Curious Christian

Newsweek’s cover story this week is about spirituality in America and how an explosion of personal ecstatic religiosity is spreading.

I note that Paganism is now being listed alongside mainstream faiths and the diversity of the movement is acknowledged. The author recognises a distinction between pantheism and panentheism so its apparent he’s done significantly more research than most Established and Emerging Church commentators Ive come across.

This article is well worth a read and there are also a number of supplimentary articles on Kabbalah, Tibetan Buddhism, etc, for those that wish to look further.

Now, my question is, if Newsweek can recognise the diversity and depth in New Spirituality, can I implore the Emerging Church to do likewise and deconstruct their metanarratives that go along the lines of:

“In today’s pick-and-mix supermarket of spiritual options, people are not often looking for the one big story. People in the postmodern era are not interested in New Age 101 or Introduction to Buddhism any more than they are looking to grab onto the whole biblical metanarrative. Instead, they are simply sampling a meditative technique from here and a healing crystal from there.”

Whilst that may indeed be true of New Spirituality at an introductory level , Newsweek’s expose on Spirituality in America shows that the depth of exploration clearly goes beyond ‘sampling’ for many Americans. Any metanarrative we construct for ourselves that asserts post-modernity has led to an abandonment of metanarratives must grapple with the fact that New Spirituality devotees flocking to Wicca, Neo-Buddhism and Yoga are actively embracing alternative metanarratives and mythologies for empowerment. We cannot exegete our culture simply by observing superficial ‘samplers’, we must be open to observing what the hard core devotees are doing as well. Else we risk seeing only what we expect to see. In universalising New Spirituality are we not being guilty of the same ‘boxing in’ that we claim others do to the Emerging Church?

I hope the Emerging Church treats this article with the seriousness it deserves and not restrict their attention to the comments it makes on Christian developments.

(PS. I have not attributed this quote as I do not wish to single out individual authors given the prevelance of such misconceptions within the Emerging Church. I only include it to provide illustration.)