Spirituality without a lodestar inevitably comes up empty

Meaning is a rare commodity in post-America

The national anthem of hell is, "I Did It My Way."

- Peter Kreeft

I read a piece by Daniel N. Gullotta at The Bulwark yesterday that’s been messing with my head ever since.

In some ways, the ground it covers is nothing new. In fact, it focuses on a subject I’ve written about fairly frequently.

It’s no secret that our nation has been growing more secular for some time:

With every passing year, traditional religious belief continues its trend of steady decline in the United States. According to the latest Gallup Values and Beliefs poll, a record low of 81 percent of American adults believe in God. That’s a slip of 6 percentage points since 2017, the last time Gallup conducted the poll, which found 87 percent of respondents affirming belief in God. As traditional beliefs wane and a new generation increasingly makes its way in the world without them, a new American religious landscape is becoming visible—and it has features both familiar and unexpected.

In my pieces about the subject, I’ve looked at the internal troubles of both, for want of better characterizations, traditional and progressive, denominations. Gullotta likewise delves into this:

Within Christianity, the decline affects both liberal and conservative denominations. Scholars, journalists, and sociologists of religion have offered a range of explanations for the drop. While simple demographics account for part of the change—as young “Nones” come of age, they are beginning to have children of their own, whereas religious couples are having fewer children than their parents and grandparents did—politics have also played a role, especially for those on the left.

The political correlation makes a great deal of sense:

David Campbell, coauthor of Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American Politics, says that “Many Americans—especially young people—see religion as bound up with political conservatism, and the Republican party specifically. . . . Young people are especially allergic to the perception that many—but by no means all—American religions are hostile to LGBTQ rights.”

But things are certainly not on solid ground on the other side of the spectrum:

But while the Religious Right has played a role in the waning of traditional Christianity in the United States, the disillusioned young scions of conservative Catholic and Protestant families aren’t emptying the pews at home to fill them in more progressive church spaces. Liberal Christians traditions are in a faster freefall than conservative ones.

Notwithstanding the Episcopal Church’s progressive stances on a number of issues that align with the mores of liberal young Americans—the denomination ordains trans people, blesses same-sex marriages, and supports abortion rights—its membership and Sunday attendance have plummeted. Far from picking up large numbers of disaffected post-evangelicals during the Trump years, the church experienced a net loss of almost 170,000 members between 2016 and 2020. These numbers reflect a decades-long trend: In October 2020, the denomination’s own news service reported that “membership is down 17.4 [percent] over the last 10 years.” The average age of the average Episcopalian and the lack of generational replacement have contributed to an overall picture that prompted one scholar to say, “The Episcopal Church will be dead in the next 20 years.” (He later wrote to clarify and mildly soften his position: “They will very likely be on life support.”) It’s been a steep slope: The denomination has produced more American presidents than any other, a reminder of the prestige and power it enjoyed as recently as one or two generations ago.

The story of decline is consistent across denominations with similarly liberal theological views on gender and sexuality, such as the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and the United Church of Christ. Likewise, liberal seminaries and divinity schools across the country have also faced tough times, with some shutting down and others downsizing or even merging to avoid closure.

The reason seems to be that an inescapable question looms: In a world in which left-leaning secular advocacy groups proliferate, aren’t these denominations redundant?

Progressive social stances and liberal beliefs do not appear to have helped these churches to attract younger people with similar convictions to join them in significant numbers. In attempting to explain the mainline’s troubles with declining membership, economist Laurence Iannaccone argued—in 1994, when the longer trend had already been apparent for many years—that part of the problem for the liberal churches is low expectations for members: They require little in the way of time, resources, and support, and are hesitant to place strong moral expectations or theological boundaries on them. In Iannaccone’s view, “Strictness makes organizations stronger and more attractive because it reduces free riding. It screens out members who lack commitment and stimulates participation among those who remain.” Likewise, more conservative critics have long argued that the key problem for liberal churches is that they lack “a religious reason for [their] own existence”; combining this feature with their emphasis on social causes leaves them looking nigh-indistinguishable from any other advocacy group, let alone one another.

The post-American public may be eschewing its traditional approach to the spiritual realm of human life, but the yearning for something beyond the atoms and molecules of this realm persists:

“The U.S. is not undergoing secularization of a type that leads to hard-core rationalist, materialist, disenchanted atheism, at least in the near term,” Smith, the Notre Dame sociologist, wrote. “If anything, the broader culture has become re-enchanted. Everybody and their cousin now wants to be ‘spiritual’ and to practice ‘mindfulness.’”

Polls of American religiosity give unaffiliated participants more options than simply “Atheist” and “Agnostic.” On the question of religious preference, Pew offers “Nothing in particular,” and Gallup’s question about religious affiliation includes the option of selecting “None”—the negation that gave rise to a new sociological category.

But “Nones” are not simply agnostics or atheists by another name. A growing subsection of Americans positively identifies as “spiritual but not religious,” a catch-all of personal religious orientations that can entail anything from cultivating private Christian faith apart from an ecclesial tradition to an open agnosticism inflected with principles derived from the practice of yoga—and much more besides. So although explicit atheism has made modest gains among Americans in recent years, it is not the philosophical upshot for most Americans who are leaving their churches, and it’s wrong to assume that a person who identifies as a “None” is a person bereft of religious conviction.

The decline into irreligion of a nation of natural believers has a strange and unpredictable character. In fact, some observers have argued that what we are witnessing is not the decline of American religion at all, but rather a “remix.”

But where is that post-American public gong to get that yearning satisfied?

Tara Isabella Burton, in her book Strange Rites, argues that the decline of confessional Christianity in America has been taken to imply the waning of religion in the country more generally. But religion is as strong as ever, in Burton’s view; you just won’t find it in church. Rather, comic book conventions, yoga studios, cyberspace, and a myriad of similar destinations have become the essential sites of a new American religious culture. Carrying forward some of the ideas of nineteenth-century French sociological thinker Émile Durkheim, Burton takes religion to be less about creeds and dogma than community and meaning making. This religiosity finds its expression “through the collective energy of its adherents, a process [Durkheim] calls ‘collective effervescence,’ a shared intoxication participants experience when they join together in a symbolically significant, socially cohesive action.”

Gullotta notes that astrology, celebrity worship, fitness obsession and movements based on conspiracy theories are some other ways people have sought to seek a glimpse of a level of reality beyond space and time.

I find the way Gullotta ends his piece most unsatisfying. He merely states that these secular forms fulfillment-attempt fit into the national character in a certain sense:

We are natural believers. While scholars may debate the meaning and significance of any of these examples—and deeper questions about what constitutes religion as a unique form of social life—the durably high level of spiritual enthusiasm is a feature of the culture of the United States that sets it apart from that of secular Europe. In its many new forms, American religion may very well turn out to be with us always, even unto the end of the age.

Come on. Oprah and Spider Man ain’t Barton W. Stone and Charles Grandison Finney. Have we lost all sense of proportionate stature if we can’t see how flimsy the substitutes with which we’ve preoccupied ourselves are?

And all this seeking in these various corners has not yielded the fulfillment that anybody’s looking for. As I noted in a piece here the other day,

The marriage rate, in steady decline for years, fell to an all-time low in 2018. As of 2019, the US had the highest number of children living in a single-parent household in the world. 

Three in ten Americans are now religiously unaffiliated.

The number of Americans identifying as something other than heterosexual has doubled in the last decade.

Drug-overdose deaths in the US reached another record high this year.

As we all know, the spree-killing trend, which got underway in 1966, when Charles Whitman ascended the University of Texas campus tower in Austin and shot 16 people, has made our present year a grim succession of carnage scenes of near-daily occurrence.

But let’s look more closely at one of the most salient points Gullotta does make. People are bailing from any kind of recognizable Christianity because they don’t want to be told what to do, and what not to do. They - we - bristle at the discipline of structure. It has been thus for so long that few have the interest - dare I say courage? - to seriously study Holy Scripture, grapple with its seeming contradictions, delve into its particulars as well as become familiar enough to discern an overall message in the arc of the story told in its 66 books.

I have found a church in which to land since I wrote this piece for Ordinary Times, but I’m sure the reticence I expressed speaks for many who are still unchurched:

I am skittish about getting involved anywhere at this point. The pitfalls are myriad and various. There’s the progressive temptation to which many churches have succumbed. Since 2015, however, there’s arisen the equally secular Trumpist infection that poisoned even such respected figures as Franklin Graham. There is also the never-ending cascade of revelations about sexual corruption in various ministries. I sometimes wonder if there’s not a touch of snobbery in my reluctance to just land somewhere. I’ll be honest: I can’t stand modern praise music and I’m uncomfortable about not joining in with the demonstrative behavior I see at most services anymore. I guess the days of organs, robes and old-school hymns are fading fast.

For so long, I insisted on an environment that was pristine, devoid of any trace of anyone within it having gone astray, and, at least as importantly for me, devoid of any trace of hokiness.

I’ve since come to see that the point is for imperfect people to come together to avail themselves of that for which they’re starved: a sense that they’re not going to tumble into the abyss.

In my own case, I think the historian in me is part of what brought me around. I knew one couldn’t dismiss the Bible, neither in and of itself, nor its role in shaping societies, cultures and world events in the last two-thousand-plus years. So I knew it was time to crack it open and reacquaint myself.

And I am indeed finding an arc to the overall story it tells. What occurs before and after swirls around a 33-year period, and, more specifically, a three-day span, in which the between-the-eyes cosmic game-changer all human beings seek transpired in space and time, with eternal implications.

We all need a message from something outside ourselves, an indication that there’s a significance to the pain, joy, fear and fulfillment we experience, that there’s a reason for these things called our existences.

We sense a basic architecture to the universe, even if we occasionally become smug and Nietzchian, existentialist or nihilist. We’re haunted by the sense that we play an inescapable role in that architecture.

Looking into what thousands of great thinkers over the course of thousands of years have done with that sense requires some humility. It requires admitting that perhaps the thought of contemporaries who have come along in our own lifetimes or a few decades back isn’t going to provide adequate answers.

That’s not easy for us to do these days. We are quite - to use a phrase that shows up a few times in Scripture - stiff-necked.

We risk becoming like those described in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, creatures who can hear the faint strains of the joyful celebration that is going on within the reality that is Heaven, but wistfully resign ourselves to a dark eternal lot instead, because it seems more appealing to have an endless discussion among ourselves about what paradise might be like rather than entering into it.