Tikkun Magazine, March/April 2009
Is There a Place for a Secular Person in the Network of Spiritual Progressives?
By Mitchell Silver
The harnessing of the "religious" vote to a right-wing agenda has been one of the most disheartening political developments in recent decades. For all those hoping for a more humane world, nothing has been more destructive of those hopes than this association of religious values with an oppressive moralism, which was then allied with militarism and unrestrained corporate avarice. In that light, the emergence of a movement to reorient religious people to a politics of social justice, and in particular, the formation of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, should be welcomed by all progressives. The question I wish to address in this essay is whether progressive secularists should view the Network of Spiritual Progressives as an institution that they can comfortably call home. Is there a place for secularists in the Network of Spiritual Progressives?
Before we can usefully get to substance, we need some semantic ground-clearing. Neither "secular" nor "spiritual" is easily or uncontroversially defined. Under some definitions "spiritual secularist" is a completely unproblematic and well-populated category; under other definitions, it is a logical impossibility. Neither set of definitions serves a fruitful discussion. Rather, we want definitions that give robust content to both terms—content that suggests a tension, but that doesn't automatically preclude compatibility.
Although "secular" can, and has, been used to mean "concerned with this world," or "non-religiously observant," or "unchurched," I will use the term to refer to those who consciously reject theism and any form of supernaturalism. Of course there are volumes to be said about what constitutes "theism" and "naturalism," but for our purposes, I'm hoping we can get away with thinking of theism as the belief that there is a cosmic intelligence (benign?) that is somehow responsible for, or permeates, all of being, and whose existence is relevant to our lives. I take naturalism to be a family of doctrines, prominent members of which include the belief that all things behave in regular, lawlike ways (whether statistically or causally determinant), the belief that miracles don't happen, and the belief that knowledge claims should be tested by applying universally valid logic to observations available to anyone. In crude summation, secularists are atheists who don't believe in magic.
"Spiritual" has acquired even more connotations than "secular." At the narrow end of the spectrum are those who reserve "spiritual" to speak only of experiences of God or of the supernatural. Under that definition, secular spirituality is ruled out of court before any evidence need be considered. By definition, secularists could not be spiritual. At the capacious end of the spiritual semantics spectrum, any highly valued aesthetic or moral experience qualifies as spiritual. Your best feelings are spiritual, and so are you, as long as you've had some really good ones. Others would focus on uncanny or not easily articulated experiences. Here, your weird feelings are spiritual, and so are you, so long as you have weird enough ones often enough. Since beautiful, morally profound, and strange feelings are quite compatible with atheistic, rational empiricism, "spirituality" so defined results in an abundance of uninteresting "secular spirituality."
I shall define "spirituality" in terms of connectedness; connections beyond yourself that provide your life with meaning, value, and purpose are spiritual. The more such connections you have, the more spiritual you are. Experiences of such connections are spiritual experiences. The strength of those connections determines spiritual intensity. Secularists are godless naturalists. Spirituality is constituted by valuable, meaning-giving connections. So much for semantics.
Employing these definitions, we see that there are kinds of spirituality that secularists are cut off from. Secularists have no connection to a belief in God or beliefs in a transcendent supernatural realm. Connections to such faith are an important part of the spiritual life of many theists and supernaturalists. Many would claim that their faith in such things is the most beautiful, morally significant, and meaning-giving element in their lives. Indeed, they would claim that without their faith in God and a supernatural realm they would fall into despair—that their lives would not be worth living. This is such an important area of spirituality that some conclude there is no spirituality worth mentioning outside it.
Secularists, however, do experience connections with the natural, godless world that give their lives meaning, value, and purpose. Their friends and family, their clan and culture, house beetles and The Beatles, pacifism and Pleiades, rivers and Rembrandt, the Yankees and Yiddish, the abolitionist movement and Aurora Borealis—all are potentially spiritual objects. The most spiritual of secularists would feel that their connections with all of history, all of life, and all of nature provide their lives with purpose and value. But anyone, secularist or not, who experiences any meaningful and valuable connection, is, to that extent, spiritual. Spirituality encompasses secular and religious connections. Religious people usually experience both kinds of spirituality, although often their secular spirituality is intertwined with their religious spirituality, e.g. meaningful relations to other people are interpreted in light of their relationship with God. Secularist spiritually is less expansive.
So whether secularists can find a home in the Network of Spiritual Progressives will depend on whether that network makes room for exclusively secularist spirituality. The Network of Spiritual Progressives will undoubtedly happily accept those who value their connections to the environment and social justice, but will it fully accept those who do not have, in fact make a principled denial of, any connection to God or a supernatural realm? Here the evidence is mixed.
In a self-description of the Network of Spiritual Progressives we find the following:
We in the Tikkun Community use the word "spiritual" to include all those whose deepest values lead them to challenge the ethos of selfishness and materialism that has led people into a frantic search for money and power and away from a life that places love, kindness, generosity, peace, nonviolence, social justice, awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation, thanksgiving, humility, and joy at the center of our lives. We believe that many of the secular movements that exist in the world today actually have deep spiritual underpinnings, but often they are themselves unaware of those foundations, unable or unwilling to articulate them, and sometimes even holding a knee-jerk antagonism to explicit spiritual or religious language. This antagonism limits their effectiveness, though it derives from legitimate anger at the way that the language of spirituality and religion has been sometimes used to justify war, oppression, sexism, racism, homophobia, ecological indifference, or insensitivity to the suffering of the poor and the homeless of the world.
To a progressive secularist's ear, the first part of this description is inviting. Most progressive secularists so value their connections to others and to the natural world that a rejection of "selfishness" and an embrace of "love, kindness, generosity, peace, nonviolence, [and] social justice," does permeate their ethical outlook. Moreover, the natural world, although literally disenchanted for secularists, can still fill them with awe and elicit wonder. Just because I believe that the Bach Cello Suites, as well as the planet Saturn, are completely the creation of natural processes, doesn't mean that I am not awe-struck at their existence, nor that I am not puzzled at just how nature achieved these wonderful effects. And if "humility" means an acute awareness that we will never figure it all out, nor will we ever be able to fully live up to our highest ideals, and we should therefore act and judge others accordingly, then secularists can count themselves among the humble.
"Thanksgiving" is a little trickier for the secularist, because it is not clear that gratitude makes sense without someone to be grateful to. But secularists can surely feel that many of the good things in their lives (what the religious call "blessings") came to them through no merit of their own. Consciousness of this fact should not only make secularists feel lucky but should also color their attitudes toward those who, through no fault of their own, have been less lucky. If the practical import of being "thankful" is a readiness to return the favor, this sense of unearned good fortune, which leads secularists to help the unfortunate, makes secularists functionally "thankful."
Finally, you don't need God to make "joy," rather than "a frantic search for money and power," a central value of your life; you just need a sane appreciation of what is really valuable. So far, the secularist can feel right at home in the Network of Spiritual Progressives.
However, then come some troublesome statements. Secularists agree that many secular movements have "deep spiritual underpinnings," but bridle at the claim that they are "unaware of those foundations." That secularists don't acknowledge religious spirituality as the foundation of their political or moral commitments, does not mean that they are unaware of the secular spiritual foundations of those commitments. Religious people may find their anti-racism grounded in their religious faith. Secularists are not less conscious of the foundation of their anti-racism merely because it is grounded in their belief in the moral worth and equality of all humans, a worth and equality derived (as the secularist sees it) from human nature, not from God. A cursory glance at the literature of moral and political philosophy, or at op-ed pages for that matter, demonstrates that secularists are hardly "unable or unwilling to articulate" the "spiritual underpinnings" of their commitments. It's just that when articulated, they are different from the religious "spiritual underpinnings." It makes secularists nervous when their unwillingness to assert religious forms of spirituality is mistaken for a general unwillingness to claim any spirituality. It's as if either their secularist spirituality isn't real spirituality, or, at least their understanding of it is defective. Lastly, although there may well be "knee-jerk antagonism to explicit spiritual or religious language," there may also be a thoughtful opposition to endorsing such language, and not only out of "legitimate anger" over the right-wing abuse of religious language for reactionary purposes (although there is that), but also out of concern that such language does not reflect the secularist's understanding of reality, human experience, or moral life.
What this means is that if the Network of Spiritual Progressives is to become a comfortable home for progressive secularists, it must broaden and deepen its spiritual pluralism. The pluralist ideal goes beyond tolerating the Other, and beyond mere formal inclusion. The pluralist ideal asks us to be sensitive to the Other's self-understanding and respectful of the Other's experience. Including the Other fully requires mindfulness that she is part of the group. The pluralist ideal is not achieved when a straight institution allows gays to join, but rather when the institution either becomes completely neutral regarding sexual orientation or it honors and respects all sexual orientations equally. That demands, for example, avoiding language in institutional life that assumes heterosexuality. Likewise, an institution that aspires to spiritual pluralism should avoid practices that tacitly exclude or show disdain for any spirituality, including principled secular spirituality.
Within the world of religious spirituality, progressives have made great advances in implementing pluralism. We've learned how to speak of God in general enough terms so that worshippers of Brahman, Yahweh, Jesus, and Allah can all feel included. The challenge now is to find spiritual language and practices that are as respectful and inclusive of the godless naturalist as they are of the religiously faithful. Just as Americans had to learn that to include Jews as full and equal members of American religious life, Jesus had to be kept out of pluralistic religious institutions and events, or relegated in those institutions to a role of just one, not especially privileged, manifestation of genuine religion, so too spiritual progressives must learn that if we are to have fully inclusive, pluralistic spiritual institutions, God must be relegated to the role of one among many possible bases of spiritual life.
I'm certainly not saying that God, indeed some very specific gods, shouldn't be central to the life of many spiritual groupings. It is good that there are institutions serving different scopes of pluralism. There should be churches that assume that all of their members are Trinitarian Christians. If those who held Trinitarian beliefs only had access to institutions that tried to serve equally all Christians—let alone Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, and atheists—then their communal spiritual life could never be authentically expressed in its full specificity. When such Christians join an ecumenical Christian organization, there is loss and gain. They cannot sing the songs they sing in their own church—songs which give precise voice to their spirituality—but they can sing Jesus' praises with a lot more people.
If the Network of Spiritual Progressives stretches to include spiritual secularists as equals, there will be loss and gain for its religious members. The inspiration generated by institutional talk of God and faith would have to be saved for less pluralistic settings, and therefore its religious members would find that the Network of Spiritual Progressives could only be a vehicle for part of their spiritual lives. On the other hand, that part of their spiritual lives served in the Network of Spiritual Progressives would be significantly enriched by adding to their fund of meaningful connections, enlarging their community of common purposes and shared values, and working with more people for peace and justice. All of this growth serves to enhance spiritual life.
Participation in the Network of Spiritual Progressives would also require constraints on the expression of secularists' spirituality. The Network of Spiritual Progressives is not a place where the secularist can celebrate the marvelous creativity of blind nature, nor a place for communal contemplation of humanity's heroic struggle for justice in an indifferent, amoral universe. But, like the religiously spiritual, the secularist is well compensated for joining a spiritual organization that limits her spiritual life.
First, of course, there is the non-spiritual compensation of increased political effectiveness that comes from broad coalition work and strategic alliances. That is an important benefit to both the religious and secular. Regardless of the kind, or extent, of one's spirituality, all progressives benefit from working together to advance a progressive agenda. Greater numbers and coordinated effort usually bolster effectiveness. Moreover, (still staying on the instrumental level of political effectiveness), the deployment of spirituality, as the Religious Right has shown, adds a depth to political commitment that energizes political action. Progressives who can unite on spiritual ground will be more effective political actors.
But the Network of Spiritual Progressives, as a spiritual organization, offers another, purely spiritual, benefit. Besides being a political home for progressive secularists, the Network of Spiritual Progressives can be a spiritual home for them. There is an intrinsic spiritual satisfaction of working for one's vision of the good with the widest group of people who share that vision, and participation in the Network of Spiritual Progressives can give secularists that spiritual satisfaction. Naturally, just as Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and religious Jews in the Network of Spiritual Progressives will need additional, more specific spiritual homes, so too will secularists.* Still, like her religious brothers and sisters, the secularist can lead a richer spiritual life for being in the Network of Spiritual Progressives. But for that to happen, we all, religious and secular alike, need to broaden our ideas of the spiritual.
* For example (to name only a few), The Ethical Culture Society, Humanist Society of Friends, Society for Humanistic Judaism, the Center for Naturalism, American Humanist Association, and The Workmen's Circle/Arbeterring
Mitchell Silver is a senior lecturer in philosophy at UMASS/Boston. He is the author of Respecting the Wicked Child: A Philosophy of Secular Jewish Identity and Education and, most recently, A Plausible God.
Source Citation
Silver Mitchell. 2009. Is There a Place for a Secular Person in the Network of Spiritual Progressives? Tikkun 24(2): 30.
