The Spiritual Turn and the Challenge of Solidarity

Since roundabout the 1960s, the West has witnessed a swelling turn away from “religion” toward “spirituality.” Both within and beyond the Christian church, individuals increasingly crave a religiosity which is experiential, expressive, and ephemeral. In the words of Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow, we have moved from an age of collective dwelling to one defined by individual seeking. This “spiritual turn,” as I call it, has had undeniable benefits, granting individuals more intellectual freedom to explore different belief systems, more social freedom to experiment with different spiritual practices, and more moral freedom to lead their lives (and love) in a way that feels authentic to them. Indeed, spirituality is deeply complementary with the “rights revolutions” of the past half-century—the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s and Gay liberation, multiculturalism—which have vastly improved the lives of millions. And yet, the spiritual turn is not without drawbacks. Spirituality’s emphasis on subjective experience over shared doctrine, rituals, and norms has exacerbated the growing societal ills of polarization, distrust, and division. Its narrow emphasis on expressive freedom has contributed to the current epidemic of loneliness and ennui. And its ephemerality, resting as it does on fragile social foundations, tends to diminish commitment. In sum, spirituality—much like Western society more generally—has a solidarity problem. However, the solution is not to turn back the clock, reversing the real progress that’s been made. Instead, I argue in this talk that we must, all of us, rethink the relationship between the individual and the collective—remembering that experience without accountability leads to arrogance, expressive freedom without community leads to alienation, and a lack of durable commitment leads to nihilism. In a word, we must resuscitate the deep truth that human flourishing is as much a collective endeavour as it is an individual one.

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