Secularism, Utopia and the Discernment of Myth

Abstract

Is spiritual experience the best way to account for the host of newer religious sensibilities that are cropping up, in enabling the crossing of borders between older religious systems that scatter the cultural landscape as the newer intolerances that have taken their place? In order to offer a theoretical angle on the question of spiritual experience I want to deal with four issues: secularism, post-structuralism, the utopian possibilities of religion, and what I want to call, following Ernst Bloch (1972), the discernment of myths. The specific issue relating to post-secularism is the widespread denigration of “religion” in favor of “spirituality.” No one, it seems, wants to be religious any more; no one, in fact has been religious for a good time now; in popular parlance, worship halls reek of incense gone rancid, moth-eaten robes, and empty temples, whether Jewish synagogues or Hindu stupas. However, what one can be is spiritual, removed from any institutional taint, free to pick up lost forms of spirituality or any variety of the new forms that spring up daily. If I add that spirituality now is characterized by bricolage and eclecticism, that it expresses a deep desire to be free from political as well as institutional taint, then we have a definition of spirituality. It is, in other words, the properly late capitalist and consumerist approach to religion. The popularity and valorization of the spiritual is so often taken as a mark of the new post-secular order, and religion has become the bogey term. The seemingly rapid appearance of such a distinction hit me while teaching in 1999. In a course entitled “Culture, Religion and Spirituality” I found that not one of the students in the course would admit to being religious: if they were anything, it was spiritual, Secularism, Utopia and the Discernment of Myth