Thread by @ZoharAtkins

The concept of "spiritual but not religious" is super old. If you want to understand it, read Paul and Epictetus. Read Luther.

My contrarian take on a trendy, yet perennial topic now under siege from both left and right.

whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/spiritual-bu…

When Paul says that through faith there will be “neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female” (Galatians 3:8), he introduces the modern notion of the liberal individual subject, stripped of association, uprooted from tribe.

Ironically, those who today assert Christianity as an axis of resistance against liberalism fail to appreciate the ways in which Christianity itself made liberalism possible.

“Spiritual but not religious”—as a matter of substance—is destined to become a Church. The tribe of those who have no tribe—those who reject tribalism—is remarkably homogenous.

Cosmopolitans are at home in TSA pre-check no less than folksy localists are at home at the farmer’s market. And with the ascendance of Zoom and remote work, cosmopolitans can now enjoy both worlds, being “of them, but not in them.”

All are “welcome” in the Church as long as one accepts the view that at bottom we are all the same through faith in Jesus. Modern liberalism took out the Jesus part, but kept the first part. The world is divided between those who don’t see difference and those that do.

While Paul’s version of spiritual but not religious involved the evisceration of group identity and the enshrinement of a new group united around faith in Christ, the Buddhist version is “form is emptiness.”

Underlying all cultural forms is a shared nothingness. Less abstractly, the core experience of the regular meditator is, paradoxically, “ego-lessness.

Ego-lessness—the realization that all matters of identity are just stories—fits well with liberalism, which is one reason why pop Buddhist is popular in the West.

Spiritual but not religious means: boundaried by the belief that boundaries between self and other are illusory and ultimately bad.

Yet in the realm of both religion and politics, the sundering of religious from spiritual, the claim that one is primary, the one sided belief that experience is a-social or that the social is all that matters, is confused.

A liberalism that ignores the group is destined to fail, but an anti-liberalism that ignores the individual is likewise doomed. To solve this problem, we must be religious, and therefore spiritual; spiritual, and therefore religious.