Spiritual and the Religious: Is the Territory Changing?

It's almost a mantra that contemporary westerners are more likely to be warm about spirituality than religion (which is a bit of a boo word). It is important that we take notice of this an respond. Rowan Williams has helped in what he said/wrote which is to be found now here: The Archbishop of Canterbury - The Spiritual and the Religious: Is the Territory Changing?. He begins in earnest a little way in: "I do want to confront the idea that the future of human spiritual awareness and maturity can lie only with a post-religious consciousness, with what might be 'sacred to any human being', over and above the affirmations of any specific religious body."

It is a closely argued piece, and so does not lend itself to extracts. I think that the main thrust would echo the concern that arose for me in my MA dissertation about life coaching and spiritual direction in relation to contemporary western culture; that 'spirituality' is in danger of failing to offer a perspective that can critique society; that without the 'backbone' that religious practices and even institutions at their best can offer, spirituality is likely to fall into the role of dupe to the status quo, a breeder of false consciousness and inauthentic living.

There's the problem; if you can recognise patterns of cosmic interconnection and yet not know how to start asking question about what sort of actions are revealing of the sacred order of things, something is missing, something that has to do with motivation for radical challenge and possible change in what we take for granted. Deciding that you are obliged to be responsible is not something you can instantly derive from belief in an interconnected universe. Responsibility has about it an irreducible element of being called to 'answer' for and to other agents; its roots have a lot to do with the sense of being the recipient of something at the hands of another. Something is bestowed which both enables and requires an answer. Yet to speak like this of 'bestowing' or 'endowing' is to move immediately into a realm in which I confront something like another personal presence. A generalised 'sacred' dimension of reality may be independent of my mind, but doesn't in itself need or suggest this language of 'bestowal'. Talking about God, not just about the sacred, assumes, on the contrary, that there is not only a sacred reality but an initiating agency that is independent of anything in our world. I am invited to make myself answerable for the good, the human welfare and spiritual health, of the human other, to make myself disposable in some measure for them, in part because of how I have learned to 'read' the world around, reading it as suggesting that an agency independent of any circumstance within the world has 'taken responsibility' for my welfare – has not only given life in general but put at my disposal the life that is its own.

Altogether, though, we need also to be able to affirm the critique of religiosity at its worst. I think that we need a fuller theology of the Powers that be articulated in relation to religious bodies. We also need to be able to articulate Christian faith in a way that relates well with the subjective turn where extrinsic authority (heteronomy) is suspect and self-integrity and unfolding is a core value.