In colonial America, few were seeking “spirituality” per se. Not a term found in Scripture itself, the word showed up in the title of only one American publication before 1800. Even in that case spirituality fronted a collection of hymns in which it referred to a quality of corporate worship, not the interior lives of individual pilgrims: namely, James Maxwell's Hymns and Spiritual Songs…Design'd to Promote the Spirituality of That Part of Christian Worship (1768). Instead, Puritans and evangelicals emphasized practices of piety; they pursued devout, holy, or godly lives; like the Apostle Paul, they juxtaposed the spiritual with the carnal, but rarely did they label their regimen of sanctification “spirituality.” Far from being a keyword in the early Protestant vernacular of personal devotionalism, spirituality was usually employed as a theological term in opposition to materiality. It pointed, in other words, to the fundamental contrast between the physical and metaphysical worlds, matter and spirit. In allied usages, spirituality sometimes referred to a specific attribute of God—alongside omnipotence or patience—or to the immaterial quality of the soul as opposed to the body.
The connotations that spirituality carried a century later were largely absent from early American Protestantism. “I should say, indeed,” the great American poet Walt Whitman exhorted in Democratic Vistas in 1871, “that only in the perfect uncontamination and solitariness of individuality may the spirituality of religion come forth at all.” The poet wanted “the subterranean fire” that seemed smothered under the “corpses” of institutions, traditions, and forms. What he wanted, in brief, were “the divine ideas of spirituality,” compared to which “all religions,” including Christianity, were “but temporary journeys.” Likewise, the Harvard philosopher and poet George Santayana, one of whose earliest pieces was a meditation on Whitman, easily marked out spirituality as the “higher side” of religion in his monumental Life of Reason: or, The Phases of Human Progress in 1905: “This aspiring side of religion may be called Spirituality.” A model for a life of simplicity, creativity, and equanimity, in Santayana's view, “spirituality likes to say, Behold the lilies of the field!” That poetic prospect, affording such clarity about spirituality's elevation over religion, remained a largely unimagined terrain among Puritans and evangelicals. Here is the bottom line: the American invention of “spirituality” was, in fair measure, a search for a religious world larger than the British Protestant inheritance.4
If it is not particularly fruitful to ground the history of American “spirituality” in early American Protestantism, then what about the iconoclastic religion of the American Enlightenment, the intellectual world that produced the religious and political ruminations of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and James Madison? Certainly, these American founders as well as their British and European colleagues offered crucial formulations of religious privacy and voluntaristic freedom. “My own mind is my own church,” the revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine insisted with plenty of bravado, but little overstatement. It would be hard to find a more important taproot of anticreedalism and anticlericalism than the enlightened ideology that these cosmopolitan statesmen both embodied and broadcast. Still, these freethinking leaders were not religious seekers, but natural philosophers. Their sense of religious privacy was a matter of political principle, not devotional solitude; their God was a distant technician, a watchmaker, not an immanent spirit, an intensifier of feeling. As deists, they viewed God as the supreme architect of nature's laws, not an intimate listener to outpoured prayers. Only when Enlightenment freedom, happiness, and autonomy were refracted through a romantic prism did the life of the spirit come to matter experientially to rational souls. Only then did the absence of religious enthusiasm seem a graver peril than its presence. “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,” Emerson would insist.5
But what about the Enlightenment's shadow, the esoteric world of Freemasons and gentlemanly inquirers into the occult, the alchemical underside of both the Renaissance and the Age of Reason? Surely, the secret sources of modern American spirituality are to be uncovered in the mystery-shrouded world of Western esotericism. That kind of claim, in actuality, is often little more than a distraction. It serves two purposes that are particularly at odds with good history: First, it is used to reinforce an orthodox perspective on history that imagines an ageless battle between the truths of Christianity and the false claims of occultists and heretics. New Age spirituality, from this perspective, becomes little more than the latest instance of ancient deviations from orthodoxy, which early modern adepts transmitted through clandestine brotherhoods and which now need to be fought against as they have always been fought against. The second purpose is the inverse of the first: ancient esoteric sources, carefully tended for centuries by secret societies and elite initiates, make contemporary searches seem venerable, even timeless. That certainly appears to be the point for the famed literary critic Harold Bloom when he announces that he is a latter-day Gnostic and that indeed the American religion at its best is a Gnostic gospel of divinized souls, each imbued with a “spark or transcendental self that is free of the fallen or created world.” It is a lot less grandiose—and a lot more accurate—to admit more immediate and mundane sources than to mystify origins with tales of ancient magi and esoteric lore. Equating the “new spirituality” with the persistence of occultism or the revival of Gnosticism is all too often either heresy-hunting or mythmaking. Much less often is it light-bearing.6
All right, enough negations: what really counts in the invention of modern American spirituality? The history that matters the most, by far, is the rise and flourishing in the nineteenth century of religious liberalism in all its variety and occasional eccentricity. Seeker spirituality—excitedly eclectic, mystically yearning, perennially cosmopolitan—is an artifact of religious liberalism, especially in its more radical stripes. Included in that company of nonconformists were Transcendentalists, romantic Unitarians, Reform Jews, progressive Quakers, devout disciples of Emerson and Whitman, Spiritualists, questing psychologists, New Thought optimists, Vedantists, and Theosophists, among sundry other wayfarers. Many of these newfangled pilgrims traveled several different religious paths in succession; some traversed more than one simultaneously; more than a few expressly saw themselves as the makers, immodestly enough, of the religion of the future, a universalized spirituality. Almost from first to last, they charted a path—at least, so they imagined—away from the old “religions of authority” into the new “religion of the spirit.” From the democratic vista of religious liberalism, a much clearer and more precise history of American spirituality comes into view.7
Even with that specified point of departure, getting a grip on spirituality is hardly an easy task. John W. Chadwick, a New England minister close in outlook to Emerson, already felt “helpless” in pinning the term down in 1891, sounding a little bit like the desperate judge trying to define pornography: “You call upon me to explain what I mean by ‘spirituality.’…I seem to know spirituality when I meet it in a man or book, but if I should attempt to define it, my definition might be as vague as that ‘kind of a sort of something' which the hard-pressed obscurantist offered as his definition of the Trinity.” When Chadwick did try to make sense of what “spirituality” had come to signify, he referred back to Transcendentalists like Theodore Parker and Emerson who had led the heady revolt against New England's established religious order in the 1830s and 1840s. It is a strategy pursued in these pages as well, and one can only hope that it is done with less feebleness and greater clarity here than Chadwick mustered in this halting moment of perplexity.8
In a recent article called “A Seeker's Guide to Faith,” the magazine Real Simple provided a helpfully concrete illustration of the historical threads pursued here. The connection came in an interview with Stephanie Jones, an artist living in Brooklyn, who had grown up attending the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Gradually she has moved away from the intermittently observed Christianity of her youth into an everyday practice of Buddhist chanting, prayer, and meditation. In calling her daughter Emerson in honor of America's paradigmatic nineteenth-century seeker and liberal dissident, Jones witnessed to her own spiritual journey and tugged on the twine that ties twenty-first-century quests to nineteenth-century emancipations. “Emerson was the prophet of spirituality,” an admirer wrote already in
