So what happened? How did Western culture shift from a broadly Christian, theistic framework to the purely immanent, humanistic, pluralistic, and psychologically oriented worldview expressed in Lennon’s song Imagine? The popular way of viewing this is to treat it as a simple subtraction sum, as though this momentous shift could have occurred just by taking God out of the mix - Western society ‘grew up’ and stopped believing in God the way children grow up and stop believing in the tooth fairy. In actual fact, it is this subtraction story which is the fairytale. It took several centuries of philosophical development to construct the purely immanent, godless view of the world which is so popular in contemporary culture.
This history has been traced extensively by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor in his seminal work A Secular Age, in which he seek to expound what it means to be ‘secular’. More recently, Carl Truman has traced drawn on this same history to explore the origins of the sexual revolution and subsequent political debate around gender identity, in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution. The development of ‘New Age’ spirituality and the Western interest in Eastern religious sources, in which we are interested here, runs in parallel. The ‘sexual revolution’ coincided with a ‘spiritual revolution’.
Here are some key points:
(1) Theism gave way to deism.
The 16th Century Reformation broke the grip of the Roman Catholic Church. The Reformed world was not split into the natural and the supernatural, the sacred and the secular. The whole world was viewed as God’s world. This gave new impetus to the sciences and arts by freeing them from the previously imposed religious restrictions . Theology was still the ‘queen of the sciences’ but nature was an expression of the mind of God and its non-religious truths could be uncovered by scientific research and portrayed in art, for their own sake.
However, this paved the way for a gradual exclusion of God from science. In a Reformed Christian view, God has not only created the mechanisms we see working consistently in the world, He remains intimately involved in guiding and sustaining these ‘forces of nature’. These phenomena are so observably regular that it became possible for doubters to ask whether God needed to be closely involved at all. Could he not just set them in motion and then retreat, leaving them running like clockwork? This is deism not theism. The more the world is understood in merely mechanical terms, the more distant God can become. Only once this view of a mechanical world had been constructed could people let go of a world sustained and controlled by God. A present God, became a relevant distant God, who became an increasingly irrelevant distant God, until people started wondering whether he was there at all, and whether it mattered.
(2) Philosophy turned inward.
Philosophy, too, began to develop in ways that departed from Christian orthodoxy. A key figure in this was Rene Descartes. A school of extremely sceptical thinkers were questioning whether it was possible to know anything with certainty. Descartes believed that mathematics was a form of knowledge about which you could be absolutely confident. Following mathematical patterns of deduction, he reasoned, would produce certainty in other areas too.
Being a bit of philosophical lumberjack, Descartes took out his intellectual chainsaw and began cutting down the trees of knowledge, felling anything that had any element of doubt, cutting off every branch that grew without respecting principles of mathematical deduction. He went about purging uncertainty with the enthusiasm of a sadistic Communist dictator and, when the epistemological blood-letting finally stopped, he was left with this famous piece of unassailable knowledge: “I think, therefore I am”. (It is not actually quite so unassailable as he thought but that doesn’t matter to us here). From this humble but confident foundation, he began to reconstruct a philosophical home from all the timber he had felled.
Descartes’ reconstruction still had a place for ‘God’ but a massive change had occurred. Christians believe in a God who has revealed himself - a transcendent being who breaks into immanent human to speak and act, most notably in Scripture and the Incarnation. Descartes’ God was not revealed, he was deduced intellectually. This is a seismic shift. True knowledge is not to be found by looking outside of ourselves but by relying on an internal capacity to know. God and Scripture are no longer trustworthy; innate human intuitions and reasoning are the only reliable foundations of knowledge.
Of course not everyone agreed with Descartes. Why give preference to intellectual capacities over those linked to the senses or moral conscience? Each position has been critiqued and counter-critiqued but Descartes’ new take on the foundations of knowledge was conceded. Since then, Western thinking has been basically ‘anthropocentric’ - oriented or centred around human capacities and experience - rather than metaphysical or theocentric. If the idea of ‘God’ is not revealed but rather constructed by human intellect, then meaning, morality, and religion, also have to be constructed - without reference to transcendent concepts.
(3) Much of the Christian church committed harakiri.
Rather than standing firm on its revelatory foundations many Christian thinkers surrender to the dominant influence of this deist and anthropocentric reorientation. Instead of allowing Scripture to shape their thinking and correct their moral outlook, theologians started to see their task as that of critiquing the Bible by the standards of human rationalism. The deist god was too far away to intervene in supernatural ways. Mechanistic science had no place for miracles. The Bible was not inspired inspiration but a record of human religious endeavour full of errors and myths which the modern mind simply could not accept. Humans were no longer subject to the Bible; the Bible was now subject to human beings. The effect of this theological suicide on churches was devastating. Christianity without an almighty God who breaks in to human experience to make himself known, is not Christianity at all. Christianity without God is dead, cold, legalistic, moralistic, spiritually dissatisfying, and powerless to have any positive impact on the human condition.
This corresponded with the first access which readers in America and Europe had to Eastern esoteric and religious books. With the rise of Western imperialism in the East and academic interest in ‘orientalism’, previously unknown Buddhist and other texts were translated into English. These new translations would not have had an extensive readership but they were of interest to spiritually hungry people, many of Puritan descent, who had grown disillusioned with their patents cold and powerless, so-distant-might-as-well-be-absent deist god. Sceptical of the Bible’s credibility, its exclusive authority claims no longer restrained interest in other religions, which might offer real, but previously taboo, spiritual insights. The pantheistic outlook of these exotic religions offered the heat, vitality, and immediacy of spiritual experience so absent from the deformed, mutant Christian-deism of the day.
Hence the 19th Century gave rise to numerous pseudo-Christian ‘cults’ which claimed recent - immanent? - new revelations and resorted to the immediate experience of occult practices. It also laid the foundation for what would become the 20th Century’s ‘New Age’ movement. The association between Buddhism and the New Age which Jon Kabat-Zinn was so cautious to conceal at the beginning of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) was not merely a perception. The import of Buddhism, the development of the New Age, and the now-common concept of ‘spirituality’ (as a distinct category to religion), were inseparable and intertwined from their inception. The have never had a distinct existence in the West but emerged together from the vacuum left by the progressive erosion of Christian religion. In the words of Leigh Eric Schmidt, whose study Restless Souls - the Making of American Spirituality has informed the narrative presented here, “The American invention of “spirituality” was, in fair measure, a search for a religious world larger than the British Protestant inheritance”.
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