Spirituality

There’s a lot of wind blowing around right now about spirituality. According to many religious commentators, Liberalism (and its evil cronies Science and Capitalism) spent this decade eradicating the spiritual from the experiences of modern people. That, they say, is why the nonreligious are now joining churches in epic numbers – the Liberal-prescribed urban lifestyle is a spiritual desert with nothing to offer people on “the biggest questions.”

It really makes me wonder where the hell these people have been. If we’re calling the spiritual that dimension of experience that is immaterial, for which subjective consciousness is the theater, then it occupies a greater part of Americans’ lives daily than, probably, it ever has. Even if we include faith in the unbeheld, faith in our place in the universe, non-instrumental morality and so forth, modern Americans cannot be called an unfeeling people. We are a deeply spiritual people. That the things which move us to spiritual feeling – fiction, mostly, and politics – are silly is inadequate to invalidate them, particularly if we’re talking validation along the same lines as religious (and historical) mythology.

Yeah, okay; so reading the masterpieces of modern fiction never educated society, civilized evil men or put a stop to tyranny or callousness, like imaginary platonic dick-stroking 19th century Liberals said it would. But neither did religious faith, in all the thousands of years people practiced it. And daily, I see Americans communicate entirely in the symbology of shared fiction (Hollywood, mostly) to make moral posits and speculate about our place in the universe. I don’t know how many of them realize they are effectively participating in a communal spiritual discourse, but the alleged “function” of spirituality is being exercised nonetheless.

Okay, so between you and me, our common mythology sucks. Hollywood films are particularly tainted by the toxic claw of capital. There’s also, probably, something pretty pernicious in getting our talking points from people paid to tell us what we want to hear. But you don’t need to travel far to find someone with a legitimate complaint about the plot to Exodus, either (and it’s not like the original publishers of the Moses story weren’t pandering to political enthusiasms). As far as I can tell, the only thing that ensures a more inherently fulfilling experience at church than at the movies is community. Why on Earth would people assume you need Exodus to build that? In two hundred years, we’ve simply taught ourselves to neglect that. Not even the whole decadent West, only America.

It’s true that American spiritual life seriously lacks something. It’s probably even true that it’s drawing secular people back to churches, choirs, God and the doctrine of eternal damnation. The Sender blames lack of imagination. These are not the only two choices.