The Roots of “Spiritual but Not Religious”
OCTOBER 12, 2024
by Michael Horton
It is well known that many westerners today describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead define “spirituality” as a life based not on external authorities and expectations but “in deep connection with the unique experiences of my self-in-relation.” Religion represents a life of “subordinating subjective-life to the ‘higher’ authority of transcendent meaning, goodness and truth, whilst the latter (spirituality) invokes the sacred in the cultivation of unique subjective-life.” This is because subjective spirituality is individualistic. Though often practiced in community, it is not defined or disciplined by any community. The individual must be free “to relate in a pick-and-choose way to old and new religious narratives, constructing his or her own life-interpreting universe, loosely woven and therefore easy to change.”
Consistently, sociologists of religion underscore the point that individual autonomy is the main driver of secularization. One may still be intensely engaged inwardly and privately while being disengaged from bodily and communal practices considered cages of the soul. Even ideological secularism appears to be compatible with spirituality. As Charles Taylor points out, if one’s measure is “the great historical faiths, or even with the explicit belief in supernatural beings, then it seems to have declined. . . . But if you include a wide range of spiritual and semi-spiritual beliefs, or if you cast your net even wider and think of someone’s religion as the shape of their ultimate concern, then indeed, one can make a case that religion is as present as ever.” Like much of secularization itself, secularization theory arose within Christian societies and, for the most part, measures the waning influence of Christian beliefs and practices.
At least in Western modernity, spirituality without religion equates roughly to pantheism or panentheism without biblical monotheism, especially as interpreted in Christianity. And, as illustrated vividly in the cases of Socrates and Spinoza, polytheists and theists alike often find such spirituality indistinguishable from atheism. Emerging first as reinterpretations of and dissent from particular doctrines, antitheism has always been a secularizing phenomenon within monotheistic (especially Christian) religions, one led typically by mystics and critics who are ordained clergy. We should not forget that the Enlightenment itself was influenced significantly by “enthusiastic” alternatives to public religion.
Many figures of the Enlightenment were associated with mystical-pantheistic sects. Spinoza, whose work influenced them, belonged to a community of Anabaptists, Baptists, Quakers, and Remonstrants known as Collegiants after his ex-communication from the Amsterdam synagogue. Neither secular nor religious (in an orthodox sense), the Collegiants were nevertheless intensely spiritual—in the words of the Marxist historian Leszek Kołakowki, “Chrétiens sans Église.” This is not the whole story of secularization, much less of modernity, but it is a much larger part of the story than is usually told.
In fact, the phenomenon treated here so infuses our collective memory that we are often unaware of its influence. Rooted in the antipaganism of the Hebrew prophets, Christianity suppressed this aspect of the Western personality, and the Enlightenment folded Christianity itself into the immaturity of superstition. My goal is to conjure this repressed memory and to recognize it as a formative and enduring legacy in the narrative of modernity. In this volume I am interested especially in the emergence of the notion of the “divine self” that lies at the heart of a major transition from a locative to a utopian cosmos.