Abstract
Attending a Medicine Wheel Gathering, or dancing at Burning Man, or reading through John Mackey’s Conscious Capitalism, or purchasing Native American dream catchers and “smudge kits” on Etsy, or using Reiki, acupuncture or other forms of energy balancing, or praying to open your heart to God’s energies—all of these practices, and many more, fit within the overlapping circles of metaphysical religion. What we have identified in this volume are shifting networks of practices that we might call metaphysical, and shifting constellations of ideas that together look like metaphysical religion. This might be the best we can do for a group of antinomians who eschew dogmatism, critique institutional religion, and seek a boundless and eclectic spirituality. This conclusion will offer a final examination of different ways of talking about and locating metaphysical religion. In the process it will also point to several of its innovative and adaptive characteristics that have not yet been examined and assess the present strength of metaphysical religion and its future trajectories.
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Notes
- 1.
Tobin Grant, “The Great Decline: 60 Years of Religion in One Graph,” Religion News Service, accessed at https://religionnews.com/2014/01/27/great-decline-religion-united-states-one-graph/
- 2.
See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Courtney Bender and Ann Taves, eds., What Matters: Ethnographies of Value in a Not so Secular Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 6–7; and Courtney Bender and Omar McRoberts, “Mapping a Field: Why and How to Study Spirituality,” SSRC Working Papers (Oct 2012), 7.
- 3.
AA has over 60,000 groups meeting weekly in the U.S. and over 1.2 mil members – not to mention the many individuals involved in related therapeutic associations such as NarcAnon. See https://www.aa.org/assets/en_US/smf-53_en.pdf
- 4.
Erin Smith, What Would Jesus Read? Popular Religious Books and Everyday Life in Twentieth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 250.
- 5.
Jeremy Stolow, “Techno-Religious Imaginaries: On the Spiritual Telegraph and the Circum-Atlantic World of the nineteenth Century,” Globalization Working Papers, Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, 11.
- 6.
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: The Modern Library, 1931; orig. 1918), 380.
- 7.
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 383.
- 8.
Vernon Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought (vol. 3) (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1927), 192.
- 9.
Harry Emerson Fosdick, “How Shall we Think of God?” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 153 (June/Nov 1926), 230.
- 10.
From Stefan Andriopoulos, “Psychic Television,” Critical Inquiry 31:3 (Spring 2005), 632.
- 11.
From “The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan,” Playboy Magazine (March 1969), accessed online Aug. 27, 2016 at http://www.nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-marshall-mcluhan/
- 12.
Quoted in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (eds.) Religion and Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 13.
- 13.
Ibid., 23, 28.
- 14.
“My argument is a simple one. It is in some—and considerable—measure because of the ubiquitousness of electromagnetically derived images in our society that individuals can turn easily to shamanic spirituality.” Catherine Albanese, “From New Thought to New Vision: The Shamanic Paradigm in Contemporary Spirituality,” in Leonard Sweet (ed.) Communication and Change in American Religious History (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993), 353–354.
- 15.
E. Norman Pearson, Space, Time and Self (Adyar, India: Theosophical Publishing House, 1957), 22.
- 16.
The 2006 Portraits of American Life Survey (PALS) asked respondents how much they agreed or disagreed with the following: “God is not a personal being, but more like an impersonal spiritual force.” 48.7 percent of respondents strongly agreed or agreed with this statement. Pew has the 2017 number of Spiritual But Not Religious at 27%. See http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/06/more-americans-now-say-theyre-spiritual-but-not-religious/Albanese points to different types of evidence that suggests that metaphysical religion has been renewed and is even more encompassing in the last several decades. See Catherine Albanese, Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 510–11.
- 17.
- 18.
Albanese, Republic of Mind and Spirit, 510.
- 19.
Candy Gunther Brown, “Evangelical Yoga: Cultural Appropriation and Translation in American Religions,” The Religious Studies Project (Podcast Transcript). 19 June 2017. Transcribed by Helen Bradstock. Version 1.1, 16 June 2017 Available at: http://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/podcast/evangelical-yoga-cultural-appropriation-and-translation-in-american-religions/
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White, C. (2022). Conclusion: The Future of Metaphysical Spirituality. In: Silk, M., White, C. (eds) The Future of Metaphysical Religion in America. Boundaries of Religious Freedom: Regulating Religion in Diverse Societies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79903-8_6
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