the relationship between transformational festivals and religion is complex. The majority of interlocutors I interviewed identified as “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR). At Burning Man, the only event that hosts a community census and publishes it publicly, 46.4 percent of participants identified as SBNR (24.3 percent identified as atheist, and 15.2 percent identified as agnostic, while only 5.5 percent identified as religious).12 Events at Burning Man exhibit the most overt rejection of religion; even with the 2017 theme of Radical Ritual, events engaging the parody of religion outnumbered formal religious services advertised on the playa13 three to one. Most participants view LIB and Burning Man as intentional, consciousness-raising, and transformational festivals. They host the highest number of workshops and events focused on religion, meditation, and other spiritual techniques, but the percentage of such offerings in relation to the massive size and scale of these events renders the impact less influential. Bhakti and Shakti Fests are the most overtly devotional, with the most concentrated emphasis on ritual and the majority of events focused on the Hindu ideal of bhakti (devotion). Wanderlust festivals are situated as transformational events, and the practice of yoga as a method of reenchantment, a kind of “secular church.”
In general, among many participants there is a sense that religions have a pure and beautiful essence and have created practical and efficacious tools with which to access that essence. However, they also feel that religions have become institutionalized, political, and corrupt. As Devanand (Joshua) explained during our early morning interview at Bhakti Fest:
There are so many different approaches because there are so many different people and types, and what is attractive to one person is definitely not attractive to another. But love, truth, compassion, kindness, generosity, these are all attractive to every human being. And those are all what’s at the core of most major religions, and all of these things that they were founded on, these kinds of principles, but then [they] gradually became corrupted systems of control. . . . Once people have power, they’re like, “We want to keep this power, so we’ve got to control rather than allow its expansion and a flow of consciousness and allow people to believe that they can choose their own life.” And that is where they started to separate that there’s God out there, over here somewhere among the clouds, and we have to obey, which is quite the opposite of what we are.14
Many of my SBNR informants echoed this sentiment, and as a result, the majority had deliberately turned away from institutionalized forms of religion. At Bhakti Fest, Kara explained to me:
Well, being raised in a Pentecostal, charismatic environment in Indiana in the 1960s and ’70s, . . . it was like, . . . “We don’t do that. It’s against my religion.” . . . I have more of an aversion to Jesus than a love for him. . . . I hated church, though I felt really deeply moved by so many things, you know, music, art, or love. . . . It’s taken me a long time to remember how to pray. It’s like—how do you pray? Who am I praying to? What am I asking for? And to me, it just comes back to gratitude. As long as I feel gratitude, then that’s all. So, I say my religion—I have the religion of common sense.15
In addition to having this personalized sense of spiritual communion, the majority of these SBNR participants employed theological universalism as a means to conflate and obfuscate differences between traditions. Even if they practiced a particular religious form, still they maintained that there are any number of possible paths to God, self-realization, and enlightenment. During our interview at Bhakti Fest, Susan explained,
It does not matter whether you are singing God’s name in Qawwali or Sanskrit or in Hindi or what have you. Do you think God cares? Just ask him. No. . . . The type of meditation I’m doing, it’s a very scientific approach, a very mechanical approach. Yes, it’s Sanskrit. Yes, it’s a lot easier for me to pull my energy to the eye center if I’m focusing on my teacher’s face, which is a devotional aspect of it. And yet, is it necessary? No. It doesn’t matter if you’re Muslim or Catholic or Lutheran or Jewish or Sikh, it’s the same. It’s pulling you up, and it’s connecting to the divine. And all of the paths can get you there if practiced with diligence.16
In this soteriology, one can pick and choose the most effective tools across traditions because, in essence, they all lead to the same goal. This fundamental and widely pervasive belief has led SBNR practitioners to view religious forms as practical tools that can be extracted from the institutional mores and theological cosmologies of their parent traditions.
My interlocutors echo Altglas’s research on Kabbalah centers and modern Hindu gurus, wherein she found that “courses, commentaries of the scriptures and writings, and teacher’s interviews all associate religion with dogma, constraint, obedience, ‘mindless ritual,’ lack of consciousness, and lack of fulfillment.”17 Likewise, speaking of the New Age movement’s propensity toward religious exoticism, she articulates this same pragmatic approach to religion: “Above all, individuals seek practical methods for personal growth in a ‘lifelong religious learning,’ beyond religious particularities. . . . The imperative of self-improvement constitutes an incentive for not stagnating and endlessly trying new techniques that could hasten this improvement.”18
Esme, a young female participant at Shakti Fest, self-identified as a “quester” for this “lifelong religious learning” in the following terms: “We’re questers, spiritual questers. So we quest for a lot of different areas, and thus in that questing you expose yourself to a lot of different paths, a lot of different experiences, a lot of different thoughts. You know, just allow that which really works for you, and [adopt] the essence as it were. Find the commonality amongst all the paths.”19 Rather than stagnate within a fixed religious identity framed by dogma and institution, these questers search for practical tools that will lead them to pure and ancient essences that are believed to be untainted by the corruptions of modernity.
The result is that even among those who visibly practice meditation, postural yoga, Vedic rituals, or kīrtan, few self-identify within the particular religion from which these practices are extracted. As I have written elsewhere, this is commonplace among those who identify as SBNR, many of whom believe in God and routinely practice religion.20 Very few yogis attending transformational festivals claim to be Hindu or Buddhist, but 95 percent practice meditation, 94 percent practice āsana, 90 percent practice prāṇāyāma, 74 percent read yogic texts, 67 percent recite mantras, 64 percent sing kīrtans, 41 percent read Hindu scriptures, 38 percent read Buddhist scriptures, and 33 percent worship deities (pūjā).21
There are multiple reasons for this absence of religious self-identification: (1) alternative spirituality is a category established in opposition to religion and formal religious affiliation, which fosters an antiestablishment and anti-institutional constituency; (2) these practitioners are not exclusive to one religious tradition, and this exclusivity is a defining feature of religious belonging;22 and (3) white SBNR populations are excluded from some of the religions in question because the assumption of a particular ethnic identity is considered a qualification for belonging. This last point is critical; both Hinduism and Native American religious traditions are ethnoreligions, within which there are no standard avenues for formal conversion. Neither is traditionally a proselytizing religion, and both have a history of foregrounding secret rites transmitted through oral traditions along strict hierarchical systems. Both are exclusionary toward outsiders and have established regulatory systems to enact that exclusion (purity and pollution in the context of Hinduism, and earned hereditary knowledge in the context of Native American religions). In fact, their predominance in SBNR communities may have everything to do with their secrecy, because the history of metaphysical religion is deeply intertwined with the quest for esoteric knowledge. Wouter J. Hanegraaff traces the very idea of the birth of a New Age to “modern Theosophical speculation which, in turn, is dependent upon older traditions in Western esotericism.”23
Yoga, pūjās, kīrtan, and homas (Hindu fire sacrifices) blended seamlessly with Tai chi, Qi gong, Tibetan singing bowls, and mindfulness meditation
