Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (review)

There is a great deal of debate about the nature—and the value—of spirituality in contemporary America. These debates are real and important. Do religious values represent American civilization "at its best"? If so, which religious values? Is conservative Christianity the answer to Americans' need for spiritual and moral direction? Are the many expressions of New Age spirituality a signal of Americans' discovery of a more genuine, authentic religious posture toward life? Or, does New Age spirituality foster asocial absorption with nature and thereby erode our engagement with the social world? Is a return to conservative Bible teachings the best defense against the gradual corruption of the most noble elements of the American way of life?

It is in the context of these debates that Leigh Eric Schmidt narrates the making of American spirituality. Professor of Religion at Princeton University, Schmidt professes no easy answers to the difficult questions we face as individuals and as a nation. He begins his historical chronicle with a rumination on the pivotal role that Ralph Waldo Emerson's Divinity School Address had in separating personal spirituality from religious institutions. It is, of course, possible to view Emerson's address as "a sign of welcome freedom, a liberation of the spirit from stunting institutions, authorities and , authorities and rites." Yet, from another perspective, it was also "an indication of self-reliance gone awry, a spiritual seeking that went everywhere and arrived nowhere." Schmidt explains that "it is that kind of pointed questioning—a doubled perspective at once open yet critical—that I have brought with me to the historical and contemporary ferment surrounding spirituality in American culture" (xi).

Schmidt's reconstruction of the making of American spirituality is indeed that of a doubled perspective, at once open yet critical. This is not to say, however, that Restless Souls lacks an interpretive voice. Schmidt's central thesis is that the Religious Right has never had a monopoly on the nation's religious values. A liberal religious tradition, one anchored in the spirit of Emerson and Whitman, has in fact been the principal source of the most promising forms of American spirituality—a spirituality that is at once religiously nourishing and capable of sustaining a vital democratic society. Late in the book Schmidt notes how the mother of Illinois Senator Barack Obama raised her son to think that religion is an impediment to broader values such as tolerance and inclusivity. Yet later in life Barack discovered that his mother actually was a deeply spiritual person, even though her spirituality differed markedly from what is ordinarily found in conservative churches. Barack gradually realized that his mother's spirituality was a deep source of her progressive democratic values. It is clear that Schmidt views the Obamas as an object lesson in the history, present, and future hopes of an American spiritual tradition: "The return of a more progressive political order goes hand in hand with the vitality and integrity of religious liberalism" (287).

Schmidt is unwilling to impose any single set of criteria as to what does, and does not, constitute spirituality. It is nonetheless clear that he links spirituality with forms of religion that follow inspirations other than those imposed from institutional authority. Spirituality is somehow an expression of a "religion of the spirit" that outgrows inherited tradition. He finds that the making of American spirituality can be most directly traced to the liberal religious currents of the nineteenth century, in all of their variety and occasional eccentricity. "Seeker spirituality—excitedly eclectic, mystically yearning, perennially cosmopolitan—is an artifact of religious liberalism, especially in its more radical stripes" (7). Included in this genealogy, then, are such nonconformists as romantic Unitarians, Transcendentalists, progressive Quakers, spiritualists, questing psychologists, New Thought optimists, Vedantists, and Theosophists. What links these varied spiritual expressions...