Last week’s post here on The Archdruid
Report suggested that the normal aftermath of an age of reason is a
return to religion—in Spengler’s terms, a Second Religiosity—as the only
effective bulwark against the nihilistic
spiral set in motion by the barbarism of reflection. Yes, I’m aware that that’s
a controversial claim, not least because so many devout believers in the
contemporary cult of progress insist so loudly on seeing all religions but
theirs as so many outworn relics of the superstitious past. This is’s a common sentiment among
rationalists in every civilization, especially in the twilight years of ages of
reason, and it tends to remain popular right up until the Second Religiosity
goes mainstream and leaves the rationalists sitting in the dust wondering what
happened.
I’d like to suggest that we’re on the brink of a similar
transformation in the modern industrial world. The question that comes first to
many minds when that suggestion gets made, though, is what religion or
religions are most likely to provide the frame around which a contemporary
Second Religiosity will take shape. It’s a reasonable question, but for several
reasons it’s remarkably hard to answer.
The first and broadest reason for the difficulty is that the
overall shape of a civilization’s history may be determined by laws of
historical change, but the details are not. It was as certain as anything can
be that some nation or other was going to replace Britain as global superpower
when the British Empire ran itself into the ground in the early twentieth
century. That it turned out to be the
United States, though, was the result of chains of happenstance and choices of
individual people going back to the eighteenth century if not furthr. If Britain had conciliated the American
colonists before 1776, for example, as it later did in Australia and elsewhere,
what is now the United States would have remained an agrarian colony dependent
on British industry, there would have been no American industrial and military
colossus to come to Britain’s rescue in 1917 and 1942, and we would all quite
likely be speaking German today as we prepared to celebrate the birthday of
Emperor Wilhelm VI.
In the same way, that some religion will become the focus of
the Second Religiosity in any particular culture is a given; which religion it
will be, though, is a matter of happenstance and the choices of individuals.
It’s possible that an astute Roman with a sufficiently keen historical sense
could have looked over the failing rationalisms of his world in the second
century CE and guessed that one or another religion from what we call the
Middle East would be most likely to replace the traditional cults of the Roman
gods, but which one? Guessing that would, I think, have been beyond anyone’s
powers; had the Emperor Julian lived long enough to complete his religious
counterrevolution, for that matter, a resurgent Paganism might have become the
vehicle for the Roman Second Religiosity, and Constantine might have had no more
influence on later religious history than his predecessor Heliogabalus.
The sheer contingency of historical change forms one
obstacle in the way of prediction, then. Another factor comes from a
distinctive rhythm that shapes the history of popular religion in American
culture. From colonial times on, American pop spiritualities have had a normal
life cycle of between thirty and forty years. After a formative period of
varying length, they grab the limelight, go through predictable changes over
the standard three- to four-decade span, and then either crash and burn in some
colorful manner or fade quietly away.
What makes this particularly interesting is that there’s quite a bit of
synchronization involved; in any given decade, that is, the pop spiritualities
then in the public eye will all be going through a similar stage in their life
cycles.
The late 1970s, for example, saw the simultaneous emergence
of four popular movements of this kind:
Protestant fundamentalism, Neopaganism, the New Age, and the evangelical
atheist materialism of the so-called Sceptic movement. In 1970, none of those
movements had any public presence worth noticing: fundamentalism was widely dismissed as a
has-been phenomenon that hadn’t shown any vitality since the 1920s, the term
“Neopagan” was mostly used by literary critics talking about an assortment of
dead British poets, the fusion of surviving fragments of 1920s New Thought and
Theosophy with the UFO scene that would give rise to the New Age was still out on the furthest
edge of fringe culture, and the most popular and visible figures in the
scientific communtiy were more interested in studying parapsychology and Asian
mysticism than in denouncing them.
The pop spiritualities that were on their way out in 1970,
in turn, had emerged together in the wake of the Great Depression, and replaced
another set that came of age around 1900. That quasi-generational rhythm has to
be kept in mind when making predictions about American pop religious movements,
because very often, whatever’s biggest, strongest, and most enthusiastically
claiming respectability at any given time will soon be heading back out to the
fringes or plunging into oblivion. It may return after another three or four
decades—Protestant fundamentalism had its first run from just before 1900 to
the immediate aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash, for example, and then
returned for a second pass in the late 1970s—and a movement that survives a few
such cycles may well be able to establish itself over the long term as a
successful denomination. Even if it does accomplish this, though, it’s likely
to find itself gaining and losing membership and influence over the same cycle
thereafter.
The stage of the cycle we’re in right now, as suggested
above, is the one in which established pop spiritualities head for the fringes
or the compost heap, and new movements vie for the opportunity to take their
places. Which movements are likely to replace fundamentalism, Neopaganism, the
New Age and today’s “angry atheists” as they sunset out? Once again, that
depends on happenstance and individual choices, and so is far from easy to
predict in advance. There are certain
regularities: for example, liberal and
conservative Christian denominations take turns in the limelight, so it’s fairly
likely that the next major wave of American Christianity will be aligned with
liberal causes—though it’s anyone’s guess which denominations will take the
lead here, and which will remain mired in the fashionable agnosticism and the
entirely social and secular understanding of religion that’s made so many
liberal churches so irrelevant to the religious needs of their potential
congregations.
In much the same way, American scientific institutions
alternate between openness to spirituality and violent rejection of it. The era of the American Society for Psychical
Research was followed by that of the war against the Spiritualists, that gave
way to a postwar era in which physicists read Jung and the Tao Te Ching and
physicians interested themselves in alternative medicine, and that was followed
in turn by the era of the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of
the Paranormal and today’s strident
evangelical atheism; a turn back toward openness is thus probably likely
in the decades ahead. Still, those are probabilities, not certainties, and many
other aspects of American religious pop culture are a good deal less subject to
repeating patterns of this kind.
All this puts up serious barriers to guessing the shape of
the Second Religiosity as that takes shape in deindustrializing America, and
I’m not even going to try to sort out the broader religious future of the rest
of today’s industrial world—that would take a level of familiarity with local
religious traditions, cultural cycles, and collective thinking that I simply
don’t have. Here in the United States, it’s hard enough to see past the large
but faltering pop spiritual movements of the current cycle, guess at what might
replace them, and try to anticipate which of them might succeed in meeting the
two requirements I mentioned at the end of last week’s post, which the core
tradition or traditions of our approaching Second Religiosity must have: the
capacity to make the transition from the religious sensibility of the past to
the religious sensibility that’s replacing it, and a willingness to abandon the
institutional support of the existing order of society and stand apart from the
economic benefits as well as the values of a dying civilization.
Both of those are real challenges. The religious sensibility
fading out around us has for its cornerstone the insistence that humanity
stands apart from nature and deserves some better world than the one in which
we find ourselves. The pervasive biophobia of that sensibility, its obsession with imagery of risingup from the earth's surface, and most of its other features unfold
from a basic conviction that, to borrow a phrase from one currently popular
denomination of progress worshippers, humanity is only temporarily “stuck on
this rock”—the “rock” in question, of course, being the living Earth in all her
beauty and grandeur—and will be heading for something bigger, better, and a
good deal less biological just as soon as God or technology or some other
allegedly beneficent power gets around to rescuing us.
This is exactly what the rising religious sensibility of our
age rejects. More and more often these days, as I’ve mentioned in previous
posts, I encounter people for whom “this rock” is not a prison, a place of
exile, a cradle, or even a home, but the whole of which human beings are an
inextricable part. These people aren’t looking for salvation, at least in the
sense that word has been given in the religious sensibility of the last two
millennia or so, and which was adopted from that sensibility by the theist and
civil religions of the Western world during that time; they are not pounding on
the doors of the human condition, trying to get out, or consoling themselves
with the belief that sooner or later someone or something is going to rescue
them from the supposedly horrible burden of having bodies that pass through the
extraordinary journey of ripening toward death that we call life.
They are seeking, many of these people. They are not satisfied with who they are or
how they relate to the cosmos, and so they have needs that a religion can meet,
but what they are seeking is wholeness within a greater whole, a sense of
connection and community that embraces not only other people but the entire
universe around them, and the creative power or powers that move through that
universe and sustain its being and theirs. Many of them are comfortable with
their own mortality and at ease with what Christian theologians call humanity’s
“creaturely status,” the finite and dependent nature of our existence; what
troubles them is not the inevitability of death or the reality of limits, but a
lack of felt connection with the cosmos and with the whole systems that sustain
their lives.
I suspect, to return to a metaphor I used in an earlier post
here, that this rising sensibility is one of the factors that made the recent
movie Gravity so wildly popular. The entire plot of the film
centers on Sandra Bullock’s struggle to escape from the lifeless and lethal
vacuum of space and find a way back to the one place in the solar system where
human beings actually belong. To judge by the emails and letters I receive and
the conversations I have, that’s a struggle with which many people in today’s
industrial world can readily identify. The void scattered with sharp-edged
debris they sense around them is more metaphorical than the one Bullock’s character
has to face, but it’s no less real for that.
Can the traditions of the current religious mainstream or
its established rivals speak to such people? Yes, though it’s going to take
some significant rethinking of habitual language and practice to shake off the
legacies of the old religious sensibility and find ways to address the needs
and possibilities of the new one. It’s entirely possible that one or another
denomination of Christianity might do that.
It’s at least as possible that one or another denomination of Buddhism,
the most solidly established of the current crop of imported faiths, could do
it instead. Still, the jury’s still out.
The second requirement for a successful response to the
challenge of the Second Religiosity bears down with particular force against
these and other established religious institutions. Most American denominations
of Christianity and Buddhism alike, for example, have a great deal of expensive
infrastructure to support—churches and related institutions in the case of
Christianity; monasteries, temples, and retreat centers in the case of
Buddhism—and most of the successful denominations of both faiths, in order to
pay for these things, have by and large taken up the same strategy of pandering
to the privileged classes of American society. That’s a highly successful
approach in the short term, but the emergence of a Second Religiosity is not a
short term phenomenon; those religious movements that tie themselves too
tightly to middle or upper middle class audiences are likely to find, as the
floodwaters of change rise, that they’ve lashed themselves to a stone and will
sink along with it.
In an age of decline, religious institutions that have heavy
financial commitments usually end up in deep trouble, and those that depend on
support from the upper reaches of the social pyramid usually land in deeper
trouble still. It’s those traditions that can handle poverty without blinking
that are best able to maintain themselves in hard times, just as it’s usually
those same traditions that an increasingly impoverished society finds most
congenial and easiest to support. Christianity in the late Roman world was
primarily a religion of the urban poor, with a modest sprinkling of downwardly
mobile middle-class intellectuals in their midst; Christianity in the Dark Ages
was typified by monastic establishments whose members were even poorer than the
impoverished peasants around them. Buddhism was founded by a prince but very
quickly learned that absolute non-attachment to material wealth was not only a
spiritual virtue but a very effective practical strategy.
In both cases, though, that was a long time ago, and most
American forms of both religions—and most others, for that matter—are heavily
dependent on access to middle- and upper middle-class parishioners and their
funds. If that continues, it’s likely to leave the field wide open to the
religions of the poor, to new religious movements that grasp the necessity of
shoestring budgets and very modest lifestyles, or to further imports from
abroad that retain Third World attitudes toward wealth.
I’m often asked in this context about the possibility that
Druidry, the faith tradition I practice, might end up filling a core role in
the Second Religiosity of industrial civilization. It’s true that we embraced
the new religious sensibility long before it was popular elsewhere, and equally
true that shoestring budgets and unpaid clergy are pretty much universal in
Druid practice. Still, the only way I can see Druidry becoming a major factor
in the deindustrial age is if every other faith falls flat on its nose; we have
a strike against us that most other religious movements don’t have.
No, I don’t mean the accelerating decline of today’s pop
Neopaganism. Old-fashioned Druid orders such as AODA, the order I head,
routinely get confused with the Neopagan scene these days, but we were around
long before Neopaganism began to take shape in the late 1970s—AODA was
chartered in 1912, and traces its roots back to the eighteenth century—and we
expect to be around long after it has cycled back out of fashion. If anything,
the volunteer staff who handles AODA’s correspondence will be grateful for
fewer emails saying, “Hi, I want to know if you have a grove in my area I can
circle with on the Sabbats—Blessed be!” and thus less need for return emails
explaining that we aren’t Wiccans and don’t celebrate the Sabbats, and that our
groves and study groups are there to provide support for our initiates, not to
put on ceremonies for casual attendees.
That is to say, AODA is an initiatory order, not a church in
the doors-wide-open sense of the word, and that’s the strike against us
mentioned above. I suspect most of my readers will have little if any notion of
the quiet subculture of initiatory orders in the modern industrial world. There
are a great many of them, mostly quite small, offering instruction in
meditation, ritual, and a range of other transformative practices to those interested in such things. Initiatory orders in the Western world have
usually been independent of public religious institutions—this was also true in
classical times, when the Dionysian and Orphic mysteries, the Pythagorean
Brotherhood, and later on the Neoplatonists and Gnostic sects filled much the
same role we do today—while those in Asian countries are usually affiliated
with the religious mainstream. In traditional Japan, for example, people
interested in the sort of thing initiatory orders do could readily find their
way to esoteric schools of Buddhism,
such as the Shingon sect; this side of the Ganges, by contrast, attitudes of
the religious mainstream toward such traditions have tended to veer from
toleration through disapproval to violent persecution and back again.
Eccentric as it is, the world of initiatory orders has been
my spiritual home since I got dissatisfied with the casual irreligion of my
birth family and went looking for something that made more sense. A
book I published last year tried to sum up some of what that world
and its teachings have to say concerning the age of limits now upon us, and it
had a modest success. Still, one thing
all of us in the initiatory orders learn early on is that our work is something
that appeals only to the few. Self-unfoldment through disciplines of
realization, to borrow a crisp definition from what was once a widely read book
on the subject, involves a great deal of hard and unromantic work on the self.
For those of us who are called to it, there’s nothing more rewarding—but not
that many people are called to it.
