Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality

By Leigh Eric Schmidt

Yoga classes and Zen meditation, New-Age retreats and nature mysticism—all are part of an ongoing religious experimentation that has surprisingly deep roots in American history. Tracing out the country’s Transcendentalist and cosmopolitan religious impulses over the last two centuries, Restless Souls explores America’s abiding romance with spirituality as religion’s better half. Now in its second edition, including a new preface, Leigh Eric Schmidt's fascinating book provides a rich account of how this open-road spirituality developed in American culture in the first place as well as a sweeping survey of the liberal religious movements that touted it and ensured its continued vitality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Sep 5, 2012
• ISBN: 9780520954113

Leigh Eric Schmidt

Leigh Eric Schmidt is Edward C. Mallinckrodt University Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of numerous books, including Heaven’s Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment, and Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays.

Book preview

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

If only I knew then what I still don't know.

—Douglas Dunn, The Year's Afternoon, 2000

Ask a cosmopolitan friend or a young person to describe his or her religion and you are likely to get ‘I'm spiritual but not religious,’ conservative provocateur Laura Ingraham writes in her recent jeremiad bemoaning the nation's cultural decay, Of Thee I Zing (2011). Predictably, Ingraham finds this popular self-description both vapid and dismaying: ‘The spiritual but not religious' moniker has become so trendy, it now has its own acronym: S-B-N-R. How about this one: S-T-U-P-I-D? Not exactly sophisticated criticism, but Ingraham flogs the SBNR crowd long enough to make an inadvertently telling swipe about how they constitute a bunch of erratic dabblers. Perpetually dipping their hands into the Whitman Sampler of Faith, Ingraham jabs, these searchers taste each flavor, but never stay long enough to savor any one in particular.¹

It is safe to say that Ingraham did not have Walt Whitman on her mind when she made that allusion, but rather a big box of chocolates. Reaching for a popular product logo, the Whitman's Sampler®, Ingraham played with the stereotyped image of the country's unmoored religious seekers as fickle consumers possessed by an insatiable appetite for variety. That censure, a commonplace of cultural criticism, has been around a long while now, and it comes not just from the right wing. Deriding the spiritual-but-not-religious demographic for its flighty tastes—say, a yearning for tofu prepared by Tibetan virgins, as Katha Pollitt put it in the pages of The Nation magazine in 2007—seems just as likely to happen on the other side of the political spectrum. Avoid weasel words. Like ‘spirituality,’ Pollitt bluntly advised her fellow liberals. It's religion. Do not fall for the spiritual as some stylish, gently lit alternative to the religious, Pollitt was saying. It is all bad—just in case anyone on the secular left was tempted to think otherwise.²

Restless Souls tried in its first incarnation in 2005 to provide space to think differently about the Walt Whitman Sampler of Faith—the American invention and hallowing of spirituality as something loftier and more open-ended than religion. Now, seven years on, the design for this second edition remains much the same. I still think the tradition that flows from Ralph Waldo Emerson, 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 the liberal highlighting of spirit over authority, individuality 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 shows up incidentally in a handful of other sources along the way, but the only recognizable thread through the mid-1980s is AA.

7. George Gallup Jr., The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1999 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2000), 281.

8. The scholarly literature on these recent religious trends has been wonderfully robust since the appearance of the first edition of Restless Souls in 2005. See especially Courtney Bender, The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Lee Gilmore, Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Jeffrey J. Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Kathryn Lofton, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); and Robert Wuthnow, After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). On the historical foundations, scholarly labors have been similarly vigorous. See notably Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Matthew S. Hedstrom, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Pamela E. Klassen, Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); John Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Michael Robertson, Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); and Christopher G. White, Unsettled Minds: Psychology and the American Search for Spiritual Assurance, 1830–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). I have learned much from this recent literature; it has helped me see many things I missed on the first pass. One conjunction—namely, the interplay among spirituality, sexuality, and religious liberalism—is something I see now that I should have done more with in these pages. I have tried to supply that missing chapter in a companion volume. See Leigh Eric Schmidt, Heaven's Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman (New York: Basic Books, 2010). The works of Jeffrey Kripal and Michael Robertson, cited above, also go a long way toward supplying that piece of the story.

9. Earl Morse Wilbur, The First Century of the Liberal Movement in American Religion (Boston: American Unitarian Association, [1916]), 28.

10. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Penguin, 1985), 211; Tony Hoagland, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2010), 14.

INTRODUCTION

SPIRITUALITY IN THE MAKING

O NE DAY I WOKE UP and wondered: maybe today I should be a Christian, or would I rather be a Buddhist, or am I just a Star Trek freak?" So one woman playfully told a sociologist who studies contemporary American religion. Reports on the mushrooming growth of a culture of spiritual seeking have become a journalistic commonplace. As the Utne Reader asked in a cover story in 1998 called Designer God, In a mix-and-match world, why not create your own religion? Eclectic devotions, creedal crossings, consumer sampling, and individualistic expression are widely seen as the religious order of the day. I cannot describe my spiritual practice as Buddhist,…or as Hindu or Catholic or Sufi, though I feel that in a sense it is all of these, the feminist spiritual writer Carol Lee Flinders concludes of her wayfaring. I meditate as best I can on Native American prayers and Taoist verses, on passages drawn from the Bible or the Upanishads, on passionate love songs composed for the One Beloved by a Spanish monk or an Indian princess-turned-minstrel. Flinders's spiritual exertions are hardly uncommon these days. The act of journeying across the bounds of traditions, denominations, and institutions has emerged as a familiar, if still creative, course of exploration for many Americans. From Jewish-Buddhist contemplatives to yoga-performing Methodists, more and more seekers have been finding spiritual insight through a medley of practices and pieties. ¹

While sociologists, pollsters, and journalists have provided steady commentary on the blossoming of spiritual seeking in American culture, these observers offer a quite limited historical perspective on how such a religious world took shape in the first place. The majority confine themselves to a watershed view of the 1960s and 1970s, a baby-boomer dividing line between a nation of ensconced churchgoers and a culture of unhinged seekers. How over the longer term did the United States become a land of spiritual questing? How was it that so many Americans became so intensely absorbed in something amorphously called mysticism or spirituality? Restless Souls shifts the prevailing focus away from rambling boomers (as well as their Gen X successors) and makes the recent spiritual upsurge a matter of cultural and intellectual history. In other words, this is not a story about a rootless generation of seekers, a sardonic tour through the spiritual marts of the New Age, or an arch essay on a bourgeois-bohemian Soul Rush. All those have been done—and done well. Too well, really, since today's pastiche spirituality has come to be seen almost invariably as a marker of a current social trend, a leading indicator of a new religious transformation rather than a historically shaped tradition of its own. The American fascination with mountaintop mysticism and seeker spirituality goes much deeper than any generational fixation allows.²

If one temptation is to make newness the basis of any news on spirituality, another is to treat such religious experimentation as timelessly American, part of an intrinsic pioneering spirit that has been mapped onto inner frontiers. It is possible, in other words, to regress too far. Put in historical terms, these contemporary spiritualities of seeking are not predictable from the Protestant-heavy colonial world of British North America or even from the sectarian sauna that became so steamy after the American Revolution. The Protestant right of private judgment, the original prerogative of a believer to interpret Scripture by his or her own lights, was a topsy-turvy notion, but the principle had various stabilizers, not least the primacy of the Christian Bible itself. If that oft-exercised right made for an exegetical madhouse full of contradiction, at least most of the faithful shared the same cell of canonical restraints. (The Bible is for infant baptism; no, it is for believers' baptism only. The Bible supports slavery; no, it vows prophetic justice and equality. The Bible demands that women keep silent in public worship; no, it licenses the prophesying of godly sisters. And so on.) Debates were everywhere, but the authority and sufficiency of biblical revelation were not up for grabs in early American Protestantism. Sure, pilgrims wandered ceaselessly into new interpretations of Christianity—with their Bibles firmly in hand.

Protestants, of course, were not only intense and often eccentric Bible readers, but also practitioners of rigorous self-examination and introspective journaling. Aren't the spiritual pilgrimages of Puritan saints the foundations of American interiority, the ghosts that linger still, across that vast spectrum of evangelical Christianity from the Baptist Jimmy Carter to the Methodist George W. Bush? How can a story about the making of American spirituality pass over (rather than through) the lives of such worthies as Ann Bradstreet, David Brainerd, Jonathan Edwards, Sarah Osborn, Phillis Wheatley, or other exemplars of Puritan and evangelical practices of piety? The spiritual disciplines these early Protestants enshrined—Sabbath observance, private prayer, diary writing, sacramental meditation, communal narration of conversion experiences, Bible reading, and covenant keeping—were vastly influential and remain so within various strands of contemporary Christianity. The point is not to diminish their importance, but to recognize that American spirituality, as the term is now broadly configured in the culture, was invented through a gradual disentanglement from these model Protestant practices or, at minimum, through a significant redefinition of them. Only through some dissociation from those Protestant habits does the term spirituality come to be distinguished from religion; only at a step removed from evangelical Christianity does spirituality begin to refer to direct mystical experience and an individual's solitary search for the absolute or the divine.³

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