John Main Seminar 2015, Hamilton New Zealand, January. David Tacey on Religion and Spirituality in a Secular World

1. Spirituality and Religion in a
Secular World
Epigraph:
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born. – Matthew Arnold
 Matthew Arnold, ‘Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse’
(1855), in Kenneth Allott, ed., The Poems of Matthew
Arnold (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965), pp. 285-
94, 288, lines 85-6.

2.  As Sandra Schneiders concedes: ‘We have to
recognize the linguistic fact that neither religion in
general nor Christianity in particular any longer controls
the meaning and use of the term “spirituality”’.
 Sandra Schneiders, ‘Religion and Spirituality:
Strangers, Rivals, or Partners?’ The Santa Clara
Lectures 6:2, 2000, 5.
 Recently the idea of ‘secular spirituality’ has emerged
in scholarly discourse, a term which would have been
seen as contradictory a hundred years ago.
 Peter Van Ness, ed., Spirituality and the Secular Quest
(New York: Crossroad, 1996).

3.  Secularism found religion to be an embarrassment to the
core ideas of the secular state: progress and human
autonomy.
 Mike King, Secularism: The Hidden Origins of Disbelief
(Cambridge: James Clarke, 2007).
 In Western Europe generally, the spiritual life was shut down
and forced underground; churches declined and lost
authority in the public sphere. Over the last fifty years,
religious participation in Britain and Australia fell from 35% of
the population to a mere 7%, but in Germany, Holland and
Italy the percentages are only between 1% and 3%.

4.  Secularism led to the privatisation of the sacred, and that is
what we find in society today and what is referred to as
‘spirituality’. Many are alienated from churches because they
are products of a secular system that has devalued public
worship and forced spiritual life into the human subject. This
has weakened religion in the public sphere and intensified
spiritual longing in the private sphere. It is a paradoxical
situation, so that as formal religions continue to decline,
interest in spirituality is skyrocketing.
 David Hay and Kate Hunt, ‘Is Britain’s soul waking up?’, in
The Tablet (London), 24 June 2000, p. 846; Gerald Heald,
The Soul of Britain, 2000. Available online at The Tablet at
this address: http://www.thetablet.co.uk/page/special-
reports03;
 David Hay, Something There: The Biology of the Human
Spirit (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2006)

5.  Hence we are, as sociologists have announced, in a post-secular culture, and
the angry outbursts of fundamentalism are only one aspect of this return of the
repressed.
 There is a vast and growing literature on postsecular consciousness. This
literature includes:
 Makarand Paranjape, ed., Sacred Australia: Post-Secular Considerations
(Melbourne: Clouds of Magellan, 2009);
 David Tacey, Re-Enchantment: The New Australian Spirituality (Sydney:
HarperCollins, 2000);
 Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds., Religion (Stanford University
Press, 1998);
 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ Press, Belknap
Press, 2007);
 Harvey Cox, The Future of Faith (New York: HarperCollins, 2009);
 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and Jürgen Habermas, Dialectics of
Secularization: On Reason and Religion, trans. Brian McNeil (2005; San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006).

6.  The East does mystical experience better than the West, which is
why there is such widespread interest in Eastern pathways,
especially among the young. The East places experience first and
asks people to experiment with spiritual practices and draw
conclusions based on their experience. This is the perfect formula
for religious life in a post-modern, post-secular and scientific world,
which is why Einstein declared that the future of religion is
Buddhism.
 Albert Einstein, ‘On Religion, God, and Philosophy’, in Alice
Calaprice, ed., The New Quotable Einstein (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2005), p. 482.
 6A According to some accounts, if only between 1% and 7% of
some Western populations are engaged in religious participation,
up to 75% are interested in, and actively pursue, spiritual
experiences.
 Robert Forman, Grassroots Spirituality (Boston: Academic Imprint,
2004).

7.  Today it has become common for people to say they
are ‘spiritual but not religious’, whereas this would have
been unheard of a century ago. The acronym SBNR is
widely used in social networks, dating sites and self-
descriptions. In an historical sense, the term
‘spirituality’ has undergone a reversal: it once referred
to those who were very religious, and now it refers to
those who are not very religious. Spirituality has
expanded as a term, whereas ‘religion’ has contracted.
Religion was the greater circle inside which spirituality
was a smaller one, and now they have changed places:
spirituality is the containing circle, and religions are the
subcategories or options for those who are so inclined.

8.  Celebrity atheists:
 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam
Press, 2006);
 Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion
Poisons Everything (New York: Hatchette Book Group,
2007);
 Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the
Future of Reason (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.,
2004).

9.  Religious institutions often look askance at this new ‘spiritual
revolution’, as it has been called.
 Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution: Why
Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).
 As well as referring to it as narcissistic and individualistic, religious
institutions refer to unorganised spirituality as ‘New Age’, which is
intended as an insult or put-down.
 Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture:
Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Leiden, New York,
Köln: Brill, 1996);
 Mitch Pacwa, Catholics and the New Age: How Good People are
being drawn into Jungian Psychology, the Enneagram and the
New Age of Aquarius (Ann Arbor MI: Servant Press, 1992).

10.  Here we need to make important distinctions. The New Age
movement does exist and deserves much of the criticism it
receives. It is exploitative, unhistorical, superficial and full of
promises it cannot deliver. It is a consumerist movement
which packages and sells cosmologies, often stolen from
indigenous cultures or borrowed from esoteric systems. The
New Age exists because the religions are not doing their job
properly; they are as yet unable to respond to the
experiential demands of the postmodern condition. It is
exploiting the situation to its advantage, and while some are
drawn to this movement, in my experience its size and reach
is overestimated. It is to be distinguished from the
postmodern and postsecular spirituality movement of which I
speak, although there is at times some overlap. The New
Age is the shop-front of the spirituality marketplace, but what
is behind the external façade is far more interesting.
 David Tacey, Jung and the New Age (London and New York:
Routledge, 2001).

11.  The secular and religious establishments like to conflate
these two movements, the New Age and postsecular
spirituality, because it suits their interests to do so. The
secular want to discredit all forms of spiritual activity and
don’t look closely enough to see what is going on to make
any distinctions.
 Jeremy Carrette and Richard King, Selling Spirituality: The
Silent Takeover of Religion (London and New York:
Routledge, 2005).
 The religious tend to regard the spirituality movement as a
competitor for souls, and are too willing to discredit what is
perceived as a rival force. The secular Left and religious
Right dislike uncontained spirituality because it does not fit
into the categories in which they are invested.

12.  In my view, we are in the midst of a genuine spiritual
revival, and I have monitored this for a number of years
at my university:
 David Tacey, The Spirituality Revolution: The
Emergence of Contemporary Spirituality (Sydney:
HarperCollins, 2003; London and New York: Routledge,
2004).

13.  If spirit remains private, it becomes frustrated and does
not flourish. John O’Donohue put it this way:
 Although each soul is individual and unique, by its very
nature the soul hungers for relationship. No soul is
private. As well as being the vital principle of your
individual life, your soul is ancient and eternal; it
weaves you into the great tapestry of spirit which
connects everything everywhere.
 John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Exploring Our
Hunger to Belong (London: Bantam Press, 1998), p.
xvii.

14.  ‘Now that my ladder’s gone’, wrote the poet Yeats, ‘I must begin
where all ladders start, in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’.
 The Jesuit William Johnston, who spent decades studying Zen
Buddhism and finding parallels with Western tradition, believed that
the Christian prejudice against the mystical needs to be overcome. He
writes:
 Today we are face to face with a new world that is attracted by
mysticism and is impatient of irrelevant and wordy speculation. Now
we are entering into dialogue with the mystical religions of Asia. In
these circumstances a revival of Christian mysticism will certainly
come. Indeed, it is already with us. Will the much neglected mystical
theology become the centre of all theology? Surely this is the way of
the future.
 The most insightful mystics in recent times, such as Thomas Merton
and Bede Griffiths, like Johnston, spent much of their lives trying to
understand Eastern mysticism and why it exerted such a mesmerising
influence on Westerners. Each of them realised that Western religion
was in a crisis of relevance and the East could provide help in
recovering the interior dimension of religious life.

15.  A major theologian of the Second Vatican Council, Karl Rahner,
said:
 The future Christian will be a mystic or he [or she] will not exist at
all.
 When I first read this, I thought it was a tall order, and couldn’t
imagine ordinary folk in my community becoming mystics in order
to achieve faith. But knowing as I do the obstacles to faith today,
and the impossibility of belief, I now agree that unless people
struggle to find an authentic personal connection with the sacred,
they might never achieve faith at all. Rahner added:
 By mysticism we mean a genuine experience of God emerging
from the very heart of our experience.
 Karl Rahner, ‘The Spirituality of the Church of the Future’, in tr.
Cornelius Ernst, Theological Investigations, Vol. 20 (Baltimore:
Helicon Press, 1981), p. 149.

16. Spirituality and religion: are they
strangers, rivals, or partners?
 Spirituality offers
 1) personal experience of the numinous,
 2) an apprehension of the mystical dimension of experience, and
 3) intuitive and feeling-based access to the ideas on which religion is based.
 Religion offers
 1) a common language to describe spiritual experience,
 2) a social context and the possibility of community, and
 3) a historical background and the possibility of the present speaking to the
past.
 Spirituality without religion is spirit without form, and religion without spirituality
is form without substance.