over institution, produced mixed results in social practice is no surprise. Just as religious liberals championed critical suspicion of any and all orthodoxies, they were also quite cognizant that their own bromides required recurrent scrutiny—not least their adoration of the mystical, the meditative, and the solitary at the expense of community and fellowship. Few of the criticisms that skeptics aim at today's religious seekers would take these nineteenth-century forerunners entirely by surprise. Religious liberals, after all, were nothing if not self-questioning on matters of faith, and their in-house misgivings still reverberate:
1. What keeps self-cultivation from turning into self-doting? Is “the crisis of self-surrender”—to borrow a phrase from William James—something that the self-reliant seeker can afford to dispense with as part of the religious life? Why should the solitary individual be taken as so definitive for religion?
2. What prevents liberal openness to religious variety from becoming flatly universalizing—as if the whole religious world could be made over in the singular image of a cosmopolitan New Englander? Are the interfaith practices and ideals that emerge from these liberal circles useful for bridging religious differences, or are such aspirations their own kind of missionary artifact?
3. Were these traveling souls really an emancipatory vanguard, or were they—as often as not—lost souls whose tramping seemed only to lead to more bewilderment and melancholy? Whether life has any meaning and even whether life is worth living—such questions were posed with blunt directness in these post-Protestant circles, but did the very asking of them suggest that doubt and unbelief had already prevailed, that the spiritual was a weak lifeline in a sea of disenchantments?
4. Was the market in the saddle, after all, and riding these questers into a global emporium in which new religious insights and abundant consumer choices were on a par with one another? How easily were Transcendentalist dreams of individual fulfillment and firsthand experience co-opted into the endless romance of consuming? “Even serenity can become something horrible,” the poet Tony Hoagland observes in his aptly entitled collection Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, “if you make a commercial about it/using smiling, white-haired people/quoting Thoreau to sell retirement homes.”10
Vital questions, like the ones above, could be multiplied at some length. It is the ambition of Restless Souls to foreclose none of them. Patent answers abound; Laura Ingraham's recent zingers are symptomatic of that. The spiritual-but-not-religious pilgrims of today, just as much as Whitman's nineteenth-century samplers, warrant fair-minded and focused engagement. No less than their foils on the religious right, they merit ethnographic familiarity and historical cognizance—as well as the kind of critical understanding that comes from careful and sustained study. Such engagement was my purpose in putting this book together in the first place; it remains so still as I send forth this second edition.
I have been fortunate in the pursuit of this project to have the support of generous institutions and foundations: Princeton University, the Lilly Endowment, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Center for the Contemplative Mind in Society, Harvard Divinity School, and Washington University in St. Louis. Each has helped me have time to research, write, and teach the history of these restless American souls.
Among colleagues, I owe a special debt to Laurie Maffly-Kipp and Mark Valeri, codirectors with me of a multiyear project on the history of American Christian practice, and, more importantly, valued friends. My gratitude is extended as well to our coconspirators in that enterprise: Catherine Brekus, Anthea Butler, Heather Curtis, Kathryn Lofton, Michael McNally, Rick Ostrander, Sally Promey, Roberto Lint Sagarena, Tisa Wenger, and David Yoo. Chris Coble at the Lilly Endowment was absolutely crucial in helping to bring us together and in keeping us on track.
Professor William R. Hutchison was always one of my favorite interlocutors for things liberal and Transcendentalist. He pressed me on one angle, then another. We had, for example, a particularly tangled correspondence over how the idea of the seeker evolved. It is with sadness that I note his passing between the first and second editions of this book. Other scholars and friends also helped me think through one piece or another of this project in one or both of its incarnations: Catherine Albanese, Dorothy Bass, Courtney Bender, Ann Braude, Richard Wightman Fox, Dean Grodzins, David Hackett, David Hall, Charles Hambrick-Stowe, Matthew Hedstrom, Amy Hollywood, Kathleen Holscher, Jeffrey Kripal, Emily Mace, John Lardas Modern, Laura Olson, Robert Orsi, Stephen Prothero, Albert Raboteau, Michael Robertson, Gary Scharnhorst, Robert Stockman, Ann Taves, Bradford Verter, David Watt, Christopher White, and Robert Wuthnow. Rosanne Adams-Junkins, Jacalyn Blume, Roger Dahl, Sue Hodson, Anne Gordon Perry, Diana Franzusoff Peterson, and Wesley Wilson offered critical guidance to indispensable archival materials.
Eric Brandt, my original editor for this project, was wonderfully supportive, and I remain very grateful for his expert eye and steady encouragement. For this second edition, I have been fortunate indeed to work with Reed Malcolm, who has managed in his years at University of California Press to put a significant stamp on the field of American religion and culture.
As in the first edition, so with the second, my most important partner in enterprises both scholarly and familial has been R. Marie Griffith. Scholarship is both satisfying and humbling, but parenting—there we really learn our limitations and find our delights.
The first edition of this book was dedicated to John F. Wilson, professor emeritus at Princeton University, a cherished mentor and friend. So, too, is this second edition. If it raised John's eyebrows to see his good name associated with something as potentially frivolous and giddy as spirituality, he has never said so. If he thinks I erred in laying so much of this history at the feet of his own New England forebears, again he has been the diplomat and not let on. Of my prodigal and restless ways beyond the pages of this book—moves from Princeton to Cambridge to St. Louis since the volume first appeared—John and I have spoken, but with necessarily oblique feeling. Colleagues together at Princeton when this book was first in the works, we see each other infrequently now. That distance has in no way lessened the deep regard and respect I have always had for John. And wistfulness, I would like to say, is irrelevant to such affections. “What have I to do with lamentation?” Whitman asked in Leaves of Grass. “I keep no account with lamentation.”
Notes
1. Laura Ingraham, with Raymond Arroyo, Of Thee I Zing: America's Cultural Decline from Muffin Tops to Body Shots (New York: Threshold, 2011), 283–84.
2. Katha Pollitt, “Happy New Year! Resolutions for Liberals,” The Nation, 22 January 2007.
3. See, for example, Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right (San Francisco: Harper, 2006); Bob Edgar, Middle Church: Reclaiming the Moral Values of the Faithful Majority from the Religious Right (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006); Gordon Lynch, The New Spirituality: An Introduction to Progressive Belief in the Twenty-First Century (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007); Amy Sullivan, The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats Are Closing the God Gap (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008); and E. J. Dionne Jr., Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
4. Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1996), 989.
5. “Thin Churches,” The Radical 4 (1868): 137–38.
6. See Ernest Kurtz, Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous (Center City, MN: Hazelden, 1979), 175–78, 194–95; Robert C. Fuller, Spiritual, but Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 112–13. With the shortcut of Google Books and its search engine, it is now a simple matter to confirm the initial association of both constructs—“spiritual but not religious” and “spiritual rather than religious”—with Alcoholics Anonymous. The distinction
