In the WSJ, Stephen Prothero discusses a new book:
One of the grand conceits of the Spiritual Left is that each of us can (and should) invent our own spirituality, which to be authentic must also be unborrowed. But the meditation techniques and yoga postures so loved among spirituality's champions did not spring forth fully formed from the genius of any American. They were cultivated over millennia by Hindus and Buddhists in India and Tibet and Japan, who were themselves sustained in those practices by institutions and clerics and everything else that Emerson loved to hate. Mr. Schmidt knows this, of course. And at a few points he seems to sense the irony of foisting an intellectual genealogy on folks who, like Charlie Brown and his friends, fancy themselves parentless.
In the end, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that there is in contemporary American spirituality more than a modicum of the feckless teenager who imagines that his foolish parents have bequeathed him nothing except perhaps a new car. The problem with this conceit is not simply that it is historically inaccurate or that it fails to give credit where credit is due. The problem--and this should matter more to spirituality's friends than to its enemies--is that spirituality depends very much on organized religion, since each of its key characteristics (even its disdain for religion itself) was created and sustained by religious believers operating inside religious institutions and for religion's sake.
What is missing from this otherwise intelligent book is a hard-headed engagement with the broader question of spirituality's provenance, specifically its symbiotic relationship with organized religion itself. Spirituality is not so much an alternative to religion as a part of it. Should the prophesy of the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier ever come to pass--that "altar, church, priest and ritual will pass away"--spirituality would go with them.
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