Stop making sponge-cake

Lefties continue to ask the question, where are the sane religious folks in America? It's a good question, given the hijacking of religion's role in the public sphere by the lunatic fringe. The great fear is that these absolutist fundamentalists - teetering on the precipice of being downright hallucinationists - had come to represent the core of American religion. They shout and grunt loud enough to make us believe it is so.

Put this problem hand in hand with the loss of the public intellectual in the US. You know, the great and genuine ones we used to have - the Deweys, Niebuhrs, Menckens, Emersons, etc. - the ones whose animating spirit channelled Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. These thinkers had little use for absolutes and fundamentalisms, the crutches of the intellectually incapacitated. Today we have paid political or ideological hacks whose stature is due more to product placement, the signature media characteristic (read: bowtie), a penchant for simplistic dualisms that treat Americans as puerile idiots (the prophecy that self-fulfills), and "a little dab will do you."

In Wilson Quarterly, Leigh Schmidt gets at the good and the bad of American spirituality. The last paragraph is the most important. Important as a springboard, that is, and not as an answer to the riddle. James merits further investigation if this question interests you, and more attention than Schmidt's quick-and-ready take on the thinker. Give James' The Varieties of Religious Experience a try, give Dewey's A Common Faith a go. Those books and others are where the political answers about religion are going to be found by progressives.

When the renowned psychologist of religion William James was asked in 1904, “What do you mean by ‘spirituality’?” he responded: “Susceptibility to ideals, but with a certain freedom to indulge in imagination about them. A certain amount of ‘otherworldly’ fancy.” That is the kind of whimsical, individualistic answer that would have earned James no small amount of scorn from today’s cultural critics had they heard it from some supposed avatar of the New Age. Yet for all of James’s vaunted privatizing of religion—he defined it, for his purposes, as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude”—he always remained very much interested in the fruits of faith, the inner resources of saintliness. What kinds of interior lives produced the energy and dedication of the saints, “their extravagance of human tenderness”? Without some sense of the spirit’s vast potentialities, James wondered, how would Americans ever confront their “material attachments” and regain “the moral fighting shape”? “Naturalistic optimism,” he wrote, “is mere syllabub and flattery and sponge-cake” compared with the hopes and demands that the spiritual life was capable of fostering. A Whitmanite individualist, James allowed the churches no monopoly on mystical experience or social conscience; a wide-awake pragmatist, he also believed that liberals and progressives turned away from the spiritual at their own peril....