immanence

While I’ve done no formal surveys, my best guess is that about half my students here at the U of Vermont (at least those in Environmental Studies) would fit into the category of “religiously unaffiliated,” the so-called “religious Nones” — a category that now makes up almost 1 in 4 Americans and over a third of those under 25.

Many, though not all, of my students resonate with the phrase “spiritual but not religious.” If they were offered the option, I suspect they would subscribe to what Elizabeth Drescher calls “spiritual cosmopolitanism.”

Drescher writes:

“Processes of spiritual and religious being and becoming trump the classic religious categories of believing, belonging, and behaving for Nones. New modes of networked, cosmopolitan affiliation tend to characterize the way Nones gather through their spiritual lives. And, from this, new stories of spiritual and religious experience that both draw upon and move beyond traditional religious language are beginning to emerge.” [italics added]

My own work suggests that this category might be thought of as a kind of proto-religious or proto-spiritual “natural state,” the religious equivalent of the proto-ethnic tuteishyi (tutejsi, tutejszy) that I wrote about here — people who are locally based (literally, “from here”) but of “no fixed address,” because “address” is something that requires recognition within a system of coordinates, rather like Lacan’s “Symbolic” is said to impose an identity on its denizens that forecloses the inchoateness of the pre-Symbolic self.

For the tuteishyi, that formatting has either not yet occurred or has been consciously avoided (as in James Scott’s ungoverned peoples). To some extent, “spiritual tuteishism” is a “polytropism,” as Michael Carrithers has called it in the Indian context, a “turning toward many sources”; and to some extent it is merely a hesitant and partial openness to such turning. The point, I would argue, is that it is a processual state of relative openness rather than relative closedness, at the same time as it involves a resistance to what’s perceived as being too closed, inflexible, and confining. It is not exactly the “seeking” of the Sixties “generation of seekers” or the New Age movement; but nor is it the closure of the “immanent frame” that Charles Taylor critiques.

In this sense, “religious None” is a poor choice of term, as it suggests an absence rather than the cautious openness to experience — religious experience alongside other kinds — that characterize many of those in the category. “Unaffiliated” is better, but even that is not quite accurate, as affiliation is part of what these “Nones” do, but a local, no-fixed-address kind of affiliation.  

The paradox is that an unaffiliated category is a non-category; the new spiritual tuteishyi remains an individual even if he or she is part of the fastest growing population set around. By contrast, the ethnic tuteishyi — by which I mean the “classic” borderland dweller (mestizo, creole, et al.) — has always been imbricated within multi-layered community, if an inchoate and externally unrecognized one. The difference is, of course, a product of the weakening of communal links in late modern society.

Sooner or later, however, waves of religious innovation — affective movements that draw on people’s capacity to ritualize and to inhabit modes of “being religious” — tend to sweep across populations. (Rather like fascism swept across Germany, though I wouldn’t of course suggest that the liberal New Englanders I teach, in their “mass psychology,” are anything like the proto-Nazis that Michael Haneke tried to depict in The White Ribbon. Far from it. Perhaps Foucault’s hope for a “non-fascist life” has made inroads in the broader culture over the past 40 years. That’s a complicated question, which I’ll leave aside for now.)

So the question for me is: when something comes up with the capacity to “format” (or “territorialize”) the “unformatted data” of the proto-religious (ignore the problems of the computer metaphor for now), what will that something be? 

I know that some of my colleagues in religious studies, and in the “religion and ecology” field in particular, would propose that it would be something on the spectrum of green religiosity (such as Bron Taylor’s dark green religion). Ecology is, after all, connected to one of the authoritative discourses of our time — science — and an ecospirituality has the capacity to make today’s ecological challenges meaningful in ways that no other spirituality does. For my students, I would say that option is fairly probable. But for the 33 million other Americans in the “spiritual but not religious” category, that would only be one option among many.

Part of the work of ecoculture may be to render it — or something like it — a viable option.

Here’s where I would say to my Religion and Ecology students: “Discuss.”