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INTRODUCTION

SPIRITUALITY IN THE MAKING

ONE 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 had grown up attending the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Gradually she has moved away from the intermittently observed Christianity of her youth into an everyday practice of Buddhist chanting, prayer, and meditation. In calling her daughter Emerson in honor of America's paradigmatic nineteenth-century seeker and liberal dissident, Jones witnessed to her own spiritual journey and tugged on the twine that ties twenty-first-century quests to nineteenth-century emancipations. “Emerson was the prophet of spirituality,” an admirer wrote already in 1882, a sentiment that Jones has effectively incarnated through her daughter's given name. To paraphrase the Concord sage himself, the here and now is intimately tied to the there and then.⁹

Or take the story of Elizabeth Lesser's search, which she relates at the outset of The New American Spirituality: A Seeker's Guide (1999). There she tells of a concerted quest for meaning and community that takes her through a series of religious affiliations in the 1960s and 1970s. Trading off between Thomas Merton's contemplative Catholicism and the meditative practices of a Zen center, Lesser eventually settles upon a westernized version of Sufism after meeting the guru Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan in 1972. It is through this encounter and the ongoing workshops of the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, that Lesser gradually finds her spiritual longing for “mindfulness,” “heartfulness,” and “soulfulness” satisfied. Could there be a more paradigmatic tale of a new generation of seekers?

It does not take long, though, to see beneath the surface of the contemporary in Lesser's search for “a new kind of spirituality.” Among the devotions she undertook with Pir Vilayat and her fellow travelers were “universal worships,” in which “each of the major world religions, and many of the minor ones as well, were honored with scripture and practice. In one Sunday service we might read from the Koran, Hindu and Buddhist texts, Sufi stories, and the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, and then chant mantras, do traditional Jewish dances, and wash each other's feet in the spirit of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples.” Those services, however trendy they might sound, were not a recent experiment of the counterculture. Pir Vilayat's father, Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882–1927), who first brought his message from India to the United States in 1910, was actually responsible for introducing the practice. Marrying a near relation of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, in 1912, Khan quickly attracted his own eclectic circle of American inquirers into Sufi music, dance, and devotion. At the outset of one of his lecture tours in 1925, the New York Times offered an account of Khan's “spirituality” in an article entitled “Indian Mystic Offers One Religion for All.” “My ancestors were Moslems,” Khan explained to the reporter. “I have no religion. All places of worship are one to me. I can enter a Buddhist temple, a mosque, a church or a synagogue in the same spirit. Spirituality is the tuning of the heart.”

In his lectures in New York and elsewhere across the country, Hazrat Inayat Khan justified his innovations through an appeal to the increasingly pervasive ideals of religious liberalism: spiritual liberty, mystical experience, meditative interiority, universal brotherhood, and sympathetic appreciation of all religions. Indeed, in the very years surrounding Khan's American sojourns, Martin Kellogg Schermerhorn, an industrious Unitarian minister from Poughkeepsie, was promoting, with the backing of the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, various collections of hymns, scriptures, and prayers for the celebration of “universal worship” services. For Schermerhorn as much as Khan, modern religious identities would be regrounded only through an undoing of ethnic, racial, and religious tribalism, including Christian and Muslim exclusivism. Hence Schermerhorn busied himself in compiling the liturgical materials for the universal religion as he imagined it would find expression in new “Cosmopolitan Churches” and within the private devotions of eclectics like himself and Khan. Just this quickly, then, Elizabeth Lesser's recent seeking can be resituated in a century-long perspective: not so much a rootless baby-boomer quest, but instead a more deeply grounded and complex exploration of a cosmopolitan spirituality.¹⁰

Anecdotes aside, the argument offered in these pages about the centrality of religious liberalism may seem at best counterintuitive. At least at an institutional level, conservative Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants dominate the current scene. The Christian Right and its high-profile allies in Washington grab the headlines and occupy the public square with confidence and flair. At the same time, new immigrants—whether Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, or Korean Christians—lobby with growing effectiveness for a fuller voice in civic life. The so-called liberal or mainline denominations have over the last half-century fallen on very hard times, suffering an almost staggering erosion in membership and public influence. Meanwhile, beyond the thinned ranks of liberal Protestants, New Agers have been so satirized as quirky crystal gazers, left-over hippies, and self-absorbed spiritual shoppers—David Brooks, a pundit for PBS and the New York Times, has called them “vaporheads”—that even neo-pagans and Wiccans feel compelled to disown the New Age epithet.¹¹ Why would anyone beyond the hallways of Harvard Divinity School or the streets of Santa Monica think that liberalism still explains much of anything about American religion?

Few commentators would dare to wear liberal Protestant blinkers anymore, let alone raise a paean to the foundational importance of America's liberal tradition. In theology, as in politics, liberalism is the hobgoblin of orthodoxies, possessing a fearsomeness for conservatives and traditionalists little removed from John Henry Newman's mid-nineteenth-century conjuration: “The more serious thinkers among us…regard the spirit of Liberalism as the characteristic of the destined Antichrist.” Perhaps given the endless polemics and the very slipperiness of the term, liberalism is a label best retired. Perhaps it would be less contentious, if more cumbersome, to refer to this larger religious impulse, under William James's rubric, as “the personal and romantic view of life.” Or perhaps it would be better to think of this as the rise of “cosmopolitan,” “eclectic,” or “ecumenical” perspectives on spirituality. Yet, as a term of considerable resonance in nineteenth- and twentieth-century religious thought, liberalism allows an array of movements, within Christianity and beyond it, to be considered under the same umbrella. However difficult, it is still possible to use the liberal epithet in contextual, evenhanded ways without necessarily launching another theological or political Last Judgment in which fundamentalist sheep are separated from modernist goats (or vice versa).¹²

Liberalism had intellectual progenitors from Baruch Spinoza and John Locke to Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, but, as a distinct religious and political ideology, it was an invention of the nineteenth century, not the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A broadly diffused movement, it was always as much a religious vision of emancipated souls as a political theory of individual rights and civil liberties or an economic calculus of the beneficence of free markets. In the United States, liberalism cohered first in the 1820s as a radical form of Protestant Christianity that then over the next few decades readily edged beyond Christianity itself. It was the volatile currency of religious innovators and critics of orthodoxy who, though spanning a wide spectrum of allegiances, remained convinced of their own essential affinities. Individualistic in their understanding of authority, religious liberals were generally contemptuous of creeds and scorned uncritical submission to scriptural texts as ignorance or even idolatry. Moving beyond mere toleration as an ideal, they led the way as eager sympathizers with other faiths. With a grand sense of human freedom and potentiality, they were committed to progress in the domains of spiritual consciousness, social organization, and scientific knowledge. For religious liberals, unlike their secular cousins, a deepened and diversified spirituality was part of modernity's promise. Materialism and scientism might challenge this unfolding religion of the spirit from one side and reactionary pieties and politics from another, but, to its proponents, those perils only made the inward dimensions of liberalism more important. Religious liberalism, with its motley bedfellows of romantics and reformers, led the way in redefining spirituality and setting out its essentials.

Getting a handle on “liberalism,” of course, is no easier than pinning down “spirituality.” The Harvard-educated metaphysician Horatio Dresser, one of the many architects of the “more spiritual phase” of American progressivism around 1900, dubbed the nineteenth century “the epoch of religious liberalism.” He saw it as a momentous movement that affected one denomination after another and that decidedly opened up the spiritual life to Emersonian self-reliance and therapeutic well-being. He quickly added, though: “The history of liberalism is so comprehensive that it is always a question nowadays what we mean when we use the term.” Then, as a succinct definition, he offered: “To be liberal is to be of the new age.” It was not a bad effort, but the basics of religious liberalism require at least a few more brushstrokes. The rudiments, at least for spiritually inclined progressives like Dresser, included

• individual aspiration after mystical experience or religious feeling;

• the valuing of silence, solitude, and serene meditation;

• the immanence of the transcendent—in each person and in nature;

• the cosmopolitan appreciation of religious variety as well as unity in diversity;

• ethical earnestness in pursuit of justice-producing reforms or “social salvation”;

• an emphasis on creative self-expression and adventuresome seeking.

An interlocking group of precepts and practices, these could pass under various names—from the Transcendentalist Newness to the Universal Religion to the New Spirituality. Religious liberalism remains particularly serviceable as shorthand for this conglomeration.¹³

Imbued to varying degrees with these principles, emancipated souls set out less on a pilgrimage toward otherworldly salvation and more on an individualized search to imbue this life with spiritual meaning and depth. Liberal pilgrims still made progress, but they did so not through the perilous landscape of damnation in John Bunyan's seventeenth-century representation of the journey to the Celestial City. Instead, they traversed an increasingly disenchanted and divided terrain that they sought to reanimate and make whole through a universalized religion of the spirit. That new topography had its own hazards, of course—mires of alienation, lost identity, and nihilism—that sometimes made hell seem more real than the spewing of any fire-and- brimstone evangelist. As Whitman observed in Leaves of Grass,

Down-hearted doubters dull and excluded,

Frivolous, sullen, moping, angry, affected, dishearten'd, atheistical,

I know every one of you, I know the sea of torment, doubt, despair and unbelief.

In opening up new roads for traveling souls, religious liberals regularly confronted those psychic risks and sometimes even overcame them.¹⁴

In a moment of irrational exuberance all his own, Thomas Jefferson once predicted that Unitarianism, as a newly minted denomination of “liberal Christians” in New England, would come to dominate American religious life as a great force of reason. With its emphasis on Jesus as moral exemplar more than divine being, its optimism about human nature, and its refined educative vision, Unitarianism would, Jefferson believed, set the tone for the new republic's unfolding improvement and advancing knowledge, its freedom from superstition and intolerance. “I confidently expect,” he wrote from Monticello in 1822, “that the present generation will see Unitarianism become the general religion of the United States.”¹⁵ That ascent did not come close to happening and now sounds downright laughable as a prediction (in a nation of about 150 million church members, Unitarian Universalists account for just over 150,000 of them). Looked at another way—say, from the far reaches of Emerson's influence—disaffected Unitarians and their liberal kin did have a sweeping effect on American religious life and the spiritual aspirations of vast numbers of Americans.

The spiritual life, as religious romantics imagined it, was nothing if not personal, and any adequate history of these developments has to emerge out of the inner lives of distinct figures. Many of those who people these pages are familiar (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, W. E. B. Du Bois, and William James), others somewhat less so (Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Lydia Maria Child, Felix Adler, Rufus Jones, Ralph Waldo Trine, Swami Vivekananda, Howard Thurman, and Thomas Kelly), and some all but forgotten (William Rounseville Alger, Anagarika Dharmapala, Sarah Farmer, Protap Mozoomdar, and Max Ehrmann). Attributable to this diverse group of thinkers, writers, and organizers were most of the fundamental innovations: the transformation of “mysticism” and “spirituality” from obscurity to prominence, the revamping of the seventeenth-century notion of “seekers,” the locating of religion's essence in the solitary individual, as well as the sympathetic capacity to appreciate and appropriate other religious traditions as spiritual resources. The following chapters pursue four generations of liberals who helped create an expansive, unsettled culture of spiritual seeking: the Transcendentalists of the 1830s and 1840s, their radical heirs of the 1850s to 1880s, the realizing agents of liberalism's universal vision between 1890 and 1910, and the seekers who brought to fruition the emergent spirituality after 1910.¹⁶

Restless Souls opens with a chapter that dives into the heart of the Transcendentalist love of “mysticism.” The English term came into being only in the mid-eighteenth century as part of the polemics over the place of ecstatic experience in the Christian life, and its associations were initially more negative than positive. A century later, it was an important and colorful fragment in the spiritual kaleidoscope. The eighteenth-century Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg, whose accounts of his extensive conversations with angels were more popular in death than in life, was one important contributor to this transformation; he reached the height of his American influence in the 1840s and 1850s. Homegrown mystics became increasingly prevalent, and many of them emerged at the intersections of the Transcendental Club and the Harvard Divinity School, a place, as one of its own deans admitted, “made up of mystics, skeptics, and dyspeptics.” By the time the pioneering American psychologist William James embraced “mysticism” as a prominent part of his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), he had a sustained lineage upon which to build. James's exploration of mystical consciousness represented a culmination in the ascent of the new mysticism from Emerson forward—a climb that had been swift and momentous in its effects. The United States was a country, a critic sighed in 1906, where “mysticism” and “a craving for spiritual experiences” had “run mad.”¹⁷

One of the most important Transcendentalist innovations, charted in the second chapter, was the remaking of the hermit's solitude into a much more expansive spiritual trope. Before Emerson celebrated lonely strolls through nature in the 1830s and before Thoreau took to the woods at Walden Pond in the 1840s, the hermit had suffered a fall from grace, with Enlightenment philosophers and Protestant critics alike attacking the “monkery” of Catholic anchorites. In the early American republic the hermit, as a social type, also stood as an outcast who sought solitude as a refuge for lonely suffering, and the tales that circulated had a tragic cast of violence, lost love, and ominous mystery. Hermits were no longer enviable or heroic embodiments of religious dedication, austerity, or vision; they more often evoked bemused curiosity than pious awe; and sometimes that curiosity turned into outright contempt, especially when the self-mortifying practices of the ancient desert saints were in view. In the half-century or so after the 1840s, however, solitude reemerged as a defining feature of the spiritual life in American culture, an oasis of redemptive isolation amid the myriad alienations of modernity. It became such an entrenched habit of mind, if not body, that such grand theorists as William James and Alfred North Whitehead made solitary experience the core of religion itself. Aptly enough, James even noted one quirky seeker he had come across in his combing of spiritual narratives for whom the very mention of “the word hermit was enough to transport him.”¹⁸

The third chapter explores the growing conviction that all the religions of the world were cut from the same cloth, that at bottom they shared a common spirituality. The Transcendentalists, eclectics to the core, were the first Americans to dabble with Asian religions as a source of personal inspiration and spiritual aspiration. From Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman on down, they distanced themselves from orthodox Christianity (and unorthodox Christianity for that matter) through appeal to the religions of the East. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a second-generation Transcendentalist, was especially prominent in crafting an absorbent, inclusive religion out of the various religions of the world. Higginson, a radical abolitionist who led an African-American regiment during the Civil War, made a signal religious contribution through a frequently republished essay called “The Sympathy of Religions.” Higginson and his numerous colleagues—among them the fellow radical Lydia Maria Child—happily offered up the gems of sacred wisdom to all liberal souls for their enrichment and through such offerings imagined themselves immersed in nothing less than “the piety of the world.” The creation of that cosmopolitan, sympathetic disposition fueled one innovation after another in American spirituality. It was a sine qua non of a seeker culture.

One of the results of the growing American encounter with Asian religions was a heightened emphasis on the practice of meditation and the value of the concentrated mind, and that distinct history is chronicled in the fourth chapter, “Meditation for Americans.” The importation of yoga as a serious practice began in the 1890s, and much of its popularity centered on the disciplines of mental focus and composure in a swirling, rushed, anxiety-ridden culture. Significantly, Americans took up yoga in the context of an increasing interest in the implications of positive thinking for health, harmony, and well-being. In 1902 William James surmised that it was not evangelical Protestants but “mind-curers” who were responsible for the growing presence of “methodical meditation” in American religious life.¹⁹ He was right about that: meditation came to more and more Americans not through a retrieval of venerable Christian practices, but through the rise of “New Thought,” as the optimistic gospel of mental healing and positive thinking was then dubbed. The burst of interest in meditation involved a peculiarly American conversation among Transcendentalists, liberal Protestants, Reform Jews, Vedantists, Buddhists, and mind-cure metaphysicians. A significant swath of New Thought was simply liberal propositions put into practical dress. Ralph Waldo Trine, one of the most popular American guides to a contemplative mind and a harmonious body, shared much more than his first and middle names with Emerson.

In the fifth chapter the saga of Sarah Farmer and her grand experiment unfolds. Inspired by the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, a much-watched international gathering of religious representatives of different faiths, Farmer set out to create an ongoing center of learning at which leading spiritual teachers from diverse traditions would congregate in pursuit of a global spirituality. To that end, she created a summer community called Greenacre in Eliot, Maine, in 1894, a gathering that would throb from one year to the next with religious variety and innovation. Under pines and in tents, mental healers communed happily with Hindu swamis, Buddhist practitioners, university professors, accomplished artists, and Concord sages. Though a stunning success—the Greenacre gatherings thrived for more than two decades; the World's Parliament lasted all of seventeen days—the community nonetheless fell into division. A fault line cracked open between those who remained loyal to the original design of eclectic seeking and those who came to favor submission to one claimant to universal spirituality. Farmer's pilgrimage into the Bahá'í faith—“the Persian Revelation,” as she called it—capped a life of religious inquiry in which elements of everything from Buddhism to Spiritualism commingled. Her new allegiance sorely tested liberal notions of freedom and open-mindedness, even though the movement she embraced echoed the wider values of peace, harmony, and universal brotherhood. The brouhaha at Greenacre raises in sharp relief the still relevant question of whether seekers are to keep on seeking for seeking's sake or to identify an end point to their search. Can a solid religious identity be achieved only through the particularity, integrity, and discipline of one tradition? Was the point of pursuing the spiritual life self-expansion, artistic creativity, and endless curiosity or instead self-surrender, obedience, and resignation to God?

Even as Greenacre's influence declined, other spiritual retreats arose. Among the more important and lasting was Pendle Hill, a community of contemplatives, activists, and seekers led by the Society of Friends (Quakers) and founded in 1930. In the final chapter, an influential group of Quaker intellectuals, all of whom doubled as spiritual guides at Pendle Hill and elsewhere, is explored. Between 1900 and 1940 Rufus Jones, a professor of philosophy at Haverford College, pioneered the liberal transformation of the Society of Friends. He remade them as the archetypal “seekers” in part by resurfacing that category from the seventeenth-century literature of English sectarians and then applying it in a universalized way to the modern religious world. Any number of twentieth-century seekers might suggest the earnestness of these striving souls, but certainly an excellent exemplar is one of Jones's own acolytes, Thomas R. Kelly, who swerved desperately out of academic philosophy into devotional discipline in the late 1930s. He stands in a long line of Quaker-connected spiritual writers in the twentieth century: from Douglas Steere, Howard Thurman, and Elton Trueblood to Richard Foster, Parker Palmer, and Mary Rose O'Reilly. The mysticism of Jones and Kelly as well as the broadly inclusive retreat at Pendle Hill made the Society of Friends disproportionately influential in the shaping of a contemporary American spirituality of seeking. In unpredictable ways, these mystic Quakers even became entangled with an estimable group of émigré writers in Southern California, including Gerald Heard, Aldous Huxley, and Christopher Isherwood, all of whom were quintessential seekers on the opposite coast.

The story, of course, continues well beyond Kelly (he died young in 1941). But the culture of seeking was, by then, in place, and after Kelly (and this includes the much ballyhooed rupture of the 1960s) it is historical epilogue. The continuing popularity of Max Ehrmann's “Desiderata,” a prose poem first published in 1927, suggests some of the echoes still resounding from the seeker culture of the early twentieth century. Its imperative of being gentle on oneself and finding serenity amid chaotic social churnings became a widely quoted spiritual motto on posters and plaques in the 1940s and 1950s; it even climbed the pop charts in the early 1970s as the title piece of a Grammy-winning album of Les Crane's; and it continues to circulate now as a “survival guide” for twenty-first-century life. Widely seen as symptomatic of the therapeutic, privatized, and individualistic bankruptcy of today's seeker spirituality, Ehrmann's piety proves, on closer inspection, much harder to caricature. Draining the puddle of syrup and surmounting the heap of satire that have overwhelmed Ehrmann is more than a concluding historical exercise. The recovery of his story serves as a closing parable for a much larger project: namely, the serious reengagement of the interwoven history of liberalism, progressivism, and spirituality in American culture. Given the ease with which the religious right now monopolizes “moral values” as their own distinct turf, it is all the more important to know the history of the spiritual left in order to reclaim an alternative vista from which to view the outworking of American democracy.

Throughout the book, the American spirituality crafted by these seekers is taken with the seriousness of the introspective brooding and liberating vision that gave it birth. Much of the contemporary commentary on American religion is suffused with the tropes of the marketplace—as if economic models of free competition, entrepreneurial promotion, and consumer demand are the most reliable guides to the spiritual ferment. From this perspective, all this spiritual sampling is but an inner mirroring of the surfeit of choice in America's megamalls. Religious seeking becomes comparable to test-driving various automobiles to see which delivers the most satisfaction on Whitman's open road. This book resists such analogies and analysis not because they are irrelevant, but because they now seem all too obvious. In an age in which conservative pundits caricature liberalism as a shallow ideology of trendy consumerism—“latte liberals” or “Volvo liberals”—it is especially important to probe deeper than brand labels in exploring the cultural import of seeker spirituality.²⁰

Already in 1930 Woodbridge Riley complained in The Meaning of Mysticism about the “sordid” and “ridiculous” aspects of “commercialized mysticism,” which “spends not hours with the mystics, but minutes with the mystics.” Notwithstanding the thinness of his own book, he was caustic about how the market trivialized “a genuine search for the interior or hidden life.” “Go to any large department store and ask for books on mysticism and they will offer you books bearing such titles as these, ‘How to Strengthen Your Will,'…‘Silent Exercises’ and the like. By means of such apparatus adults can do their daily dozen in mental gymnastics.” In a market society, spiritual practices can be turned into commodities as much as spoons, handguns, or Halloween treats. This book takes for granted that commerce has been a powerful agent in the production and distribution of everything from Bibles to balloons; likewise, inner quests, even for off-the-grid simplicity or spiritual enlightenment, never transcend the market. Indeed, the consumer culture all too clearly feeds those very yearnings in its advertising images of spas, sports-club yoga, and alpine retreats.²¹

How else to understand the “Off-the-Cuff Philosophy” bracelet available from a recent catalog called Signals: Gifts That Enlighten and Entertain? In sterling silver, the bracelet features a saying dubiously attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, “beloved author, minister, activist, poet, philosopher, and lifelong believer in America”: “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” How else to fathom the advertisement for the Chevy Tahoe that promotes it as the perfect vehicle for “self-discovery” with a line from Thoreau's Walden? Thoreau's words—“I never found the companion so companionable as solitude”—bless the image of the forest-tucked SUV. The consumer culture encourages spiritual desires, just as it cultivates any number of other desires, and then offers the goods to assuage (temporarily) those cravings and anxieties. But a cynical narrative about commercialization is hardly the primary story of modern interiority. At this point it seems appropriate to give the trope of spiritual shoppers a much-deserved rest. And the same goes for all the smorgasbord, buffet, cafeteria, and deli imagery that one hears in relation to contemporary spirituality—as if religious seekers were little more than spiritual gluttons gobbling up anything and everything that they can heap on their plates.²²

Even as it offers an inner history of restless souls, this book remains inextricably tied to outer lives. It is a recurring rap on the “new spirituality” as well as on the eccentric individuality of Whitman and friends that they quickly sink into solipsism and become politically and ethically weightless. Narcissism and consumerism are serious issues—in the study of American spirituality as in the study of other aspects of American culture—but they are not uniquely Emersonian, romantic, or liberal problems. Evangelical Protestantism, which has produced more than its share of critics of the “new spirituality,” has also given rise to more than its share of Bible-based diets, gospels of wealth, and guides for the maximized erotic pleasures of married heterosexual couples. In other words, a therapeutic culture of self-realization and a consumer culture of self-gratification are at least as much “evangelical” as they are “liberal.” Yoga studios and aromatherapy hardly hold a candle to the conglomerate of T-shirt fashions, aerobics videos, and apocalyptic best sellers that makes up the Christian Booksellers Association.

The same liberal spirit that led to a critique of conventional Christianity and organized religion readily energized strenuous activism and self-denying social engagement, including innumerable reform causes from abolition to suffrage, from international relief to workers' rights. Commonly contained within this seeker spirituality was a critical social and political vision; repeatedly, self-reliance and solitary retreat were held in creative and effective tension with a sharply honed social ethics. By the 1920s and 1930s, the joining of “prayers and pickets” was a given of liberal spiritual practice. The religious and political vision of Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1950s and 1960s gained much from that combined inheritance from Thoreau to Mohandas Gandhi. A handful of nineteenth-century religious liberals, after all, had led the way in creating an open spiritual and ethical exchange with like-minded leaders in India and threw their support behind the anticolonial Buddhist revival in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). The ongoing call to “Free Tibet,” the fruitful alliance between American religious progressives and the Dalai Lama, has a history behind it that a bumper sticker can hardly compress. Or when Rabbi Michael Lerner speaks now of the possibilities of an “Emancipatory Spirituality,” when he sets that vision against the reactionary dimensions of American religion and politics, he is engaging the historical idiom long joining the material work of liberal progressivism to lived spiritual practice.²³

It does not require a commitment to religious liberalism to recognize its historical importance in giving birth to modern American spirituality. It is quite possible that traditionalists of whatever flavor will read this history as a tale of religious loss and cultural incoherence, a long train of evidence that self-reliance has run roughshod over community in the United States. It is equally possible that those who cherish a newfound spiritual eclecticism will read this history as a tale of far-seeing prophets to be acclaimed for their vision of progress and cosmopolitanism. Poised with the historian's caution between criticism and celebration, Restless Souls strives for a fair-minded depiction of the origins and unfolding of the American preoccupation with spirituality.