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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

If only I knew then what I still don't know.

—Douglas Dunn, The Year's Afternoon, 2000

“Ask a cosmopolitan friend or a young person to describe his or her religion and you are likely to get ‘I'm spiritual but not religious,’” conservative provocateur Laura Ingraham writes in her recent jeremiad bemoaning the nation's cultural decay, Of Thee I Zing (2011). Predictably, Ingraham finds this popular self-description both vapid and dismaying: “‘The spiritual but not religious' moniker has become so trendy, it now has its own acronym: S-B-N-R. How about this one: S-T-U-P-I-D?” Not exactly sophisticated criticism, but Ingraham flogs the “SBNR crowd” long enough to make an inadvertently telling swipe about how they constitute a bunch of erratic dabblers. “Perpetually dipping their hands into the Whitman Sampler of Faith,” Ingraham jabs, “these searchers taste each flavor, but never stay long enough to savor any one in particular.”¹

It is safe to say that Ingraham did not have Walt Whitman on her mind when she made that allusion, but rather a big box of chocolates. Reaching for a popular product logo, the Whitman's Sampler®, Ingraham played with the stereotyped image of the country's unmoored religious seekers as fickle consumers possessed by an insatiable appetite for variety. That censure, a commonplace of cultural criticism, has been around a long while now, and it comes not just from the right wing. Deriding the spiritual-but-not-religious demographic for its flighty tastes—say, a yearning for “tofu prepared by Tibetan virgins,” as Katha Pollitt put it in the pages of The Nation magazine in 2007—seems just as likely to happen on the other side of the political spectrum. “Avoid weasel words. Like ‘spirituality,’” Pollitt bluntly advised her fellow liberals. “It's religion.” Do not fall for the spiritual as some stylish, gently lit alternative to the religious, Pollitt was saying. It is all bad—just in case anyone on the secular left was tempted to think otherwise.²

Restless Souls tried in its first incarnation in 2005 to provide space to think differently about the Walt Whitman Sampler of Faith—the American invention and hallowing of “spirituality” as something loftier and more open-ended than “religion.” Now, seven years on, the design for this second edition remains much the same. I still think the tradition that flows from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lydia Maria Child, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Sarah Farmer, William James, Rufus Jones, Howard Thurman, Max Ehrmann, and company is worthy of serious consideration as an important variety of American liberalism, but I am concerned far more with the roots of this religious outlook than with its current political consequence. It was common enough over the last three decades, and especially in the first years of this century, to imagine that the renewal of the religious left was just what the country needed as a counterweight to the rise of the religious right. As I reflect now on this second edition, I would readily admit that such a perspective had particular resonance during President George W. Bush's ascendancy, when Restless Souls was under initial construction. A veritable flotilla of academics and pundits raised the flag for “spiritual progressives” in hopes that such religious liberals might reawaken and coalesce into a more vital political force.³ On second look, I would leave such present-day potentialities for others to stoke (or dampen) and dwell instead on the historical questions at the heart of Restless Souls: How did the spiritual come to be privileged over the religious by so many Americans, and what were the cultural implications of sanctifying that division? Those are puzzles enough.

A proclamation from Whitman's Democratic Vistas (1871), on display among the epigraphs to this book, is one canonical moment in the imagining of “spirituality” as the most elevated, precious, and desired portion of religion. Not in churches, creeds, sermons, or organizations, but in the “solitariness of individuality” would “the spirituality of religion” be realized: “Only here, and on such terms,” the poet announced, “the meditation, the devout ecstasy, the soaring flight.” Whitman's Democratic Vistas is revealing not only because of the way it exalts “spirituality” and extracts it from “religion,” but also because of the string of closely interconnected concepts it brings into alignment with the spiritual: meditation, solitude, mystical ecstasy, ineffability, freedom, aspiration, and individuality, all of which get juxtaposed with ecclesial institutions. The latter, Whitman claimed, “melt away like vapors” when confronted with these boundless “soul energies.”⁴

To consider the nineteenth-century transformation of “spirituality,” as Whitman's free-associated litany suggests, is also to track a host of related terms, practices, and ideas. Much of the time “mystical experience” and “mysticism,” for example, ran in advance of “spirituality” as the keywords in this liberal lexicon for denoting religion at its best, but the mystics, too, served as romanticized stand-ins for the broader Transcendentalist reevaluation of the churches as sources of community and authority. “The people do not believe any longer in churches,” an editorialist in The Radical—a masthead for post-Protestant liberals—opined in 1868. “And they have no faith at all in ‘organized religion.' That for them has been played out. Religion does not bear such fumbling with in our day. It has a private office…. We need not run to church, nor exercise ourselves so in efforts to be spiritual.”⁵ In excavating how “spirituality” was transformed in the nineteenth century, it quickly becomes clear how much else needs to be excavated as well—in this instance, the very way in which religion became equated with “organized religion,” an obverse formulation without which spirituality as creative individuality and pure interiority could not take wing. Indeed, religion gradually became so thoroughly associated with system and structure that the very adjective organized came to be superfluous; for today's seekers, it is implied in the term religion.

As Laura Ingraham's cutting remarks suggest, the notion of being “spiritual but not religious” has now become the favored way of describing America's metaphysical preoccupations. Of relatively recent vintage as a labeling device, the spiritual-but-not-religious tag emerged initially within the world of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) in the middle decades of the twentieth century.⁶ That recovery group, originating in the seeker culture of the 1930s and 1940s, found multiple sources of inspiration—from evangelical devotional guides to the experimental quests of such figures as Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard. Tellingly enough, among the most prominent wellsprings for AA founder Bill Wilson was William James's Varieties of Religious Experience. Taking James's account of conversion, mysticism, and healthy-mindedness to heart, Wilson built a small-group therapy around disclaiming any ties to institutional religion, while simultaneously accentuating the importance of spiritual experience for self-transformation. Through the 1960s and 1970s the spiritual-but-not-religious distinction was being invoked mostly in relation to AA's popular twelve-step program, but the construct soon gained much wider currency. By the 1990s it had become the coin of the realm, a paradigmatic expression used in everything from personal ads to academic monographs. On the cusp of the new millennium, the Gallup organization even decided that the concept had gained enough cultural traction to ratify it with a question in a public-opinion survey; the poll presented Americans with three options for describing their beliefs: religious, spiritual but not religious, or neither. Thirty percent chose the SBNR option.⁷

The ascent of the spiritual-but-not-religious identification was immediately seen as an important sign of the times, the most conspicuous indicator of a “new spirituality” that had come into vogue among baby boomers and post-boomers. To be sure, the descriptor's growing usage represented an impressive flowering: from the recovery literature of AA, it had burgeoned into a well-nigh ubiquitous designation. Notwithstanding its relative novelty as a piece of shorthand, the SBNR epithet was also the latest condensation of a post-Protestant sensibility that had initially taken shape among a particular set of nineteenth-century religious dissidents—Transcendentalists, radical Unitarians, Whitmanites, progressive-minded Quakers, and their sundry allies. These liberal religious currents, almost by definition, were never containable within denominational bounds, and eventually they flowed into any number of new rivulets—from AA to Burning Man to channeling to Druidic nature worship to Esalen.⁸ Despite the ever-growing profusion of metaphysical options, it is not an overreach to maintain that familiar liberal, romantic notions—about personal experience, organized religion, serenity, solitude, sublime surroundings, artistic self-expression, and cosmopolitan piety—continue to structure this spiritual-but-not-religious disposition. The cachet of this latest appellation should not disguise its recognizable historicity, the ways in which it serves as a discursive variation on deeply embedded cultural themes. The SBNR diction sounds anything but new once it is set alongside the vernacular of nineteenth-century religious liberalism, a dialect that was spoken with increasing frequency and fluency from the 1830s forward.

Recognizing those long-term commonalities still leaves the million-dollar question hanging in the air: What were the social consequences of imagining religion this way? Did this Emersonian turn—the sense that religion was fundamentally about the sacredness of the individual, not the institution of the church—represent self-reliance run amok? Did spirituality, once reimagined in the private and intimate terms of nineteenth-century religious liberalism, have any public face or political weight? It was a commonplace among religious liberals to insist that their open-road spirituality necessarily circled back to an ethic of social compassion and progressive reform. That proposition amounted, indeed, to liberal orthodoxy by the turn of the twentieth century. When Earl Morse Wilbur, president of the Unitarian seminary in Berkeley, sketched in 1916 one of the first historical portraits of “the Liberal Movement in American Religion,” he claimed that the tradition effectively combined two qualities: On the one hand, the “inner significance” of religious liberalism was defined “in terms of Mysticism,” “a mystical attitude of the soul”; on the other hand, it was an “ethicized and socialized religion,” a faith insistently applied to public life.⁹ This, at least, was the talk that religious liberals talked, but how they walked that talk has, of course, always been harder to assess. Restless Souls examines any number of wayfarers who attempted to join their spiritualized individuality to social practice, whether embodied in Thomas Wentworth Higginson's ecumenical sympathies and abolitionist activities or Rufus Jones's humanitarian labors through Quaker relief networks. Still, the social import of this American-made spirituality was necessarily messy, diffuse, and plural. Its architects commonly insisted that their social ethics and mystical absorptions were inextricably linked, but they hardly had a fail-safe blueprint for establishing that combination or for making it effective.

That the liberal highlighting of spirit over authority, individuality over institution, produced mixed results in social practice is no surprise. Just as religious liberals championed critical suspicion of any and all orthodoxies, they were also quite cognizant that their own bromides required recurrent scrutiny—not least their adoration of the mystical, the meditative, and the solitary at the expense of community and fellowship. Few of the criticisms that skeptics aim at today's religious seekers would take these nineteenth-century forerunners entirely by surprise. Religious liberals, after all, were nothing if not self-questioning on matters of faith, and their in-house misgivings still reverberate:

1. What keeps self-cultivation from turning into self-doting? Is “the crisis of self-surrender”—to borrow a phrase from William James—something that the self-reliant seeker can afford to dispense with as part of the religious life? Why should the solitary individual be taken as so definitive for religion?

2. What prevents liberal openness to religious variety from becoming flatly universalizing—as if the whole religious world could be made over in the singular image of a cosmopolitan New Englander? Are the interfaith practices and ideals that emerge from these liberal circles useful for bridging religious differences, or are such aspirations their own kind of missionary artifact?

3. Were these traveling souls really an emancipatory vanguard, or were they—as often as not—lost souls whose tramping seemed only to lead to more bewilderment and melancholy? Whether life has any meaning and even whether life is worth living—such questions were posed with blunt directness in these post-Protestant circles, but did the very asking of them suggest that doubt and unbelief had already prevailed, that the spiritual was a weak lifeline in a sea of disenchantments?

4. Was the market in the saddle, after all, and riding these questers into a global emporium in which new religious insights and abundant consumer choices were on a par with one another? How easily were Transcendentalist dreams of individual fulfillment and firsthand experience co-opted into the endless romance of consuming? “Even serenity can become something horrible,” the poet Tony Hoagland observes in his aptly entitled collection Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, “if you make a commercial about it/using smiling, white-haired people/quoting Thoreau to sell retirement homes.”¹⁰

Vital questions, like the ones above, could be multiplied at some length. It is the ambition of Restless Souls to foreclose none of them. Patent answers abound; Laura Ingraham's recent zingers are symptomatic of that. The spiritual-but-not-religious pilgrims of today, just as much as Whitman's nineteenth-century samplers, warrant fair-minded and focused engagement. No less than their foils on the religious right, they merit ethnographic familiarity and historical cognizance—as well as the kind of critical understanding that comes from careful and sustained study. Such engagement was my purpose in putting this book together in the first place; it remains so still as I send forth this second edition.

I have been fortunate in the pursuit of this project to have the support of generous institutions and foundations: Princeton University, the Lilly Endowment, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Center for the Contemplative Mind in Society, Harvard Divinity School, and Washington University in St. Louis. Each has helped me have time to research, write, and teach the history of these restless American souls.

Among colleagues, I owe a special debt to Laurie Maffly-Kipp and Mark Valeri, codirectors with me of a multiyear project on the history of American Christian practice, and, more importantly, valued friends. My gratitude is extended as well to our coconspirators in that enterprise: Catherine Brekus, Anthea Butler, Heather Curtis, Kathryn Lofton, Michael McNally, Rick Ostrander, Sally Promey, Roberto Lint Sagarena, Tisa Wenger, and David Yoo. Chris Coble at the Lilly Endowment was absolutely crucial in helping to bring us together and in keeping us on track.

Professor William R. Hutchison was always one of my favorite interlocutors for things liberal and Transcendentalist. He pressed me on one angle, then another. We had, for example, a particularly tangled correspondence over how the idea of the seeker evolved. It is with sadness that I note his passing between the first and second editions of this book. Other scholars and friends also helped me think through one piece or another of this project in one or both of its incarnations: Catherine Albanese, Dorothy Bass, Courtney Bender, Ann Braude, Richard Wightman Fox, Dean Grodzins, David Hackett, David Hall, Charles Hambrick-Stowe, Matthew Hedstrom, Amy Hollywood, Kathleen Holscher, Jeffrey Kripal, Emily Mace, John Lardas Modern, Laura Olson, Robert Orsi, Stephen Prothero, Albert Raboteau, Michael Robertson, Gary Scharnhorst, Robert Stockman, Ann Taves, Bradford Verter, David Watt, Christopher White, and Robert Wuthnow. Rosanne Adams-Junkins, Jacalyn Blume, Roger Dahl, Sue Hodson, Anne Gordon Perry, Diana Franzusoff Peterson, and Wesley Wilson offered critical guidance to indispensable archival materials.

Eric Brandt, my original editor for this project, was wonderfully supportive, and I remain very grateful for his expert eye and steady encouragement. For this second edition, I have been fortunate indeed to work with Reed Malcolm, who has managed in his years at University of California Press to put a significant stamp on the field of American religion and culture.

As in the first edition, so with the second, my most important partner in enterprises both scholarly and familial has been R. Marie Griffith. Scholarship is both satisfying and humbling, but parenting—there we really learn our limitations and find our delights.

The first edition of this book was dedicated to John F. Wilson, professor emeritus at Princeton University, a cherished mentor and friend. So, too, is this second edition. If it raised John's eyebrows to see his good name associated with something as potentially frivolous and giddy as spirituality, he has never said so. If he thinks I erred in laying so much of this history at the feet of his own New England forebears, again he has been the diplomat and not let on. Of my prodigal and restless ways beyond the pages of this book—moves from Princeton to Cambridge to St. Louis since the volume first appeared—John and I have spoken, but with necessarily oblique feeling. Colleagues together at Princeton when this book was first in the works, we see each other infrequently now. That distance has in no way lessened the deep regard and respect I have always had for John. And wistfulness, I would like to say, is irrelevant to such affections. “What have I to do with lamentation?” Whitman asked in Leaves of Grass. “I keep no account with lamentation.”

Notes

1. Laura Ingraham, with Raymond Arroyo, Of Thee I Zing: America's Cultural Decline from Muffin Tops to Body Shots (New York: Threshold, 2011), 283–84.

2. Katha Pollitt, “Happy New Year! Resolutions for Liberals,” The Nation, 22 January 2007.

3. See, for example, Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right (San Francisco: Harper, 2006); Bob Edgar, Middle Church: Reclaiming the Moral Values of the Faithful Majority from the Religious Right (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006); Gordon Lynch, The New Spirituality: An Introduction to Progressive Belief in the Twenty-First Century (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007); Amy Sullivan, The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats Are Closing the God Gap (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008); and E. J. Dionne Jr., Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

4. Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1996), 989.

5. “Thin Churches,” The Radical 4 (1868): 137–38.

6. See Ernest Kurtz, Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous (Center City, MN: Hazelden, 1979), 175–78, 194–95; Robert C. Fuller, Spiritual, but Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 112–13. With the shortcut of Google Books and its search engine, it is now a simple matter to confirm the initial association of both constructs—“spiritual but not religious” and “spiritual rather than religious”—with Alcoholics Anonymous. The distinction shows up incidentally in a handful of other sources along the way, but the only recognizable thread through the mid-1980s is AA.

7. George Gallup Jr., The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1999 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2000), 281.

8. The scholarly literature on these recent religious trends has been wonderfully robust since the appearance of the first edition of Restless Souls in 2005. See especially Courtney Bender, The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Lee Gilmore, Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Jeffrey J. Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Kathryn Lofton, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); and Robert Wuthnow, After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). On the historical foundations, scholarly labors have been similarly vigorous. See notably Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Matthew S. Hedstrom, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Pamela E. Klassen, Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); John Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Michael Robertson, Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); and Christopher G. White, Unsettled Minds: Psychology and the American Search for Spiritual Assurance, 1830–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). I have learned much from this recent literature; it has helped me see many things I missed on the first pass. One conjunction—namely, the interplay among spirituality, sexuality, and religious liberalism—is something I see now that I should have done more with in these pages. I have tried to supply that missing chapter in a companion volume. See Leigh Eric Schmidt, Heaven's Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman (New York: Basic Books, 2010). The works of Jeffrey Kripal and Michael Robertson, cited above, also go a long way toward supplying that piece of the story.

9. Earl Morse Wilbur, The First Century of the Liberal Movement in American Religion (Boston: American Unitarian Association, [1916]), 28.

10. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Penguin, 1985), 211; Tony Hoagland, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2010), 14.