"I'm not a religious person, but I pursue my own spirituality in my own way. It's organized religion that I have no use for."

This comment, made on a recent talk radio program, expresses the mood of an increasing number of people in North American society. Contrary to predictions of a few of decades ago, spirituality is in.

… 82 percent of Canadians consider themselves to be "somewhat or very spiritual."

It has become acceptable, even fashionable, to have a spiritual dimension to one's life and to pursue it openly. In the words of Douglas Todd, religion writer for The Vancouver Sun, "spirituality has become trendy."

Evidence is not difficult to find: a Kokanee beer commercial features a fresh-looking young person holding a can of beer and enthusiastically proclaiming that "it's a spiritual thing!" Prime Minister Jean Chretien declares to an assembly of native delegates in Ottawa that "spirituality is missing in our society, and spirituality is absolutely necessary to find the right way." Grammy-winning members of non-religious musical groups routinely thank their "higher power" alongside a myriad of friends and backup people for their successes. Jack Munro, head of the Forest Alliance of British Columbia, praises Premier Glen Clark for changes he made to the Forest Practices Code because they address "spiritual values." Terms such as the "new spirituality," "spiritual outlook," "spiritual dimension," or "spiritual consciousness" have become commonplace in our culture. Movies such as Michael, Ghost, and Angels in the Outfield, all of which have as main characters spiritual beings who are made to be life-like and personal, have had broad appeal.

The continuing popularity of books with a spiritual message, such as M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Travelled, Thomas Moore's Care of the Soul, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen's Chicken Soup for the Soul, Clarissa Pinkola Esres's Women Who Run with the Wolves, and James Redfield's The Celestine Prophecy, not to mention the spate of books by Shirley Maclaine, show the pervasiveness of this change in our culture.

A recent Maclean's/CBC News poll revealed that an astounding 82 percent of Canadians consider themselves to be "somewhat or very spiritual." When results were viewed by region, Atlantic Canadians were found to be the most spiritual (86 percent) while British Columbia residents were found to be the least, though the number is still high (74 percent). More women than men consider themselves to be spiritual, but the percentages for both are high, with 49 percent of all Canadians saying that they have "grown more spiritual in the last few years."

According to the American Booksellers Association, the sale of New Age books jumped from 5.6 million copies in 1992 to 9.7 million in 1995. Forbes magazine reports that close to $2 billion is spent each year in the United States on various aids to spiritual and physical well-being, including aroma therapists, channelers and macrobiotic food vendors.

Spirituality in business

This marked growth in spirituality is not limited to the private lives of North Americans. Increasingly, it is pushing into the public square, into the business, academic, medical and psychological communities.

Lance Secretan, Canadian business consultant and author of the recent best-seller Reclaiming Higher Ground, reports an increased interest in spirituality at the workplace. He gives as many as 100 speeches each year on this issue. His clients include such corporate giants as IBM, Johnson & Johnson and the Four Seasons hotel chain. His goal, he says, is to help them to build a "sanctuary in the workplace" and to develop strategies for addressing the split between work lives and soul lives.

We have come to function in the workplace, he asserts, in a way that alienates the soul. "We're pulling apart human beings by speaking about our work lives, our home lives, our love-making lives." In reality, he says, there is one whole, complete person who goes to work, and the workplace should be a place where one's spiritual well-being is not sacrificed.

Books on the subject, such as Tom Chappell's Soul of a Business and Leading With Soul by Lee G. Bolman and Terrence E. Deal, are hot sellers. On-line spiritual groups are proliferating; business retreats feature nature walks, exercise sessions and various forms of spiritual contemplation.

"For too long," writes family therapist Barbara Holstein, "spirituality in the workplace was devalued. The separation of Church and state meant that God happened only on the weekends." The spirituality of humanity, she declares, "is undeniable." Though this may come as old news to some, the fact that it is now being shouted in the "secular" workplace is relatively new.

The Bank of Montreal is typical of many corporations in its attitude toward spirituality. In its employee training the bank routinely uses spiritually oriented materials. Denis Nixon, until recently a senior vice president of the bank, forthrightly states that: when helping employees develop good habits and change bad ones, "the techniques one uses are spiritual in nature, because self-awareness and looking inward is where all change begins."

Spiritual awareness is not limited to those people in the working world. It has also come to play a significant role in the lives of unemployed people in the often discouraging process of finding their way back to employment.

Spirituality is important in this process, states Secretan, because a successful job search begins by questioning one's definition of success and by identifying one's most basic values. A spiritual retreat, he notes, is a highly useful step because searching for one's deeply held values is a spiritual exploration. Once one's values are set out, it is possible to target a job that matches them. This enables the job seeker to reconnect more confidently with the world of work.

The value of spirituality for the unemployed, however, is even more foundational, adds Secretan. It is essential for combating a widespread and crippling heresy in our culture, namely that what you do is what you are. Most of us think we are human doings rather than human beings. When we find ourselves doing nothing through unemployment, we conclude that we are being nothing. Self-esteem collapses and anger and self-pity close in, producing what Secretan calls a "dejected (because rejected), discouraged (because no longer achieving), dispirited self."

Something is needed to shore up the spirit before a successful job search can be undertaken, and that, says Secretan, is a spiritual journey. This may include prayer and faith, but it may well incorporate far more. Loving others, loving the planet and finding ways to serve others are all part of a spiritual pilgrimage.

Spirituality in medicine

Spiritual expression also shows up in the fields of medicine and psychology. That Western medicine has spent the last 100 years trying to rid itself of remnants of mysticism has not stopped a growing number of medical practitioners today who want to examine the connection between healing and spirituality. Doing such research, says Jeffrey Levin, a gerontologist and epidemiologist at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, "is no longer professional death."

"One of the most unspiritual places I can think of," he claims, "is institutional religion."

One such instance of this kind of research is the controlled study of prayer and its effects on healing carried out by Dr. Elizabeth Targ, clinical director of psychosocial oncology research at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. In her experiment, 20 severely ill AIDS patients were randomly selected. Half were prayed for; half were not. The people doing the praying, called "healers" by Targ, came from a wide variety of religious traditions (including Christian, Buddhist, Jewish and native American) as well as some from no religious tradition at all. Some described their activity as "prayer"; others did not. None of the patients was told to which group he or she had been assigned.

The results, according to Targ, were "encouraging" enough to warrant further study. Specifics of the initial study were published in late 1997. Targ has now turned her efforts to a similar study of women with breast cancer in which patients will join support groups and become involved in such activities as yoga, meditation and spiritual exploration. The goal is for participants to pursue the meaning of life and connectedness to themselves, to others and to something greater.

Elsewhere, in response to the new health habits of Canadians and Americans, more and more medical schools are adding courses on holistic and alternative medicine with titles such as "Caring for the Soul." In the most literal sense, North Americans are voting with their feet for a new kind of health care, seeking treatment from alternative therapists and faith healers in large numbers, and spending nearly $30 billion per year to receive such help. Millions more are spent on bestselling books and tapes by New Age doctors such as Deepak Chopra, Andrew Weil and Larry Dossey, who offer a blend of medicine and Eastern-flavoured spirituality.

The same desire for spiritual solutions is found in the sphere of marriage and family counselling. The Family Journal reports that spirituality is gaining increased attention among marriage and family therapists. According to the Journal, over the past 15 years at least seven studies have directly assessed the relationship between marital, satisfaction and spirituality. The results: higher scores on marital satisfaction are associated with higher levels of spirituality.

Spirituality, not religion

Evidently, North Americans have become a society of spiritual practitioners and seekers. What does it mean? How should Christians in particular view this cultural development?

The first step in understanding the new spirituality is to realize that it must not be confused with religion or, more specifically, organized religion.

"Spirituality is no longer associated with religion," says John Stackhouse, professor of religion at the University of Manitoba. "It can be anything from a life-changing experience to a leap in the gut when one sees a sunset. It could be paranormal phenomena like you'd see on The X-Files or an exploration of native Canadian religions."

Business consultant Lance Secretan goes further. "One of the most unspiritual places I can think of," he claims, "is institutional religion." In his view, spirituality involves such commodities as love for others, love for the planet and service to others, but it need not include religion in the traditional sense.

This is significant if for no other reason than that until rather recently the terms "spirituality" and "religion" were considered synonymous. Religious structures were considered the primary supports for people embarking on a spiritual journey. The guides were priests, ministers, rabbis and religious men and women. No more.

A recent survey by the editor of the Spiritual Book Associates (SBA), a book club located at Notre Dame University in Indiana, compared the top ten spirituality best-seller lists in 1967-68 with those from 1992-93. In 1968 all the authors were men and priests, including some of the theological giants in the Catholic Church such as Karl Rahner, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Bernard Haring. In contrast, the most popular book in 1993, May I Have This Dance?, was written by a woman, Joyce Rupp, author of five books on spirituality and a director of spiritual retreats. The 1993 list included two books by lay people, another woman and a man, but none by prominent theologians.

The chase for material goods has left many people with more toys but less satisfaction.

A 1996 survey entitled Project Canada Consultation on Research and Ministry, conducted by Reginald Bibby, sociologist of religion at the University of Lethbridge, bears out the trend distinguishing spirituality from religion. Canadians were asked how important both religion and spirituality were to them. Though 68 percent of Canadians indicated that spirituality was "very important" or "somewhat important" to them, only 57 percent said the same thing about religion.

When asked if their interest in spirituality and religion (evidenced by attendance at church services) had increased or decreased since 1990, one-fifth (22 percent) indicated that their interest in spirituality had increased in that time, whereas just nine percent said the same for religious service attendance.

What is the attraction of this new-found spirituality? "There seems to be a cultural exhaustion," states Stackhouse in a Maclean's interview, "after the Me decade of the '70s and the Me-too decade of the '80s." Spirituality holds much allure, he added, for a society facing widespread economic hardship, political uncertainty and family breakdown. "Almost everywhere you look there is a sense that things are really wrong, that the price we've paid for material prosperity is too high … . People are looking for the transcendent."

In other words, it would appear that many Canadians have a sense of unease in their lives. Though the chase for material good has paid healthy dividends in terms of material wealth, it has also left many people with more toys but less satisfaction. This has sent people looking for something more; they are hoping to find it in a new inner life.

Stanley Grenz, professor of theology and ethics at Regent College and Carey Theological College in Vancouver, adds that the basic ethos of post-modernism, which increasingly rules the day, is negative and pessimistic (see related article, Touched by Postmodern Spirituality"). "For the first time in recent history," he writes in his book A Primer on Postmodernism, "the emerging generation does not share the conviction of their parents that the world is becoming a better place in which to live. From widening holes in the ozone layer to teen-on-teen violence, they see our problems mounting. And they are no longer convinced that human ingenuity will solve these enormous problems or that their living standard will be higher than that of their parents."

Similar attitudes prevail in the corporate world. Many believe that the primary reason for the growth of spirituality in that sector is the widespread feeling that North American workplaces have become insecure, even scary environments. Downsizing, re-engineering and layoffs in the past several years have transformed the corporate world into an unfriendly place.

"So many people are afraid of losing their jobs," says Lance Secretan. "Those who are left are emotionally scarred by the layoffs of their friends and co-workers. There's reduced support staff, more difficult technology to master, and everyone is stretched thin trying to perform."

But there is more to the changing workplace than simply a reduction in manpower, says Secretan. "The contract between employer and employee has been broken," he argues. "People used to think in terms of working for a company, for 20 or more years, of giving their commitment to the company and receiving the same in return." No more. "It has now become common for companies, on the one hand, to speak of their greatest resource being people, and then turn around and lay off 500 of them." The result is that people no longer feel the same level of commitment or connection with the company and are looking elsewhere for it. "They're looking within," he says, "and that's what spirituality is all about."

In contrast, a disenchantment with organized religion has steered people into a host of new directions. Why have people left it in droves to seek a spiritual dimension to their lives?

Douglas Todd of The Vancouver Sun speculates that part of the reason is that respect for religion is at a low point due to the sex and money scandals of televangelists in the past. Indeed, by all accounts the immoral activities of evangelists Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, Ralph Rutledge and others, broadcast around the globe, have had a profoundly negative effect on the way many people view religious authorities and institutions.

For many people, religion is associated with negative childhood experiences or with meaningless adult ones. And so, to satisfy a spiritual hunger, they tend to look elsewhere than the organized church.

Spirituality is seen by many to be individual, affective, immediate and flexible. Religion, on the other hand, is often thought of as outer, cognitive, distant and rigid. In Todd's words, religion is viewed by many as a negative commodity. "It's external, it's authoritative, it's handed down to us by religious authorities," he states, "and it's all too often seen to be unauthentic."

Spirituality, on the other hand, says Todd, is viewed as a positive entity, "as something that wells up inside a person; more authentic, more honest."

More important than any of these, however, is that religion is considered irrelevant to the needs and circumstances of contemporary people. When it really matters, religion appears unable to help. One female CEO, a Catholic who was ousted from a hospital administrative post, articulated this irrelevance unabashedly in a recent magazine interview: "Organized religion—church and pastor—is unable to conceive of the needs and is not structured to respond to or support people like me." But, she continued, "prayer, belief in the goodness of God, a deepening of self-knowledge and getting to know my own potential through reflection and meditation proved to be critical."

Flexible spirituality

Spirituality holds an appeal that religion never could for another important reason, namely its ability to throw off the constraint of religious dogma and be flexible to the age and times in which we live.

Humans, and their spirituality, do not develop in isolation. The shape they ultimately take has much to do with the prevailing thought patterns and intellectual culture in which they flourish. Different times and places have different reigning cultural ideas and circumstances, and these exert a powerful influence on the precise kind of spirituality that emerges.

Pluralism and tolerance are the dominant cultural thought patterns of the day. Ours is a pluralistic age in which many world views compete for our acceptance with none being dominant. Tolerance is the watchword. Commonly misdefined as the acceptance of or agreement with all views, tolerance rarely includes—though it should—allowing those with whom one disagrees to hold and express their views. Tolerance, defined as accepting all views as equally valid, is the chief virtue of our day.

An idea, viewpoint or world view that is believed to be "intolerant" runs the risk of being rejected and condemned in our society for that reason alone without regard for the merits of the view itself. A belief in tolerance has led many to reject the right of one person to claim that his or her view is correct and its opposite is necessarily wrong. This is especially so in matters of religion and spirituality but is true to a lesser degree in other matters as well.

As Allan Bloom observed in his best-selling book The Closing of the American Mind, vast numbers of people in our society no longer strive to find truth, to discover which view is right and which is wrong so that they can come closer to the truth. The very idea of truth, that one view is right and its opposite wrong, is the enemy. It causes bigotry, narrow-mindedness, riots and wars. The new goal is to seek an understanding of reality that works for me and allow others to do the same without calling anyone else's view of reality true in the sense that its opposite would be false.

The result has been a general devaluation of truth itself. In the postmodern mind, truth is not an objective reality "out there" that we encounter and come to understand through a reasoning process. Rather, as Grenz explains in A Primer on Postmodernism, "We construct the world using concepts drawn from our own communities and frameworks of understanding, which we bring to the world. In this sense, truth in our postmodern world is relative to the community in which a person participates. And since there are many human communities, there ate necessarily many different truths."

Eclectic spirituality

With the concept of absolute truth changed, with the constraints of religion gone, and with tolerance and pluralism as the key virtues of our age, the predictable result is an acceptance of many forms of spirituality as legitimate. This is precisely the appeal of spirituality in the '90s.

Some people are experiencing an awakening within established religions and others are not. "I am an eclectic," Cara Segger Victoria bookstore assistant, told Maclean's. "I look to the past for inspiration but also towards the New Age movement," She performs the ceremonial magic of Wicca, reads tarot cards and practises elements of Buddhism and Taoism. In her words, "All attempts of mankind and womankind to reach for the divine are valid."

This is the appeal of New Age thinking. It offers a menu of spiritual choices. This new-found freedom to self-define spirituality is perfect for the times. "To me, spiritual development means finding your voice and finding yourself," says Vicki Poels, training and development manager at Cargill Inc. in Minneapolis. "I'm interested: in developing my spirituality. But I think it's something you have to do on your own, rather than in an organized setting."

David Gergen, editor-at-large for U.S. News & World Report, praises the eclectic approach. "Whatever form a religious pilgrimage takes," he writes, "we should encourage those willing to make the journey." Message: '90s spirituality is tolerant and pluralistic.

Religion, on the other hand, has never encouraged such freedom to believe and think as you please, Religious institutions have always set forth specific truth claims, doctrines and ethical codes said to be true, implying that their opposites must be false. For good or ill, religion by its very nature will never be able to command the same type of appeal that a spirituality free of religious constraints can achieve.

The new quest for spirituality is undeniably taking place. Should Christians see this as a unique and exciting opportunity to advance genuine Christian spirituality? Or is the development cause for distress?

… we have reason to be optimistic about this trend while being realistic about its shortcomings.

Christians should not be surprised by the trend toward spirituality. If, as Christians have always believed, we are made with a built-in ability to relate to God, what Blaise Pascal called a "God-shaped gap," then we humans will have a spiritual hunger as long as we live. No amount of secularization and no number of scientific explanations for events will eliminate this gap or suppress this human spiritual component. In fact, oddly enough, depriving this spiritual dimension may well do the opposite by producing an emptiness and a longing for something beyond the physical realm which eventually erupts into a quest for spirituality. The present trend towards spirituality appears to bear out the existence of such a "God-shaped gap."

Beyond this, we have reason to be optimistic about this trend while being realistic about its shortcomings.

Drawbacks of the trend

On the down side, we need to realistically acknowledge that building "my own religion" outside a formal structure leads to a spirituality that is "untested." As journalist Douglas Todd points out, religious institutions over the centuries have always tested and debated their teachings and, in this way, monitored the extremes, whether of individuals or of doctrines. But the new spirituality has lost all of that. In fact, part of its attraction is precisely that nobody controls it. If I want to believe something, it is true for that reason alone. It is my truth.

The mass suicide of followers of Marshall Applewhite and his Heaven's Gate cult, who thought they would be transported in death to a space ship trailing the Hale-Bopp comet, gives substance to fears about unchecked and untested extremes in a build-your-own spirituality. But as U.S. News & World Report magazine stated shortly after the suicides in April 1997, "Subtract the spaceship and the mass suicide and you have a yearning and a search familiar to millions … one that has found a home in the New Age movement."

Arguably, the mass suicide of Applewhite's comet-struck followers was a grotesque extension of a now well-established and widespread fascination with spirituality, self-exploration and paranormal phenomena. "The members of Heaven's Gate," said U.S. News & World Report, "were in tune with their time. They designed web sites. They got their cars washed. They wore Nikes."

And their spirituality had no testing or constraints. It is worth considering that the "no-constraints" freedom of contemporary spirituality will be the seeds of its own undoing or, at the very least, its rethinking.

Reasons for optimism

In spite of this very real danger, there are reasons to be optimistic about the new spirituality. The fact that contemporary spirituality involves no one telling me what to believe leads to an authentic faith rather than one produced by fear or authority. In addition, as Todd points out, "Now people are at least talking about spiritual matters." It wasn't too long ago, he recalls, that "many were proud of knowing nothing about religion. Where else," he asks, "do you find people proud of their ignorance about an area of inquiry?"

This new openness to various avenues of spirituality provides the basis for an appeal to members of our society to examine Christian spirituality. That provides Christians with the opportunity to engage others in dialogue.

Obviously, not everyone pursuing spirituality will be open to a Christian form of it. As one student at a major Canadian university recently put it, "It's sometimes frustrating to see students open to many ideas from around the world but closed to Christian ideas." However, it is now possible to call on those professing an openness to all forms of spirituality to demonstrate that openness by being willing to examine Christian spirituality as well. To instinctively refuse would be inconsistent, something many of us are from time to time but something none of us want to be seen to be.

Inviting people to consider Christianity must be done in a way that is relevant to this spiritually conscious age. This, of course, is no more than Christians have ever been required to do in any age. We will have to recognize what is valid in this present day and affirm and build on that. For example, instead of simply writing off the New Age movement and its followers as inspired by Satan, we should applaud and appeal to their obvious interest in spiritual matters to invite them to consider the alternative of Christianity.

Alister McGrath and Michael Green, in their joint work How Shall We Reach Them?, report that many former New Age followers have become Christians as a result of their ongoing quest for God and spirituality. "We should seek to invite and encourage an experiential encounter," they write, "between the New Ager and our Lord Jesus, the risen Christ." To this end, they encourage Christians not to shun New Agers nor to be fearful of and defensive toward them. Rather, in their view Christians ought to attend some New Age gatherings and cultivate authentic friendships with people there. They are eager to talk about spiritual things.

In assessing the contemporary rush to spirituality, it is important to ask what this trend says about the spiritual health of our society. It may be tempting to assume that greater spiritual awareness and interest reflect better spiritual health in society. But does it?

Eugene Peterson, professor of spiritual theology at Regent College in Vancouver and well-known author of The Message, a contemporary version of the New Testament, raises searching questions about this trend. He compares the spiritual health of our culture to the physical health of a person. Talking a great deal about one's physical health, he asserts, is not usually taken as a sign of physical health. "Nor," he writes in his book Subversive Spirituality, "does the wide spread interest in spirituality today lead me to think that the North American soul is in a flourishing condition."

When our bodies and souls are working well, we don't talk about them, he notes. In fact, we are largely unaware of them. This has led him to conclude that the frequency with which the word spirituality occurs these days is more likely to be evidence of pathology than of health. The interest itself is not sick, he explains. Rather, the sickness has provoked the interest.

What is the sickness? Secularism, Peterson suggests. There is a ground-swell of recognition spreading through our culture, he observes, that all of life is at root spiritual, that everything we see is formed and sustained by what we cannot see. He then declares that our culture has failed, precisely because it is a secular culture. It has tried to deny and suppress this spiritual reality. We have reduced our lives to material assets, "things," and their function. The initial thrill of having all these things come our way with no thought of their nature or purpose, and having the freedom to do as we please with them, have eventually given way to loneliness the things cannot fill and boredom with our freedom.

The initial response might be to acquire even better and newer things of the kind that brought us the initial thrill. North Americans have done so for well over a century now, Peterson notes, and we are surprised to find ourselves lonely behind the wheel of a BMW or bored to death as we advance from one prestigious job to another.

Little by little we begin to realize that getting more and doing more only make the sickness worse. We begin to realize that a secular life, that is, a life concerned with temporal matters without regard to spiritual ones, eventually obliterates two essentials of human fullness: the desire for intimacy, the experience of human love; and the desire for transcendence, to experience divine love. We long both for human touch, for someone who knows our name, and for divine meaning.

It should be no surprise, notes Peterson, that people so poorly trained in intimacy and transcendence might not get far in their quest for spirituality. "Almost anything at hand that gives a feeling of closeness, whether genitals or cocaine, will do for intimacy. And almost anything exotic that induces a sense of mystery—from mantras to river rafting—will do for transcendence."

If Peterson is correct in his analysis that signs of spiritual sickness are in the air, then Christians must remember that Jesus said He came to heal the sick. Healthy people have no need of a physician. Christians would be wise to see the renewed interest in spirituality as an admission of spiritual need and an opportunity for presenting Christian spirituality.

The example of the apostle Paul is instructive. On one occasion he found himself addressing a group of thinkers who had erected an idol that bore the inscription: "To an Unknown God." Rather than condemn this idol as a false form of spirituality (as he could have), he recognized it as an implied admission of spiritual need and openness. He seized on it as an opportunity to present a relationship with Jehovah through the resurrected and living Christ as the way to satisfy spiritual hunger.

Might not the same approach be relevant for the millions of seekers in the new millennium?

Paul Chamberlain is author of Can We Be Good Without God? Chamberlain teaches ethics and philosophy of religion at Trinity Western University.

Originally published in Faith Today, September/October 1997.
faithtoday.ca

Other related articles

Defining "Spiritual" Activity

Healing Through Jesus

Splitting Sacred and Secular

The Quest for Spirituality

The Semantics of Spirituality

Touched by Postmodern Spirituality

Waiting for God

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