A spiritual awakening
You will need to get used to me saying this phrase over the next few months. While I was walking the Camino…
The fellow pilgrims I encountered almost entirely identified as spiritual and most of those were unaffiliated to an institutional religion.
What intrigued me was that many of those were disappointed with the churches being closed. When a church was open, they’d go in and rest, light a candle and sit still. The open church played an important role for them without asking anything back.
Over the whole time, I was reading a substack by theologian Diana Butler Bass. She started a series reflecting on her book, Christianity After Religion that she’d written in 2012. It was a response to the cultural and religious shifts she was observing after what she called a "decade of discontent”. 9/11 and the subsequent war on terror, George Bush election case in Florida, global financial crisis of 2008. This year she was reflecting how the decade didn’t stop, and the next ten years were just as disruptive. She wanted to write a second edition but her publisher declined, so she used her substack to reflect on how things are now.
It’s no surprise that the institutional religions have not fared well in that extra 10 years. The decline in religious affiliation has continued—a 12% drop. At the same time non-affiliated spirituality or spiritual but not religious increased by 9%. these are people that christians have referred to somewhat disparagingly (even if accidentally) as the “nones.”
The Aotearoa data is similar if not more stark.
It’s not that people are becoming atheists, it’s that they are not finding answers within conventional Christianity or other religious institutions.
This is not new for most of us. We knew it either explicitly or intuitively.
“The church is in decline” had become a constant refrain I would interject out of frustration that church leaders around me were over-focussing on small issues at the expense of the bigger ones. For some reason, conventional christianity has been absolutely obsessed with the placement of penises. And largely unanimated by the big existential concerns of the times: climate change, racism, inequality, greed, imperialism—how capitalism by its very nature requires impoverishment to keep labour costs down for a competitive edge. We have not been a counter-protest to these things. In that sense, and to extend the imagery, we’ve been largely impotent. In fact, it’s probably precisely because of the energy we’ve expended in minor concerns and culture wars that we’ve become so unable to address the larger issues.
Again, for many of us here, this is not new. Where Diana Butler Bass has really inspired me is how she is framing this shift not as a crisis, but, if we look at the increase in the spiritual but not religious, it is better understood as an awakening.
“Not everyone who has experienced God afresh is an evangelical, fundamentalist, or Pentecostal.” she says.
This is actually a hard thing for our systems to respond to because it doesn’t fit the models that so much energy is going into. In fact it’s precisely in the space where there is no energy being invested that the strongest growth in ‘God awareness’ is being experienced.
Awakenings begin when old systems break down, in ‘periods of cultural distortion and grave personal stress, when we lose faith in the legitimacy of our norms, the viability of our institutions, and the authority of our leaders in church and state.’
Here’s the cycle in a nutshell [slide]
People are encountering God outside the church and we have hardly engaged with them. Trust me, I understand this because I’ve been at a loss myself—more from an ambivalence “that’s their choice” rather than what do they want from me. Though, it’s not entirely true that I’ve not tried to engage with this group, I’ve been part of several experiments in that space. But it’s a tricky space to think through.
Inevitably people ask “well, what do they mean by spirituality?”
And that’s a tricky question to answer and my suspicion is that we don’t need to find out what, but just accept ‘that’ people are spiritual.
I do feel I need to spend a bit of time rebutting the traditional critique before we move on.
Objection 1: Well what do they actually believe?
Winfred Cantwell Smith notes that “faith became both intellectualised and impersonalised”, as
“decade after decade the notion was driven home that a religion is something that one believes or does not believe, something whose propositions are true or not true.” As he further states, “A legacy of it is the tendency still today to ask, in explanation of ‘the religion’ of a people, What do they believe?—as though this were a basic, even the basic, question.”
Orthodoxy is dead. Belief in propositions, ideologies and doctrines has been undermined by simple questions, doubts and authenticity. There is no way that Cityside would be able to recite any of the creeds without having fingers crossed behind our back. The fact that we can say this now has changed the nature of belief significantly.
The irony is that as we’ve impersonalised belief at the macro level, and the individual level we’ve deeply internalised it and made ourselves arbiters of its value. In not being beholden to central authority on doctrine, structure and behaviour, we’ve been able to pick and choose, try and test, explore and imbibe a version of Christianity that’s become less and less useful as we’ve grown out of it.
It’s time we acknowledged the myopia of holding to the potential for a singular truth when the Church itself is pluralistic. Even our own faith phases through evolutions—a plurality of phases. Orthodoxy requires stasis. Few of us are static in our belief.
Objection 2: It’s not real spirituality
Upon what do we base this critique? As if we understand what real spirituality is! Surely this needs to be fired back at us first! If we’ve really done a good job with stewarding spirituality, then we would not be in the decline we are. How dare we make that accusation.
It’s true that we’ve lost cultural credibility through scandals, hypocrisy and, now the ludicrous political scene. New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have launched scathing attacks on christianity and all religion for that matter accusing it as being the source of most human conflict and death.
Indeed the swords wielded in the name of Christ in so many paintings, sculptures and stained glass windows testify to this. Let’s not ignore that the Third Reich was laden with religious ideology. Let’s not ignore the crusades used holy war as a motivation for slaughter. Let’s not ignore how intertwined missionary endeavour and colonisation have been through history. We cannot ignore the story we are part of. But we can also acknowledge why we are not those things any longer—if indeed that is true.
Objection 3: it’s unhealthy spirituality
Again, pointing the finger right back at us. My personal critique of the way that unchecked charismatic renewal has laid the foundation for individualistic, self-mediating, experiential expectations of spirituality and encounter that we have reduced the idea of the Gospel to “Jesus died and rose so you could become all you were meant to be.” As if self-actualisation was the point of the suffering on the cross?
The centering of self in the gospel story is pretty much antithetical to giving up self for others. This is not to say self-reflection and awareness aren’t fundamental to our faith, of course they are! But it’s not for self’s sake, not at all. And when our services, sermons, books, devotions and prayer all point to self-improvement, we are in serious danger of becoming a baptised version of the wellness industry. Particularly when many of these practices, sermons and books carry the toxicity of protectionism, ardent conservatism and coercive language around consent.
I can guarantee you that almost every argument that is pitched against the ‘spirituality of the world’ as it might be put, can be turned back onto us like a laser ready to cut out cancer. But we prefer not to.
And I think that is because we live in compromise.
Here’s the thing. Week in week out preachers all over the country are telling us how the bible says that we need to do better at this or that. That our belief in such and such is so important in order not to be led astray. That being bible believing is the big task of Christians and there’s nothing else to it. And it’s whittled down in many cases to a subset of a subset of texts that are referred to consistently to create a simplistic picture of the world.
When it comes to sexual purity, cussing, gossip, or, in some places, respecting the leaders in authority, the text is used as a blunt instrument and kept with very narrow English definitions.
Mention that the bible is pretty clear also on whether we should loan with interest, provide for those who have no means or love our enemies. Or that we should seek first the kingdom of God, and prioritise accordingly, the preachers are pretty quick to find more complex interpretations so we can wheedle out of it.
The point is that we are in compromise but we don’t admit it. As middle class citizens it is impossible to live like the twelve disciples or the Apostle Paul.
Our job is not to be John the Baptists! Our job is to listen to the Spirit to understand what life we are being asked to live. Our job is to respond incrementally and in your capacity to do so.
“It’s unhealthy spirituality”, someone said, well if the church had a grasp of healthy spirituality we wouldn’t be in this predicament.
Diana Butler Bass has this to say about the shift that’s been happening:
In terms of religion, it has caused every single American religious tradition - liberal or conservative, mainline or evangelical, ancient or modern, sacramental or contemporary - into some sort of defensive posture, worried about membership, budgets, buildings, and the future. No denomination has escaped this and none has dealt with it well. Every plan that I know of to fix, save, restructure, or otherwise rescue particular denominations has failed.
I think we need to pay attention here. I’m not saying that there’s no hope for the institution. Quite the contrary, but the nature of our role needs exploring. How do we serve the spirituality out there that wants little to do with our institutions?
[note for reader: I went off piste here so there’s no notes just headings….]
Consider something alternative:
create through Sanctuary
restore through Service
relate through Story
The measure of success has be based on :
nothing
a conviction that this practice is a good thing
Mulling the idea of contemplative lunches
inventing new ways of contemplation and space but retaining the foundations that we’ve inherited through tests of time
The big question is whether this is something the community are asking for. We know that they did a few years ago. Whether they still do or not remains to be seen.
Concurrency. Q+A