Why I Don’t Hate Evangelicals: Part I

We in the UU church have a low tolerance for evangelical Christians. In our intolerance, we tend to lump all orthodox Christians[1] into one category and then dismiss them as deluded and morally inferior. This means that evangelical Presbyterians are painted with the same brush as tent revivalists. We fail to make important distinctions and to see nuances that exist not only among individual Christians but also in broad groups of “evangelicals”. There is a word for ascribing negative characteristics to broad swaths of people – prejudice. We suffer from this type of prejudice and it gets expressed in the same way prejudice expresses itself in any other group – demonizing, fear mongering, “us versus them” thinking and so on. As always, the antidote to prejudice is understanding.

In the interests of full disclosure, I hold a Masters of Divinity from Fuller Theological Seminary (the intellectual center of the Evangelical left) and before “loosing my faith” in 1984 considered myself to be an Evangelical Christian. Much of what follows reflects my insider’s understanding of this from a relatively sophisticated level – I was at the heart of the intellectual engine of neo-evangelicalism and therefore keenly attuned to the nuances and differences within the conservative wing of Christian church in America. My current information is admittedly a bit out of date, but hopefully not so much so as to undermine the usefulness of this post and the next.

This blog entry will come in two parts. The first will trace the history of the evangelical movement in the United States and try to tease out a number of key components and lineages that help us to place the overall conservative religious movement in a broader context of religious history. The second will attempt to assess the evangelical movement from a perspective of human development by looking at social and cognitive lines of development and their interplay with belief systems.

So let’s start with a little history….

Evangelicalism

The strands of Evangelicalism in America has parallel but different roots. However, all of these strands trace their deepest roots to the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 40s. During that time, the Anglican Church in England was deeply entrenched and wedded to upper class interests. This was true both in England and the Colonies. The religion was largely civil and had become depersonalized in many respects. It was a sterile, intellectual faith that was articulated by a church which, by its very mandate, was an extension of the state. Against this backdrop arose the Methodist movement initiated by John Wesley. This movement emphasized personal experience of the divine, personal piety[2] and social justice. There was a strong emphasis in this movement on the notion of free will and the commitment (conversion) to the saving work of Christ. Soon another stream arose from the Calvinist tradition, represented by George Whitfield in England. Both of these movements swept through the urban lower classes. The Methodist movement in particular emphasized a keen interest in social change through the betterment of society. The Calvinist tradition (with its post-millennial [3] point of view) also believed in progress of humanity towards an eventual kingdom of God on earth in which justice and mercy would be available to all. These groups were far from separatist. They were deeply engaged in social reform and held deep convictions about the importance of social justice.

In the United States a Calvinist preacher, Jonathan Edwards, was preaching a message of personal conversion in Northampton Massachusetts which began to spread throughout the urban areas of the north. The movement swept the colonies in the 1730s and 40s through the work of both Wesley and Whitfield. among others. Much of this Great Awakening occurred in northern urban settings though Wesley rode into the south and found success there. These plantings of Methodists in the south lead to the second Great Awakening in the early 1800s primarily in the Appalachian region and tidewater states. This time the religious movement largely took the form the tent revival meetings and focused on personal conversion and personal piety (particularly abstinence – alcoholism on the frontier was epidemic).

The Third Great Awakening began in the 1850s and had a strong social gospel component. This was a largely urban movement spawned by opposition to slavery and then to the exploitation of labor and the excesses of the gilded age. It was largely populist in its message and post-millennial in it understanding (i.e. that Christ would return when peace and justice had been established throughout the earth). While many rural areas were touched by this movement, it was largely urban in its focus. The Universalist movement was an outgrowth of this time of religious ferment. (Note: See Jeff's comment for a well taken correction to this last sentence.)

Fundamentalism

Fundamentalism takes its name from a twelve volume series of essays entitled “The Fundamentals” published between 1910 and 1915. These essays reflected a number of specific tenets and advanced one important new belief. The main impetus of these essays was to affirm the validity of Christian scriptures in the face of Biblical criticism that had emerged in Germany and was beginning to be felt in England. These schools of criticism questioned the accounts of Biblical miracles based largely on reason and the scientific world view that had emerged in the Enlightenment. The Fundamentals were written as a defense against this “encroachment” of modernism. As such, these writings defended the inerrancy of scripture, the virgin birth, the substitutionary atonement and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Infused into this concoction was a heavy dose of something that had been only peripheral in Christan dogma until that time. The Fundamentalists espoused pre-millennialism or the belief that Jesus would be returning to earth to set up an earthly kingdom sooner rather than later. This pre-millennialism held to a view that the world was on a dark path of increasing sin and degradation and would only be saved by the advent of Christ. This view was distinctly contrary to the entire history of Christianity in America (and indeed the most generally accepted doctrine of both Catholic an Protestant churches). Until this time, the dominant view had been post-millennial – the view that the world would, with the efforts of good Christian people – improve until it was worthy of Christ’s reign.

The post-millennial view had lead to deep commitments to social progress and reform. This pre-millennial view led, perhaps inevitably, to a very heavy dose of separatism. The leaders of the fundamentalism movement launched a two prong offensive against modernity. They attempted to fight it in the marketplace of ideas and they attempted to protect their flocks from its “dangers” by instituting a profound separation from secular society. The Scopes trial is perhaps the most famous initiative of the first effort. The social prohibitions (no dancing, no drinking, etc.) and imperatives to flee worldly pleasures was the most obvious manifestation of the second.
Early Fundamentalism was primarily a phenomenon of the south and of rural areas. The importance of this rootedness of Fundamentalism in rural, non-urban populations in Tidewater and Southern states cannot be overstated. Even today, the political divide in the United States is not between blue states and red states, but between rural America and urban America.

The Advent of Billy Graham

In 1949, Billy Graham held revivalist tent meetings in Los Angeles and struck a chord. The movement he started has been called by some the Fourth Great Awakening. Graham was, at the time, a fundamentalist. He had grown up in a Tidewater state but lived in an urban area. His family had been liberal Christians, but he himself was converted by an evangelist named Mordecai Ham from Kentucky. Ham could trace his spiritual lineage from Fundamentalism back to the Second Great Awakening. Graham, who had been raised in Charlotte, North Carolina, was able to take the message of fundamentalism and shape it to be heard by a new audience. While Graham himself was intellectually a pre-modern fundamentalist by religious confession, he was in every other important way a modernist. He understood corporate structures, was motivated by success and achievement (albeit for “God”) and was thoroughly comfortable with using the structures of the modern world for his ends. Unlike his fundamentalist forebears, he was not socially marginalized or inept. He proceeded to strip fundamentalism of its separatism, but retained the anti-intellectual and pietistic aspects. He poured pre-modern mythic religion into modern wineskins. As was true of the Second Great Awaking, Graham’s message was highly quietist – it spoke of personal salvation without a specific social agenda (except for vague patriotism and culturally inspired anti-communism). He borrowed much from the successful revivalist techniques but combined those with remarkable marketing and preaching skills. This combination managed to reach the growing hoards of post-war suburbia.

Thus a profound new force in American religious history came to the fore – the Evangelical – doctrinally conservative, highly pietistic, non-separatist and, most importantly, politically quietist. This largely suburban movement from the 1950s to the early 1970s was markedly apolitical. It stressed personal piety and conversion. While undoubtedly conservative on the whole, it did not espouse an overt political agenda. At the core of this movement was a belief that “saving” people by initiating personal conversion was the only thing that ultimately mattered. This required that individuals be “in this world, but not of it” and there was therefore a sense that one participated in society in order to save individuals.

And so in the 1960s, all major orthodox lineages in the United States could trace their roots to the First Great Awakening, but from there they fractured into four main streams:

• Politically active and socially assimilated liberal movements of
  mainline churches found in urban and suburban areas, (having been influenced by the
  Third Great Awakening and fundamentally modernist in their perspectives),
• Politically marginalized, socially separatist, highly pietistic fundamentalist churches found mostly in rural areas and in the deep south, (influenced by the Second Great Awakening and galvanized by the Fundamentalist Movement and deeply pre-modern in their perspectives),
• Politically quietist, socially assimilated and personally pietistic suburban churches, (who were pre-modern in their beliefs but modern in most other ways), and
• Politically liberal but socially oppressed and personally pietistic urban black churches (shaped mostly by oppression, but in part by the social gospel of the Third Great Awakening and the religious revivalism of the Second Great Awakening.)

The 1960s.

In the 1960s, post-modernism crashed into modernism and exploded in a way few cultural shifts have done in recent history. The importance of pluralism was reflected in the civil rights and feminist movements. The failures of capitalistic imperialism were reflected in opposition to the Vietnam War and the rise of the ecological movement. The culture wars were fully engaged. Those cultural creatives who embraced postmodernism moved to a progressive social agenda that admitted large scale change. Those who remained modernists were shell-shocked and huddled in suburbia (though suburbia ended up having its share of postmodernists as well). Those in rural America thought the modernists and postmodernists alike were at best crazy and at worst of the devil.

The Rise of the Christian Right

The Moral Majority came to the fore in 1978 with the rise of Jerry Falwell. Falwell had started Thomas Road Baptist church in the 1950s and had grown that church over the succeeding decades. As part of his work, he did a radio broadcast entitled “Old Time Gospel Hour". At first, this radio show was distinctly fundamentalist. It preached a separatist message and focused on personal conversion and piety. It was distinctly pre-millennial in its eschatology – emphasizing that the secular world would continue to deteriorate into sin until the eventual return of Christ.

However, Falwell was moving away from a purely fundamentalist perspective. (In the end, he renounced the term Fundamentalist and took on the label Evangelical). He was increasingly disquieted by the marginalization of fundamentalism and the separatism that spawned it. Seeing the tremendous evangelical inroads made into suburban American and also seeing a complete absence of political agenda, he realized that there was a tremendous vacuum in the movement Graham had inspired. (While himself politically conservative, Graham had assiduously avoided politicizing his movement – it was about saving individual souls be they white, black, Asian, American, Soviet, Republican or Democrat.)

From his fundamentalist roots in its original opposition to modernity and now post-modernity, Falwell saw the opportunity to capitalize on the religious faith of suburbia and fill the vacuum that had been created. He went on to interject a fundamentalist soco-political agenda that was, at its heart, aggressively anti-post modernist. It struck deeply at the relativistic moral value structures of post-modernity and pushed hard on the demographic that Billy Graham had created. However it scrupulously avoided offending modern sensibilities. ( This is reflected in Falwell's moving from "Old Time Gospel Hour" - a Fundamentalist title - to the "Moral Majority" - a distinctly modernist name.) This emergent created a new force in the religious landscape.

Suburban Christians, who had a pre-modern religious belief, were personally pietistic and socially assimilated with a modern political ideology but strongly opposed to post-modern pluralism were vulnerable to this move. This group was primed for political action – and the agenda of the Fundamentalist stream became one of all out assault on the post-modernist advances of the 1960s with a few of the old fundamentalist attacks on modernity thrown in for good measure. This rise of essential fundamentalism stripped of separatism and with a revived political mission provided the basis for the Christian Right. This movement has fed largely on the fact that suburbia sits pulled between the poles of urban and rural America and, because it holds the balance of political power between the two different world views held by those segments, it has had a profound impact on the partisan political balance of power. Falwell's understanding of this strategic importance made it his prime battleground against post-modernism.

It is this disproportionate influence coupled with the virulent anti-post-modernist agenda that concerns most UUs. If all of the suburban Christians simply believed in a mythic god and went quietly to their Bible studies on Wednesday night, we might write books on the virtues of atheism and the idiocy of faith, but we would not hate them so. However their fight against the post-modern political agenda is what raises our hackles and causes us deep concern. We are, to our bones, post-modernists and this assault threatens our most cherished beliefs.

It is interesting to note that the movement stands outside of the mainstream of the evangelical heritage in the United States. The Evangelicals of the First and Third Awakenings were profoundly progressive. These movements were rooted in urban movements that shaped the rise the liberalism in this country. What happened in the recent Culture War was a highjacking of this tradition by a southern revivalist movement with its roots in Fundamentalism which played on the shock and fears generated by a post-modern worldview and the inability of many in suburban America to assimilate that perspective. The modernists in America, those living in the suburbs, retreated in the face of the onslaught of post-modernism and sought something to “conserve” their sense of the world. For some, they regressed to take on pre-modern religious beliefs. Their fear and existential dread was exploited and turned into a virulent and aggressive anti-post-modern movement. This highjack of the Evangelical movement resulted in a huge confusion of the distinctions between Evangelicals and Fundamentalists as they had emerged historically. Indeed the leaders who coopted the Evangelical movement intentionally conflated those movements in very unfortunate ways. As a result, the landscape today is confusing. In the "Evangelical" movement we now have:

• Rural fundamentalists (those who have pre-modern beliefs, separate from the world and are not active politically)
• Rural evangelicals (those who have pre-modern beliefs, don’t separate from the world and are not politically engaged but are personally pietistic)
• Suburban fundamentalists (those who have pre-modern beliefs, seek not to live a lifestyle of modernity and are not active politically)
• Suburban Evangelicals (those who have pre-modern beliefs, live a modern lifestyle, tolerate post-modernity and are not active politically – think orthodox Presbyterians)
• Suburban Evangelical-Fundamentalists (those who have pre-modern beliefs, live a modern lifestyle, are actively opposed to post-modernity and are active politically – think anti-gay, anti-abortion, prayer in school charismatic and bible church types)
• Urban Evangelicals (pre-modern belief systems, personally pietistic, working on progressive political agendas – think black churches and groups like Sojourners)

What leaps out from this is that conservative political activism doesn’t seem inexorably tied to pre-modern belief systems. This strongly argues against the notion that it is the Christian belief structure that is motivating the conservative political activism. It is my contention that the Christian Right is more a function of sociological trends related to post-modern incursions on the social and belief structures of modernity than it is about religious ideology. Our "fight" is with one group of evangelicals - those who are Evangelical/Fundmentalists - and our fight is not about religious belief systems but the clash of post-modernism with the popular culture.

This shifts the “battleground of ideas” from one of religious perspectives to one of sociological development. It is my hope that, as UUs, as we come to understand the nuances of these various groups and the sociological forces in play, we will come to find more skillful means in addressing the real issues involved. Demonizing “evangelical Christians” paints the world with a very broad brush and causes us to miss the underlying dynamics of the forces at work. This makes us singularly ineffective. Indeed the spate of books that have come out in recent years decrying religious belief structures as the problem miss the point almost entirely. The problem is not one of intellectual belief but of the development of human consciousness as expressed in sociological development. The belief structures are a symptom or manifestation of this underlying issue of cultural development - not its cause. To think we can argue our way to sociological development by harranging people about their premodern belief systems makes about as much sense as harranging an 8th grader to do differential calculus. They simply aren't ready developmentally to hear it and will not hear it until they are. There are more skillful ways to address this although they don't allow for the same sense of self-righteousness. (This will be the subject of the second post.)

Interestingly, there is a growing movement of Suburban Progressive Evangelicals. This group has a pre-modern belief system, but a progressive social agenda involving stances that are anti-war, pro-environment, pro-human rights, pro-feminism, but also pro-life. This group is being led by people who understand the great traditions of American progressive religious thought pioneered in the First and Third Great Awakenings. They are attempting to build bridges with modern society and not engage in the destructive culture wars of the past forty years. they are actually our natural allies in changing cultural values - provided we can graciously allow them to continue to hold to a premodern belief structure. This group is proving remarkably flexible in allying itself with postmodern feminists and envirnonmentals to achieve joint political aims. We risk marginalizing this emergent group if cannot develop the tolerance to give them the space to intellectually hold the beliefs they hold.

___________________



[1] I am differentiating orthodox from liberal and heterodox. An orthodox Christian, roughly speaking, would be one who would subscribe to the literal truth of the Nicene Creed (a benchmark of orthodoxy for both the Catholic and Protestant churches). Those who don’t believe the literal truth of this creedal statement would either be liberal (seeing the creedal statement as metaphor, archetype or meaning making myth) or heterodox (not believing one or two specific creedal statements to be true but ascribing literal truth to the remaining statements.
[2] By pietistic I mean committing to a lifestyle of personal integrity in line with scriptural injunctions and engaging in a strong devotional practice.
[3] The post millennial and pre-millenial views are extremely important to this discussion. Post-mileniallists believe that the church’s mandate is to create a just and equitable society (the Kingdom of God) on earth that will be fit for Christ to reign over. Pre-millenialists believe that Christ must come back to set straight a world lost in increasing sin and depravity. The post-millenial view has been the historic orthodox doctrine of the Catholic and virtually all mainline Protestant churches. Contrary to many assumptions, the pre-millenial view was not a force in Christian theology until the early 20th Century.

© 2008. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

What are We Missing?

As we reflect on the spiritual marketplace in our modern, secularized world, there is no question that something is afoot. This week in Seattle an innovative trust and financial management company that serves families of extreme wealth rented the symphony hall to have alternative medicine expert Andrew Weil speak to its customers, potential customers, and their advisors on aging in one of its “Thought Forums”. Andrew Weil wasn't always so mainstream. In 1971 he first visited Esalen where he participated in then cutting edge seminars on health and human consciousness. His efforts and the efforts of other physicians and healthcare professionals and researchers who largely gathered under the initial aegis and leadership of Esalen brought alternative medicine to the United States and within a few short decades turned it into what is now referred to respectfully as "complimentary medicine."

The stuff that was on the very outer fringes of cultural acceptability only recently is becoming mainstream in some very important ways. Yet we as Unitarian Universalists are missing this cultural sea-change and dooming ourselves to fundamental and, I suspect, quite permanent, irrelevance. We sit back and dismiss these movements out of hand – this hunger people have for something of significance that feeds their souls. We see it as somehow too “woo-woo” or “New Age”. Yet in our complacency, the world is passing us by very, very quickly. The folks who consider themselves “spiritual but not religious”, some of whom are referred to as Cultural Creatives, constitute approximately 20% of our population and probably reflect an even larger percentage of the demographic in more hip, urban and liberal areas where many of our churches exist.

As sophisticated UUs, I have heard us scoff at those who race after chimeric “spiritual” fixes – like The Celestine Prophecy or The Secret or “What the Bleep Do We Know” – and yet people who are seeking comfort in these things, and other ideas that are even stranger, have a deep human longing to become more whole and more loving people whose lives are rooted in something deeper than the shallow materialism of our age. This “pop” spirituality speaks of something much more profound - a human tropism towards the spiritual. It speaks of something that is emerging in our culture that has profoundly ancient antecedents. It runs so deep that it might even be irreducibly embedded in structures of human consciousness or even the fabric of the universe itself. The problem is that these popular forms of spiritual expression are ill-formed, lack depth, and are concocted out of ideas that seem to us rational folk to be patently foolish, confused and magical. In short, a throw-back to pre-rational superstition.

And many of them are. And yet…

While this frothy spirituality oftentimes denies and condemns the deeper wisdom traditions, their ideas are the distant and sometimes barely recognizable relatives of the much deeper truths found in perennial philosophies and the paths of mystics in Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu traditions, among others. While the airy ideas of these facile trends lack depth and discipline, they can serve as gateways for literally millions of people to possibilities of real spiritual depth and profound experience. In talking with many UUs, the story is the same. Plenty of visitors, but few stick. Could part of the reason be because we are so very close to what they are looking for on paper, but fall short of embodying that promise in action, particularly with respect to spirituality?

As a faith that ostensibly draws on these well-grounded and respected traditions, we as Unitarian Universalists have the opportunity to deeply explore and live these truths and thereby offer to the world a path of depth, integrity and real meaning. But this way requires that we take our spiritual calling as seriously as we take our political one. It requires that we truly acknowledge the sources, not just with affirmation, but with incarnation. It requires discipline and study and devotion to spiritual practice.

Our denomination runs the risk of being swept into irrelevance. It continues to shrink in most appreciable ways and it is rapidly aging. We live in deadened humanism and narrow definitions of liberal political orthodoxy that have already been dismissed by our culture as fundamentally irrelevant. At this point, we have no voice that is resonating with those around us. Yet in our Sources we have latent depth and profound messages that, if taken seriously and coupled with spiritual practice, can not only revitalize our congregations but drive a new message of relevant political and social transformation.

Many leaders of cultural thinking point to emerging structures of consciousness that profoundly integrate the spiritual, the psychological, the intellectual and the ethical dimensions of life in ways that shape the soul. While this emerging consciousness is clearly not a panacea, and will raise its own problems, we are on the cusp of a revolution in the way ordinary people construct the meaning of their lives. It would be a shame to sit on the sidelines and only watch when we have the very real potential of dynamically participating in the emergence of a new order of human consciousness.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Prolegomena to Metaphysics

I have debated about how personal to become in sharing my own deepest spiritual beliefs. Ulimately, however, to be honest with this blogging process it is important that you, dear reader, know the core of where my perspectives originate - what is the the central fountainhead of the pieces you see here. Before I do that, however, I have to provide some context.

The title of this blog - Prolegomena to Metaphysics - is an homage to Immanual Kant's "Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics". This work was a distillation of the conclusions of his most famous work "Critique of Pure Reason" written to gain wider readership of the main work. A prolegomena is short essay that precedes and explains the more substantive work.

The Great Traditions

Two great traditions have struggled with the issue of the nature of reality.

The ancient Greeks had the leisure to invent philosophy. In a span of less than 50 years, the fundamental substance that would form the core of the Western debates for next 2200 years was said. Aristotle and Aristocles (better known as Plato) defined the parameters of Western thought and indeed, some would argue, that all of Western intellectual history has been a footnote to these two intellectual giants. The significantly different perspectives of these two greats have been debated in different forms until the very recent past.

Scholars agree that Aristotle, that premier taxonomist, got it about right when he divided philosophy into four areas: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics. Respectively, these ask: What is the nature of reality? How do we know truth? What is the good? What is the beautiful? Every other philosophical question seems to lie in one of these four areas. To oversimplify a bit, but not much, the west has attempted to understand these realities by looking primarily at the outer world through the lens of reason.

While a simplification, Indian philosophy created six systems (darshanas) which seek to map human knowledge: Samkhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Vaiseshika, Mimamsa and Vedanta. Each of these schools addresses questions recognizable as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and aesthetics. To again oversimplify, the East attempted to answer these questions by looking primarily within through the lens of observation.

These questions - What is reality? How do we know the truth? What is the good? What is beautiful? - are the central questions of human existence. The West and East agree on this much. To ask these questions is what make us human – we are reflectively self-conscious.

In the area of metaphysics a number of issues emanated from the central question – what is reality – and these issues recur in Eastern and Western philosophy are the same. Mind and Matter, God and No God, Unity and Multiplicity, Identity and Change, Reality and Illusion, Will and Fate, Causation, and so on.

And both traditions spent thousands of years rehashing the same discussion, endlessly exploring nuance. In the West, reason refined the argument to the point where metaphysics died with Immanuel Kant. Kant who conclusively proved the limits of pure reason in determining the nature of reality as it was then understood. The East was less decisive. As people observed, they drifted into an endless array of sects and practices limited only by human experience with no rational metric to determine whether these beliefs bore relation to objective reality.

The Revolution in Human Perspective

And then a remarkable thing happened, again within the course of 50 years. In 1905, in his spare time over several months, Albert Einstein wrote four articles that fundamentally changed the course of human thought. During that same period, observations of very small particles lead to very strange conclusions about the very fabric of the nature of reality itself. Unfortunately, the two views were at odds with one another. Because these views fundamentally shifted the way the world is viewed for the first time since the ancient Greeks started thinking on these things, the implications of these theories on the nature of reality began to work their way through the world of philosophy in the West. Because these ideas had resonance with mystical insights form the East, the East began a process of grounding its philosophy in outward reality. These developments forced both traditions to question assumptions and recast their world view from more or less common ground. In other words, integration became possible and an integral world view based on multiple traditions could begin to emerge.

While many writers and thinkers could be chosen to discuss the emergence of this new level of human consciousness, the writings of two have had a most profound impact on me personally. These two seem somehow "essential" in that they articulate the core of what this revolution is about.

A. Whitehead

In 1927/1928 a brilliant mathematician, theoretical physicist and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, delivered the Gifford lecture series in what was eventually collected in the book Process and Reality. This book is very tough sledding, made even more so by the fact that Whitehead never bothered to polish his lecture notes. The process cosmology elaborated in these lectures proposes that the fundamental elements of the universe are in process as occasions of experience. According to this notion, what people commonly think of as concrete objects are actually processes. Occasions of experience can be collected into groupings; something complex such as a human being is thus a grouping (or nexus) of many smaller occasions of experience. According to Whitehead, everything in the universe is characterized by experience (which is not to be confused with consciousness); there is no mind-body duality under this system, because "mind" is simply seen as a very developed kind of experiencing while "body" is a lower order process. Whitehead's occasions of experience are interrelated with every other occasion of experience that precedes it in time. Inherent to Whitehead's conception is the notion of time’s directionality; all experiences are influenced by prior experiences, and will influence future experiences. An occasion of experience consists of a process of prehending other experiences, and then a reaction to it.

By application of his ideas, Whitehead is able to fundamentally reconcile a number of very difficult Western philosophical problems in unique and compelling ways. His solution – when stripped down, look profoundly Eastern – reality, as we perceive it, simply arises as processes – that being is a potential for becoming. Because of its density, this book has not seeped into popular conceptions, but it is the first and most profound attempt at a post-Kantian philosophic cosmology after Einstein. Whitehead essentially provides the intellectual freight needed to ground much of the intuitive insight expressed by the Continental existentialists and to a lesser extent the German Idealists, who were otherwise too easily dismissed by more rigorous approaches. It is not so easy to dismiss Whitehead.

B. Aurobindo

In India, between 1914 to 1949, a western educated Indian mystic and philosopher, Sri Aurobindo, wrote a series of articles that would eventually be collected into book – “The Life Divine”. He realized that Einstein and the developments of evolutionary biology pointed the way to a reconciliation of Eastern and Western thought and that it was possible for human beings to perceive the world in way that brought reason and subjective experience together. In his book The Life Divine, he posited that humans represent a apex of evolution to date and that they are uniquely situated to lead a spiritual life. By this he meant that Matter and Spirit are met in human consciousness. He posited that the purpose of existence is to discover the latent spirit in all things and release infuse and elevate all of life by application of higher forms of human and transpersonal consciousness. The importance of Aurobindo cannot be overstated. His influence in Western thought has been far reaching through the seminal work of Allan Watts, Aldous Huxley, the Beat Movement. Indeed, the entire gestalt of the 1960’s (and New Consciousness thinking) was fundamentally shaped by his work. Whether people recognize the lineage or not, most progressive thinking in the Western world since then has been significantly influenced by his work.

Based on these two pillars of early 20th Century thought, as well as some sother ignficiant writers, I have begun to develop a personal metaphysics.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

The Work of Jean Gebser

This is a post I have been wanting to do for some time. I finally got up the gumption to tap this out. I hope you, dear reader, find this useful.

Jean Gebser (1905 – 1973) was an autodidact whose main impact was in the study of the transformations of human consciousness. He was also a linguist and poet. While he has had a loyal following both in the United States and Europe, it has been relatively small. Ken Wilber’s work has brought him to the attention of a much wider audience and Gebser’s ideas are most important to anyone who is wrestling seriously with issues of spirituality, politics and human development. His experiences in pre-war Germany, Italy, France and Spain and reflection on the sea-change of intellectual perspectives reflected in the full blossoming of post-modern thought caused him to look closely at the structures of human consciousness through human history. After fleeing to Switzerland hours before the boarders were closed after the invasion of France, we befriended Carl Jung and did most of his mature writing while connected to the Jung Institute. His most notable book is The Ever-Present Origin. His work draws on fields as diverse as poetry, philosophy, religion, physics, architecture, music, and political science. His principal thesis is that humanity has experienced various structures of consciousness that carry within them deep perspectives of time, space, human relations, cosmic connections and images. These epochs span millennia and as there is a fundamental failure in one structure, another emerges. Gebser identifies five basic structures evidenced through human history: The Archaic, The Magic, The Mythic, The Mental and The Integral Ages. Each age includes, yet transcends the ages before it.

The Archaic Structure is difficult for us to grasp – it lies at the dawn of human awareness. Consciousness is dimly aware of itself as something separate from the flow around it. There is some sense of past, present and future but it is wrapped in a miasma and is largely undifferentiated. It is a world devoid of perspectivity. Structures that associate with this stage are groups or family units much like the great apes.

The Magic Structure is characterized by five primary characteristics: 1) a sense of self, but little or no ego structure or deeper self-awareness, 2) ambigous or cyclical sense of space and time, 3) interweaving of self and nature, 4) a magical relationship between self and not-self, 5) a lack of understanding of the differences between the non-liminal and liminal. Language emerges as this stage and words are seen as powerful in their own right. Man is deeply identified with nature and surviving within the natural order is a matter of ritual, incantation, and magic. Religion tends to be shamanistic and animistic. Political organizations tend to be tribal. The cultures tend to be hunter-gathers or in their later stages, horticultural. Tool making is rudimentary. Slavery is endemic. Art begins to be produced. Time tends to be cyclical and space is holy and laden with significance. Gods begin to emerge, but they tend to be local and associated with the tribe or family. This is a highly emotive phase.

The Mythic Structure brings the advent of more sophisticated tools and with it agriculture. Myths begin to emerge and with them mythical beings who stand above nature and can control it. The afterlife begins to become an important factor in life. Formal religion, typically with priests and holy men emerges and political structures tend to be centralized and autocratic. Slavery continues to exist, often on a massive scale. This phase tends to rely heavily on images and art begins to become quit sophisticated. Poetry becomes an important communicator and oral traditions develop to share the myths and stories. Space tends to be two dimensional and time is linear but malleable by the gods. Eventually this stage develops into monotheism and creedal belief systems. This in creates a profound ideological identification and an intolerance of the myths and religions of others. Political structures tend towards the authoritarian and imperial. Technology is sophisticated but largely based on trades and crafts. Guilds and castes are common.

The Mental Structure involves humanity stepping from two dimensional space into three dimensional space. Art becomes truly perspectival and fully articulated. Intellectual abstraction becomes possible as do pursuits of philosophy, science, mathematics, and other studies. Works of fiction emerge. Monotheism continues but eventually gives way to esoteric forms of unitive mysticism, philosophy or atheism. Time is seen as linear and cause and effect are essential to understanding the nature of the world. Ultimately, the mental structure gives way to a form of reductionism in which all that exists is material. Technology is used to reshape our understanding of the universe and matter itself. Industrialization emerges. This stage sees the rise of the nation state and the corporation. Human freedom is highly regarded. The dark side of this age is a profound lack of ethical restraint. While technology can be used for great good, it also wrecks havoc with war and environmental degradation.

The Integral Structure may, according to Gebser, be emerging. He sees the fundamental changes in our understanding of space and time as highly significant – just as with the transitions of prior ages where space and time underwent radical restructuring in human consciousness. The emergent picture is that time and space are not fixed, but relative and related. This age, Geber speculates will be trans-rational, trans-personal, and diaphanous (where there is transparent recognition of the whole, not just parts). It is likely to be highly mystical with deep realizations by both individuals and societies in which truth is uncovered in large chunks of integrated wholeness. The tensions and relations between things are more important, at times, than the things themselves and process becomes of pre-eminent concern. Nothing is seen as isolated and there is a profound experience and understanding of inter-connection and even identity. Time is seen both as infinite and illusory. Sentient life is seen as connected. While it is too early in this process to determine what political structures will emerge or what art will evolve into, there is are hints on the horizon for those who are looking for these.

I find interesting is that the mental stage was adumbrated well before its more general emergence. It was presaged by the intellectual flowering in ancient Greece. Is it possible that, with the current Integral Stage, a presaging may be found in the writings of India in the writings of sages such as Nagarjuna and Sankara?

As we look at our own culture, we see examples of late mythical stages (with rational overtones) and late mental stages of development. We begin to see, in cultural creatives and many on the vanguard of spiritual and intellectual exploration, the emergence of an integral consciousness. This, it seems to me, is important news for Unitarian Universalists.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

The Big Mistake

In my last blog entry I wrote about our denomination’s difficulty in addressing the needs of those who are “spiritual but not religious”. In fact, this group is not particularly new. While this group is a substantial percentage of the populations now, it traces it heritage back to the New England Transcendentalists. One of these, Ralph Waldo Emerson was a famous UU…at least in our time. While we enthusiastically claim him as one of our patron saints today, Emerson had a rough go of it in his own day. His ideas were not particularly embraced with open arms and he was a lightening rod for controversy throughout his adult life.

His Harvard Divinity School Address of 1838 was a manifesto for what was to become the Transcendentalist movement. It was an immediate sensation and it almost instantaneously polarized ministers and laity in the Unitarian Church. Between that address and 1885, a debate raged in the Unitarian church between liberal Christian traditionalists who espoused the Enlightenment understanding of the Christian gospel expressed in social action (represented by Theodore Parker), and the Transcendentalists who sought to ground theology and political action in personal experience and a sense of union with the cosmos.

In 1885, three years after Emerson’s death, the debate ended with a near total victory going to the Christian side of the debate. As is often the case, the "winners" co-opted a good deal of the intellectual capital of the vanquished faction – such as a notion of universal religion. However, the Unitarians steadfastly refused to accommodate any form of inner mysticism in favor of a strict rationality and outward focus.

Those in the United States who claim to be “spiritual but not religious” are the direct cultural and intellectual heirs of Emerson and the Transcendentalist movement. Could it be that had the tent of Unitarian Universalism been large enough to embrace the notion that spirituality is not merely a matter of mind, and even action, but also of something deeper and more primal – something mysterious – we might be living in a very different church today? It just might be that those in our culture whose hunger for a spiritual reality is not satisfied by consuming the cheapjack wares in the markets of New Age cranks and charlatans would have found a home with us and the peace they seek. Perhaps it is not too late.

© 2007. Matthew W. Wesley. All rights reserved.

Whither Unitarian Universalism?

There has been much written lately of the need to revitalize liberal religion. Theologians and pastors express their desire to reinvigorate a faith that should hold such promise but seems fundamentally unable to deliver what the mind and heart of congregants and society as a whole seek. This wistfulness at times seems to take on a hint of desperation. There are clarion calls for change, cynical declamations of the death of Unitarian Universalism, and a myriad suggestions of how to revitalize a dying theology. We hope for a cure – or perhaps even a resurrection - but the suggested measures seem more and more futile and we seem no closer to revivifying our faith.

Yet as we look around us, our culture is obviously alienated and seeking answers. There are many who cross our thresholds looking for something, who are not finding it, and leave in disappointment. Many of these people cannot put their finger on what, exactly, they are looking for, but they know that the secular culture is not giving them the answers that they seek. They are looking for something fundamentally religious, but what we are offering is simply not addressing their needs.

Perhaps it is time to declare the truth. Liberal religion has managed to make itself irrelevant. We have marginalized ourselves and, in many ways, while endlessly examining ourselves, have failed to observe what is occurring in the broader culture. Because we have been fundamentally unable to correctly assess and understand what is happening around us, we have painted ourselves into a corner. The situation is not hopeless, but it requires our understanding our roots, the ennui of modernity, the failure of post-modernity, and how we, as a church, can fit into what comes next.

A Brief Retrospective

To understand how we arrived at this crossroads, it seems necessary to engage in a bit of intellectual history. I beg the reader’s indulgence with the following walk through the evolution of modern philosophy, truncated though it will be. However, without appreciating the antecedents to our modern liberal faith it is impossible to see how it fundamentally disconnects from our culture and therefore a path to relevance.

Early in the Enlightenment it became clear to a number of forward thinkers that the Age of Reason had profound implications for religion. As Europeans moved out of the Age of Faith, they realized that the world was, indeed, a very complex place and they began thinking in earnest about that complexity. Clearly there was a great deal of physical complexity to be explored and early scientists from the Renaissance forward began their work of understanding astronomy, biology, physics, chemistry and the rest of it. As that work advanced, it became clear that the social order that had been predicated on faith was itself suspect and that suspicion quickly led to a realization that the nature and role of man in the universe was very much up for grabs.

Philosophy, as fundamentally distinct from theology, began to flower in the West as it not had since Ancient times. These early attempts at philosophy took their cues from the ancients: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle among others. The ancient problems of metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy and epistemology become subjects of incisive and profound debate. Against that backdrop two main streams of thought emerged in the late 17th and early 18th Centuries. The Realists, represented by Descartes, articulated a fundamental dualism that distinguished between body and mind. The body, according to Descartes and his lineage, is a machine subject to the laws of physics. The mind was something else again. Truth, according to the Realists, could not be had by observation alone, but only by deduction and, thus, the superiority of mind over nature was firmly established. For the Realists, the body was merely a vessel for the higher functions of the mind and this led to a devaluation of the material world.

The British Empiricists, in reaction to the Continental Realists, developed an epistemology based on sense data. In the hands of Locke and Hume, and their followers, the material word is the fundamental reality. All claims not based in exterior physical reality as perceived by the senses are deemed not proved by reason and met with skepticism. While a tremendous boon to scientific method, this monistic reductionism to mere physical reality created massive philosophic problems when it came to epistemology, and, by extension, ethics and aesthetics. For the Empiricists, it was impossible to reason from what “is” to what ought to be and thus there was a fundamental dilemma at the core or Empiricism. Indeed, the Empiricists managed in a few short decades to dissociate the true from the good and the beautiful and, simultaneously, they redefined the true to exclude matters of speculation divorced from science. They reduced all truth to what can be deduced from the observation of phenomena and thereby gutted the entire philosophic endeavor in metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics. Their epistemological methodology was so powerful that it was a death blow to the Realist point of view which was wholly speculative in comparison and not even remotely capable of rising to the challenge. The Empiricists set the parameters of the debate of fundamental ideas for next one and half centuries.

Immanuel Kant, without doubt the greatest of the Enlightenment philosophers, attempted to unify what the Empiricists had managed to dissociate. His principal books Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgment address truth, ethics and aesthetics in turn. At the heart of his arguments is the distinction between phenomena and noumena (that which is perceived by the senses and that which is understood by the mind a priori). Accepting, for the most part, a monological world view posited by the Empiricists, Kant argued that this world is organized by mental concepts for which there is no purely empirical basis. Without these, there would be mere parade on unchoate sense experience. He thus developed a philosophy of Idealism. Yet for all its complexity, critics agree that this sophisticated epistemology was built on a sophistic bit of legerdemain which rendered it fundamentally incapable of reconciling the dissociations generated by the Empiricists between mind, matter and morals. Tried as he might, Kant could not create the unified field theory of this day.

In response to the coldly materialistic and rationalist view that was emerging as the consensus of the Enlightenment sprung the Romantic Movement. The philosophic precursors to the Romantic Movement - Leibnitz, Fichte and Spinoza - argued that nature was monistic, not dualistic. However, unlike the Empiricists, they fundamentally denied the notion that the world of phenomena was the essence of the reality but rather that phenomena were a mere manifestation of a higher reality (typically, God or Nature). Their views tended towards a pantheistic worldview that rendered phenomena fundamentally illusory. They exalted imagination, intuition, faith, and inspiration and had a fundamental contempt for the rational, which they viewed as dissociative and harmful. For some, followers of Fichte, this involved a path of transcending the world of appearance and union with a Transcendental Self. For the followers of Spinoza, there was a movement of identifying with nature. Beyond the original progenitors of this worldview, there was little attempt to develop a thoughtful moral system, it became clear fairly quickly that “act naturally” was not a sufficient moral code in the shadow of the violent callousness of nature itself. Romanticists did (and still do) idealize primitive cultures while ignoring the fact that in these cultures life was far from progressive and, for most, was nasty, brutish and short. Because they devalued reason, the Romantics tended to be fuzzy thinkers.

Into this mix stepped the German Idealists. Schelling and Hegel argued that that the fundamental distinction pointed out by Descartes was a false dichotomy. That mind and nature must emerge from the same matrix, the same “ground of being” and must therefore be unified. At the most fundamental level, there was no meaningful distinction between subject and object (mind and matter). They went on to say that Spirit (Geist in German) was working itself out in the world of phenomena (which contains both mind and matter). This worldview stated that reality is a process of unified reality expressing itself in multiplicity and in a process of teleological development. As Hegel put it, “The Absolute is in the process of its own becoming.” At its root, this developed Idealism proposed a transpersonal reality and a teleological direction to history and human development.

Within a few decades German Idealism was dead letter. It had been supplanted by political systems (such as communism) and by the rise of the nation state, industrialism, capitalism and scientific progress (all of which were the natural outgrowth of the ideas of the British Empiricists). This rush of efficiency brushed aside the insights of these philosophers as quaint and fundamentally irrelevant metaphysics.

Also problematic was the fact that the German Idealists were depending primarily on a flash of intuitive insight. The physical sciences did not support their theories and their worldview could not be substantiated by scientific method (though it seemed to comport with the emerging theories of social and physical evolution). These philosophers were unable to propose a methodology to prove their contentions - a way to show that, indeed, reality was nondual and transpersonal. Their arguments were mere words on a page and lost in the headlong rush of modernity.

The Rise of Liberal Theology

As is always the case, Christian systematic theology took its cues from the general cultural developments. In this case, theology was transformed by the principles of the Enlightenment. Christian theology was subjected to the scrutiny of reason and was stripped of the miraculous and the mysterious. By the middle of the 19th Century, Jesus had become merely an historical figure and the powerful tools of textual criticism had torn to shreds any vestige of the notion that the Bible was the infallible word of God. By the end of the 19th Century, God was dead.

As humanity stepped into the 20th Century, it did so with the awesome legacy of the power of scientific method with its roots in materialist monism. This worldview allowed humanity to make great strides in advancing education, medical care, political freedom, democracy, increased standards of living, technology, and our collective general understanding of the universe. Most of these benefits were relegated to the few. The Enlightenment also spawned the corporation, the democratic nation sate, capitalism, and a view that people and the environment are essentially very complex machines to be used and harnessed for the purposes of men. It should have come as no surprise that the full flowering of this worldview in the 20th Century was, with all its advances, also a moral wasteland of genocides, world wars of unimagined horror, environmental degradation, economic exploitation and a host of other evils. The Enlightenment world view left us with vast technological capability, but did not commensurately advance our ability to think or act morally. It gave us amazing tools, but no equivalently noble understanding of how to use them.

Recent Theological History

In the midst of the horror of modernity, the Existentialists arose. Growing out of the phenomenology of Husserl and the dismissal of the German Idealists, there was a growing visceral realization of the implications of the fact that materialism provided no basis for ethics and that Enlightenment rationalism was a spiritual cul de sac. The Existentialists reasoned that because matter was all there was, all that was possible was to simply be and to act authentically according to that being. In Christian theology, this movement manifested itself as liberal theology. Soren Kierkegaard promulgated a leap of faith. The great Christian myths were reinterpreted to remove the irrational and transformed into metaphorical realities. Karl Barth attempted to separate Christ from culture. Rudolph Bultmann worked to demythologize Christianity and Paul Tillich sought to find philosophic solace in tying Christianity to the works of Hiedegger and other existentialists. And finally, the process theologians attempted to redefine Christian faith as a pluralistic and inclusive expression of the divine.

Given the political ferment of the mid-Century, Liberation Theology arose as a means to combat oppressive systems. While there is no appreciable systematic theology for this movement, it grows fundamentally out of a reinterpretation of the Christian salvation myth as a mandate for social liberation and change. Growing out of Marxist ideology and a recognition of the mandates of teachings of the historical Jesus, this movement took shape as a social force particularly in Central and South America.

On the intellectual front, post-modernism emerged as a critique of the Enlightenment world view. It’s central tenet, that all thought is culturally embedded and therefore inescapably relative, sought to neutralize the political and economic excesses of the Enlightenment while not discarding its essentially monistic materialist worldview. Because post-modern thought is fundamentally pluralistic and global, it has found great resonance with many people with religious sensibilities. It seems “spiritual” and universal. But while it promises an open-hearted compassion, it fundamentally and irrevocably runs aground on the shoals of moral relativism which, in the blink of an eye, is transformed into moral nihilism. Thus, the core of liberal theology, as it has evolved to date, arises from a world view that cannot fundamentally address the question of moral nihilism because it is fundamentally founded on a radical materialistic monism. Any religion which cannot rise above moral nihilism cannot survive for long.

In the end, most of liberal theology of the last century and the religious formulations it spawned are fundamentally secular ideas dressed in religious language. They are not authentically religious at their core but are rather secular ideas clothed in the guise of religion. And because the secular ideas themselves are deeply problematic, dressing them up in religious language is like the wolf donning grandma’s clothes.

Unitarian Universalism Emerges

The Unitarian Universalist Association, established in 1961, was founded largely on humanist principles. The Humanist Manifesto of 1933 and its restatements in 1972 and 2003 contain many tenants that the vast majority of modern Unitarian Universalists would nominally find acceptable expressions of their world view. The world views expressed in these documents are attempts at creating a wholly secular liberal religion – one devoid of the need to mythic gods or anything beyond the material. They are based on the fundamentally monistic world view of the Empiricists that admits nothing beyond physical reality. While the Humanist documents contain aspirational goals that could be construed as moral, those goals can be immediately dismissed as fundamentally and irrevocably unsupported and unprovable by the very methodology on which the humanists claim to rely…reason. They are articles of pure faith and worse, they are disingenuous because they have been known to be false for close to 300 years. As became evident in the 1700s, reason (in the formal philosophic sense) cannot provide a sufficient basis for morality if all of reality is merely material. What “is” (i.e. material reality) can never be a sufficient basis for what “ought” to be. Put in concrete terms, scientists can splice genes but cannot tell society what the ethical use of that technology should be. This internal contradiction renders scientific materialism, in its pure form, a fundamentally bankrupt worldview when it comes to morals or beauty. It can provide no basis for religion and thus secular religious Humanism was dead on arrival.

Much of the recent hand-wringing over the future of Unitarian Universalism, and its being mired in late stage humanism, weak forms of liberation theology and post-modern multiculturalism, can be attributed to the fact that our faith is premised on this reductionist world view. There is simply no specifically moral or religious power in the tenants of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought. Some elements, while cautious of stating this too directly, have realized the consequences of being too wedded to an Enlightenment world view that is premised solely on materialism. The options are either to dress up symbols of faith as though they have some metaphoric meaning that is intrinsic to themselves, to culturally appropriate and bastardize religious practices from other cultures in a vain hope to import superficial meaning, devolve into mere political action without a fundamental moral base, or to flee into Romanticism. All four are evident in the modern UU church. We are an intellectually bankrupt faith that drifting without a source for deep morality or conviction. We therefore shamelessly plagiarize the secular culture in an attempt to create a pastiche that will pass for meaning. We have been unable to find that intellectual integrative framework that allows us to generate a compelling moral and aesthetic framework. Instead, we are heirs to a cold rational view of the world that ultimately deadens, rather than enlivens, its adherents. We vaguely recognize the horrors of modernity and confusion of post-modernity, but we have not sufficiently questioned the assumptions of modernity and post-modernity such that we would seek a compelling alternative. We are essentially materialists hoping, against reason, for hope.

And so, whither Unitarian Universalism?

The New Physics and the New Age

The early part of the 20th Century brought with it a radical restructuring in the way we look at the physical world. In the very large and the very small, the universe became a very strange place. People began to recognize that these discoveries had massive philosophical implications. Physical cosmology allowed for the regeneration of philosophic metaphysics. One of the first to grasp these implications was Alfred North Whitehead. While he carefully distanced himself from the German Idealist excesses, he revived and recast many of the nascent ideas that had been articulated by Schilling and Hegel. Whitehead, while not completely able to shed the philosophic discussions of the past, was able to resurrect the notion of valid interior reality (and hence the possibility of morality). He articulated a view that reality is process and that “god” is not yet, but becoming. Whitehead’s arguments were difficult to grasp and not readily accessible to laypeople, but a few theologians that saw the implications for resurrecting a viable ground for new understanding of the notion of divinity in the modern world. That theological understanding has profound implications and seems to hold great promise, but it is unwedded to any type of religious practice.

At the same time, philosophers in the East were seeing corollaries between their complex cosmologies and the loose implications of Western science. Sri Aurobindo, educated in the West, wrote extensively to establish, from the perspective of Hindu Vedantic philosophy, a non-dual view of the world that transcended both monism and dualism. Again, the notions were remarkably similar to those of the German Idealists. However, they were also backed by millennia of spiritual practice (in the forms of janna, karma, bhakti, tantric and raja yoga) that made the discussion subjectively authentic and which provided what was missing from Whitehead’s intellectual construct – repeatable, consistent and predictable non-dual human experiences. Aurobindo’s ideas while revolutionary were firmly rooted in the Advaita schools of Vedantic philosophy. Many of his ideas have analogues in philosophical Taoism and the more philosophic streams of Mahayana Buddhism. Moreover, the states of non-dual consciousness reported by yogis parallels similar non-dual states found in virtually all mystic traditions of both the East and the West. Nevertheless, Aurobindo’s writings were the first large scale attempt to integrate deeper Hindu philosophic ideas into a Western framework, informed by Western philosophic debate and then recent scientific developments. People took notice.

As it came to pass, Aurobindo’s philosophy had a great deal of influence in the West. Due largely to the unheralded work of Frederic Spiegelberg, The work of Aurobindo was introduced to key participants in the Beat movement in San Francisco, including Alan Watts, Allen Ginsberg, Michael Murphy, Dick Price and Jack Kerouac. Fritz Perls, Abraham Maslow, and other intellectual and cultural luminaries of the time such as Gregory Bateson, Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, and Ram Dass were also deeply influenced. This San Francisco renaissance in turn led to the rise of Esalen and the founding of the California Institute of Integral Studies Through this lineage, Aurobindo’s influence on the thinking of progressive spiritual practitioners in the West cannot be overstated.

In addition to these philosophic developments, the 20th Century saw the emergence of a whole new science – psychology – which was specifically designed to explore inner space. For the first time the rigors of reason were turned inwards. However, the same rules that applied to scientific inquiry could not effectively plumb the depths of the human psyche. This inner world turned out to be a weird and wonderful landscape filled with all sorts of realities – rational and irrational. Interestingly, the psychological movement became the human potential movement when it came into contact with the philosophy of Aurobindo in San Francisco in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Some of the manifestations of this collision were truly cultlike but most were seriously grounded in theory and clinical practice. Maslow, Perls, Rogers, Frankl, Groff and others were influenced directly or indirectly by the evolutionary, transpersonal spirituality of Aurobindo and his introduction to the West in San Francisco in the late 1950s and 1960s.

In the 1960s Eastern thought and the human potential movement collided with hallucinogenic experiences and they all went mainstream. At the same time, social unrest brought about by racial injustice and the Vietnam War galvanized a generation. This was a tremendous time of intellectual ferment and radical new ways of thinking emerged about human rights, education, politics, ecology, gender, race and host of other fields. The fact that this was not purely rational in an Enlightenment sense gave permission to many to abandon reason. The resulting consciousness movement is a patchwork of the truly looney and the profound. It is strikingly varied and diverse movement. Many ideas that have emerged in popular culture seem fundamentally unreasonable. Yet serious work based on a fundamentally altered worldview not based solely an Enlightenment scientific materialism is being done by scholars, scientists and academicians. Indeed, these streams of thought are gaining growing recognition in academic circles as having significant insights that are advancing human understanding. In short, some of this movement seems to be an emergence of an anti-intellectual Neo-Romantic movement while other parts seem to be developing a fundamentally Transrational philosophy that has deep intellectual credibility. These later developments are worthy of our serious consideration.

What is most interesting about the New Consciousness movement is that its philosophical tenants are almost uniformly rooted in personal and corporate disciplines and practices. These range from the rationally odd and apparently unsupportable (such as the magical use of crystals and astrology) to the highly disciplined and culturally proven (highly disciplined zen and yoga practices). Some of these ideas seem nothing less than irrational wishful and muddied thinking, but others are sublime in the richness of their tradition and ability to connect ideas and experiences common to the human condition. This is not a small matter. Sorting these out is important work and most people cannot be bothered – they simply label it all as New Age and dismiss it. For thinking religious people, that is a shame. The salient fact is that millions of people are part of this movement and exploring their inner landscape (as well as acting to change the world) in intentional communities with a view to finding truth and meaning. Is that not the very definition religion?

A Modest Proposal

I would submit that “religion” in a rather chaotic and disparate set of displays is happening around us throughout our culture. It is estimated that 20% of the population in the United States is open to the idea of transpersonal spirituality and at least dabble in aspects of that spirituality. This new religion is most definitely not a liberal religion rooted in the Enlightenment but rather a transpersonal religion springing from the implications of the new physics and rooted in both Eastern and Western nondual philosophies. It is a fundamental shift of worldview and, at this point, we, as Unitarian Universalists, are, for the most part, lagging far, far behind these trends because we do not understand them or know what to make of them. We are locked in old arguments about dead issues. The world has moved on and left us behind. Yet, if we pay attention, we as Unitarian Universalists are uniquely situated to participate in what is a major cultural shift that is only gaining momentum. Why is it that we are so well situated to grasp this opportunity?

First, and most important, we are not truly affiliated with a mythic tradition. Our Christian roots have been effectively cut and while we can and should look at the historical Jesus and the Christian tradition, we do so as we would any spiritual tradition. We have no need to perpetuate symbols that have lost their meaning to thinking people in our culture. In short, we are in a very different position from mainline churches faced with the same problems and which must, by virtue of their heritage, cleave to an outdated liberal religion grounded in a fundamentally materialist world view.

Second, our roots in the humanist movement allow us, in all good conscience, to take the next step into world of transpersonal psychology and the academically responsible manifestations of the human potential movement. We can read and incorporate the latest thinking on human development and foster the individual and corporate growth of individuals in ways that allow people to reach their full potential. We provide a community in which that can happen, and with a bit of thought, we can begin to create structures that truly allow congregants to move up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and live authentic, more psychologically whole, lives. If we do this one thing, our churches will, inevitably grow and grow in very healthy ways.

Third, our religious syncretism can be changed from mere dabbling to a commitment to explore interior space in ways that are culturally authentic and proven. We are ideally situated to assist individual congregants in finding their own spiritual practices from any one of many traditions that allow them to explore and discover their interior space and reconnect with an integrated reality that is neither fundamentally monistic or dualistic. There is something to be said for creating depth around these practices as is the case for many spiritual traditions. Our genius is that we are not wedded to any particular tradition but can help congregants navigate a spiritual practice that will, over time, create great meaning for them and for their communities.

Fourth, our theologians can be at the vanguard of thinking about the moral and sociological implications of the cosmological conclusions that are being derived as this New Consciousness unfolds. It has been said that saving our planet doesn’t involve understanding how to live morally but rather in understanding how to get human beings to agree to live morally. This type of sea change of consciousness requires insight, focus, perspective and a fundamentally integral view of the world that will allow for thoughtful but forceful change. It also requires thoughtful political action designed to unite and integrate world views rather than foster the polarization and divisions that exist in our body politic.

Conclusion

This article is a call for leadership in our seminaries and in the denomination as a whole to begin a revisioning of Unitarian Universalism that is not a rehashing of fundamentally failed materialist viewpoints from the past or the imposition of the moral relativism of the post-modern critique, but rather a brave exploration of the vanguard of progressive thinking about cosmology, human consciousness, modern religious practice and the redesign of the social order to permit sustainable human and ecological structures. We have the potential of turning our churches into centers of spiritual life that are on the cutting edge of intellectual, cultural and moral change. It is an unparalleled opportunity that should not be missed. Indeed, if we ignore it, we do so at our peril.


Matthew Wesley holds a Masters of Divinity from Fuller Theological Seminary and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. He is a member of the Woodinville Unitarian Universalist Church in Woodinville, Washington and is a practicing estate planning attorney.

© 2007. Matthew W. Wesley. All rights reserved.