Opinion – Ross Douthat: Humanity’s future depends on openness to spirituality, but being too open is dangerous

Experts tend to classify phenomena, especially in periods of turmoil. We use labels like “populist” or “nationalist,” for example, to generalize about the desires of millions of voters, even though many of them might more accurately be described as simple experimenters: people who pull different levers or describe swerves to the left. or on the right without any clear aim except to evoke a different political experience.

What happens in politics also happens in religion. As a journalist, I’m always looking for terminology that captures the many divisions within the broader decline of American Christianity: “liberal” versus “conservative” Catholics when I write about my own church; “heresy” or “orthodoxy” to describe trends in or around Christian belief; “secularism” and “paganism” to speak of strands of post-Christianity.

But the dissolution of the old order of American religion — the decay of churches and denominations and the rise of non-institutionalized spirituality — means that more and more religious lives are lived in the in-between space between different worldviews, an experimental territory of which it is wrong. expect coherence, theological consistency, or a definite set of prior assumptions and beliefs.

In this column I want to defend the rationality of this type of spiritual experimentation and then warn of its dangers (the discussion will get more bizarre as we go along). First, however, I’ll give three examples of the experimental style I’m thinking of, ranging from the general to the specific.

I start with the broad youthful drive towards what we might describe as magical thinking, ranging from the astrology fad to the TikTok craze of “manifesting” desired outcomes in your life. This is in some ways an extension of the self-help spiritualities that have long been linked to American religiosity, but at this point the magical dimension is more specific, while the link with old-time religion is weak or even non-existent.

At the same time, it is not clear how far any part of this can be characterized as belief. What we see, instead, is a make-believe dimension to everything, ranging from “this isn’t real, but it’s fun” to “maybe not real, but it’s cool to play with” and on to to “this here is real, but who knows what it means”. Even some people who explicitly identify with witchcraft seem to have this ambiguity in their identification: they are participants in a culture of ritual and exploitation, not people who believe in a specific set of postulates.

A second example is the growing fascination with psychedelics and hallucinogenic drugs, which takes both secular and scientific forms, but also has a strong spiritual dimension, with many participants believing that drugs not only cause an experience within the mind but also open the “doors of perception”, in the words of Aldous Huxley, to capture realities that exist constantly above and around us.

This is clearly the case with the emerging spiritual culture around DMT, an ingredient in the psychedelic broth known as ayahuasca that has already become the preferred trip for so-called psychonauts, that is, explorers of the spiritual territory that its ingestion seems to open up for them. For many DMT users it seems to provide an oddly shared experience: they report coming across similar landscapes and beings, as if they all connected with the common archetypes of some Jungian unconscious (which would be strange enough in itself) or if they had in fact entered the same supernatural plane.

And this last belief produces spiritual experimentation in its purest form: people who take DMT for this purpose are not so much practicing a religion as trying to discover the religion’s supernatural basis and articulate a personal theology from what they find and see.

Now we have a third example, this one very specific: a statue recently appeared in a New York courthouse occupying a plinth next to figures of famous legislators like Moses and Confucius. She is a golden woman, or at least a female figure, with hair braided into horns, roots, or vines in place of arms and feet. It emerges from a lotus flower.

The sculptor responsible for the figure, the American of Pakistani origin Shahzia Sikander, emphasized the political significance of her work. The golden woman wears a version of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s lace collar, and the idea is that she is supposed to symbolize female power in a historically male-dominated legal world and is supposed to protest the repeal of Roe v. Wade.

But it is clear that the work is also an attempt at a religious icon, an icon forged from an amalgamation of spiritual traditions. It is paired with a similar statue by the same artist, which bears the word “Havah”, evoking the name of Eve in Arabic and Hebrew and thus taking a feminist position in relation to the monotheistic tradition. But the image of the statue at Supreme Court headquarters is also pantheistic, with the roots and flower evoking the spirituality of nature, “a magical hybrid of plant and animal,” in the words of one art critic. Finally, it is difficult to see the horn braids, the vines that resemble tentacles, as an appropriation of Christian images of the demonic in a statue that takes a stand against the political positions of conservative Christianity.

But none of these interpretations is stable; like people who dabble in magic or experiment on the fringes of consciousness, Sikander has created a religious icon devoid of recognized religious significance, one that is intentionally open to viewer interpretation, one that summons spiritual energy in non-specific ways.

For the intransigent materialist, everything I have just described makes sense, as long as one understands that it is make-believe, a search for experiences, artistic experimentation. Only when it becomes serious does all this offend rationality.

But hard-nosed materialism itself is a strange late-modern superstition, and the kind of experimentation I describe is actually far more rational than life lived as if the universe were random and indifferent and human beings were gene-transmitting machines endowed with an illusion of consciousness.

Yes, there are many New Age and “mystical” practices that make no sense or only lead to pyramid schemes; there are pitfalls for gullibles everywhere. But the basic pattern of human existence and experience, an orderly and mathematically beautiful cosmos that offers extraordinary secrets for human investigation and supplies us with all kinds of wild spiritual experiences, even in our age of supposed disenchantment (and sometimes offers them even to professional skeptics), makes general openness to metaphysical possibilities a default mode that fundamentally makes sense.

This applies especially if you have no theological tradition, if you have not had the religious education to structure your contact with the mysteries of the universe – if you are starting from scratch.

But just because an attitude of spiritual experimentation makes sense, it’s also important to point out something that is taught by virtually every horror movie, yet is nevertheless overlooked in much of American spirituality: the importance of being very careful. with its open attitude of not simply taking the benevolence of the metaphysical realm for granted.

If the material universe as we find it is beautiful, but also naturally dangerous and permeated with sin and evil wherever human initiative is at work, there is no reason to expect that any spiritual dimension will be different. There is no reason to think that being a “psychonaut” is less risky than being an astronaut, even if the risk takes a different form.

There is plenty of data that points to the dangers. Not all near-death experiences are heavenly; some of the DMT users come back traumatized; The American Catholic Church reportedly receives an increasing number of requests for exorcisms at the same time that its cultural influence is diminishing in other areas. And there should also be a fundamental uncertainty surrounding even initially positive experiences: all that glitters is not gold, and the idea that certain forces are out to deceive or use you permeates different religious cultures (and even the quasi-religious culture that today involves the UFO experience).

I write as a Christian; my religion explicitly warns against magic, scrying, summoning spirits, and the like. (Atheist polemicists often say that religious people are atheists about every god but their own, but this is not really the case; Christianity certainly accepts that there are other powers in the world besides its trinitarian God.) And it makes sense that in a culture where people are reacting against the Christian past, there might be an instinct to ignore such bans, to see them as just another form of patriarchal chauvinism, of white male control.

But the premise of danger in the supernatural realm is not limited to the Christian tradition, and the idea that pantheism, polytheism, or any other alternative to Western monotheism automatically generates kind and humane societies finds no confirmation in history.

So, from any religious perspective, there is reason to be concerned about a society where the structures are worn out and a mass of people have gone on a quest without maps or are playing in disbelief with symbols that evoke multiple spiritualities at once, or even employing these symbols against what’s left of Christianity.

Some element of danger is inevitable. The future of humanity depends on people opening the doors to the transcendent, not closing themselves in materialism and despair. But when the door is open, be very, very careful what you invite in.