Lydia Maria Child, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Sarah Farmer, William James, Rufus Jones, Howard Thurman, Max Ehrmann, and company is worthy of serious consideration as an important variety of American liberalism, but I am concerned far more with the roots of this religious outlook than with its current political consequence. It was common enough over the last three decades, and especially in the first years of this century, to imagine that the renewal of the religious left was just what the country needed as a counterweight to the rise of the religious right. As I reflect now on this second edition, I would readily admit that such a perspective had particular resonance during President George W. Bush's ascendancy, when Restless Souls was under initial construction. A veritable flotilla of academics and pundits raised the flag for “spiritual progressives” in hopes that such religious liberals might reawaken and coalesce into a more vital political force.3 On second look, I would leave such present-day potentialities for others to stoke (or dampen) and dwell instead on the historical questions at the heart of Restless Souls: How did the spiritual come to be privileged over the religious by so many Americans, and what were the cultural implications of sanctifying that division? Those are puzzles enough.
A proclamation from Whitman's Democratic Vistas (1871), on display among the epigraphs to this book, is one canonical moment in the imagining of “spirituality” as the most elevated, precious, and desired portion of religion. Not in churches, creeds, sermons, or organizations, but in the “solitariness of individuality” would “the spirituality of religion” be realized: “Only here, and on such terms,” the poet announced, “the meditation, the devout ecstasy, the soaring flight.” Whitman's Democratic Vistas is revealing not only because of the way it exalts “spirituality” and extracts it from “religion,” but also because of the string of closely interconnected concepts it brings into alignment with the spiritual: meditation, solitude, mystical ecstasy, ineffability, freedom, aspiration, and individuality, all of which get juxtaposed with ecclesial institutions. The latter, Whitman claimed, “melt away like vapors” when confronted with these boundless “soul energies.”4
To consider the nineteenth-century transformation of “spirituality,” as Whitman's free-associated litany suggests, is also to track a host of related terms, practices, and ideas. Much of the time “mystical experience” and “mysticism,” for example, ran in advance of “spirituality” as the keywords in this liberal lexicon for denoting religion at its best, but the mystics, too, served as romanticized stand-ins for the broader Transcendentalist reevaluation of the churches as sources of community and authority. “The people do not believe any longer in churches,” an editorialist in The Radical—a masthead for post-Protestant liberals—opined in 1868. “And they have no faith at all in ‘organized religion.' That for them has been played out. Religion does not bear such fumbling with in our day. It has a private office…. We need not run to church, nor exercise ourselves so in efforts to be spiritual.”5 In excavating how “spirituality” was transformed in the nineteenth century, it quickly becomes clear how much else needs to be excavated as well—in this instance, the very way in which religion became equated with “organized religion,” an obverse formulation without which spirituality as creative individuality and pure interiority could not take wing. Indeed, religion gradually became so thoroughly associated with system and structure that the very adjective organized came to be superfluous; for today's seekers, it is implied in the term religion.
As Laura Ingraham's cutting remarks suggest, the notion of being “spiritual but not religious” has now become the favored way of describing America's metaphysical preoccupations. Of relatively recent vintage as a labeling device, the spiritual-but-not-religious tag emerged initially within the world of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) in the middle decades of the twentieth century.6 That recovery group, originating in the seeker culture of the 1930s and 1940s, found multiple sources of inspiration—from evangelical devotional guides to the experimental quests of such figures as Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard. Tellingly enough, among the most prominent wellsprings for AA founder Bill Wilson was William James's Varieties of Religious Experience. Taking James's account of conversion, mysticism, and healthy-mindedness to heart, Wilson built a small-group therapy around disclaiming any ties to institutional religion, while simultaneously accentuating the importance of spiritual experience for self-transformation. Through the 1960s and 1970s the spiritual-but-not-religious distinction was being invoked mostly in relation to AA's popular twelve-step program, but the construct soon gained much wider currency. By the 1990s it had become the coin of the realm, a paradigmatic expression used in everything from personal ads to academic monographs. On the cusp of the new millennium, the Gallup organization even decided that the concept had gained enough cultural traction to ratify it with a question in a public-opinion survey; the poll presented Americans with three options for describing their beliefs: religious, spiritual but not religious, or neither. Thirty percent chose the SBNR option.7
The ascent of the spiritual-but-not-religious identification was immediately seen as an important sign of the times, the most conspicuous indicator of a “new spirituality” that had come into vogue among baby boomers and post-boomers. To be sure, the descriptor's growing usage represented an impressive flowering: from the recovery literature of AA, it had burgeoned into a well-nigh ubiquitous designation. Notwithstanding its relative novelty as a piece of shorthand, the SBNR epithet was also the latest condensation of a post-Protestant sensibility that had initially taken shape among a particular set of nineteenth-century religious dissidents—Transcendentalists, radical Unitarians, Whitmanites, progressive-minded Quakers, and their sundry allies. These liberal religious currents, almost by definition, were never containable within denominational bounds, and eventually they flowed into any number of new rivulets—from AA to Burning Man to channeling to Druidic nature worship to Esalen.8 Despite the ever-growing profusion of metaphysical options, it is not an overreach to maintain that familiar liberal, romantic notions—about personal experience, organized religion, serenity, solitude, sublime surroundings, artistic self-expression, and cosmopolitan piety—continue to structure this spiritual-but-not-religious disposition. The cachet of this latest appellation should not disguise its recognizable historicity, the ways in which it serves as a discursive variation on deeply embedded cultural themes. The SBNR diction sounds anything but new once it is set alongside the vernacular of nineteenth-century religious liberalism, a dialect that was spoken with increasing frequency and fluency from the 1830s forward.
Recognizing those long-term commonalities still leaves the million-dollar question hanging in the air: What were the social consequences of imagining religion this way? Did this Emersonian turn—the sense that religion was fundamentally about the sacredness of the individual, not the institution of the church—represent self-reliance run amok? Did spirituality, once reimagined in the private and intimate terms of nineteenth-century religious liberalism, have any public face or political weight? It was a commonplace among religious liberals to insist that their open-road spirituality necessarily circled back to an ethic of social compassion and progressive reform. That proposition amounted, indeed, to liberal orthodoxy by the turn of the twentieth century. When Earl Morse Wilbur, president of the Unitarian seminary in Berkeley, sketched in 1916 one of the first historical portraits of “the Liberal Movement in American Religion,” he claimed that the tradition effectively combined two qualities: On the one hand, the “inner significance” of religious liberalism was defined “in terms of Mysticism,” “a mystical attitude of the soul”; on the other hand, it was an “ethicized and socialized religion,” a faith insistently applied to public life.9 This, at least, was the talk that religious liberals talked, but how they walked that talk has, of course, always been harder to assess. Restless Souls examines any number of wayfarers who attempted to join their spiritualized individuality to social practice, whether embodied in Thomas Wentworth Higginson's ecumenical sympathies and abolitionist activities or Rufus Jones's humanitarian labors through Quaker relief networks. Still, the social import of this American-made spirituality was necessarily messy, diffuse, and plural. Its architects commonly insisted that their social ethics and mystical absorptions were inextricably linked, but they hardly had a fail-safe blueprint for establishing that combination or for making it effective.
That
