Why Isn't 'Spirituality' Enough?...Continued from page 2

As Schmidt explains, Higginson's vision called for "a cosmopolitan piety in which religious identities were open, fluxional, and sympathetic rather than closed, fixed, and proselytizing."

Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote his essay, "The Sympathy of Religions," in 1871. Clearly, he was ahead of his time. Higginson's poetic description of his universalistic and relativistic spirituality has been realized in the development of American cafeteria-style pseudo-religion.

Schmidt sees a political possibility behind his analysis of America's religious landscape. A proponent of "progressive" causes, Schmidt believes that American political liberals should embrace spirituality as a means of countering the influence of conservatives and traditional Christians.

"The roots of today's seeker spirituality are tangled, but they go deep in American culture and often prove, on closer inspection, to be surprisingly robust," Schmidt argues. "It is hard, once one has traveled any length on the roads forward from Emerson and Whitman, not to be impressed by the tenacity of this joined tradition of spiritual seeking and political progressivism in American religious life."

Interestingly, Schmidt points to Sen. Barack Obama, the recently elected senator from Illinois who has emerged as one of the leading lights in the Democratic Party. Obama, Schmidt advises, wants to "reconnect progressive politics with religious vision."

Senator Obama's statement on this point deserves careful analysis: "My mother saw religion as an impediment to broader values, like tolerance and racial inclusivity. She remembered church-going folks who also called people nigger. But she was a deeply spiritual person, and when I moved to Chicago and worked with church-based community organizations, I kept hearing her values expressed."

We should note that Obama made no reference to where his mother discovered those "broader values" nor did he identify any specific content concerning these values or the spiritual vision that was claimed to undergird them. Nevertheless, Obama's statement serves to indicate how the concept of spirituality functions as a substitute for any specific truth claim or religious identification.

More surprisingly, Schmidt appears to be impressed with Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine, and his ideal of an "Emancipatory Spirituality." In Lerner's analysis, "The liberal world has developed such a knee-jerk hostility to religion" that those "who actually do have spiritual yearnings" have been marginalized.