Waiting for God; the Spiritual Explorations of a Reluctant Atheist  by Lawrence Bush, Ben Yehuda Press, 2007

A Plausible God; Secular Reflections on Liberal Jewish Theology   by Mitchell Silver, Fordham University Press, 2006

The Spirituality Revolution; the Emergence of Contemporary Spirituality  by David Tacey, Brunner-Routledge, 2004

Atheism today still focuses on what’s wrong with religion and religious belief. Where are the atheist books that go the next step and tell us how the secular faith and values that humans need are built up in a post-religious age? Come on people. We have to end poverty, racism, and religious divisiveness, and tackle global warming and species loss on a worldwide basis together, as one people. The human species needs a massive infusion of energy for non-commercial, heart-to-heart values. Is there any point in looking to atheists for leadership in that shift, or can we only look to “spirituality” and the more spiritual (i.e. less divisive, more universal) religions? And if spirituality is critical, where do “spiritual atheists” fit in?

Larry Bush calls himself a “spiritual atheist.” He would quite like to join in with the liberal/Left spiritual movements of his boomer peers, but he can’t, because they insist on believing in supernatural entities and assistance. “Is it so hard to keep hope alive,” he asks, “without believing that the entire universe is on your side?”

Bush’s Waiting for God is a great improvement on the anti-religion tirades of Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins. For an atheist Bush has had an unlikely life, earning his living as a writer within Jewish religious institutions. He has grown to admire liberal faith communities. He finds that many of them “offer their members tools with which to cope with life’s challenges, celebrate the most meaningful moments, struggle with egotism (or the unhealthy lack of it) and aspire to powerful virtues of discipline, generosity, humility, joy, compassion, mindfulness and more.”

Bush investigates three movements in particular that have held attractions for him and many other spiritual seekers: Mordecai Kaplan’s Recontructionist Judaism, Matthew Fox’s Creation Spirituality, and Wiccan or Goddess religion, as typified for him by the writings and leadership of Starhawk. But he can’t join any of them because each requires belief in the unbelievable. And he objects that the anti-science, anti-capitalist ethos that suffuses these movements fails to appreciate how the prosperity, education, freedom, and longevity of life that nurtured them came to be.

An agnostic myself, I agree with most of Bush’s reasons for not believing. But the book was a deep disappointment. For a start, I would give a lot more credit to spiritual left movements for making capitalism livable than he does. But that’s not my main beef. It’s that in the aftermath of his demolition job Bush is left with a purely individualistic, lonely pride at not succumbing to others’ delusions. I want to know how spiritual atheists can create nourishing communities. What is stopping us from reviving ritual, dance, song, service, teaching and many other functions of a good congregation, not splitting each of those off into separate disciplines as at present, but combining them in a holistic quest to honor and serve each other and the biosphere? And while creating such communities, I want to know how we nonbelievers can join with other spiritual progressives, including believers in all kinds of things we don’t believe in, to make humane, ecological values rule in this world. If you are a spiritual atheist trying to create that values-centric coalition, you don’t start with a belief-centric take on what is intellectually wrong with those who should be your natural allies. I expected a man of Bush’s sensitivities would be trying to create that coalition but clearly he isn’t.

America is a society with a religious majority. If you are a person who believes in democratic transformation you cannot build an adequate progressive movement unless it speaks to this majority and makes it feel welcome and comfortable, and that can’t happen with Bush’s religio-phobia, no matter how smartly articulated. Anyone who is content to be a lone secular critic—like so many in the literary and academic world—gives up on the coalition building with religious believers that is essential to challenge the contemporary elites of wealth and power and their destructive values. Too often it seems the Left would rather be right than effective.

Bush’s book sent me to one I had not heard of and, more amusingly (and tellingly for the publisher’s publicity department if they have one), one that Tikkun editor Michael Lerner had not heard of. Mitchell Silver’s A Plausible God is a secular philosopher’s study of three contemporary Jewish thinkers: Mordecai Kaplan, Arthur Green, and… Michael Lerner. Silver says he wrote the book because so many of his secular friends  and family started finding a place for God in their lives. But theirs was the kind of God even an atheist could believe in. It was a plausible God, one who does not stand outside the world but suffuses the cosmos with her (his? its?) presence, a God who has no quarrel with science. This God had no power to avert the Holocaust. She cannot make your prayer-wishes come true, other than by inspiring you and your community to action. This is a God to encourage those who are used to having some degree of agency in this world, who don’t imagine their only hope lies in turning the tables through magical Raptures or after-death Judgments.

Silver seduced me with his clarity: he has a lovely ability to sum up these theologians’ ideas. Yet I have always gravitated more to the sociology of religion: thinking it impossible in principle to judge the truth of God-talk, I still wanted to know its effects. For a philosopher Silver surprised me by going beyond the logical consistency of beliefs to a concern with how much comfort and inspiration the theologians’ beliefs, stories, myths, metaphors, and theological equivocations provide to their followers. And most usefully, he asks whether secularism does better or worse than the plausible God in providing reassurance and inspiration. 

He notes that Green, Lerner, and Kaplan “do not want to dispute scientific facts, but the wonder and mystery that religion provides are dear to them… This is a powerful brew. Hope and faith, intense emotionality, and total commitment, mystery, and infinity.” The secularist in contrast “takes no joy in the mysteries of existence and she bridles at the notion that anything is in principle unknowable.” But the moral benefit of mystery, Silver argues, is that it keeps us humble, for “…the secularist has no principled bulwark against the belief that she has got the fundamentals all figured out.” So comes his surprising conclusion that “Nonbelievers are more liable to dogmatism than new-God believers.”

This insight provides a much better basis for building a coalition of the secular and spiritual.

Faith is often used as a synonym for belief, but can better be seen as its opposite, if faith is the quality that allows us to go forward in love, service, and joy when we have no certainty. If we have no certainty of belief and no compensating rational hope of progress either, then what stops us from sinking into despair? The non-believer who is pessimistic or realistic but doesn’t let that stop her from helping others and reveling in the universe, may be the most purely faith filled person of all.

What words do we have for the nonbeliever’s trust in whatever it is that feeds her faith: her body, community, connections with nature? To call her a philosopher implies too much cerebral logic. No, she is spiritual. What better word do we have? “Spiritual” doesn’t have to mean escapist, nor does it have to be a synonym for a believer in spirits, other worlds, or a traditional God.

This is the kind of “spiritual” David Tacey talks about in The Spirituality Revolution. He makes a good case that there is an upsurge of interest in spirituality in wealthy countries, despite the decline in belief. For example, he writes, “According to the Soul of Britain project sponsored by the BBC in 2001, 76 percent of Britons indicated an interest in spiritual matters, even though only seven to ten percent of them attend church regularly. Underneath what appears to be increasing secularism lies a deep thirst and hunger for the sacred.”

If American atheists are still obsessed with religion rather than with developing a liberating, life-affirming and politically progressive spirituality, that may be because fundamentalist religion is still so strong in America. Breaking news of secular society’s search for spiritual engagement with the world is likely to come most clearly from the young in the most secular societies, like Western Europe, Australia, and Canada.

David Tacey is an Australian literature professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne. He was drawn first to literature for what it gave him spiritually and psychologically in responding to the world. But he spent twenty years teaching it in the approved secular manner, in universities where, he says, every kind of liberation is encouraged (feminist, gay, Marxist, psychotherapeutic etc.) except for spiritual liberation, which is mistrusted as premodern and irrational. So he kept his true love of literature private. Various leading authors like Patrick White sympathized with his problem. Eventually, secure in tenure and self, he offered courses in spirituality and found students flocking to them in large numbers.

“Secular education was associated with freedom, free-thinking and liberation from ecclesiastical authorities,” he writes. “But now secular education bestows a new kind of baleful authoritarianism, in which the soul and spirit are imprisoned and never allowed to take flight. Our deepest spiritual impulses are repressed and denied by secular education. As the cycle of history turns, we discover that the freedom of one era is the oppression and tyranny of another.” He cites Jacques Derrida (the founder of Deconstructionism) for his new interest in spirituality now that religion has been deconstructed, but says this is one strand of postmodernism that the secular university refuses to absorb.

The book annoys at times, claiming to speak for “youth spirituality” as if that was one thing. It is at its best when Tacey actually quotes his students. He is writing in large part to conventional church people, telling them what they are missing in the younger generation. What many of Tacey’s students appear to want seems remarkably similar to the plausible God of Silver’s book. Two quotes give the feel of the book: “By ‘spiritual’ we refer to an encounter with a source of mystery that transforms us as we come into contact with it.” “If we care to listen to what youth are saying they are indicating that their spirituality is engaged spirituality, concerned with the welfare of the world and the sacredness of endangered nature,” as opposed to the escapism the older secular generation fears it is.

This seems to me the core challenge of the twenty-first century: How to create spiritual movements inspired by our deepest values and understanding of what is sacred, able to generate the social energy we need to transform our society along compassionate, inclusive, and ecological lines, and that embrace science and scholarship (and avoid cultism—but that’s a topic for another time). A tall order. We need the best hearts and minds of our time to sign on and make it happen. If you don’t know where to sign on, try www.spiritualprogressives.org.