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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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