The God Within Syncretism Individual Spirituality Reading Essay

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Note: if you have no discipline to read and do not think critically, do not take this assignment. The essay must answer the question directly. Must have CRITICAL thoughts and DEEP analysis, Remember is philosophy.

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1- The essay must have 500 to 600 words. -Good grammar and a structuring of sentences-.

3- You must read the article BEFORE answering. Do not copy anything from the internet. They must be YOUR Own Thoughts.

4- Do not cite too much. With one or two citations is enough. Note: Do not use outside resources besides the one that I give you. EACH ANSWER HAVE THEIR OWN book.

5- Read the articles.

6- NOTE you must do the essay of 500 0r 600 words and send me an overall summary. Good grammar.



s syncretism Re-Visited

What, if anything, is problematical about a syncretism which cherry-picks doctrines and practices from the various religious traditions? After all, it works for Elizabeth Gilbert, true?



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THE GOD WITHIN If there is a representative religious pilgrim for our times, it’s probably the blond, rangy magazine writer–turned–memoirist Elizabeth Gilbert. In 2001, at age thirty-two, Gilbert was a professional success story with a seemingly enviable private life. She had three books and a National Book Award nomination under her belt, a rewarding day job as a travel writer, an apartment in Manhattan, and a big new house in the Hudson Valley, as well as a devoted husband with whom she intended to start a family, and soon. But just five short years later, she was something else entirely, having traded in the marriage and the houses for a globetrotting spiritual quest. This quest led to the publishing phenomenon known as Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia—a book that spent an extraordinary 187 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and transformed Gilbert into the kind of woman who gets embodied by Julia Roberts and romanced by Javier Bardem in the big-screen version of her life story. The spiritual odyssey that made all this possible began, like many similar odysseys before it, with a dark night of the soul—a literal 3 a.m. of misery that found Gilbert locked in the bathroom of her Hudson Valley home, weeping furiously over the life she thought she wanted but didn’t want anymore, and then falling on her knees in prayer. “This was a first for me,” she informs the reader: Culturally, she was some sort of Christian (“born a Protestant of the White Anglo-Saxon persuasion”), but theologically, she had always been unable to swallow “that one fixed rule of Christianity insisting that Christ is the only path to God.” So she addressed the divine that night using Christian terminology—“God,” “He”—but with a more open-ended attitude toward Whoever might be listening. (“The Universe, the Great Void, the Force, the Supreme Self, The Whole, The Creator, the Light, The Higher Power …”) Her prayer was simple enough—a litany repeated deep into the night, pleading for deliverance from the vows she’d taken and the life she’d planned: I don’t want to be married anymore. I don’t want to be married anymore. I don’t want to live in this big house. I don’t want to have this baby. At long last, someone spoke back. “It was not an Old Testament Hollywood Charlton Heston voice,” Gilbert writes, “nor was it a voice telling me I must build a baseball field in my backyard. It was merely my own voice, speaking from within my own self.” And yet, and yet—“this was my voice as I had never heard it before. This was my voice, but perfectly wise, calm and compassionate. This was what my voice would sound like if I’d only ever experienced love and certainty in my life. How can I describe the warmth of affection in that voice, as it gave me the answer that would forever seal my faith in the divine?” “Go back to bed, Liz,” the voice told her. So she did. And eventually, fortified by what she describes as more of a “religious conversation” than a “typical Christian conversion experience,” she left the husband and the house and the plans for having kids behind and set out into the unknown. At first, this leap led to only more misery—her husband fought her tooth and nail over a divorce he didn’t want, and the boyfriend she “moved right in with” after leaving her spouse proved to be more emotionally withdrawn than she expected, and then more sexually withdrawn as well, which sent her into a tailspin of loneliness, alienation, and “meticulously detailed suicidal thoughts.” But eventually, the God she’d met that fateful night began to make His presence felt. Her relationship with her boyfriend was Ross Douthat: “The God Within” – page 1 of 20 miserable, but he also introduced her to his spiritual guru, who had an ashram in India and whose acolytes in New York City chanted together every Tuesday night. At the same time, on a magazine assignment in Indonesia, she met a “ninth-generation Balinese medicine man” who prophesied that she would lose all her money at least once in her life (which is basically what was happening in the divorce) but then “get it all right back again,” and also that she would return to Bali “someday soon,” stay for three or four months, and help him practice his English.3 And she also found herself developing a sudden, unexpected fascination with Italy— the language, the culture, the food… Then come the two miracles. First, her husband finally signed off on their divorce. It had taken a year and a half to bring him to the negotiating table, and even after a deal seemed to be hammered out, he kept her on tenterhooks for weeks and months. Amid this agony, a friend encouraged her to write a mental petition to God, asking Him to “help us end this conflict, so that two more people can have the chance to be free and healthy, and so there will be just a little bit less animosity and bitterness in a world that is already far too troubled by suffering.” Then, in an echo of Catholicism’s invocations of the saints, her friend suggested that she mentally add other people’s names to the petition—her mother and father and sister, her friends and coworkers, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Saint Francis of Assisi, Gandhi and Mandela and the Dalai Lama, all holy men and women and all the living and the dead. Within an hour of performing this spiritual exercise, her cell phone buzzed. Her husband had signed. The second miracle followed swiftly, in the form of an ample publisher’s advance that allowed her to unite her three newfound “I” fascinations—Italy, India, Indonesia—into a world tour and then a travel book. Thus freed, fortified, and funded, Gilbert set out on the journey that became Eat, Pray, Love: a four-month Roman holiday, where she learned to love herself and life again; a sojourn in her (now ex-) boyfriend’s guru’s South Asian ashram, where she learned to commune with God; and finally the prophesied months in Bali, where she found a way to balance worldliness and godliness, by sitting at the medicine man’s feet (and correcting his English) while gradually falling into the arms of a handsome Brazilian divorcé. The Roman excursion supplies the travel porn, and the Balinese sojourn the requisite happy ending, but it’s the ashram section that really distinguishes Eat, Pray, Love from the ordinary run of self-help books. Here Gilbert fulfills the promise of that first late-night encounter, with a frank, earthy, and entirely unembarrassed account of what it feels like for a late-modern, postfeminist, haute-bourgeoise American to search relentlessly for the direct, unmediated, and overwhelming experience of God. Her story captures the grittiness of spiritual exertion—the psychological agony involved in shutting off one’s internal monologue, the cruel physicality of extended prayer and meditation, the boredom that so many rituals can inspire, the necessity of fighting your way through all these obstacles. Then it captures, humorously but also movingly, what so many mystics have found waiting on the other side: the sense of an overwhelming divine love, like a “lion roaring from within my chest”; the sense of a God who “plays in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on water”; and, above all, the sense that all of mortal life is a “kind of limited comic-strip world” compared with what it feels like to be “pulled through the wormhole of the Absolute.” Through all these earth-shaking, all-enveloping encounters, though, Gilbert’s theological views don’t seem to change a whit. Despite meeting God in a Hindu ashram, she doesn’t become a Hindu, but then again neither does she revert to the Ross Douthat: “The God Within” – page 2 of 20 Christianity of her American upbringing. Her initial premises endured unchallenged to the end: All religious traditions offer equally valid paths to the divine; all religious teachings are just “transporting metaphors” designed to bridge the gulf between the finite and the infinite; most religious institutions claim a monopoly on divinity that they don’t really enjoy. To the plight of so many contemporary Americans, awash in spiritual choices but skeptical of every particular religious option, eager to worship and pray but uncertain where and how and to whom to do it, Gilbert offers a reassuring endorsement of do-it-yourself religion. “You have every right to cherry-pick when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in God,” she insists. Not only a right, indeed, but a positive duty: “You take whatever works from wherever you can find it, and you keep moving toward the light.” Her final theological epiphany is the same as her first one. A journey that began with God speaking to her in “my own voice from within my own self”—albeit “as I had never heard it before”—ends with the realization that the Elizabeth Gilbert-ness of that Voice is the key to understanding the nature of divinity itself. The highest spiritual wisdom, she writes, isn’t just that God waits for us inside our own hearts and minds and souls. It’s that “God dwells within you as you yourself, exactly the way you are.” The best way to remedy our “heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment,” then, isn’t to remake ourselves in imitation of Christ (or Buddha, or Krishna, or whomever), but rather to recognize that “somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme self who is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine.” This is the highest religious dogma, and our highest religious obligation is like unto it: To “honor the divinity that resides within me,” and to worship at the feet of the God Within. * * * Gilbert’s voice is distinctive—warm and chatty, selfdeprecating and sincere—but her testimony isn’t unique. The message of Eat, Pray, Love is the same gospel preached by a cavalcade of contemporary gurus, teachers, and would-be holy men and women: Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle, Paulo Coelho and James Redfield, Neale Donald Walsch and Marianne Williamson. It’s the insight offered by just about every spiritual authority ever given a platform in Oprah Winfrey’s media empire. (Winfrey dedicated two episodes of her show to Gilbert’s book.) It’s the theology that Elaine Pagels claims to have rediscovered in the lost gospels of the early Christian Church. It’s the religious message with the most currency in American popular culture—the truth that Kevin Costner discovered when he went dancing with wolves, the metaphysic woven through Disney cartoons and Discovery Channel specials, and the dogma of George Lucas’s Jedi, whose mystical Force, like Gilbert’s God, “surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.” This creed is sometimes described as “spiritual, not religious”—because some of its proponents are uncomfortable with the word God (a term that “has become empty of meaning through thousands of years of misuse,”14 according to Tolle), and because all of them are critical of institutional religion and insistent that their spiritual vision is bigger than any particular church or creed or faith. But this is perhaps a distinction without a difference. Whether you drop Eat, Pray, Love into the “religion” section or the “spirituality” section at your local bookseller, it still testifies as explicitly as Augustine’s Confessions or Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain to the truth of a particular theology, a particular way of thinking about God. Ross Douthat: “The God Within” – page 3 of 20 The theology’s tenets can be summed up as follows. First, that all organized religions offer only partial glimpses of the God or light or Being that all of them pursue, and that the true spiritual adept must seek to experience God through feeling rather than reason, experience rather than dogma, a direct encounter rather than a hand-me-down revelation. “Being can be felt,” writes Tolle, “but it can never be understood mentally.” “Listen to your feelings,” the Deity counsels Walsch in his Conversations with God. “Listen to your Highest Thought…. Whenever any of these differ from what you’ve been told by your teachers, or read in your books, forget the words.” Second, that God is everywhere and within everything, but at the same time the best way to encounter the divine is through the God within, the divinity that resides inside your very self and soul. “The boy reached through the Soul of the World,” Coelho writes at the climax of his parable The Alchemist, “and saw that it was a part of the Soul of God. And he saw that the Soul of God was his own soul.” In Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, Elaine Pagels praises the early Gnostics for “recognizing that one’s affinity with God is the key to the kingdom of God.” Third, that God’s all-encompassing nature means that sin and death and evil—or what seem like sin and death and evil—will ultimately be reconciled rather than defeated. There is no hell save the one we make for ourselves on Earth, no final separation from the Being that all our beings rest within. “Consciousness is universal,” writes Chopra, “and if there is a such a thing as Godconsciousness, no one can be excluded from it.” “There is no such thing in this universe as hell,” Gilbert assures her readers, “except maybe in our own terrified minds.” Finally, that beatitude is constantly available. Heaven is on earth, “God is right here, right now,” and eternity can be entered at any moment, by any person who understands how to let go, let God, and let themselves be washed away in love. “At some point everyone will vibrate highly enough so that we can walk into heaven, in our same form,” writes Redfield.“I do believe in life after death,” says Coelho, “but I also don’t think that it’s that important. What’s important is to understand that we are also living this life after death now.” This theology overlaps in some interesting respects with the prosperity gospel. Both propose an answer to the problem of theodicy; both blur the distinction between God and man; both open a path to numinous experience for people uncomfortable with the flesh-and-blood miracles of Christian orthodoxy; both insist on a tight link between spiritual health and physical wellbeing. The notes are somewhat different, but the rhythm of New Thought pulses underneath Chopra as well as Osteen, Tolle as well as Meyer. And many pop metaphysicians— Rhonda Byrne, for instance—move smoothly in between the two worldviews, mixing and matching as the spirit moves them. Both belong to what Sydney Ahlstrom calls the “harmonial” element in American religion, which “encompasses those forms of piety and belief in which spiritual composure, physical health, and even economic well-being are understood to flow from a person’s rapport with the cosmos.” But at the deepest level, the theology of the God Within ministers to a different set of spiritual needs, and tries to resolve a different set of contradictions, than the marriage of God and Mammon. Whereas the prosperity gospel suggests that material abundance is the main sign of God’s activity in this world, the apostles of the God Within focus on internal harmony—mental, psychological, spiritual—as the chief evidence of things unseen. Whereas the prosperity gospel talks about prayer primarily in terms of supplication, the theology of the God Within talks about it primarily in terms of meditation and Ross Douthat: “The God Within” – page 4 of 20 communion. And while the prosperity gospel insists that evil and suffering can be mastered by prayer, the God Within theology suggests that true spiritual enlightenment will expose both as illusions. The prosperity gospel is a theology of striving and reaching and demanding; the gospel of the God Within is a theology of letting go. The prosperity gospel makes the divine sound like your broker; the theology of the God Within makes him sound like your shrink. This distinction is illustrated by Oprah Winfrey herself, arguably the greatest popularizer of God Within theology. (“Our mission,” Winfrey has said of her ever-expanding cultural empire, “is to use television to transform people’s lives…. I am talking about each individual coming to the awareness that, ‘I am Creation’s son. I am Creation’s daughter … ultimately I am Spirit come from the greatest Spirit. I am Spirit.’”) Yale University professor Kathryn Lofton, the author of Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (2011), notes that Winfrey’s message always has a strong consumerist bent. “At the end of an episode, once a couple has gotten control over their credit cards, there has to be some way of finding a reward for them. Peace of mind is one thing, but wow, much better if they get to take a road trip with their new Hyundai!” But whereas it’s clear with prosperity preachers that everything is subservient to the goal of upward mobility and wealth accumulation, for Oprah, consumption is just a means to a higher end. Instead of making everything secondary to the commercial, Lofton points out, in her ministry “all else becomes subservient to the spirit. The first question everyone should ask is, ‘What is my spirit telling me to do?’ How do you tap into your spirit? How do you re-enchant your spirit after being pulled upon, tugged upon, by the false pragmatism of men, family, work? The replies to that are frequently flattered by the commercial, but not solely comprised of it.” At the same time, where the prosperity gospel’s adherents insist, often noisily, that they’re just as orthodox as the next Christian, the devotees of the God Within do something more sweeping but also more subtle. As Gilbert’s eastward pilgrimage suggests, their theology is heavily indebted to Hindu and Buddhist concepts of divinity, and to the Eastern mystical tradition more broadly. But in the American context, the God Within represents itself as the truest form of every religion— Eastern and Western, monotheistic and polytheistic, and, yes, Christian above all. Rather than rejecting “the great teacher of peace who was called Jesus” (as Gilbert describes him) or claiming to have found a more excellent way than Christianity, its exponents insist that they are being truer to Christ than many Christian churches. Chopra has written two books about Jesus, Tolle quotes him throughout his spiritual manuals, Coelho is constantly reworking New Testament parables for his own purposes. At the climax of Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy, one of the more enlightened characters explains that they’ve actually been pursuing “the path shown by the Christ,” who “opened up to the energy until he was so light he could walk on water” and “was the first to cross over, to expand the physical world into the spiritual.” Call a prosperity preacher a Christian heretic, and he’ll angrily dispute the premise. Accuse Deepak Chopra or Paulo Coelho or Oprah of being a Christian heretic, and you’ll get a tolerant smile and the suggestion that perhaps you just haven’t opened your mind to a broad enough conception of what Christianity really is. This tendency is connected, as I’ve already suggested, to the quest for the “real Jesus” and the contemporary fascination with the Gnostic strand in early Christianity. But while the church of the God Within welcomes the patina of Pagels-style Ross Douthat: “The God Within” – page 5 of 20 scholarship, it doesn’t require dusty archaeological troves or careful textual reinterpretations to claim Jesus of Nazareth as its own. Go all the way back to Ralph Waldo Emerson, in many ways the originator of American-style God Within theology, and you find this: Jesus Christ belongs to the true race of prophets. He saw with an open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth to take possession of his World. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, “I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me, or see thee, when thou also thinkest as I think.” The reader will search the canonical gospels in vain for the words Emerson places in quotation marks. But never mind—a genial confidence in its own intuitions, untrammeled by inconvenient factual roadblocks, is part of the God Within theology’s appeal. Its universalism speaks to the characteristically modern assumption that no single tradition could possibly encompass the fullness of religious truth. Its eagerness to recruit Jesus to its cause reassures Americans that they are staying true, in some sense, to their childhood faith. (And not only Jesus: The apostles of the God Within are at pains to appropriate the great Christian mystics, and many Christian philosophers as well.) The result is a faith that’s at once cosmopolitan and comforting, promising all the pleasures of exoticism—the mysteries of the Orient! the wisdom of the Maya! —without any of the pain of actually turning your back on anything you love. But its attempt to reconcile the universal and the particular runs deeper than culture and geography. The appeal of God Within theology also rests in the way it addresses a more ancient dilemma: the problem of how to reconcile God’s immanence with His transcendence, His activity in the world with the absolute gulf separating creator and creation, His seemingly human attributes (love, compassion, mercy; justice, anger, vengeance) with His impassable Otherness. In Christian orthodoxy, characteristically, this dilemma has been left unresolved—either audaciously or illogically, depending on your point of view. The early Christians made bold to claim that the God of the Greek philosophers— omnipotent and omniscient, beyond time and space and change —was simultaneously the more personal, activist God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Jehovah of the Hebrews was also the Prime Mover of the universe; Jesus of Nazareth was somehow the Alpha and Omega as well. If there was a contradiction between these two conceptions of God—between the Bible’s sometimes loving, sometimes wrathful father and philosophy’s unchanging Absolute—it was left to percolate as one of Christianity’s many mysteries. “If philosophers wanted to remain faithful to the traditional teaching,” the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski writes, “and to believe in a God who is simultaneously Plotinus’s One, the Old Testament’s Angry Leader and Jesus’s loving Father, they were bound to confess their helplessness; no intellectual effort could pierce the ultimate mystery.” America was founded, in part, by men who found the idea of an ultimate mystery offensive, and set out to rationalize this paradox away. This was the great appeal of Deism, to Thomas Jefferson and many others. Deist theology reconciled Christianity’s contradictions by depersonalizing the Christian God, making him a First Cause rather than a constant active Ross Douthat: “The God Within” – page 6 of 20 force in history—a clockmaker who stands forever outside the universe he’s built, unmoving and unmoved. But while Deism was reasonably satisfying as a philosophical school, it was sterile as a religion. A clockmaker God could provide no consolation, little guidance, and no grace, and Deist theology had nothing of significance to say about the kind of numinous experiences that have nourished and sustained the world’s religions. The Deist God was forever inaccessible, forever out of reach, and anyone claiming to have encountered Him was either deluded or a fraud. Small wonder that from Emerson and the Transcendentalists onward, the Deists’ American descendants have often been more attracted to the opposite approach—to a faith rooted in mysticism, which starts with the direct experience of an ultimate Reality and then tries to reason from this unmediated experience to a coherent understanding of the Almighty. Like Deism, this understanding inevitably depersonalizes God. He is no longer Yahweh, no longer Jesus, no longer Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; instead, He’s “Being,” “the Soul of the World,” “the Highest Thought,” or “the experience of supreme love.” But where the Deists’ depersonalization pushed God into the empyrean and out of reach, the God Within’s depersonalization makes him absolutely accessible. To quote Kolakowski again, this theology represents an “effort to bring God closer to human experience” by “depriving him of recognizable personal traits.” He’s so absolute that He’s immanent, so beyond time and space that He’s available to everyone at every moment, so universal that He’s in you as you. In The American Religion (1993), Harold Bloom offers the following distillation of this message: The soul stands apart, and something deeper than the soul, the Real Me or self or spark, thus is made free to be utterly alone with a God who is also quite separate or solitary…. What makes it possible for the self and God to commune so freely is that the self already is of God; unlike body or even soul, the American self is no part of the creation, or of evolution through the ages. The American self is not the Adam of Genesis but a more primordial Adam, a Man before there were men and women. Higher and earlier than the angels, this true Adam is as old as God, older than the Bible, and is free of time, unstained by mortality. This is almost exact. But Bloom, himself a self-proclaimed Gnostic, is drawing too strong a connection between the contemporary religion of the self and ancient Gnosticism’s disdain for the fleshly snares of the natural, created world. The cult of the God Within owes a debt to the ancient Gnostics, clearly, but it takes their impulse in a more democratic and optimistic direction, shedding both the spiritual elitism woven into texts like the Gospel of Judas and the idea that the physical universe itself is corrupt and needs to be escaped. It accepts the Gnostic premise that we should seek after our divine spark, but it locates this spark both inside and outside the self. The human soul has God within it, but so does the entirety of the natural world as well. Thus Bloom’s claim that “no American ultimately concedes that she is part of nature” is arguably false. Instead, from Emerson down to Elizabeth Gilbert, American God Within theology blurs naturally into a kind of pantheism. “Being indivisible,” Kolakowski writes of this conception of God, “He cannot be, of course, the raw stuff that things have been made of; His unspoiled plenitude is to be found in every fragment of the world and thus whatever is, is divine. This idea would be anathema to many ancient Gnostics, but it’s completely natural Ross Douthat: “The God Within” – page 7 of 20 to the modern apostles of the God Within. When they aren’t urging people to look within themselves for God, they’re urging them to seek Him in the natural world instead. “I have built into all things an energy that transmits its signal throughout the universe,” Walsch’s God informs the reader. “Every person, animal, plant, rock, tree—every physical thing—sends out energy, like a radio transmitter.” One of Gilbert’s visions culminates with her rushing into the midst of a meadow, throwing her arms around a clutch of eucalyptus trees, and kissing them ecstatically: “I looked around the darkened valley and I could see nothing that was not God.” express unease about our hypertechnological society. The threat of global warming, in particular, has lent to mystical pantheism qualities that every successful religion needs—a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of “thou shalt nots,” and a piping-hot apocalypse. (No recent cultural development captures this tension more than the immense box-office success of James Cameron’s Avatar, a pantheistic-message movie that earned a billion dollars while lecturing its audience on the perils of precisely the kind of technological mastery that made its lavish visual effects possible in the first place.) Here we see the vindication of another of Alexis de Tocqueville’s predictions about America’s religious future: At the same time, a mystical pantheism, in which God is an experience rather than a person, turns out to represent a form of religion that even some of our more strident atheists can support. Richard Dawkins has called pantheism “a sexed-up atheism.” (He means that as a compliment.) Citing Albert Einstein’s expression of religious awe at the “beauty and sublimity” of the universe, Dawkins allows, “In this sense I too am religious.” Like-wise, Sam Harris concluded his polemic The End of Faith by rhapsodizing about the numinous experiences available from immersion in “the roiling mystery of the world.” When the conditions of society are becoming more equal and each individual man becomes more like all the rest … a habit grows up of ceasing to notice the citizens and considering only the people, of overlooking individuals to think only of their kind. At such times the human mind seeks to embrace a multitude of different objects at once, and it constantly strives to connect a variety of consequences with a single cause. The idea of unity so possesses man and is sought by him so generally that if he thinks he has found it, he readily yields himself to repose in that belief. Not content with the discovery that there is nothing in the world but a creation and a Creator, he is still embarrassed by this primary division of things and seeks to expand and simplify his conception by including God and the universe in one great whole. The appeal of this simplified conception has only been sharpened by the materialism and scientism of modern life. Our very alienation from nature makes us more likely to invest it with metaphysical significance. We pine for what we’ve left behind, and associating God with the natural world is an obvious way to With Harris’s and Dawkins’s endorsements, we seem to have come a long way from anything like traditional Christianity. Yet the most sophisticated exponents of God Within theology would beg to differ. What the New Atheists are responding to, they argue, is an insight about God that can also be found in the works of impeccably orthodox Christian metaphysicians. The apparent divide between Harris’s “roiling mystery of the world” and the God of an Augustine or a Teresa of Ávila isn’t actually that vast. The two conceptions of divinity are separated more by terminology and historical contingency than by anything truly essential. Ross Douthat: “The God Within” – page 8 of 20 This argument has been advanced most persuasively by Karen Armstrong, the former nun turned prolific popular historian. Like many others of her generation, Armstrong left both her convent and Catholicism behind in the 1970s, and eventually found her vocation elucidating the common themes that she sees running through all the great religious traditions. The first is that a universal compassion is the highest moral good; the second, that the mystical pursuit of an essential unknowable Deity ultimately trumps the more superficial quest for theological correctness. Against the more strident antitheists, Armstrong insists that this religious mentality is entirely compatible with a liberal, scientific, technologically advanced society. But, more important, she insists that it’s actually truer to the ancient traditions of Judaism, Islam, and (especially) Christianity than is much of what currently passes for conservative religion today. Her argument is developed to its fullest in her 2009 book The Case for God, which sets out to rescue the idea of a Deity from its cultured despisers and its more literal-minded defenders alike. Both modern fundamentalists and modern atheists, Armstrong contends, have mistaken religion for a set of propositions to be assented to, or a catalogue of specific facts about the nature of God, the world, and human life. This approach to piety would be foreign to many premodern religious thinkers, including the greatest minds of the Christian past, from the early Fathers of the Church to medieval eminences like Thomas Aquinas. These and other thinkers, she writes, understood faith primarily as a practice, rather than as a system—not as “something that people thought but something they did.” Their God was not a being to be defined or a proposition to be tested but an ultimate reality to be approached through myth, ritual, and “apophatic” theology, which practices “a deliberate and principled reticence about God and/or the sacred”41 and emphasizes what we can’t know about the divine. In other words, in the highest forms of Christian theology, the experience of God—which, inevitably, passeth all rational understanding—was always primary and dogmatic definitions strictly secondary. Here, for instance, is Armstrong limning the views of Gregory of Nyssa, the fourth-century saint and theologian: “[He argued that] we could not speak about God rationally, as we speak about ordinary beings, but that did not mean that we should give up thinking about God at all. We had to press on, pushing our minds to the limit of what we could know, descending ever deeper into the darkness of unknowing and acknowledging that there could be no final clarity.” Or, again, here’s her gloss on Thomas Aquinas: “Whenever he made a statement about God, [Aquinas insisted that] the theologian must realize that it was inescapably inadequate…. By revealing the inherent limitation of words and concepts, theology should reduce both the speaker and his audience to silent awe. When reason was applied to faith, it must show that what we call ‘God’ was unknowable.” Here, finally, is her summary of what the doctrine of the Trinity really meant to the more mystically inclined Fathers of the Church: There is no selfhood in the Trinity. Instead there is silence and kenosis. The Father, the ground of being, empties itself of all that it is and transmits it to the Son, giving up everything, even the possibility of expressing itself in another Word. Once that Word, has been spoken, the Father no longer has an “I” and remains forever silent and unknowable. There is nothing that we can say about the Father, since the only God we know is the Son. At the very source of being is the speechless “nothingness” of Brahman, Dao, and Nirvana, because the Father is not another being and resembles nothing in Ross Douthat: “The God Within” – page 9 of 20 our mundane experience. The Father confounds all notions of personality and, since the Father is presented in the New Testament as the end of the Christian quest, this becomes a journey to no place, no thing, and no one. In the same way, the Son, our only access to the divine, is merely an eikon of the ultimately reality…. Like any symbol, the Son points beyond itself to the Father, while the Spirit is simply the atman of the Father and the “we” between Father and Son. We cannot pray to the Spirit, because the Spirit is the ultimate innerness of every being, ourselves included. This is heady, high-level stuff. But note that it all brings us back to the same place that Elizabeth Gilbert ended up—with a divine spirit who’s in you as you, a God of the Universe who turns out to be the God Within. If we accept Armstrong’s interpretation of the history of Western theology, then, today’s mass-market spirituality doesn’t really represent a rupture with the deepest message of Christianity. Rather, it represents an attempt to take an insight that was historically the property of the faith’s greatest spiritual adepts— theologians, philosophers, mystics—and democratize it, popularize it, bring it to the masses. Instead of settling for inadequate attempts to intellectually circumscribe divinity, ordinary believers can finally experience the ultimate reality directly. Instead of halftruths about God’s knowability, they’ll get the whole truth about His transcendence of every human concept and conceit. In the age of the God Within, the insights that were once available only to claim a Christian warrant. But they are increasingly offering distortions of traditional J well-beingA cloistered Carmelites or the Summa Theologica’s most sophisticated readers can be offered to everybody, everywhere. And they’ll reveal a God at once more transcendent and more immediately available than anyone had dared to guess. There are some difficulties with this appealing synthesis, however. Armstrong’s story is provocative but frustratingly incomplete. Nothing she says is quite wrong: the great Christian sages did indeed insist on the limits of theological language in describing God (the whole of the Summa, Aquinas once suggested, was “mere straw” compared to the the insights of the mystics), and many Christian saints reported ecstatic experiences not unlike those that envelop Elizabeth Gilbert and her fellow travelers. But the casual reader of the The Case for God would be forgiven for thinking, from Armstrong’s portraits of apophatic theology in action, that figures like Aquinas and Augustine were essentially Gilberts or Chopras or Tolles avant la lettre, preaching a universal and nonspecific deity rather than the God of Christian orthodoxy. In reality, all of those figures were fiercely dogmatic by any modern standard. They were not fundamentalists, reading every line of scripture literally and worshipping an anthropomorphic God, and they were, as Armstrong says, “inventive, fearless and confident in their interpretation of faith.” But their inventiveness was grounded in shared doctrines, and constrained by shared assumptions. Their theology was reticent in its claims about the ultimate nature of God, but it was very specific about how God had revealed Himself on Earth. Acknowledging that the mystical logic of the Trinity piled unknowability on unknowability did not permit a believer to dissent from the dogma entirely and invent one that “worked” for him instead. Accepting the bottomless mystery inherent in the Incarnation did not justify treating that doctrine as just one way among many to understand and worship God. The biblical revelation might ultimately suggest that Yahweh/Jehovah/Jesus was inherently ungraspable, but it was still the only revelation Ross Douthat: “The God Within” – page 10 of 20 that Christians were licensed to accept. Many great Christian theologians would argue that human reason could never quite comprehend exactly what the resurrection meant, but none of them would deny that Jesus was physically resurrected—and they would have been pretty poor Christian theologians if they had. can almost feel her coming out of that delirious experience, then looking around at the political climate of medieval Spain (where she lived under one of the most repressive religious tyrannies of history) and soberly, dutifully, apologizing for her excitement.” The same respect for the specificity of revelation has defined the greatest Christian mystics. Christianity has certainly made room, as Armstrong suggests, for mystical encounters not unlike the kind that are celebrated by the apostles of the God Within—encounters that seem to transcend time and space, and that hint at divine realities that no creed or catechism can quite capture. But at the same time, as Kolakowski notes, the Christian churches imposed strict limits on their mystics as well. They were expected to maintain “the ontological distinction between God and the soul” and to refrain from suggesting that “the mystical union involves a total annihilation of personality.” They were forbidden to use their experiences “as a pretext for disregarding the traditional rules of obedience, let alone the common moral duties.” And their claims to divine favor were tested against their conduct: “A mystic’s experience, if genuine, strengthens his common virtues of humility, charity, chastity; it proves to be a diabolic temptation, rather than God’s gift, if it breeds hubris, indifference to others, or irregularities of conduct.” Yet there may be wisdom in the rules and limits that Christian institutions imposed on their visionaries. (Or, more often, attempted to impose, Gilbert’s exaggerated portrait of medieval repression notwithstanding.) For one thing, it’s more difficult than many modern spiritual writers suggest to separate ideas from actions, teaching from conduct, and dogma from practice in religious history. The dogmas tend to sustain the practices, and vice versa; making a bricolage of different religious traditions is often just a way of guaranteeing that those same traditions die out within a generation. It’s possible to gain some sort of “knack” for a religion without believing that all its dogmas are literally true. A spiritually inclined person can no doubt draw nourishment from the Roman Catholic Mass, for instance, without believing that the Eucharist literally becomes the body and blood of Christ. But without the doctrine of transubstantiation, the Mass would not exist to provide that nourishment. Not every churchgoer will share Flannery O’Connor’s opinion that if the Eucharist is “a symbol, to hell with it.” But Catholic faith has been sustained for two thousand years because of the Flannery O’Connors, not the Paulo Coelhos. To most modern writers, these kinds of restrictions just reflect the tyranny of religious institutions and their discomfort with the kind of freedom that true visionaries deserve. “I am a Catholic,” says Paulo Coelho, but “in between the light and us, sometimes there are too many rules.” Discussing Teresa of Ávila, Elizabeth Gilbert bemoans the way the saint veers from wild ecstasies (“it is a glorious bewilderment, a heavenly madness, in which true wisdom is acquired”) to swift and dutiful expressions of self-abnegation and humility. “Reading Saint Teresa today,” Gilbert remarks, “you So God Within religion tends to be parasitic on more dogmatic forms of faith, which create and sustain the practices that the spiritual-but-not-religious seeker picks and chooses from, reads symbolically, and reinterprets for a more enlightened age. The breadth of God Within religion can represent a kind of shallowness, since real spiritual breakthroughs generally Ross Douthat: “The God Within” – page 11 of 20 require a narrowing—the decision to pick a path and stick with it, rather than hopscotching around in search of a synthesis that “works for me.” Without these kind of strictures and commitments, Luke Timothy Johnson has argued, mysticism drifts easily into a kind of solipsism: “Kabbalism apart from Torah-observance is playacting; Sufism disconnected from Shariah is vague theosophy; and Christian mysticism that finds no center in the Eucharist or the Passion of Christ drifts into a form of self-grooming.” Such solipsism carries moral as well as spiritual dangers. For anyone familiar with the spiritual memoirs and manuals of earlier eras, it’s startling how little moral exhortation there is in the pages of the God Within literature. There claim a Christian warrant. But they are increasingly offering distortions of traditional J wellbeingA are frequent calls to “compassion” and “kindness,” but little guidance for people facing actual dilemmas. And what guidance there is often amounts to “if it feels good, do it”—quite literally, in some cases. “I tell you this,” Walsch’s God insists: “No kind of evolution ever took place through denial. If you are to evolve, it will not be because you’ve been able to deny yourself the things that you know ‘feel good,’ but because you’ve granted yourself these pleasures—and found something even greater. For how can you know that something is ‘greater’ if you’ve never tasted the ‘lesser’?” For a faith rooted in mystical experience alone, this is probably an inevitable problem. The sense of harmony, unity, and communion that so many mystics experience can provoke a somewhat blasé attitude toward sin and wickedness, and a dismissive attitude toward ordinary moral duties. (“He was fundamentally treacherous to civilization,” a contemporary wrote of Emerson, because “he appeared to me utterly unconscious of himself as either good or evil.”) If pushed too far, the quest for a “Supreme Self” can blur into the most ancient human temptation, the whisper in Eden that “ye shall be as gods.” If pushed too far, Julian of Norwich’s mystic’s creed that “all will be well and all will be well and all manner of thing will be well” can become a blithe assumption that every choice and happening is divinely inspired. If God is beyond personality, perhaps He is beyond morality as well— and thus why should his beloved followers worry overmuch about petty questions like whom they happen to be sleeping with, or how best to dispose of their income? After all, all will be well and all will be well and all manner of thing will be well…. In her provocative book on spiritual experience, Fingerprints of God (2009), Barbara Bradley Hagerty notes that “virtually every woman I interviewed, and several of the men, reported that their values and goals had veered so dramatically away from their spouses’ [after a mystical encounter] that they eventually divorced.” Usually “the transformed people felt a twinge of regret at losing their former life but found invariably that the spiritual adventure more than compensated.” Hagerty writes that she “felt sorrier for their family and friends, who became the ‘collateral damage’ of the spiritual experience.” Orthodox Christianity, Kolakowski points out, used the distinction between Creator and creation to emphasize that believers are bound to ordinary as well extraordinary duties. The God Within, on the other hand, can sometimes prove so overwhelming that devotees feel free to abandon their more quotidian responsibilities, entrusting merely finite goals and merely mortal companions—which often means spouses and children—to providence’s care while they obey the promptings of their Supreme Self or Highest Thought. (“I have little use for the past and rarely think about it,” writes Tolle, in a passage that chills rather more than inspires.) Ross Douthat: “The God Within” – page 12 of 20 One thinks here of Orwell’s famous admonition that saints should be judged guilty until they are proven innocent. To be sure, often they are innocent: Christian orthodoxy doesn’t exclude the possibility that God might call someone to abandon what can seem like their immediate moral responsibilities. Certainly nothing in the literature of the God Within is as radical as this Gospel admonition: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” But the strictures that orthodoxy places on its mystical seekers, the emphasis on hierarchies of goods and ordinary duties, also do honor to the words of Jesus—who insisted, after all, that he had come to fulfill the law rather than abolish it. And they’re a useful reminder that the promptings of one’s inner self aren’t necessarily identical to the promptings of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes the God Within isn’t God at all, but just the ego or the libido, using spirituality as a convenient gloss for its own desires and impulses. Sometimes your books and teachers are right, and what seems your Highest Thought is really emanating from the lower reaches of your soul. Sometimes God might offer you a less consoling and more demanding insight than Gilbert’s delighted discovery that He “dwells within you as you yourself, exactly the way you are.” To exclude or minimize these possibilities, as so many modern mystics do, is to risk baptizing egomania, divinizing selfishness, and leaving few legitimate ways to distinguish the God within a Mother Teresa from the God within a Jim Jones or a David Koresh. Most Americans are not Koreshes, mercifully. But neither are they fulltime mystics or professional philosophers—or even professional writers like Gilbert, equipped with book contracts that enable them to spend a solid four months in spiritual seclusion. For people leading more ordinary lives, reducing religion to the God Within and only the God Within doesn’t create a vast population of budding Teresas of Ávila. It just provides an excuse for making religious faith more comfortable, more dilettantish, more selfabsorbed—for doing what you feel like doing anyway, and calling it obedience to a Higher Power or Supreme Self. The result isn’t megalomania but a milder sort of solipsism, with numinous experience as a kind of spiritual comfort food rather than a spur to moral transformation—there when you need it, and not a bother when you don’t. It’s the church of the Oprah Winfrey Network, you might say: religion as a path to constant self-affirmation, heresy as self-help, the quest for God as the ultimate form of therapy. * * * The man who saw this coming was Philip Rieff, a midcentury psychologist and the philosopher, and the husband, briefly and unhappily, of the critic and essayist Susan Sontag. In 1966, while most observers of the religious scene were hailing Harvey Cox’s union of Christian faith and secular ambition, Rieff produced The Triumph of the Therapeutic: The Uses of Faith After Freud, which was as densely written as The Secular City but more prophetic. The age of traditional Christian faith was over—in this much, Rieff agreed with his era’s “death of God” theologians. But the new animating spirit of the age was likely to be personal desire rather than political ambition. Religious man was giving way to “psychological man,” not ideological man. In place of a secularized Christianity building the kingdom of God on earth, Rieff foresaw an age of therapy, in which the pursuit of well-being would replace the quest for either justice or salvation. “Religious man was born to be saved,” he wrote, but “psychological man is born to be pleased.” This new man would be interested in neither political utopianisms nor moral Ross Douthat: “The God Within” – page 13 of 20 idealisms. All existing orders would be equally acceptable to him, “so long as the powers that be preserve social order and manage an economy of abundance.” (The absence of political prescriptions in the literature of the God Within is almost as striking as the absence of moral exhortation.) So would all ethical systems: “If ‘immoral’ materials, rejected under earlier cultural criteria, are therapeutically effective, enhancing somebody’s sense of well-being, then they are useful.” The only universal goal would be harmony and happiness —“more joy, right now!” runs O, the Oprah Magazine blurb for Tolle’s The Power of Now—and the definitions of that happiness would prove as various as human personalities. The therapeutic revolution, Rieff wrote, “does not aim, like its predecessors, at victory for some rival commitment, but rather at a way of using all commitments, which amounts to loyalty to none.” In this new landscape, “‘I believe!,’ the cry of the ascetic,” would lose precedence to “‘one feels,’ the caveat of the therapeutic.” Crucially, though, the triumph of feeling over belief could still leave plenty of room for spirituality. Rieff, writing in the late afternoon of Freudianism, probably overestimated the extent to which psychoanalysis rather than mysticism would dominate the therapeutic era. But he predicted, with uncanny accuracy, the way the therapeutic mentality would dress itself in the garments of the religious traditions it had displaced. (“Psychological man, in his independence from all gods, can feel free to use all god-terms,” Rieff suggested. “I imagine he will be a hedger against his own bets, a user of any faith that lends itself to therapeutic use.”) He foresaw, as well, the theological forms that this bets-hedging would take. The bulk of The Triumph of the Therapeutic is devoted to analyzing what amount to highbrow forerunners of the God Within—C. G. Jung’s religion of the Unconscious, Wilhelm Reich’s pantheistic religion of energy, and D. H. Lawrence’s “Oceanic God.” Here is Rieff on what this would mean for the culture as a whole. In the emergent culture, a wider range of people will have “spiritual” concerns and engage in “spiritual” pursuits. There will be more singing and more listening. People will continue to genuflect and read the Bible, which has long achieved the status of great literature; but no prophet will denounce the rich attire or stop the dancing. There will be more theater, not less, and no Puritan will denounce the stage and draw its curtains. On the contrary, I expect that modern society will mount psychodramas far more frequently than its ancestors mounted miracle plays. In 2005, forty years after this uncanny anticipation of reality television, Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton conducted a long investigation into the religious lives of American teenagers, and discovered exactly the kind of therapeutic theology that Rieff had seen coming. Smith and Denton found no evidence of real secularization among their subjects: 97 percent of teenagers professed some sort of belief in the divine, 71 percent reported feeling either “very” or “somewhat” close to God, and the vast majority self-identified as Christian. There was no sign of deep alienation from their parents’ churches, no evidence that the teenagers in the survey were poised to convert outright to Buddhism or Islam, and no sign that real atheism was making deep inroads among the young. But neither was there any evidence of a recognizably orthodox Christian faith. “American Christianity,” Smith and Denton suggested, is “either degenerating into a pathetic version of itself,” or else is “actively being colonized and displaced by a quite different religious faith.” They continued: “Most religious Ross Douthat: “The God Within” – page 14 of 20 teenagers either do not really comprehend what their own religious traditions say they are supposed to believe, or they do understand it and simply do not care to believe it.” say pleasant, respectful, well-behaved, and nondisruptive. Niceness is the highest ethical standard, popularity the most important goal, and high self-esteem the surest sign of sanctity. What they believe instead is remarkably consistent across different denominations and traditions. According to Smith and Denton, the “de facto creed” of America’s youth has five main premises. 1. “A God exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.” 2. “God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.” 3. “The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.” 4. “God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.” 5. “Good people go to heaven when they die.” “What appears to be the actual dominant religion among U.S. teenagers,” Smith and Denton write, “is centrally about feeling good, happy, secure, at peace. It is about attaining subjective well-being, being able to resolve problems, and getting along amiably with other people.” If there’s “an essential aspect of living a moral life” in therapeutic faith, they conclude, it’s the obligation to always persist in “feeling good about oneself.” And if there’s a central ethical commandment, it’s summed up by the many teenagers who defined morality as follows: “Just don’t be an asshole, that’s all.” Smith and Denton dub this theology Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. It’s a resonant term but not an entirely accurate one. Therapeutic this religion certainly is, but “Deism” suggests a distance between God and man, and a sense of divine detachment from the affairs of the world, that the teenagers in the survey don’t actually seem to accept. Indeed, the sociologists acknowledge as much, writing that “the Deism here is revised from its classical eighteenth-century version by the therapeutic qualifier, making the distant God selectively available for taking care of needs…. God is something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist: he is always on call, takes care of any problem that arises, professionally helps his people to feel better about themselves. The theology’s supposed “moralism,” meanwhile, is astonishingly weak. The God of MTD “is not demanding,” the authors note. “He actually can’t be, because his job is to solve our problems and make people feel good.” Therapeutic religion doesn’t call its adherents to prayer or repentance, to works of charity, or even the observance of a Sabbath. Instead, being a moral person “means being the kind of person that other people will like,” which is to A spirituality of niceness is not without its selling points. Therapeutic religion is immensely tolerant: since the only true God is the one you find within, there’s no reason to impose your faith on someone else. The idea of persecution— historically a temptation for nearly every Christian sect—seems not only wrong but hopelessly anachronistic. In a diverse and pluralistic society, this kind of easygoing religion has obvious advantages. “Theologically speaking,” Damon Linker has written of Moral Therapeutic Deism, “this watered-down, anemic, insipid form of Judeo-Christianity is pretty repulsive. But politically speaking, it’s perfect: thoroughly anodyne, inoffensive, tolerant … [and] perfectly suited to serve as the civil religion of the highly differentiated twenty-first-century United States.” Therapeutic religion’s intertwining goals of happiness and selfesteem, too, are not so easily dismissed. Even Rieff, whose book has the tone of a jeremiad, could understand the case for Ross Douthat: “The God Within” – page 15 of 20 such a faith. “I am aware that these speculations may be thought to contain some parodies of an apocalypse,” he wrote. “But what apocalypse has ever been so kindly? What culture has ever attempted to see to it that no ego is hurt?” But a tolerant society is not necessarily a just one. Men may smile at their neighbors without loving them and decline to judge their fellow citizens’ beliefs out of a broader indifference to their fate. An ego that’s never wounded, never trammeled or traduced—and that’s taught to regard its deepest impulses as the promptings of the divine spirit—can easily turn out to be an ego that never learns sympathy, compassion, or real wisdom. And when contentment becomes and end unto itself, the way that human contents express themselves can look an awful lot like vanity and decadence. This growing vanity may even be quantifiable. Between 1982 and 2006, sixteen thousand American college students filled out the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, a psychological evaluation that asks for responses to statements like “If I ruled the world, it would be a better place,” “I think I am a special person,” and “I can live my life any way I want to.” The trend was consistent: the average student in 2006 had a higher narcissism score than 65 percent of college students a generation earlier. The Millennials were more likely to agree with statements like “I find it easy to manipulate people” and “I insist upon getting the respect that is due to me.” Other surveys have showed similar results. In the 1950s, only 12 percent of teenagers identified with the statement, “I am an important person.” A half century later, it was 80 percent. As narcissism has waxed, empathy has waned. In 2010, researchers at the University of Michigan reported that contemporary college students scored about 40 percent lower than their predecessors in the 1970s on tests assessing their ability to put themselves in other people’s shoes. They were more likely than their parents’ generation to agree with statements like “other people’s misfortunes do not usually disturb me a great deal,” and less likely to agree with prompts like “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective” and “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.” This sounds a lot like what Christian Smith discovered, when he followed up on his study of teenagers with a similar project focusing on the spiritual lives of American twentysomethings: The majority of those interviewed stated … that nobody has any natural or general responsibility or obligation to help other people…. Most of those interviewed said that it is nice if people help others, but that nobody has to. Taking care of other people in need is an individual’s choice. If you want to do it, good. If not, that’s up to you…. Even when pressed—What about victims of natural disaster or political oppression? What about helpless people who are not responsible for their poverty or disabilities? What about famines and floods and tsunamis?—No, they replied. If someone wants to help, then good for that person. But nobody has to. This growing narcissism has been a spur to excess on an epic scale. The narcissist may find it easy to say no to others, but he’s much less likely to say no to himself—and nothing defines the last decade of American life more than our inability to master our own impulses and desires. A nation of narcissists turns out to be a nation of gamblers and speculators, gluttons and gym obsessives, pornographers and Ponzi schemers, in which household debt rises alongside public debt, and bankers and pensioners and automakers and unions all compete to empty the public trough. Ross Douthat: “The God Within” – page 16 of 20 Therapeutic theology is hardly uniquely responsible for these trends. Our appetites have increased in proportion to our unprecedented wealth, and our immediate-gratification culture has been made possible by material abundance and technological progress. Obesity is a disease of civilization. The credit boom is the fruit of clever innovations in the financial sector. Mass media and mass advertising have made overconsumers of us all. The advance of narcissism may have a great deal to do with the explosion of social media, and the constant self-cultivation and self-marketing that it requires. (“We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000,” one of the University of Michigan researchers noted—which is to say, just as MySpace and then Facebook came online.) What the cult of the God Within has done, though, is make American religion an enabler of this excess rather than a potential curb against it. America would no doubt be an intensely consumerist society with or without therapeutic religion, and a solipsistic society with or without the God Within. But the triumph of the therapeutic has steadily undercut American religion’s ability to serve as a corrective or a critique. For all their claims to ancient wisdom, there’s nothing remotely countercultural about the Tolles and Winfreys and Chopras. They’re telling an affluent, appetitive society exactly what it wants to hear: that all of its deepest desires are really God’s desires, and that He wouldn’t dream of judging. This message encourages us to justify our sins by spiritualizing them. The covetousness of the American consumer becomes a path to self-actualization: Think of the way Oprah’s network suggests that peace of mind goes better with a new Hyundai; think of the vast market for high-end products and luxury goods that promise “simplicity” and “authenticity.” (Everything from their vacations to their kitchens, David Brooks wrote of the current American upper class in 2000’s Bobos in Paradise, seems designed to be “the physical expression of some metaphysical sentiment.”) The gluttony of the Whole Foods–shopping gourmand is redefined as a higher form of asceticism: if you put enough thought (and money) into your locally grown artisanal grass-fed free-range organic farm-to-table diet, then a lavish meal can be portrayed as one part philosophical statement, one part eucharistic feast. The physical vanity of the diet-and-exercise obsessive is recast as the pursuit of a kind of ritual purity, hedged about with taboos and guilt trips and mysticized by yoga. (Not for nothing does Amazon.com include diet and exercise books on its “Religion and Spirituality” bestseller list….) Nowhere is the spiritualization of what used to be considered sinfulness more apparent than in our sexual and romantic lives. The decline of marriage, the weakening of family structures overall, the shift from a child-centric to a romance-centric model for adult sexual relationships—all of these trends would exist if Oprah Winfrey was still anchoring a local news show and Deepak Chopra had never given up endocrinology for mysticism. But therapeutic religion has often provided the narrative that Americans use to justify their abandonment of what used to be considered basic moral obligations. This was true during the divorce revolution of the 1970s, when popculture figures like Wayne Dyer—a proto-Chopra who urged his readers to connect with “the Source,” his favored term for the God Within—emerged to minister to people looking for a spiritual justification for deserting their families. It’s just as true today—and not only because Dyer himself is still churning out pamphlets. From our Hallmark cards to our divorce courts, the American way of love has become therapeutic to its very core. It emphasizes feelings over duties, it’s impatient with institutional structures of any sort, and it’s devoted to the premise that the God or Goddess Within should never, ever have to settle. Ross Douthat: “The God Within” – page 17 of 20 Think of the way Elizabeth Gilbert’s spiritual odyssey plays out. Eat, Pray, Love begins with her throwing over her husband of five years (a man whose devotion and decency she praises to the skies) because she’s bored and frustrated and isn’t ready to have kids, and ends with her finding love with a handsome Brazilian in Bali. In the interim, God’s intercession is sought to smooth her divorce proceedings and then to ease her sense of guilt over her own conduct. It’s hard to imagine a better encapsulation of religion’s role in post–sexual revolution America—as an enabler of adult desire, whether gluttonous or libidinous, and a source of endless justifications for whatever the heart already prefers to do. “Historically,” Rieff notes in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, “the rejection of sexual individualism … was the consensual matrix of Christian culture.” With the crisis of orthodox belief, the Christian matrix has been shattered, and a different set of moral standards has emerged. One is the rule of consent, the idea that whatever adults do with their bodies is their business, so long as neither party is harmed in the process. (According to Neale Donald Walsch, God’s only specific sexual commandment is that “no action involving another may be taken without the other’s agreement and permission”—which makes the Deity sound rather like the bouncer at an S&M club.) Another is a rule of love: the idea that some forms of promiscuity may well be wrong, but that a strong emotional attachment, whether in or out of marriage, is enough to elevate sex from “casual” to licit. Undergirding both of these standards are two deeper assumptions. First, that the urge to have sex is both more irresistible and more fundamental to personal identity than other impulses and appetites. Second, that the act of sex itself is basically a small thing, a little spasm of delight which an all-powerful God can’t possibly care that much about, at least so long as you’re a kind and charitable person whose heart is fundamentally in the right place. In James Frey’s The Final Testament of the Holy Bible (2011), one of many recent literary attempts to improve on the gospels, the latter sentiment even gets attributed to Jesus Christ himself. “Love and laughter and fucking are what make life better,” Frey’s modern-day messiah tells a Catholic priest. “God doesn’t care about the petty dramas that mean so much to us. God doesn’t care what we say or who we fuck or what we do with our bodies or who we love or who we marry.” This idea has become so commonplace that it’s worth pausing to consider how extraordinary it is. is. I don’t just mean extraordinary in the context of a religious culture that’s still obsessed with Jesus of Nazareth, who was as hard on sins against chastity as he was on sins against the widow and the orphan. I mean extraordinary in the context of basic moral reasoning and simple common sense. Almost nothing that human beings do in life is freighted with as many potential consequences as sexual relations: emotional consequences, physical consequences, and above all, the world-altering consequence of creating an entirely new human life. The promises of the sexual revolution notwithstanding, neither contraception nor abortion has done away with these realities. Sex may be “safer” with pills and condoms, but it’s never anything remotely close to safe. Acknowledging this truth doesn’t require accepting Christian conclusions on every controversial question. But for a culture as putatively religious as our own, it requires giving more consideration to the Christian premise that bright lines and absolute standards may have, if anything, a stronger role to play in sexual matters than in other areas of human life. True, this perspective can be a warrant for prudishness, hypocrisy, and sexism. But it can also be a way to afford human sexuality a kind of deep respect that acknowledges sex’s promise but also Ross Douthat: “The God Within” – page 18 of 20 its perils— for the couples involved and for the ever-widening circle of people that any sexual encounter can affect and (more importantly) create. Fidelity within lifelong relationships and continence outside them: these are hard standards, but when lived out successfully, they have been the basis for a remarkable amount of human flourishing— from the ordinary grace of a happy childhood to the extraordinary lives of the saints. Since the 1960s, though, this is an argument that the Christian churches have found themselves increasingly helpless to promote. According to the sociologist Mark Regnerus, for a small minority of religious Americans— the devoutest of the devoutest— there’s still a strong correlation between Christian faith and Christian sexual conduct, manifested in lower-than-average rates of out-ofwedlock childbearing, abortion, and divorce. But outside this inner circle, the impact of religion seems if anything to run the other way. Overall, Evangelical teenagers are more likely to have sex at an early age; Evangelical mothers are more likely to bear children outside marriage; Evangelical marriages are more likely to end in divorce. Catholics have more abortions than the national average. African-Americans and Hispanics are among the most religious demographics in America, yet they have the highest rates of out-ofwedlock births. The same is true when you zoom out and compare America to the rest of the developed world. Our vaunted religiosity is real enough, but our ostensibly Christian piety doesn’t have the consequences a casual observer might expect. We have some of the most liberal divorce laws in the Western world, and the high divorce rates to go with it. We sentimentalize the family more than certain cultures, yet we also have one of the highest rates of unwed births. Our opinion polls suggest that we’re more pro-life than Europeans, but we tolerate a much more permissive abortion regime than countries like Germany or France. We’re more likely to fight over stem cell research than other developed countries, but our fertility clinics are among the least regulated in the world. We nod to God, and then we do as we please. Again, the advantages of this therapeutic culture should not be easily dismissed. Tolerance, freedom, personal choice— what Rieff calls the “kindly” aspects of the new spiritual order— can loom very large indeed, especially when set against the web of shame that the older Christian culture sometimes bound around believers and nonbelievers alike. But it’s striking that the things that therapeutic, God Within religion doesn’t seem to have delivered to Americans are the very things that it claims to be best suited to provide— contentment, happiness, well-being, and, above all, the ability to forge successful relationships with fellow human beings. Instead, the solipsism and narcissism that shadow God Within theology seem to be gradually overwhelming our ability to live in community with one another. Just as Christopher Lasch predicted, in a therapeutic culture “the cult of intimacy conceals a growing despair of finding it,” and “personal relations crumble under the emotional weight with which they are burdened.” Americans are less happy in their marriages than they were thirty years ago; women’s self-reported happiness has dipped downward overall. Our social circles have constricted: declining rates of churchgoing have been accompanied by declining rates of just about every sort of social “joining,” and Americans seem to have fewer and fewer friends whom they genuinely trust. Our familial networks have shrunk as well. More children are raised by a single parent; fewer people marry or have children to begin with; and more and more old people live and die alone. A Duke University study found that Americans reported having an average of three people with whom they discussed important matters in 1985, Ross Douthat: “The God Within” – page 19 of 20 but only two in 2004; the percentage with exactly zero confidants doubled, and the percentage who talked only to family members rose from 57 percent to about 80 percent. We’re freer than we used to be, but also more isolated, lonelier, and more depressed. In The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Rieff quotes a line from Goethe: “Speaking for myself, I too believe that humanity will win in the long run; I am only afraid that at the same time the world will have turned into one huge hospital where everyone is everybody else’s humane nurse.” As ordinary human relationships have attenuated— families weakening, true friendship waning— this is roughly what’s been happening. As Ronald Dworkin pointed out in a 2010 Policy Review essay, the United States has witnessed a hundredfold increase in the number of professional caregivers since 1950. Our society boasts 77,000 clinical psychologists, 192,000 clinical social workers, 105,000 mental health counselors, 50,000 marriage and family therapists, 17,000 nurse psychotherapists, 30,000 life coaches— and hundreds of thousands of nonclinical social workers and substance abuse counselors as well. “Most of these professionals spend their days helping people cope with everyday life problems,” Dworkin writes, “not true mental illness.” This means that “under our very noses a revolution has occurred in the personal dimension of life, such that millions of Americans must now pay professionals to listen to their everyday life problems.” Learning to love ourselves and love the universe isn’t necessarily the best way to learn to love our neighbor as ourselves, it turns out, and an overemphasis on the essential unity of all things— the Creator and creation, God and man, Yahweh and Elizabeth Gilbert— may be a good way to dissolve more intermediate loyalties completely. The result is a nation where gurus and therapists have filled the roles once occupied by spouses and friends, and where professional caregivers minister, like seraphim around the throne, to the needs of people taught from infancy to look inside themselves for God. Therapeutic religion promises contentment, but in many cases it seems to deliver a sort of isolation that’s at once comfortable and terrible— leaving us alone with the universe, alone with the God Within. Ross Douthat from Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics Such a “culture of care,” as Dworkin calls it, is a logical end point for a society in which the religious instinct is oriented more and more toward every individual’s own Highest Thoughts and innermost spirits. Therapeutic theology raises expectations, and it raises self-regard. It isn’t surprising that people taught to be constantly enamored of their own godlike qualities would have difficulty forging relationships with ordinary human beings. (Two Supreme Selves do not necessarily a happy marriage make.) Ross Douthat: “The God Within” – page 20 of 20
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Running head: ANALYZING SYNCRETISM

Analyzing Syncretism
Institution Affiliation
Date

1

ANALYZING SYNCRETISM

2
Introduction

Syncretism is no religion of its own. It specifies not a specific way of religiosity nor
particularly recommends certain practices for spiritual satisfaction more than others. It, however,
encompasses the amalgamation of multiple religious practices and doctrines to form a descript
viewpoint of individual spirituality. From a traditional perspective, this ambiguity of rituals,
practices and spiritual beliefs may render syncretism problematic. This essay seeks to understand
syncretic theology to figure out whether this incertitude is unsettling. It argues that although
syncretism borrows much from multiple theological ideologies, its dogmas both overlap and
differ from every one of them on various aspects of spirituality and intent creating a shallow and
parasitic inclusionary theology of some sort.
Borrowed Tenets of Syncretism and Their Different Adaptations
An effort to understand syncretism and determine what is problematic about it requires
that tenets that form its theology be identified. The first tenet shuns organized religion as partial
and limiting. It argues that only through feeling, experience and direct encounter that can one...


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