Spiritual but Not Religious: the Influence of the Current Romantic

ATR/88:3 Spiritual but Not Religious: The Influence of the Current Romantic Movement Owen C. Thomas* A significant number of people today identify themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” distancing themselves from contin- uing religious traditions of formation. Various explanations have been offered for this. This article claims that this phenomenon is the result of the influence of a new Romantic movement that began to emerge in the 1960s. Historians, sociologists, philosophers, and contemporary theologians give evidence for such a new movement, which is found in popular culture, and in post- modernism, neoconservatism, the new consumerism, and especially in the current spirituality movement. Romantic movements tend to disparage traditional religion and to affirm unorthodox, exotic, esoteric, mystical, and individualistic spiritualities; this is true of the current spirituality movement. The current spirituality movement also resembles Romantic movements in its ambiguity, and in its destructive as well as constructive tendencies. Many commentators have noted the current cultural phenomenon of the large number of people, perhaps twenty percent of Ameri- cans, who are self-identified as “spiritual but not religious.” Some of these commentators have offered explanations for this phenomenon. Among these are Weber’s idea of the “routinization of charisma” in or- ganized religion, which may have turned off many seekers; the regular emergence in the religious traditions of renewal movements of which the spirituality movement may be an example; the unprecedented contact and interchange among the world religions; the suspicion of institutions of all kinds and the resulting search for something more * Owen C. Thomas is Professor of Theology emeritus of the Episcopal Divinity School and the author of several books in the philosophy of religion and theology. A former physicist, he has been a visiting professor at the Gregorian University and the North American College in Rome, and president of the American Theological Society. His e-mail address is [email protected]. 397 398 Anglican Theological Review individual, private, and experiential; and the authoritarian structures and social constraints of religious institutions which have become hurtful and destructive.1 Since this phenomenon seems to be limited to English and North American cultures, another possible explanation of it is linguistic. I refer here to the fact that the meaning of “spirit” (and thus “spirituality”) in English is much narrower than its equivalents in the Germanic and Romance languages, in which it refers to all the uniquely human capacities and cultural functions.2 Tillich attributes this difference to the impact of the British empirical tradition which separated the cognitive functions of the mind from the functions of emotion and will, and identified “spirit” with the latter.3 Thus Geist became “ghost” and esprit became “sprite.” This may have led some to see a clear difference between religion and spirituality. This linguistic factor, however, has undoubtedly been enhanced by the explanation for the phenomenon of “spiritual but not religious” offered below. In this essay I will propose that a major reason for this phenomenon, which has not been noted, is that the current spirituality movement which arose in the 1970s is largely the product of a new Romantic movement which emerged in the 1960s. The current Ro- mantic movement has influenced all aspects of our cultural life; the spirituality movement is in large part a product of this. Romantic movements always tend to disparage traditional religion and to affirm unorthodox, exotic, individualistic spiritualities. Romantic movements are also ambiguous, with tendencies which are destructive as well as productive. This ambiguity also attaches to the current spirituality movement. 1 Meredith Maguire, “Mapping Contemporary American Spirituality,” Christian Spirituality Bulletin 5 (Spring 1997): 3-8; Douglas Burton-Christie, “Retrieval,” Spi- ritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 3, no. 2 (2003): vii; Sandra M. Schneiders, “Religion vs. Spirituality: A Contemporary Conundrum,” Spiritus: A Journal of Chris- tian Spirituality 3 (2003): 163-165; Robert C. Fuller, Spiritual, but Not Religious: Un- derstanding Unchurched America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 5-7; Wade Clark Roof, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Re- ligion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 81-82, 173-179; and Reid B. Locklin, Spiritual but Not Religious? An Oar Stroke Closer to the Farther Shore (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2005), 2-5. 2 For a fuller elaboration of this point, see my essay “Some Problems in Contem- porary Christian Spirituality,” Anglican Theological Review 82, no. 2 (2000): 270. 3 See Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press. 1951-1963), 1:249-250, 3:21-25. Spiritual but Not Religious 399 What are the marks of a Romantic movement? Philosopher William Thomas Jones has described Romanticism as a complex syndrome of “biases” in the direction of what he calls the dynamic, the disordered, the continuous, the soft-focused, the inner, and the other- worldly.4 Historian Craig Brinton portrays the Romantic tempera- ment as “sensitive, emotional, preferring color to form, the exotic to the familiar, eager for novelty, for adventure, above all for the vicari- ous adventure of fantasy, reveling in disorder and uncertainty, in- sistent on the uniqueness of the individual to the point of making a virtue of eccentricity.” He states that Romanticism involves the “exal- tation of intuition, spirit, sensibility, imagination, faith, the immeasur- able, the infinite, the wordless.”5 Sociologist Colin Campbell, quoting Gauderfroy-Demombynes, states, “Romanticism is a way of feeling, a state of mind in which sensi- bilité and imagination predominates over reason; it tends towards the new, towards individualism, revolt, escape, melancholy, and fantasy.” Other typical characteristics of this way of feeling would be: dissatisfaction with the contemporary world, a restless anxiety in the face of life, a preference for the strange and curious, a pen- chant for reverie and dreaming, a leaning to mysticism, and a cel- ebration of the irrational.6 The existence of a new Romantic movement has been argued by historians, sociologists, theologians, philosophers, and interpreters of popular culture. The historian Theodore Roszak has argued extensively that we are in a new Romantic movement in his books The Making of a Counter Culture (1969) and Where the Wasteland Ends (1972). He ex- plores the youth movement of the 1960s and interprets it as a new Ro- mantic movement by comparing it with the first Romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To support his thesis, Roszak offers an analysis of the themes of the first Romantic movement in the work of Blake, Wordsworth, and Goethe. Then he shows how these themes have been adopted by the youth movement, 4 W. T. Jones, The Romantic Syndrome: Toward a New Method in Cultural An- thropology and History of Ideas (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), chaps. 5-7. 5 Crane Brinton, “Romanticism,” The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 8 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 7:206b, 209b. 6 Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 181. 400 Anglican Theological Review seen especially in its protest against the dominance of science and tech- nology and the resulting rationalization, secularization, bureaucratiza- tion, and dehumanization of life.7 Although Roszak refers solely to the German and English versions of the first Romantic movement, a simi- lar case could be made from the American version as exemplified in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists, who were deeply influenced by the European versions.8 Roszak often appeals to Jung, especially in the latter’s studies of hermeticism and alchemy. Philip Rieff offers an interpretation of romantic themes in Jung’s writings, namely, feeling versus intellect, spontaneity versus restriction, the unconscious as savior, introversion, the creative disorder of the interior life, and especially fantasy, which Rieff describes as “the Jungian successor to Christian faith.”9 Also, in an unpublished essay of 1971 entitled “Romanticism as a Religious Movement,” historian Sydney Ahlstrom states, Many observers have pointed to a pronounced romantic element in the new interests that mark the 1960’s. A short unelaborated enumeration will suffice as a reminder: 1) the revival of Novalis’ plea that youth must bring in the new day; 2) the surge of interest in Far Eastern religion that Herder and Friedrich Schlegel pio- neered; 3) the commitment to history that Hegel personified and which Herbert Marcuse and the Marxist revival betoken; 4) the renewed interest in astrology, hermetic philosophy and the occult which Saint-Martin and Oettinger championed; 5) the interest in subjectivity, the subconscious, and openness to others associated with Rousseau’s Confessions and dozens of romantic autobio- graphical expositions; 6) the search for the meaning and realiza- tion of an organic sense of community and a general enlivening of organic metaphors as an antidote to materialism, individualism, and mechanism; 7) a widespread attack on conventional morality which also reverberated in [Rousseau’s] La Nouvelle Heloise and [Schlegel’s] Lucinda; 8) a return of interest in Hermann Hesse who himself

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