This podcast post really needs a soundtrack. So, please click on this Secular Sabbath video and leave it running. Then open the GetReligion post in a second browser window and start reading. This will help with the content — I promise.
This week’s “Crossroads” discussion (CLICK HERE to tune that in) focused on a timely, solid feature at The Free Press with this catchy headline: “Can You Find God in a Bikini?” The story was timely because, in many ways, this is a news story that has been with us for decades (if not for centuries, viewed from a theological, pre-electronic-trance-music point of view).
To understand my thinking here, it helps to follow a timeline linking a few books on this topic.
Let’s start here, with “Understanding the New Age,” which was researched in the late 1980s by the great religion-beat pro Russell Chandler. The key to this vague New Age thing, he said, is the movement’s “view of the nature of reality, which admits to no absolutes” and, thus, all “standards of morality” are “relative.”
In the mid-1990s, linked to another burst of New Age media buzz, I interviewed Chandler and the resulting “On Religion” column included this thesis:
A few years ago, most generic bookstores had a "New Age" section. Today, this is rare. But this doesn't mean that the wave of religious trends that crested in the 1980s simply vanished. Truth is, it soaked in.
"You don't see New Age shelves anymore because you can find New Age books in almost every part of the store," said Russell Chandler, an award-winning religion writer best known for his 18 years at the Los Angeles Times. "They're in the psychology section and over on the women's shelf. You'll find them under self-help, stress, holistic health and the environmental, too."
The day of New Age cover stories in news magazines may have passed, but that's beside the point. New Age faith, said Chandler, has "become so visible that it's now all but invisible."
Reading Chandler led me to New Age preachers such as Marianne Williamson (yes, she is seeking — again — the White House as a Democrat) and her bestselling book “A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles.” Here is a key passage:
Only love is real. Nothing else actually exists. If a person behaves unlovingly, then, that means that, regardless of their negativity — anger or whatever — their behavior was derived from fear and doesn’t actually exist. They’re hallucinating. You forgive them, then, because there’s nothing to forgive.
And, thus:
A sin would mean we did something so bad that God is angry with us. But since we can’t do anything that changes our essential nature, God has nothing to be angry at. Only love is real. Nothing else exists.
Williamson gained a national following as a spiritual advisor to Oprah Winfrey and a frequent guest on her broadcasts. It would be hard to overstate Oprah’s influence on middle America during that period of time (and for years to come).
We were living in Oprah America and she was everywhere. I discussed that two decades ago in the journal Homiletics in an interview called “We’re Taking Communion at the Mall.”
Hang in there, because the first decade of this timeline is almost done and I will not trouble you with the decades between the early ‘90s and the current feature in The Free Press. That would, literally, be a BOOK.
About the same time as reading “A Return to Love,” I read (frequent GetReligion readers knew this was coming) sociologist James Davison Hunter’s most influential book — “Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America.” The thesis was that there had been “a fundamental realignment in American religious pluralism.” In a 10th anniversary “On Religion” column I summed that up this way:
The old dividing lines centered on issues such as the person of Jesus Christ, church tradition and the Protestant Reformation. But these new interfaith coalitions were fighting about something even more basic – the nature of truth and moral authority.
Two years later, Hunter began writing "Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America," in which he declared that America now contains two basic worldviews, which he called "orthodox" and "progressive." The orthodox believe it's possible to follow transcendent, revealed truths. Progressives disagree and put their trust in personal experience, even if that requires them to "resymbolize historic faiths according to the prevailing assumptions of contemporary life."
At some point, all of this clicked together for me and I realized that this was linked to a term — “Sheilaism” — from the work of the late sociologist Robert N. Bellah, as expressed in the 1985 bestseller "Habits of the Heart.” This transcript of a 1986 lecture is also helpful.
The key, of course, was an interview with a woman named Sheila (as I summarized in another “On Religion” column):
"I can't remember the last time I went to church," she said. "My faith has carried me a long way. It's Sheilaism. Just my own little voice." The goal was to "love yourself and be gentle with yourself. … I think God would want us to take care of each other."
A decade later, during the so-called "New Age" era, researchers described a similar faith approach with this mantra — "spiritual but not religious."
That quote, gentle readers, showed up in a “Crossroads” podcast last year about the stunning statistical rise of “Nones” and “Nothing in particular” believers in American culture: “Religion News Service offers new story about an old trend called 'Sheilaism'.”
That Religion News Service piece was totally valid, because the “Sheilaism” trend, as merchandised in the New Age era and beyond, is alive and well.
This is demonstrated perfectly in that feature at The Free Press, which focuses on the Secular Sabbath movement led by 32-year-old Genevieve Medow-Jenkins, who is having tremendous success among hip, influential pop-culture and social-media “influencers.”
The key, once again, is that what individual believers feel is true and right for them. There is no need for that terrible D-word.
Part of what’s pushing people away from religion, Medow-Jenkins says, is its dogma — something that briefly soured her on Judaism when she was young. Once, while visiting her Orthodox relatives in the Midwest, Medow-Jenkins remembers them asking her not to eat with them, because her Subway sandwich wasn’t kosher.
“It was so negative for me because it was so rule-bound,” she says. “And I knew when I created Secular Sabbath, I didn’t want it to have many rules. I wanted it to feel like you could be any version of something and still be included.”
There are, of course, many paths to the Divine.
However, some of the paths are more useful and dogma-free than others in this day and New Age.
[Medow-Jenkins] does try to steer clear from any connections to Western religions like Christianity, and instead borrows from Eastern traditions, because people are “more open to it.”
More than anything, she wants to dispel the idea that God is uncool.
“In American culture, we are so disconnected from feeling passionately about things—because it’s terrifying to care,” she says. “People are afraid to feel into spirituality.”
One more passage from this feature will connect the dots, via the personal testimony of Juliana King, a 37-year-old acupuncturist and the hip musician Rhye:
”I had to reclaim the word God,” she tells me, sitting by the pool, listening to Rhye, who’s ten feet in front of her humming into a microphone. “Because God felt like this man in the sky that tells you how to be, and so I was uncomfortable with the word for a long time.”
King, who has a hint of mascara smudged beneath her eyes after a cold plunge, tells me she grew up in Texas, by the Mexico border, in a small city of about 150,000 called McAllen. There, she attended a Presbyterian church.
“I technically went to church,” she says. “But it was just a place I showed up.”
Now, she says she’s a “cafeteria spiritualist” who picks and chooses which practices work for her.
“I want to find God and know God in my own way,” she says. “I don’t want anyone to tell me the quality of God or how to worship or anything, I want all that to be my own experience.”
That’s enough of this newsy journey — for today. But this trend will return to the headlines again, and again, and again, because it’s real. This wave has soaked deep into the sand of America’s cultural beach. That is — dare I say this — an absolute truth.
Enjoy the podcast, and, please, pass it along to others. Also, you can sign up to receive “Crossroads” via Apple iTunes.
FIRST IMAGE: Uncredited photo with the feature “Living My Own Religion” at the CounterCurrents.org website.