old faiths have all pulverized. ’Tis a whole population of gentlemen and ladies out in search of religions.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Worship,” 1860
America is an opportunity to make a Religion out of the sacredness of the individual.
—John Weiss, American Religion, 1871
I have worshiped in an Evangelical church when thousands rose to their feet at the motion of one hand. I have worshiped in a Roman Catholic church when the lifting of one finger broke the motionless multitude into twinkling motion, till the magic sign was made, and all was still once more. But I never for an instant have supposed that this concentrated moment of devotion was more holy or more beautiful than when one cry from a minaret hushes a Mohammedan city to prayer, or when, at sunset, the low invocation, “Oh! the gem in the lotus—oh! the gem in the lotus,” goes murmuring, like the cooing of many doves, across the vast surface of Thibet…. I do not wish to belong to a religion only, but to the religion; it must not include less than the piety of the world.
—Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
“The Sympathy of Religions,” 1871
To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls.
—Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road,” 1856
The ripeness of Religion is doubtless to be looked for in this field of individuality, and is a result that no organization or church can ever achieve. As history is poorly retained by what the technists call history, and is not given out from their pages, except the learner has in himself the sense of the well-wrapt, never yet written, perhaps impossible to be written, history—so Religion, although casually arrested, and, after a fashion, preserved in the churches and creeds, does not depend at all upon them, but is a part of the identified soul…. I should say, indeed, that only in the perfect uncontamination and solitariness of individuality may the spirituality of religion positively come forth at all. Only here, and on such terms, the meditation, the devout ecstasy, the soaring flight.
—Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 1871
CONTENTS
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
If only I knew then what I still don't know.
—Douglas Dunn, The Year's Afternoon, 2000
“Ask a cosmopolitan friend or a young person to describe his or her religion and you are likely to get ‘I'm spiritual but not religious,’” conservative provocateur Laura Ingraham writes in her recent jeremiad bemoaning the nation's cultural decay, Of Thee I Zing (2011). Predictably, Ingraham finds this popular self-description both vapid and dismaying: “‘The spiritual but not religious' moniker has become so trendy, it now has its own acronym: S-B-N-R. How about this one: S-T-U-P-I-D?” Not exactly sophisticated criticism, but Ingraham flogs the “SBNR crowd” long enough to make an inadvertently telling swipe about how they constitute a bunch of erratic dabblers. “Perpetually dipping their hands into the Whitman Sampler of Faith,” Ingraham jabs, “these searchers taste each flavor, but never stay long enough to savor any one in particular.”1
It is safe to say that Ingraham did not have Walt Whitman on her mind when she made that allusion, but rather a big box of chocolates. Reaching for a popular product logo, the Whitman's Sampler®, Ingraham played with the stereotyped image of the country's unmoored religious seekers as fickle consumers possessed by an insatiable appetite for variety. That censure, a commonplace of cultural criticism, has been around a long while now, and it comes not just from the right wing. Deriding the spiritual-but-not-religious demographic for its flighty tastes—say, a yearning for “tofu prepared by Tibetan virgins,” as Katha Pollitt put it in the pages of The Nation magazine in 2007—seems just as likely to happen on the other side of the political spectrum. “Avoid weasel words. Like ‘spirituality,’” Pollitt bluntly advised her fellow liberals. “It's religion.” Do not fall for the spiritual as some stylish, gently lit alternative to the religious, Pollitt was saying. It is all bad—just in case anyone on the secular left was tempted to think otherwise.2
Restless Souls tried in its first incarnation in 2005 to provide space to think differently about the Walt Whitman Sampler of Faith—the American invention and hallowing of “spirituality” as something loftier and more open-ended than “religion.” Now, seven years
