In BAD RELIGION: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat analyzes current American spirituality beginning with Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, which was made into a movie starring Julia Roberts.
“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, Neal 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. 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 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, 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. It still testifies to the truth of a particular theology, a particular way of thinking about God.
The theology’s tenets can be summed up as follows. First, that all organized religions offer only partial glimpses of 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. ‘Listen to your feelings’, ‘Listen to your Highest Thought’.
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.
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.
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 understand how to let go, let God, and let themselves be washed away in love.
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. It just provides an excuse for making religious faith more comfortable, more dilettantish, more self-absorbed – 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 form 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.
God Within religion doesn’t seem to have delivered to Americans the very things that it claims to be the 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. Americans are less happy in their marriages than they were thirty years ago. 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. Learning to love ourselves and love the universe isn’t necessarily the best way to learn to love our neighbor as ourselves.” (pp.211-241)
Thank God for Jesus and the Gospel. “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16) He will deliver us from self-centeredness and selfishness to love one another by the power of the Cross and the Spirit.
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