Postmodernity's Spiritual Renaissance
By Margaret M. Poloma and Matthew T. Lee
[Originally published July 21, 2008 in the OnFaith website, a joint venture of the Washington Post and Newsweek. Text reprinted with permission.]
Prophets of ancient Israel foretold the future, healed the sick, even raised the dead. Moses parted the Red Sea; Jonah found himself in the belly of a whale; Isaiah raised a widow’s son back to life, and Daniel was left unharmed in a den of lions. The fact that much modern scholarship dismisses such pre-modern accounts, including the mystery and miracles found in the life of Jesus (himself a product of Hebraic culture) as “only myth” has not satisfied the quest of modern men and women for spiritually empowering experiences.
Refusing to act as children of the Enlightenment and limiting their reality to the rationalism and scientism of the day, many have sought spiritual experiences grounded in pre-modern religions. We suggest that there is change in the winds – a spiritual renaissance, if you will – in which a shift to postmodernity has opened up a space for “main street mystics” of all kinds to participate in alternate realities and talk about spiritual experiences. Dissatisfaction with the “iron cage of rationality” is widespread in this new era, and people are rediscovering old truths about the spiritual side of life, whether they be rooted in the ancient Hebraic culture and its early Christian offshoot, American Indian, Asian Buddhist, Indian Hinduism, or African Shamanism.
As we see it, one of the consequences of the postmodern turn is a questioning of the modernist separation of natural and supernatural. In assessing various human experiences, we find a “natural” continuum, from the very solidly empirical, through assorted dream states and various forms of hypnosis and trance, to intense altered states of consciousness involving deeply mystical experiences. A scientific outlook would label the latter as hallucination or possibly psychosis, since a modernist mental grid tends to discount the supernatural as an anomaly of brain chemistry. Yet the world’s great religious traditions have always prescribed spiritual practices in order to help people attain higher states of consciousness. Depending on the tradition, such experiences variously included a sense of mystical union with God, the extinction of the self, and an overwhelming experience of love.
We have seen evidence of the shift toward post-modernism in the blurring of the boundaries between Enlightenment naturalism and pre-modern spiritualism in our new study that focuses on godly love in the Pentecostal tradition. Pentecostalism is the fastest growing variant of Christianity (with a half billion adherents worldwide) in part because it fills the experiential vacuum wrought by Enlightenment thought and secular culture. It gives followers a postmodernist mental grid that normalizes the mystical and produces an expectation of the miraculous. Our interviews with both national and local “prophets and leaders” provide rich descriptions of how experiences of God serve as a “flame of love” that goes beyond personal mysticism to ignite benevolent service to others. One of our recent interviewees said of her pentecostal experience of the Holy Spirit: “I always had the words, but I didn’t have the music.” In encountering the Christian pentecostal culture she found the music that choreographed a flow beyond personal spiritual experiences toward a life of empowered service.
So what is the link between religious experiences of the unseen and other so-called paranormal encounters? Again we return to the shift in worldview from materialistic modernism to a post-modern culture that is open to the spiritual. Whether we are considering experiences with “new age” ghosts or the pentecostal Christian Holy Ghost, it appears that the modernist position continues to crumble under the weight of ongoing personal spiritual experiences, contemporary media influenced by post-modernist thought, post-modern critique of modernity’s limitations, and public discussion (such as this one) of spiritual phenomena.
The authors are faculty in the Department of Sociology at the University of Akron and Co-Investigators, with Stephen G. Post, on the Flame of Love Research Project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation.
