Spirituality Is Not Flaky New Age Mush

I often give lectures in synagogues, churches, and universities around the country, and I am generally greeted with good-natured skepticism when I tell my audiences that it's possible to build spiritual aliveness into a religious life. For many Jews and Christians, the most they have come to expect from a religious community is a place to do social action or charity, or a place in which they can find good-hearted people. I think that both of these are important parts of what a religious community should do, but something is missing: a spiritually alive encounter with the sacred.

Many young people today reject religious communities precisely because they can't find their spiritual yearnings addressed in synagogues or churches. The hunger for meaning and purpose in life is as strong and central to human life as the hunger for food or for sex, and that sense of meaning leads people to want some relationship to the sacred.

Just as some social and religious orders demean or repress our desires for sex, so today we live in a world whose institutions and social practices implicitly demean or repress our hunger for meaning. This repression has led to a wide range of pathologies in daily life.

And yet, though the dominant culture celebrates its material success, though it imagines that anyone who has "made it" in the competitive marketplace must be a fountain of wisdom, though it encourages people to "look out for number one," though it does its best to ridicule or expose as self-interested anyone who claims to be motivated by some higher purpose, people nevertheless insist upon some form of spiritual nourishment, grabbing on to whatever form of spirituality provides an alternative to the dominant culture.

Hungry for some community in which their need for meaning can be explored, some are attracted to a reactionary spirituality that is used to justify right-wing political agendas. It is frequently not the right-wing politics but rather the safety to explore spiritual issues that attracts them to these communities. For many people, these communities are the only places they've ever encountered people who care about others and don't evaluate others by how wealthy, physically attractive, smart, or powerful they are. People who choose a reactionary spirituality sometimes make this choice for a good reason: because they are fed up with the one-dimensional and technocratic realities of daily life.

Most of the people in these right-wing religious communities are not stupid or evil, despite the ways they are caricatured in the media. On the contrary, they have made a choice that, in their context, was the most noble and principled commitment available. In my forthcoming book, "Spirit Matters," I try to describe what an Emancipatory Spirituality might look like, because reactionary spirituality need not be the only option.

On the other end of the spectrum, we get another distortion. Sometimes the hunger for meaning leads people to glom on to flaky and narcissistic forms of spirituality. I've sometimes lost patience with spiritual talk I hear emanating from "New Age" sources, because it seems as if "spirituality" is being used as permission to abandon serious thinking and open the door to every imaginable spiritual commodity. Writers in New Age magazine, Utne Reader, and other serious spiritual journals sometimes bemoan this appropriation of the term "New Age" by charlatans, opportunists, and flakes.

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