sage himself, the here and now is intimately tied to the there and then.9
Or take the story of Elizabeth Lesser's search, which she relates at the outset of The New American Spirituality: A Seeker's Guide (1999). There she tells of a concerted quest for meaning and community that takes her through a series of religious affiliations in the 1960s and 1970s. Trading off between Thomas Merton's contemplative Catholicism and the meditative practices of a Zen center, Lesser eventually settles upon a westernized version of Sufism after meeting the guru Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan in 1972. It is through this encounter and the ongoing workshops of the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, that Lesser gradually finds her spiritual longing for “mindfulness,” “heartfulness,” and “soulfulness” satisfied. Could there be a more paradigmatic tale of a new generation of seekers?
It does not take long, though, to see beneath the surface of the contemporary in Lesser's search for “a new kind of spirituality.” Among the devotions she undertook with Pir Vilayat and her fellow travelers were “universal worships,” in which “each of the major world religions, and many of the minor ones as well, were honored with scripture and practice. In one Sunday service we might read from the Koran, Hindu and Buddhist texts, Sufi stories, and the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, and then chant mantras, do traditional Jewish dances, and wash each other's feet in the spirit of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples.” Those services, however trendy they might sound, were not a recent experiment of the counterculture. Pir Vilayat's father, Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882–1927), who first brought his message from India to the United States in 1910, was actually responsible for introducing the practice. Marrying a near relation of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, in 1912, Khan quickly attracted his own eclectic circle of American inquirers into Sufi music, dance, and devotion. At the outset of one of his lecture tours in 1925, the New York Times offered an account of Khan's “spirituality” in an article entitled “Indian Mystic Offers One Religion for All.” “My ancestors were Moslems,” Khan explained to the reporter. “I have no religion. All places of worship are one to me. I can enter a Buddhist temple, a mosque, a church or a synagogue in the same spirit. Spirituality is the tuning of the heart.”
In his lectures in New York and elsewhere across the country, Hazrat Inayat Khan justified his innovations through an appeal to the increasingly pervasive ideals of religious liberalism: spiritual liberty, mystical experience, meditative interiority, universal brotherhood, and sympathetic appreciation of all religions. Indeed, in the very years surrounding Khan's American sojourns, Martin Kellogg Schermerhorn, an industrious Unitarian minister from Poughkeepsie, was promoting, with the backing of the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, various collections of hymns, scriptures, and prayers for the celebration of “universal worship” services. For Schermerhorn as much as Khan, modern religious identities would be regrounded only through an undoing of ethnic, racial, and religious tribalism, including Christian and Muslim exclusivism. Hence Schermerhorn busied himself in compiling the liturgical materials for the universal religion as he imagined it would find expression in new “Cosmopolitan Churches” and within the private devotions of eclectics like himself and Khan. Just this quickly, then, Elizabeth Lesser's recent seeking can be resituated in a century-long perspective: not so much a rootless baby-boomer quest, but instead a more deeply grounded and complex exploration of a cosmopolitan spirituality.10
Anecdotes aside, the argument offered in these pages about the centrality of religious liberalism may seem at best counterintuitive. At least at an institutional level, conservative Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants dominate the current scene. The Christian Right and its high-profile allies in Washington grab the headlines and occupy the public square with confidence and flair. At the same time, new immigrants—whether Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, or Korean Christians—lobby with growing effectiveness for a fuller voice in civic life. The so-called liberal or mainline denominations have over the last half-century fallen on very hard times, suffering an almost staggering erosion in membership and public influence. Meanwhile, beyond the thinned ranks of liberal Protestants, New Agers have been so satirized as quirky crystal gazers, left-over hippies, and self-absorbed spiritual shoppers—David Brooks, a pundit for PBS and the New York Times, has called them “vaporheads”—that even neo-pagans and Wiccans feel compelled to disown the New Age epithet.11 Why would anyone beyond the hallways of Harvard Divinity School or the streets of Santa Monica think that liberalism still explains much of anything about American religion?
Few commentators would dare to wear liberal Protestant blinkers anymore, let alone raise a paean to the foundational importance of America's liberal tradition. In theology, as in politics, liberalism is the hobgoblin of orthodoxies, possessing a fearsomeness for conservatives and traditionalists little removed from John Henry Newman's mid-nineteenth-century conjuration: “The more serious thinkers among us…regard the spirit of Liberalism as the characteristic of the destined Antichrist.” Perhaps given the endless polemics and the very slipperiness of the term, liberalism is a label best retired. Perhaps it would be less contentious, if more cumbersome, to refer to this larger religious impulse, under William James's rubric, as “the personal and romantic view of life.” Or perhaps it would be better to think of this as the rise of “cosmopolitan,” “eclectic,” or “ecumenical” perspectives on spirituality. Yet, as a term of considerable resonance in nineteenth- and twentieth-century religious thought, liberalism allows an array of movements, within Christianity and beyond it, to be considered under the same umbrella. However difficult, it is still possible to use the liberal epithet in contextual, evenhanded ways without necessarily launching another theological or political Last Judgment in which fundamentalist sheep are separated from modernist goats (or vice versa).12
Liberalism had intellectual progenitors from Baruch Spinoza and John Locke to Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, but, as a distinct religious and political ideology, it was an invention of the nineteenth century, not the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A broadly diffused movement, it was always as much a religious vision of emancipated souls as a political theory of individual rights and civil liberties or an economic calculus of the beneficence of free markets. In the United States, liberalism cohered first in the 1820s as a radical form of Protestant Christianity that then over the next few decades readily edged beyond Christianity itself. It was the volatile currency of religious innovators and critics of orthodoxy who, though spanning a wide spectrum of allegiances, remained convinced of their own essential affinities. Individualistic in their understanding of authority, religious liberals were generally contemptuous of creeds and scorned uncritical submission to scriptural texts as ignorance or even idolatry. Moving beyond mere toleration as an ideal, they led the way as eager sympathizers with other faiths. With a grand sense of human freedom and potentiality, they were committed to progress in the domains of spiritual consciousness, social organization, and scientific knowledge. For religious liberals, unlike their secular cousins, a deepened and diversified spirituality was part of modernity's promise. Materialism and scientism might challenge this unfolding religion of the spirit from one side and reactionary pieties and politics from another, but, to its proponents, those perils only made the inward dimensions of liberalism more important. Religious liberalism, with its motley bedfellows of romantics and reformers, led the way in redefining spirituality and setting out its essentials.
Getting a handle on “liberalism,” of course, is no easier than pinning down “spirituality.” The Harvard-educated metaphysician Horatio Dresser, one of the many architects of the “more spiritual phase” of American progressivism around 1900, dubbed the nineteenth century “the epoch of religious liberalism.” He saw it as a momentous movement that affected one denomination after another and that decidedly opened up the spiritual life to Emersonian self-reliance and therapeutic well-being. He quickly added, though: “The history of liberalism is so comprehensive that it is always a question nowadays what we mean when we use the term.” Then, as a succinct definition, he offered: “To be liberal is to be of the new age.” It was not a bad effort, but the basics of religious liberalism require at least a few more brushstrokes. The rudiments, at least for spiritually inclined progressives like Dresser, included
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