The New Camoldolese Hermitage, a Benedictine Order along the Big Sur Coast of California offers as many as 35 priests, brothers and initiates an extraordinary monastic community. A few of the brethren in individual hermitages will go without daily human contact for up to five years. Most practice the contemplative life of silence, service and prayer in a variety of isolation levels. Periods of silence and fasting for days at a time are most common. Yet even for the hermits, their self-understanding is always as a worshipping community. Community initiation, orientation and then connection throughout the devotee's isolation period is essential.
The Christian traditions of the monastic movement began in the fourth century CE. These traditions were were about utopian ideals of community not spiritual isolation. The same can be said for the Buddhist traditions of monasticism which began 800 years before that.
This is all to say that even in extremes, by its nature, spirituality is both deeply personal and communal.
History is replete with examples of blind obedience to a religious community in which the individual's experience is stifled. Rational thought, freedom of movement and choice can be suspended and violence sanctified when religious conformity to the group is manipulated; The Salem Witch Trials (1692), Jonestown Massacre (1978) or the 9/11 attacks on the United States (2001) are just a few examples.
If spirituality is explored and nurtured in personal isolation it can be a recipe for empty shallowness at best or delusions at worst. One of the symptoms of severe mental illness can be the religious fantasies and projections born of extreme paranoia, anxiety and anger.
Healthy spirituality is both deeply personal and communal. Thoughts and feelings about one's spirituality are very personal, of course. Even in the context of religious traditions their expression can be highly individual. Finding the balance between the two is not easy.
Which raises a significant question about recent trends in North American religious life.
The Pew Religion Survey lists the fastest growing segment of religious affiliation in North America as those self-identified as “spiritual not religious”. There are many reasons for this. In their book Un-christian (Baker Books, 2007) Kinnaman and Lyons of The Barna Research Group list "hypocrisy", "intolerance", "judgmental dogma" and "religious involvement with politics" as significant factors that are turning people off to religious institutional life. This is especially true for those under 50 years old.
Ironically, surveys find that while 60% of North Americans list "religion as important in life" (Pew) 90% “believe in God” (Gallop Poll). Although a people with deep spiritual roots and interests, fewer and fewer North Americans affiliate with religious institutions. The decline in Main Line Protestant membership continues quite dramatically.
Could we conclude that that North American spirituality is increasingly isolated? This may not be a new trend. In his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000) sociologist Robert D. Putnam concluded “…over the last quarter century…we sign fewer petitions, belong to fewer organizations that meet, know our neighbors less, meet with friends less frequently and even socialize with our families less often. We even bowl alone. More Americans are bowling than ever before, but they are not bowling in leagues….”
Couldn’t the same be said of religious affiliation? We believe in God.....however we understand that....and we want to do that all by ourselves?
The problem is you can’t. And we don't.
Since the first home sapiens gathered in hunting clans thousands of years ago, spiritual expression has always been enculturated. Religious thought and ritual permeate culture. One can insist that they don't need organized religion to experience God but the very language they use to do so has been shaped by a variety of external religious forces.
One such example is "civil religion". Here in North America whether an individual rejects the concepts of God or traditions of any one religion altogether, they do so living in a culture that promotes Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day, Easter and Halloween as major business and civic events. In a nation that prides itself for "the separation of church and state" United States civil religion shapes even the one never exposed to organized religion; our coinage, pledge to allegiance, singing "God Bless America" at the seventh inning stretch of a baseball game introduce and reinforce concepts of divinity to religious and non-religious alike.
Atheism doesn't live in a vacuum. It presupposes and is juxtaposed over against formal religious language and tradition. To insist that one "doesn't believe in God" requires some knowledge of, if not exposure to, someone else's notion of "God".
Certainly the hypocrisy of institutional religion is glaring. While preaching concern for the poor, certain institutions acquire vast sums of wealth. While condemning and excluding those of minority gender and sexual orientation, church leaders are exposed for their own infidelities and abuses. Organized religion deserves to be held accountable for its failures. It is no accident that religious affiliation is in decline in North America.
Yet here's the dilemma. We need community if our spirituality is to evolve beyond sentimentality.
The 2007 award winning movie Into the Wild, based on Jon Krakauer's book of the same title, describes the true life journey of a young man named Christopher McCandless as he seeks the purity of spiritual insight. He dies alone in a broken down van in the Alaska wilderness, a place of overwhelming beauty, realizing that the only insight worth having is that which can be shared with others.
Those who assert that they worship God best during a walk along a beach or in the beauty of the mountains may insist that they have no need of organized religion. Such folk may have indeed cultivated the mindfulness of their connection with all of life and the order of creation. But they have not done so alone.
Religious affiliation can be messy, confusing and at times heartbreaking. All churches, synagogues and mosques are human institutions. Yet they can also be the spiritual home that nurtures and celebrates the things most meaningful in life.
The trends in decline of organized religion may suggest that North Americans are increasingly self-isolating. They may also suggest that they are open to searching for new and relevant forms of community. Note the expansion of the 12 Step Program movement during the Twentieth Century; an inherently spiritual community. While the Protestant church in north America has been in decline, the 12 Step Program has grown to offer millions of people healing from an expanding list of personal addictions.....often in the vacant facilities of the church!
Since spirituality as expressed in religion has and always will be both personal and communal, as traditional institutions contract we can look forward to the emergence of new and significant forms of spiritual community in the future.