wrong with this latest column of Douthat’s it’s hard to know where to begin. It’s a prime example of how if you don’t understand the problem, then of course you won’t say sensible things about solving it. He begins by recalling the best-seller popularity of various “anti-God” books published shortly after 9-11. Dubbed the “New Atheists”, these authors wrote high profile books about the anti-intellectual absurdity of religion, and the disastrous political and social consequences of fundamentalism, exemplified by the Al-Qaeda attacks.
Douthat mistakenly believes these books represented some dramatic turning point in modern religion’s decline. But their popularity actually showed the depth of a decline that was already well underway. No one read these books and thought, “Wow! I hadn’t thought of that before. I guess I’ll stop going to church.” Rather, most people read these books to have their previous doubts and disdain confirmed. And in that, the books were very successful.
Douthat begins with these 20-year-old books because the focus of his article are three new books showing, in his view, a way back to religion. The authors are all Christian neo-conservatives, like Douthat, who discloses he also has book along similar lines about to come out. Apparently, the publishing pendulum has swung to the other side.
I think Douthat’s biggest mistake is thinking that the crisis in Christianity is primarily an intellectual one. It does have such a problem to the extent that it clings to its ancient and medieval worldview. But that’s not primarily why people have been leaving the church. They’ve been leaving because Christianity is failing them as religion.
That’s not to say that people are leaving Christianity for some other of the world’s religions. As I’ve said before, all the world’s ancient religions are long past their sell-by dates. You can find neglected or abandoned temples and shrines everywhere. Religious revivals still happen from time-to-time, for mostly local reasons. But the fact is that for the vast majority of urbanized people, wherever they are, the traditional ancient religions simply do not connect with their modern lives. Yet people are still looking for spiritual meaning and direction.
Douthat blithely dismisses the rise of the “spiritual but not religious” as having peaked (based on one report out this summer). This is a good thing, in his view, since these spiritual seekers, unmoored from the guidance of religion, have been descending into all sorts of absurdities.
The decline of religious membership and practice is increasingly seen as a social problem rather than a great leap forward. People raised without belief are looking for meaning in psychedelics, astrology, U.F.O.s. And lately the rise of the “Nones” — Americans with no religious affiliation — has finally leveled off. So the world seems primed for religious arguments in the same way it was primed for the new atheists 20 years ago.
Douthat needs to get out of his evangelical academic bubble more often. There are no signs that churches are experiencing any kind of revival. Or that more people are finding “meaning” in psychedelics, astrology, and UFOs (!). Or that people are now “primed for religious arguments.” (Douthat is the type of evangelical who believes the answer to the church’s problems is to get more people to read C. S. Lewis.)
Despite its being disconnected from organized religion, the spiritual quest of people today is genuine and very much alive. It is necessarily amorphous and hard to measure. Those who study such things often dismiss it because it doesn’t fit into traditional religious boxes, but that’s a mistake. Something genuinely new is arising, even if its form is not yet apparent.
At the end of his essay, Douthat wonders “whether contemporary disillusionment with secularism is enough to draw people to the threshold of religion.” But why is religion the only option? Secularism was a response to the failures of religion. Yet religion’s flaws haven’t been fixed, so why would going back to it make any sense?
Today’s spiritual quest is not disconnected from the past but it is not a return to the past, either. It’s biggest difference, especially in relation to orthodox Christianity, is its dismissal of theism: belief in a divine being—God—somewhere “out there.” The bearded, robed man on a throne above the clouds simply can’t be reimagined in a way that makes sense in the modern world. Yet traditional Western religion simply cannot shake its attachment to this ancient, mythical figure. For modern people, however, it’s a nonstarter.
Yet the question which gave the initial energy to the great world religions remains at the heart of today’s spiritual searching: Who am I? In the 5th century BCE, the maxim “Know thyself” was inscribed on the Greek Temple of Apollo at Delphi. That goal has been a central pursuit of philosophy, religion, science, literature, and spirituality ever since.
In the modern world, difficulty answering the question, “Who am I?”, has been the primary source of popular anxiety and confusion. Religion used to provide a workable answer for us but doesn’t anymore. To say one is a “child of God” sounds reassuring until you realize you don’t have a meaningful understanding of who God is.
The essence of spirituality is the conviction that our being is spirit, and thus we are all divine, already and always one with God. While religion believes our goal is to find and connect with God, spirituality’s goal is for us to awake to the unity we already have with God. In the words of the French theologian and mystic, Teilhard de Chardin:
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
The primary activity of worship is the verbal expression of praise and prayer to the God beyond us. The primary activity of spirituality is meditation, the growing awareness in contemplative silence of our true nature as spirit and one with God.
Spirituality is not foreign to religion. Far from it. But it has almost always been a “minority opinion,” contained in monasteries or among desert recluses. Whenever it began to expand beyond those confines, it was usually suppressed by religious authorities.
Today, spirituality is again spilling out into the world. This time, however, religious authorities lack both the power and the credibility to contain it. Instead, as Douthat does here, it is simply ignored, in hopes it will just go away. They don’t understand that it may well be our world’s best hope that it spreads far and wide.
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