New Secular Spirit

THE SECULAR SPIRIT
By
Michael H. Ducey, Ph.D.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR:
Sunday Morning: Aspects of Urban Ritual (New York, TheFree Press, 1977)
Outgrowing Catholicism (Madison, Wisconsin, The Windhover Press, 1990)

Millard: How does one start on the path?

Trungpa: Make friends with oneself. Start sitting.1

Table of Contents

Introduction

PART ONE: THE HEART OF THE MATTER

Chapter One: The Argument
Chapter Two: A Personal Preamble
Chapter Three: The Alice Miller Finding
Chapter Four: Two Kinds of Faith
Chapter Five: The Jesus Question
Chapter Six: Spiritual Learning
Chapter Seven: The Secular Spirit

PART TWO: THE BIG PICTURE

Chapter Eight: The Development of Spiritual life: Theory
Chapter Nine: The Development of Spiritual life: History

PART THREE: CHRISTIANITY IN AMERICA

Chapter Ten: The Mainstream Protestant Churches
Chapter Eleven: Those Catholics!
Chapter Twelve: Evangelical Insurgency

Introduction:

BISHOPS AND CHILDREN

My question is this: how could Roman Catholic bishops, for a period of at least 25 years, not perceive the inherent evil of child abuse? I mean, this is not a population of convicted felons in penal institutions. These are supposedly spiritual leaders. There is a puzzle here. But it is a puzzle that a valid psychology of religion can solve.

It is a clinical question, and deserves a clinical answer. My answer is that bishops are influenced by a state of mind that is the equivalent of being on a mood-altering medication. It is a product of their religious practices. We can call it "religious trance."

In this state of mind, the reality of children's pain does not fully register on them. And in this state of mind, they tend to deny anything that threatens the instruments that produce it. What has gotten them to take child abuse seriously is not the pain of children, but subpoenas, criminal charges and millions of dollars in costs. In this case the spiritual teacher has been secular law and society, and the spiritual student has been the religious organization.

I have thought a lot about the comment of Karl Marx that religion is the opiate of the masses. I eventually came to the conclusion that it is an extremely simplistic observation which nonetheless raises the question of the place of opiates in human consciousness. The overview is that there are a lot of them, and the more we study them, the more we know about the human condition. Opiates have been essential in the evolution of human consciousness.

The fact that religion is one of the opiates used to stabilize emotions does not make it necessarily a bad thing. In fact, the historical analysis suggests that religion is one of the most positive opiates humans have devised. It protected from pain, allowed the powers of the ego to grow, and people have outgrown it.

So, the true nature of religion is that it has a dual character. On the one hand it is a vehicle for awareness of the ultimate conditions of human existence. But on the other hand, since it is an instrument that goes to the very depths of the human experience, it also has to handle the introspective disorders in the human psyche. And so, historical religion, in its beginnings, came up with genius-level trance induction techniques that permit gradual access to commonplace trauma imprints. The Mass is one example; the haaj experience of Muslims is another; bathing in the waters of the Ganges for Hindus is another.

These are all culturally-supported hallucinations whose historic purpose is the gradual healing of the effects of primitive child-rearing practices. We must regrettably conclude that the "real presence" of the divine in all these exercises is purely, but powerfully, imaginary.

The use of these practices has declined over time. The twilight of their usefulness is most extreme in advanced industrial society. The alternative to them for mature spirituality is to engage one's interior self without sedative, while fully awake. To paraphrase a Buddhist maxim: Stop sedating yourself with ritual; make friends with yourself; start sitting.

Thus, the Mass is a sedative, Roman Catholicism is deeply attached to that sedative, and its cultural value is declining. Thus bishops, the ultimate insiders of that culture, have a double psychological problem. On the one hand, they view reality through the lens of religious trance, and so abused children do not easily appear real to them. On the other hand, they so highly value the Mass as a unique instrument of "salvation", that when its existence is threatened, they tend to go into a denial defense.

PART THE FIRST:
THE HEART OF THE MATTER

1. THE ARGUMENT

Religion has a dual character. On the one hand it is a vehicle for awareness of the ultimate conditions of human existence. But on the other hand, since it is an instrument that goes to the very depths of the human experience, it is also the vehicle for any introspective disorders that may show up in the human psyche on the way to that awareness.

The work of the Swiss psychiatrist Alice Miller has shown that culturally approved child-rearing practices routinely traumatize. So there are in fact powerful disorders in the human psyche that individuals and cultures only heal in the course of time. This repressed pain and fear must be sedated in the earlier stages of ego development in order for attention to be paid to more positive introspective elements. Any element so sedated still shows up in the thoughts and behavior of the sedated individuals, but as projections -- i.e., qualities seen as outside the self -- rather than attributes of self.

Therefore the paradox of traditional religion is that it has been successful at both these enterprises: revelation and sedation. So, Karl Marx was only partly right. The opiate function is only one side of religion. Insofar as traditional religion only sedates the repressed, it does not heal the self. It rather makes ticking time bombs out of its adherents.

Thus we find that religious ritual is a complex and brilliant trance induction technique that succeeds in quieting internal anxieties while suggesting thoughts and images that serve, generally, to strengthen the ego. Ritual is in fact the main practice that simultaneously reveals and sedates the content of the unconscious. However, since religious ritual is a form of hypnotic induction, it is clearly "therapy" -- a means to the end of a more mature personality structure. Individuals who benefit from the experience of ritual will often arrive at the point where they want to "terminate therapy." They will want to encounter the world from a more wakeful standpoint and therefore outgrow the need for the hypnotic state. This frequently turns them into "heretics" and causes social upheaval.

Religious symbolism is saturated with projections of infantile dependency, and religious organizations make parent-child relationships permanent.

The constant presence of these projections in religious practice fits into a pattern if we only grant one over-arching premise: they are all based on traumatizing child-rearing practices.

Where We Are Now

The dialectical irony is that religion has been successful at its twofold task, and so it has rendered its opiative function obsolete. The successor to religion in regulating the repressed is called secularism. Secularism begins in Europe in the sixteenth century when the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V does not invite the Pope to the treaty deliberations in Augsburg in 1555, when he is trying to negotiate his relationship with the Lutheran nobles of northern Germany. This is because he knows that the Pope will not make any compromise with "heresy", and he needs the troops of northern Germany to help him fight the Turks.

Under secularism there is positive self-regard, and "reason" is given the task of healing the repressed. Instead of going to church, we turn to science. Historically, this is not immediately successful in regulating the repressed. In fact, it sinks into the pathology of the Holocaust in the mid-twentieth century on the way to a full understanding of itself. Yet, because secularism relies on the native powers of the psyche instead of the artificial controls of religious trance-induction techniques, it is the only system than can support the later stages of emotional development. [See the discussion in Chapter 8.]

Therefore, the present moment is a time when the sedating/ regressing technologies for spiritual growth designed for the earlier stages of personality development are giving way to the wakeful technologies of the later stages. This situation has not been in existence for very long. It is new, and as a culture, we do not know very much about it. So, it is a time of confusion and anxiety. For many people it is a loss of familiar and reliable reference points in the spiritual landscape that feels dangerous and threatening.

2.

PERSONAL PREAMBLE

I was born into a middle-class Irish Catholic family in Chicago in 1933, the sixth of seven children. Absorbing the neuroses of the sub-culture and the time, I joined the Jesuits at age nineteen, went to India as a missionary at age twenty-six, and had an identity crisis at age thirty-three which got me out of the Jesuits and the church. Looking back, there were certain key transition points.

One happened in 1963. I was studying theology in the Jesuit seminary near the town of Kurseong in India. The location is in the Himalayas at an altitude of about 7,700 feet, about 20 miles from the famous British military resort of Darjeeling. Incredible scenery. In what I remember as my very first formal class in New Testament exegesis, Fr. Herman Volkaert, S.J., had us read to ourselves John 20, 19: "In the evening of that same day, the first day of the week, the doors were closed in the room where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews. Jesus came and stood in their midst." Then he shouted at us, "What happened?" (In his manner of teaching, as I recall, he did a lot of shouting.) In the moment of that question and the discussion that followed, I realized that all I had been previously taught about Christianity was superficial and lame. I was 30 years old at the time and had been in the Jesuits for 11 years. But it was only at that moment that something shifted in my body, and I realized that Jesus was part of a reality that was open-ended and mysterious.

The shift was so subtle that I had no language for it at the time. I did not acquire language for it until about 25 years later. In that interval I did not even seek language for it. I just lived my life according to its impact. Only when I started working on my book Outgrowing Catholicism in 1987 did I go back into my memory banks to see if I could account for the steps in my life's process. When I did that, I realized right away that that moment in 1963 had been a crucial turning point. Even in 1987 the language I had for it was crude. I could only say that "something shifted in my body." Now that I have worked more with somatic process I realize that the shift that occurred in 1963 was an awakening of the connection between my neo-cortex, limbic cortex and brain stem as centers of control in my body. I had begun to stop living just in my head. [SIDE BAR - The Tri-une Brain.]

The Tri-une Brain

This description of three broad functions of the human brain was the beginning of "brain mapping".
The first scientific paper on the tri-une brain was written by Paul D. MacLean and published in 1952, but it took about thirty years for this knowledge to inform thinking about human behavior and motivation.
The overall structure of the perspective is that there are three seats of knowledge in the brain: (1) the neo-cortex with its right and left hemispheres which is the seat of the "higher functions" such as language, imagery and reasoning, (2) the limbic cortex which includes the amygdala and the septem and governs fight-flight responses and other emotional functions, and (3) a group of elements clustered around the brain stem which process time and space awareness and other sensori-motor functions of the body. MacLean called this area "the R-Complex".
The neo-cortex is a late evolutionary development and found only in the primates. The limbic cortex is common to all mammals. The R-Complex is shared by reptiles, and hence is sometimes referred to as "the reptilian self".

Fr. Volkaert pointed out that obviously, from the text, the body of Jesus that John reported on was not exactly the same kind of body that I have. The text is very clear: the doors of the room were closed. (I remember him asking the class in the discussion, "Do you have a body like that?") In order to answer the question, I had to do a somatic scan. So this was the moment in time when I started to recover my body. It was the moment when I started to realize that I was in the Jesuits because of disembodied images playing in my head (i.e., neo-cortex), and that if I listened to my body, I could not stay in that social location. But this "realization" was not verbal at that time. There was no actual conversation with myself. The realization was entirely somatic, and it was nascent. I only began tentatively to think differently. It took another three full years before I consciously decided to leave the Jesuits.

The second incident was three years later, on the eve of my actual departure from the Jesuits. It took place in St. Stanislaus Retreat House in Parma, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. The time was December 1966. When I got to the point where I knew I was going to leave, I planned out the day when I would stop saying my daily morning Mass. On that day I went to the chapel where I had been doing it, in order to see what, if any, emotional reaction I would have. I was prepared for a twinge of sadness or guilt. But what actually did happen was quite different. I stood there and looked at the little altar, the chalice, the vestments and missal that I was never going to use again, and what went through me was a gentle but definite feeling of relief. It was actually quite startling. It was as if my body was releasing toxins it had been holding on to all my life.

(A few years later, when I was experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs, I did have the experience of my body releasing chemical toxins when I was coming down from an acid trip. The LSD on the market in those days was often lightly laced with strychnine. I remember standing on the third floor back landing of the house on Wrightwood Avenue in Chicago, looking out the little square window across the frost-laden garage roofs of Chicago back yards in the early morning light of All Saints Day (the day after an all-night hippie Halloween party). We had been up all night. I had taken the acid about twelve hours previously. I was now near the end of the "coming down" cycle. I felt a slight shiver through my whole body as the level of strychnine released another notch. And the thought passed through my mind, "Why, this is exactly what I felt that morning at St. Stan's when I said goodbye to the altar.")

I have since concluded that the practice of saying Mass is a trance-induction technique that induces a state of dissociation from the body. This eases traumatic pain but also dulls the generic body sense that is mediated by the reptilian brain. It mobilizes the endogenous opioids.

The third experience in the recovery of my body was a series of introspective insights in 1986 and 1987. During that period of time I was investigating the offerings of "New Age" therapeutic workshops. In three separate events over a period of about two years I experienced what psychologists would call the release of childhood memories, in which certain garden-variety moments of trauma in my early life came to the surface of my consciousness. Each of these experiences had its own grounding and completing effect on my life. Each of them contributed towards a more secure sense of my self. Each of them reduced the areas of my body and the areas of my brain that were numbed by habitually mobilized opioids.

Also in this period of time I embarked upon the project of writing out the whole story of my experience with Catholicism. This resulted in a book called Outgrowing Catholicism -- A Study. A Practical Guide. A Personal Reflection. The writing of this book was extremely cathartic for me, but it only analyzed the break-down of the old belief system. It did not offer anything to put in its place. As a religion editor at Doubleday tersely put it in turning down my manuscript, "You have to give them something." So I ended up having to publish it myself. I sent out review copies and in the end sold a few hundred books. The rest are still in my storage locker. The book was a commercial disaster, but a therapeutic success. I got my past out of my system.

The fifth phase of my recovery of my body began right after writing Outgrowing Catholicism. When I finished the book I realized that now indeed it was time for me to focus fully on learning more about my body. This was in 1991. It so happened that I encountered at that moment a woman by the name of Kay Ortmans, who was then 84 years old, and had been teaching body awareness for over fifty years. She is well-known in bodyworking circles for her seminars conducted over many years at The Wellsprings Foundation in Ben Lomond, California in the Santa Cruz mountains. In 1991 she was living in semi-retirement in Madison, Wisconsin, where I was, but was still taking students, giving massages, and holding small workshops.

I ended up studying with Kay for two years. She and her followers and other students gave me my apprenticeship in the workings of somatic energy. I spent hundreds of hours assisting and giving and receiving bodywork, in movement workshops and free-associational drawing, all to the accompaniment of classical music. At the end of that training I moved back to the Chicago area.

In Chicago I extended the reach of my somatic self-awareness even further by studying bodywork and trauma treatment with the trainers of Hakomi Integrative Somatics. Nowadays they call it "sensorimotor psychotherapy" and it is gaining more and more acceptance in professional psychology.

I still study reptilian, to get more proficient at it. There is always more to learn about one's body-mind relationship. But in the main I would now describe myself as "reasonably well embodied". I think I get what somatic existence is really all about. I feel more confident about the little koan I made up for myself: "The body is not afraid of death. Only the mind, incomplete in its relationship with the body, is afraid of death."

3.
THE ALICE MILLER FINDING

The Swiss psychiatrist Alice Miller published three books in the 1970s (in German) and 1980s (in English) that developed the observation that child-rearing practices themselves regularly traumatize children.2 She uncovered very specific evidence in the form of nineteenth century German child-rearing manuals. For example she comments that:

In the mid-nineteenth century a man named Schreber, the father of a paranoid patient described by Freud, wrote a series of books on child-rearing. They were so popular in Germany that some of them went through forty printings and were translated into several languages. In these works it is stressed again and again that children should start being trained as soon as possible, even as early as their fifth month of life, if the soil is to be "kept free of harmful weeds".3

Miller calls this "poisonous pedagogy". A central feature of it is "the conviction that parents are always right and that every act of cruelty, whether conscious or unconscious, is an expression of their love."4 She says that this claim of parental figures to unchallenged authority comes from unresolved experiences of their own childhood.

The pedagogical conviction that one must bring a child into line from the outset has its origin in the need to split off the disquieting parts of the inner self and project them onto an available object. The child's great plasticity, flexibility, defenselessness, and availability make it the ideal object for projection.5

The first thing to note about this situation is that these child-rearing practices traumatize. Traumatic child-rearing leads to the split-self: "Splitting the human being into two parts, one that is good, meek, conforming and obedient and the other that is diametrically opposite."6

How can it have come about that the split I have just described is attributed to human nature as a matter of course even though there is evidence that it can be overcome without any great effort of will and without legislating morality? The only explanation I can find is that these two sides are perpetuated in the way children are raised and treated at a very early age, and the accompanying split between them is therefore regarded as "human nature." The "good" false self is regarded as the result of what is called socialization, of adapting to society's norms, consciously and intentionally passed on by the parents; the "bad", equally false self is rooted in the child's earliest experiences of parental behavior, visible only to the child who is used as an outlet.7

Such practices also give rise to "the illusion of existential worthlessness", which the British psychiatrist Michael Balint called "the basic fault". Balint was trying to explain certain difficult cases he encountered in psychoanalysis. He came to the conclusion that "analytical work proceeds on at least two different levels, one familiar and less problematic, called the Oedipal level...", and the other "...I propose to call the level of the basic fault."8

The term "basic fault" does not refer to a moral condition and implies no guilt. It is a metaphor drawn from the physical sciences. "In geology and in crystallography the word fault is used to describe a sudden irregularity in the overall structure, an irregularity which in normal circumstances might lie hidden but, if strains and stresses occur, may lead to a break, profoundly disrupting the overall structure."9

It shows up as an extremely painful "gap" in the deepest recess of the human psyche. It is a chasm, a crevice, an abyss, possibly of fearful darkness, into which the conscious ego is in danger of irretreivably falling. It projects out into the world as an array of binary oppositions, e.g., between self and other, we and they, sacred and profane, grace and nature, safe and dangerous, etc. Balint says of the patient's emotions when aware of the basic fault:

The only thing that can be observed is a feeling of emptiness, being lost, deadness, futility and so on, coupled with an apparently lifeless acceptance of everything that has been offered. Everything is accepted...but nothing makes sense. ......Although highly dynamic, the force originating from the basic fault has the form neither of an instinct nor of a conflict. It is a fault, something wrong in the mind, a kind of deficiency which must be put right. It is not something damned up for which a better outlet must be found, but something missing either now, or perhaps for almost the whole of the patient's life.10

Balint says that "...the origin of the basic fault may be traced back to a considerable discrepancy in the early formative stages of the individual between his bio-psychological needs and the material and psychological care, attention, and affection available during the relevant times." 11 This is of course a reference to child-rearing practices.

This basic fault or something very much like it is undoubtedly the experiential foundation for the "original sin" of Christian theology. The theological doctrine of original sin turns an experiential defect into an ontological defect, a clear case of projection.

A short time before Balint's work, there appeared a more popular description of the basic fault that has produced a slightly different language. It is The Aristos, a philosophical essay by the novelist John Fowles, first published in 1964. The Aristos is a literary rather than a scientific work. He speaks of the existence of the "nemo".

...I believe each human psyche has a fourth element, which, using a word indicated by the Freudian terminology, I call the nemo. By this I mean not only `nobody', but also the state of being nobody -- `nobodiness'. In short, just as physicists now postulate an anti-matter, so must we consider the possibility that there exists in the human psyche an anti-ego. This is the nemo.12

Fowles expands for many pages on the manifestations of the nemo in personal, social and political life. Some examples:

7 The nemo is a man's sense of his own futility and ephemerality; of his relativity, his comparativeness; of his virtual nothingness.
8 All of us are failures; we all die.
9 Nobody wants to be a nobody. All our acts are partly devised to fill or to mask the emptiness we feel at the core.
16 I can counter my nemo by conflicting; by adopting my own special style of life. I build up an elaborate unique persona, I defy the mass. I am the bohemian, the dandy, the outsider, the hippie.
37 I vote because not to vote represents a denial of the principle of right of franchise; but not because voting in any way relieves my sense that I am a pawn, and a smaller and smaller pawn, as the electorate grows. 13

The basic fault shows up in many accounts of spiritual life, but not all of them. It is "the dark night of the soul" in St. John of the Cross, "the shadow" in C. G. Jung, "the gap between subject and object" in D. W. Winnicott, "the nemo" in John Fowles, "the leap of faith" in Soren Kierkegaard, "the heart of darkness" in Joseph Conrad, "dread" in Jean Paul Sartre, and so on and so forth. In each case it is an experience of darkness, meaninglessness, isolation and self-worthlessness at the "center" of human experience.

But it does not show up in all spiritual literature. I do not find the basic fault in the works of Lao Tzu, classical Buddhism, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the biblical prophets or the four Gospels. It is however pervasive in popular culture, modern literature, the letters attributed to St. Paul, and the history of organized religion.

In recent years, especially since the First World War, there has arisen a body of scientific literature on the effects of trauma. We now know a lot about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. That knowledge is being applied to the diagnosis and treatment of military personnel, former prisoners of war, victims of torture, and victims of physical or sexual child abuse.

The level of trauma being treated in modern hospitals is obviously deeper than what is produced by child-rearing in the culture as a whole. That is why its symptoms stand out. However, the symptoms will be the same in both cases, except those due to cultural traumatization will be milder.

Dr. Judith Herman (Trauma and Recovery, 1997) gives this overview of those symptoms:14

It is a kind of fragmentation, whereby trauma tears apart a complex system of self-protection that normally functions in an integrated fashion. Abram Kardiner described the essential pathology of the combat neurosis in similar terms. When a person is overwhelmed by terror and helplessness, "the whole apparatus for concerted, coordinated and purposeful activity is smashed." (p. 34)

The symptoms of PTSD fall into three main categories: hyperarousal, intrusion (the permanent imprint) and constriction (numbing). (p. 35) Pitman and van der Kolk suggest that trauma may produce long-lasting alterations in the regulation of endogenous opioids (endorphins), which are natural substances having the same effects as opiates within the central nervous system. (p. 44)

Traumatized people become adept practitioners of the arts of altered states of consciousness ... dissociation, voluntary thought suppression, minimization , outright denial ... Perhaps the best name for this complex array of mental maneuvers is doublethink (Orwell), "the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them." (p. 87)

The ability to hold contradictory beliefs is one characteristic of trance states. The ability to alter perception is another. Prisoners frequently instruct one another in the induction of these states through chanting, prayer and simple hypnotic techniques. (p. 87) These include the ability to form positive and negative hallucinations and to dissociate parts of the personality. (p. 88)

Alice Miller pointed to the evidence of "poisonous pedagogy" in child-rearing manuals in German, but not just one linguistic culture is at issue here. The Germanic tribes were after all only one of the numerous groups that entered Europe from the steppe of Central Asia and became the forebears of all Caucasians. In The Chalice and the Blade (1987), Riane Eisler notes that the Kurgans replaced the Old Europeans in the second millenium before the Christian Era. The last surviving example of Old European culture was on Crete. Old European culture in the Bronze Age -- starting around 8000 BCE -- had a highly developed agricultural organization, female goddess figures, social planning and non-warlike economies. It was much more peaceful and comfortable than its successor cultures. Old European culture was matrilineal, but not matriarchal. It was a "partnership culture".

Two salient characteristics of the Kurgan cultures were the centrality of violence in their economies and their pre-occupation with death. They were also of course patriarchal, highly stratified, practiced slavery, and subjugated women. The Old Europeans did not appear to make a very big deal about death, but the extremely elaborate funerary practices of the Kurgans -- especially for their chiefs -- expended great energy in trying to "overcome" death.

If the second millenium before the Christian era seems like a long time back to go to find the source of contemporary child-rearing practices, recall that World War I is generally conceded to express tribal hostilities that went back over a thousand years. So, 2000 BCE is not too far back to go, because child-rearing practices are the product of an evolutionary learning process, and cultural evolution, as we know, is quite slow compared to some other human processes.

Judith Herman notes that when Freud talked about childhood trauma in "The Etiology of Hysteria" in 1896, the effect on his colleagues and his culture was so dire that it prompted him to suppress the whole topic forthwith and never return to it in his lifetime. The whole idea of the presence of trauma in western culture had to be subsequently re-discovered three times (twice by Abram Kardiner, that is, after World War I and after World War II, and for the third time by Vietnam veterans and women working on issues of rape and domestic violence in the 1960s and 1970s) before its existence was publicly acknowledged.

This history powerfully suggests that childhood traumatization is indeed a regular feature of all cultures. Indeed, if we look at the symptomatology carefully, there is no reason to suspect that any cultures on the whole planet are free of this phenomenon.

Peter Levine (Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, 1997) is one of the leaders in contemporary trauma research. He cites a study of aboriginal societies that finds that "societies that practiced close physical bonding and the use of stimulating rhythmic movement had a low incidence of violence. Societies with diminished or punitive physical contact with their children showed clear tendencies toward violence in the forms of rape, war, and torture." He then adds:

The work of Dr. Prescott and others points to something we all know intuitively: that the time around birth and infancy is a critical period. Children assimilate the ways that their parents relate to each other and the world at a very young age. When parents have been traumatized, they have difficulty teaching their young a sense of basic trust. Without this sense of trust as a resource, children are more vulnerable to trauma.15

So, I take the Alice Miller finding to be that we are all traumatized, and all prone to being dissociated. Miller herself says that in her clinical work, she came to the conclusion that "every perpetrator was once a victim." This leads to the corollaries that terrorists are terrified and torturers are tortured. This is not to excuse. This is only to correctly diagnose, strategize and respond.

4.
TWO KINDS OF FAITH

A useful definition of faith is that it is the non-rational knowledge religion gives.

To go along with the dual character of religion, there are two kinds of faith. One of them is trans-rational and gives the awareness of the ultimate ground of human existence. The other is pre-rational and consists of the set of terrified projections imprinted by a harsh childhood that introspection encounters on its way to awareness of ultimate ground.

The object of the interiority exercise is to be completely awake. In this condition we know exactly who and what we are, without illusion or deception or fear. It is a fully embodied sense of the ultimate conditions of human existence. I call this knowledge universal faith. It is serene, flexible and tolerant.

The second kind of faith is a projective-regressive-dissociative set of beliefs that we can call sectarian faith. It is rigidly boundaried and thus provides an identity: "I am a Catholic, ...a Protestant, ...a Muslim, ...a Jew, ...a Hindu, ...a Vaishnavite, ...a Buddhist, ...a Christian, ....a Methodist, ...a Pagan", and the rest. It is powerfully defensive and therefore subtly or overtly hostile to all other forms of projective-regressive-dissociative faith. It creates an us-and-them world and is the vehicle for strong emotions of anger and fear.

Sociologist Dean R. Hoge calls it "empirical faith":

Our experiences have taught us that the members of different denominations actually live in different worlds and are shaped by distinct assumptions and experiences. This is shown by the different ways denominational members talk about their own faith and church life, and it is shown by the ignorance they have about other denominations. ..... We have been impressed repeatedly by how encapsulated church members are in their own religious worlds. For people in every congregation, their own congregation, and especially their friends in the congregation fashion their understanding of religious reality. Anyone disbelieving this statement can put it to a test: Ask people in any denomination about the theology and practices of other denominations. You will see how little they know.16

This kind of faith is projective and regressive in that it conceives of god and spiritual realities as the unfinished relationships of childhood. It takes all those memories of the first few years of life that were lived under the regime of harsh child-rearing practices, and projects this content out onto the world as divinely inspired truths. This kind of faith is dissociative in that it has suppressed and is completely out of touch with huge chunks of self. In particular, all the pain from harsh child-rearing practices is thoroughly suppressed and the parts of time and the parts of the body that carry those memories are completely numb. Therefore, the behavior associated with this kind of faith is ruled by ideas rather than empathic perception, and so it can perform all manner of insensitive cruelties in the name of orthodoxy and truth.

Universal faith, on the other hand, is completely inclusive in its scope, remarkably defenseless, and identifies as merely human. It grounds an extremely realistic, flexible and compassionate presence in the world. That is, because it has complete access to all that its own self truly is, it also has great access to the truth of the existence of other human beings. It can comprehend and care for their existence. It also has a completely embodied sense of the permeability of the boundary between time-space and non-time-space, and it finds all this quite amusing.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin describes the path to universal faith as follows:

... I took the lamp, and leaving the zone of everyday occupations and relationships where everything seems clear, I went down into my inmost self, to the deep abyss whence I feel dimly that my power of action emanates. But as I moved further and further away from the conventional certainties by which social life is superficially illuminated, I became aware that I was losing contact with myself. At each step of the descent a new person was disclosed within me of whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer obeyed me. And when I had to stop my exploration because the path faded from beneath my steps, I found a bottomless abyss at my feet, and out of it came -- arising from I know not where -- the current which I dare to call my life.17

One of the best verbal descriptions of this kind of faith to be found anywhere is that of the Zen master, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi:

Because you think you have body or mind, you have very lonely feelings. But when you realize that everything is just a flashing into the vast universe, then you become very strong and your existence becomes very meaningful.18

Ken Wilber noted that it is not always easy to detect the difference between pre-rational and trans-rational knowledge:

A major therapeutic confusion among theorists stems from what I have called "the pre/trans fallacy", which is a confusing of pre-rational structures with trans-rational structures simply because both are non-rational. This confusion runs in both directions: pre-rational structures (phantasmic, magic, myth) are elevated to trans-rational status (Jung), or trans-rational structures are reduced to pre-rational infantilisms (e.g., Freud). It is particularly common to reduce samadhi to autistic, symbiotic or narcissistic-ocean states. ... Alexander (1931) even called Zen a training in catatonic schizophrenia. In my opinion such theoretical (and therapeutic) confusions will continue to abound until the phenomenological validity of the full spectrum of human growth receives more recognition and study.19

The pre/trans fallacy causes a lot of problems: "Practitioners of meditation, often swimming in the rhetoric of transformation, may fail to recognize the regressive nature of much of their experiences."20 It is easy in personal growth work to get "a mixture and confusion of pre-egoic fantasy with trans-conceptual insight, of pre-personal desires with trans-personal growth, of pre-egoic whoopee with trans-egoic liberation."21

For the past four hundred years or so there has been a great debate in Western culture about the relative merits of two forms of knowledge, one of them called "faith" and the other called "reason." The "reason" in this discussion is the rational-deductive-logical-conceptual knowledge obtained by science. The "faith" that is involved is not universal faith, but rather the projective-regressive-dissociative faith of the Christianity of the time. It is the kind of knowledge of self and the world possessed under the conditions of religious trance.

We now know that the knowledge of science is a limited form of knowledge. And we should now know, at this stage of the discussion, that projective-regressive-dissociative faith is also an extremely limited form of knowledge. There is no conflict between universal faith and scientific knowledge. There is however a very serious conflict between universal faith and sectarian faith.

5.
THE JESUS QUESTION

I was rigorously trained in Roman Catholic theology. Thirty-five years after that training I have arrived at a two-part conclusion. Part one is that Jesus of Nazareth is the incarnation of the second person of the blessed trinity. The other part is that this assertion is largely irrelevant to the present stage of history.

So, I think the legacy of Jesus is important. It tells us something about our existence that no other source reveals. But I am also convinced that the authentic legacy of Jesus has not the smallest hope of taking its place in history until Christianity is divested of all traces of sectarian faith. That is to say, we have to take all the projections, regressions and trance induction techniques out of Christianity before the legacy of Jesus can get a fair hearing. However, Christianity without its projections and trance induction techniques would be unrecognizable vis-à-vis the contemporary institutions that go by that name.

For example, the Roman Catholic practice of the Mass will have to go. It is too heavily a trance induction technique and is based on a mistaken interpretation of the New Testament. [See Chapter 9.] The authority of clergy has to go. This is clearly a paternalism that doubts the power of self to grow. The concept of "redemption" has to go. It was a metaphor that worked pedagogically in the time of St. Paul, but it is merely a metaphor, and once you get to the heart of things, it gets in the way. We are not green stamps. There is no economic transaction going on in the Jesus event. The concept of original sin has to go. It was in the first instance a very big mistake that may have served developmental purposes, but is clearly schizoid in implication, and in conflict with positive self-regard, which is the state of consciousness of the healthy human organism. The concept of "grace" as something added to and outside of nature has to go. Again, this line of thought is schizophrenigenic and a leftover from a stage of emotional development in which the ego is very weak.

So, I like to say to those who ask me when I am coming back to my former religion that I will be glad to do that on only a few conditions: If they throw out going to church, the clergy, original sin and their doubt of self, then I will be glad to join them in talking about Jesus.

And I actually think that when you do throw out all those things, the New Testament becomes a really interesting document.

However, in the cultural climate of today -- which is dominated by religious institutions deeply invested in trance-inducing ritual, a powerful clergy, and defensive identity structures -- it is pretty much a waste of time going after projection-free investigation of the legacy of Jesus. The main tasks of spiritual development today are education, political and economic stability and introspective healing. If we manage those, then sectarian religion will continue to wither away, and in a few hundred years we might have an interesting global synthesis of spiritual systems.

A Weird Little Theological Post Script

Creation and Evolution

I have always thought that the controversy about creation versus evolution is really silly. Ever since I was a very young philosophy student in the Jesuits it has seemed simple and obvious to me that God creates evolution. (Recently I seem to find in the thinking of Stephen Hawking some mathematics that would support this.) I mean, isn't that pretty obvious? Creation is about Being. It is the answer to the question, "Why is there anything and not simply nothing at all?" Evolution is about what happens after things are.

Well, I guess you do have to have an insight into Being in order to get that point, but doesn't everybody have the ability to have that? After all, everybody is. I mean, does anyone really think that he or she causes himself or herself to be?

As long as we are on this point, we might as well follow it out. Once you get it that everything that is, is because it is made to be by a source outside itself, then you get it that creation is totally gratuitous. And once you get it that creation is totally gratuitous, then there is no need for some ontological extra called "the supernatural."

However, lots and lots of theologians love to talk about the supernatural, as in "the supernatural order", which they think of as "the order of grace", which is a "higher" order than the order of nature, an order to which human beings need to be "elevated". But it seems to me that if you look at the history of Christian theology, you will see very clearly that this whole business about a "supernatural order", as well as the whole business of "original sin", is based on a very serious introspective misunderstanding that took place in the time of Augustine.

Now certainly Paul and the early Christians are very clear about an experiential aspect of their lives -- which is the difference in their control of impulses such as sex and greed -- after their conversion to Christianity compared to before their conversion. And they certainly take a very dim view of the pagans of their time and of the jews who did not convert to Christianity. However, I do not think they ever actually ontologize this experience. It would never even have occurred to most of them to talk in that language. Paul in particular was not one to use the ideas of Plato and Aristotle. Paul talked about experience.

It remained then for Augustine and his generation to ontologize the experience of Christian conversion, and to turn the xaris of grace from a mere gift to a whole new order of being. It was an understandable error because, given the level of introspective competence of the culture of the time, it was natural for them to mistake emotional forces residing in the unconscious and attributable to child-rearing practices for fixed aspects of being. But it was a mistake, and only Pelagius came even close to getting it right.

So I like to observe that in the argument between Pelagius and Augustine, Pelagius was right philosophically, scientifically and exegetically, but Augustine was right developmentally. So I think it is about time that we re-visited Pelagius to see what a Christian theology would look like that did not split the psyche into two distinct components, and did not split the world this way either.

6. SPIRITUAL LEARNING

Millard: How does one start on the path?
Trungpa: Make friends with oneself. Start sitting.22

The key concept is that traditional religious practices are developmentally "early", in the service of the weak ego. They are techniques for engaging the unconscious and coming to an awareness of our essential human being. They are ingenious and appropriate to the level of development they address. However, recent trauma studies have made them all, not yet completely obsolete, but certainly obsolescent. The point of all those techniques is to be grounded in your true reality. The main obstacle to this grounding is the residue of fear and overwhelm left over from early childhood experiences. Now there is a technique that is more direct, more efficient and more sensitive than all those traditional religious techniques. We can think of it as "therapeutic mindfulness accompanied by a highly developed inner body sense."

As human beings continue their quest for wholeness, more advanced techniques gradually replace earlier attempts.

Spiritual learning is mainly about pacifying your demons. Once you pacify your demons, everything becomes clear. "When you realize that everything is a flashing into the vast universe, then you become very strong and your existence becomes very meaningful."

But it can be hard to get started. When the ego is weak, it is easily overwhelmed by the forces of the unconscious. The early twentieth century French poet Paul Valéry said somewhere, "If you want to go down into the self, you'd better go armed to the teeth."

That is why traditional religion devised its trance induction techniques: to access the unconscious safely. They were appropriate technology for a thousand years ago, but now they have become addictions.

From recent trauma studies we have learned that "armed to the teeth" simply means armed with certain specific skills, principally a well-developed "inner body sense", which is able to detect the earliest onset of re-enacting trauma. Once you can detect the onset, you can control the memory, and gradually allow yourself to complete the defense mechanism that was overwhelmed when you were very young and very small. In trauma treatment we have learned that we can access anything inside ourselves as long as we do it slowly enough.

So, the watchwords now are (a) relax and (b) notice. It is not necessary to be ambitious. Exert no pressure. We do not have to "do" anything. The unconscious yields up its secrets easily if only it is permitted to be voluntary.

There are some spiritual systems that understand this. There is a meeting today between very old spiritual technologies and very new ones. Sufism and Buddhism harmonize with psychotherapy. The thirteenth-century Sufi mystic Jelaluddin Rumi could easily say that "The cure for pain is in the pain."23 But he was a very unusual personality. For most people, engaging one's demons takes guidance in starting slowly and proceeding step by step.

Sleeping Vs. Waking

Just noticing the difference between being awake and being in trance is step one. This is a bit tricky, even though it is elementary, because culture's default setting for introspection is escape. Culture typically supports habitual trance, and so awareness of the difference between waking and sleeping is not automatic.

However, once you get the difference, you are ready to grasp the fact that you have a choice. And it is not the point never to go into trance, but simply to be aware of when you are awake and when you are asleep. Then you also learn how useful it is to make your home in the waking state. When you have a satisfying or disturbing trance experience, you "return to the body" and find grounding there. Of course, there is the problem that emotional pain stored in the body can make trance-states very attractive. In fact, escapist trances for people who have a lot of pain stored in their bodies are the foundations of cults and other totalitarianisms.

The Secular Spirit

When one is making progress with being awake and being asleep and beginning to enjoy wakefulness, there comes a time when the sedating ministrations of conventional religion no longer feel good. The ritual, the organ music, the pious hymnody, the orchestrated entrancements all become mild irritations that interfere with the texture of consciousness. This distaste is a response of the deepest part of the psyche. It is therefore quintessentially "spiritual", and is exercised in respect to all sedating technologies. The psyche in this condition cannot stand being put to sleep -- unless of course it is for some clearly defined and specific purpose in therapy -- because this gets in the way of its path to wholeness. This discomfort with sleepiness occurs when the woundedness created by harsh child-rearing practices is reduced enough to permit a positive disposition towards going inside. What awakens at this moment is the appetite for interiority.

The principal objection of the secular spirit to sectarian religion is the obstacles it puts in the way of this appetite for interiority. The secular seeker says to religion, "Will you please go away and stop trying to put me to sleep!"

This appetite understands Rumi: "The cure for pain is in the pain." Now, I have seen people visibly recoil when I cite this saying of Rumi. I have seen the expressions on their faces turn from receptivity to anger. This is testimony to the normal level of pain in society today, and the power of the default setting of escape. To bring interiority into the conversation violates a taboo.

But there must be some reason why we are still reading Rumi's works six hundred years after he died. If the comment about the source of pain is accurate, then it is of inestimable value, because it gives the actual solution to the problem. If you look for the source of pain where it isn't, then you will not cure the pain. Your only recourse will be more and more sedatives. You are stuck with the constant deadening of your sensibilities, and the prospect of living a less and less full life. But if you look for the source of your pain where it is, ah, then a whole new range of opportunities opens up for you.

There's Nothing Ahead

Lovers think they're looking for each other,
but there's only one search: Wandering
this world is wandering that, both inside one
transparent sky. In here
there is no dogma and no heresy.

The miracle of Jesus is himself, not what he said or did
about the future. Forget the future.
I'd worship someone who could do that!

On the way you may want to look back, or not,
but if you can say There's nothing ahead,
there will be nothing there.

Stretch you arms and take hold the cloth of your clothes
with both hands. The cure for pain is in the pain.
Good and bad are mixed. If you don't have both,
you don't belong with us.
When one of us gets lost, is not here, he must be inside us.
There's no place like that anywhere in the world. 24

The thirst for interiority can be produced by the lucky accident of exceptional childhood experience, by unusual individual talent, by psychotherapy, or by fortunate experiences of personal success such as continuous material security, getting a good education, social approval, or by any one of these or by all of them together.

A device that the Buddhists use is the sutra. A sutra is a statement of spiritual principle that the practitioners memorize and then chant, usually daily. It contains introspective truths that a master will then use as a basis for commentary and other guidance of the learners. A popular sutra in use today is the work of a first century teacher called Avalokitesvara. It is called "The Heart Sutra". It is readily available in numerous commentaries, and there are many translations on the Internet.

The Heart Sutra

Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva when deeply practicing Perfect Understanding perceives that all five skandhas are empty and is saved from all suffering and distress.

Shariputra, form does not differ from emptiness, emptiness does not differ from form. That which is form is emptiness, that which is emptiness is form. The same is true of feelings, perceptions, impulses, consciousness.

Shariputra, all dharmas are marked with emptiness. They do not appear or disappear, are not tainted or pure, do not increase or decrease. Therefore, in emptiness no form, no feelings, perceptions, impulses, consciousness. No eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, no color, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no object of mind, no realm of eyes, and so forth until no realm of mind consciousness. No ignorance and also no extinction of it, and so forth until no old age and death and also no extinction of them. No suffering, no origination, no stopping, no path, no cognition, also no attainment with nothing to attain.

The Bodhisattva depends on Perfect Understanding and the mind is no hindrance; without any hindrance no fears exist. Far apart from every perverted view one dwells in Desirelessness.

In the three worlds all Buddhas depend on Perfect Understanding and attain enlightenment.

Therefore, know that Perfect Understanding is the great transcendent mantra, is the great bright mantra, is the utmost mantra, is the supreme mantra, which is able to relieve all suffering and is true, not false. So proclaim the Perfection of Understanding mantra, proclaim the mantra that says:

Arrived, arrived, completely arrived, everyone arrived at enlightenment, yes!

Notice that the center of the sutra is about fear. And this is enough to begin the exploration of self.

If the fear of going inside seems to be persistent and sticky, then don't do it. Temporize, be oblique. Just play around with the idea. Read a book by just about any contemporary Buddhist, or have a casual conversation with a friend. The cultivation of interiority is so much a social movement these days that it is not hard to find some one who just casually and in the normal course of their lives has tried some form of meditation or other introspective practice.

Pre-Trans Confusion

In 1985 Robert Bellah published a book called Habits of the Heart. It is a study of belief systems of modern Americans. It turns out to be a profoundly elegiac lament for the loss of some earlier time of harmonious bliss. Bellah found Americans to be quite confused about where to place their spiritual loyalties, and the solution he recommended for this problem was a return to the practices of a Christian childhood: "Perhaps common worship, in which we express our gratitude and wonder in the face of the mystery of being itself, is the most important thing of all."25

This is paradoxical because Bellah is precisely the scholar who charted the course forward for many developmental thinkers with his ground-breaking description of religious evolution and the process of "religious symbolization." After all of his marvelous and helpful commentary on this activity, he seems to have personally abandoned it.

One lesson to be learned from this is that intellectual achievement and emotional achievement do not necessarily go hand in hand. Bellah's personal rejection of religious symbolization in favor of the regressive trance of traditional Christian ritual does not one whit detract from the quality of his scholarly work. And he is certainly welcome to practice what he intuitively decides is best for him. The greatest spiritual legacy of the Protestant Reformation is the freedom we have to choose our own tools of spiritual growth (e.g., secularism). But his choice also illustrates the two general options we have in a situation of spiritual confusion. One is to shut down the pain with some mildly or extremely regressive trance induction device, such as traditional Christian ritual. The other is to stay awake, go inside with Rumi and seek the cure for pain in the pain.

In Chapter 9, I will discuss the dynamics of religious trance at length for the Roman Catholic Mass, but the same principles apply to all "worship". For the term "worship" itself means regression to a childlike state. When one worships, one gets very little and turns one's dependent face to the hoped-for benevolence of an extremely powerful parent-figure.

The pre/trans fallacy makes it likely that in a time of spiritual confusion we can regress in the service of the ego and not recognize it as such. In order to tell the difference between pre-rational regression and trans-rational advancement, we have to experiment with both of them and keep careful notes.

The Teaching-Learning Relationship

There are different teaching-learning relationships in the two phases of spiritual growth. In the earlier phase the relationship is one of parent to child. It is characterized by the transference of the learner, as the primary need is to complete the unfulfilled needs created by the lack of nurture in child-rearing practices. In this relationship the parent dictates behavior and provides reality orientation. It performs the functions of the ego for the weak ego of the learner. This is the "Our-Holy-Mother-the-Church-and-Our-Holy-Father-the-Pope" system.

In the later phase the relationship is between equals, between two adults, where the "teacher" is merely a technical assistant to the self-controlled ego-functions of the learner. The learner has an appetite for interiority, but finds it confusing.

The basic model for this relationship is what Carl Rogers described as "the helping relationship" fifty years ago. Rogers' formulation of this relationship paved the way for the present era of personal growth technologies in the West. He first proposed the basic principle of this relationship in the nineteen-forties: "I have come to trust the capacity of persons to explore and understand themselves and their troubles, and to resolve those problems in any close, continuing relationship where I can provide a climate of real warmth and understanding." 26

The characteristics of the helping relationship can be summarized as follows:

1. Congruence: to be what you are, genuine and without "front", openly being the feelings and attitudes you actually experience.
2. Empathy: accurate understanding of the other's private, inner world and the ability to communicate significant fragments of that understanding.
3. Positive Regard: a full acceptance of what the other actually is.
4. Communication skill: the ability to detect the interpretation the other puts on my efforts to express congruence, empathy and positive regard.27

When these qualities are present, Rogers says, "change is predicted." That is, personal [spiritual] growth will occur.

Religion and Interiority.

All religions know about the practice of introspection. In most religions it is offered only to a few initiates, not to the general public. Different systems call it by different names, and handle it differently. Some names for introspection are: (1) the classic buddhist term: mindfulness, (2) the Zen phrase: doing nothing, (3) Meister Eckhart's: Gelassenheit (lit: "letting-ness") , and (4) the more familiar western term "meditation".

These terms are all generic and stand for the threshold position of "looking inward", an initial placing of oneself in the presence of one's unconscious. However, once one enters the ante-chamber of the interior world by assuming the stance of "mindfulness", there are still significant choices to make. The world of interiority is quite complex and vast, and there are many options as to purpose and method. Therefore, Chogyam Trungpa's observation seems to be universally valid, "To start on the path, make friends with yourself; start sitting." But once you do get inside, there are still choices.

A centrally important aspect of these choices is the degree of freedom each one gives in accessing the unconscious. For the unconscious is rarely entered without prior censorship.

All religions exercise some form of conscious control over their introspective practices. So, one way we have of classifying religions is by the degree of freedom they permit in this matter. On a scale from zero to ten these degrees range from the zero of conservative Christianity to the seven or eight of the "free association" of psychotherapy, or the nine of Sufi mindfulness.

Some examples of forms of control are (a) meditation protocols (mantras, texts, images), (b) rituals, (c) theological treatises, (d) chanting.

Lack of freedom is due to the fact that the content of the unconscious is extremely unfamiliar to the conscious mind and potentially very painful. In regard to the issue of unfamiliarity, the information stored in the unconscious is non-linear and extra-rational. It includes elements that are neither visual, auditory nor conceptual, but purely tactile and kinesthetic. In regard to pain, the unconscious contains the memories of all the early experiences of life that were painful to the fetus, infant and young child that we all once were. Thus entry into the unconscious can produce all manner of mystery and surprises, some of which can be emotionally devastating.

So, religions generally approach it very cautiously, in a highly structured manner. In fact, taking the notion of freedom one step further, we can classify religions and schools of meditation by the degree to which they are escapist or engaging of the painful content of the unconscious.

I would note three major structures in wide use today and that have been around for thousands of years. They therefore represent three fundamentally basic strategies humans have devised for getting into the unconscious, but doing so safely.

1) concentration ("one-pointed") meditation. This Hindu technique is, I would say, resolutely escapist, and produces powerful out-of-body states that can anesthetize the subject in regard to physical pain, but also isolate the subject from physical/social reality and lead to the construction of inegalitarian and insensitive social systems (e.g., the caste system).

2) vipassana ("non-judgmental insight") meditation. This ancient and powerful buddhist technique is, I would say, delicately and subtly escapist in its orientation. The distancing of "self" from the content of the unconscious through the technique of being non-judgmental creates a soft but powerful barrier between the ego and all painful memories. In order for "healing" to occur -- the only process that leads to complete integration of these materials -- pain must be allowed to "come up." Of course, if one does not have the tools to handle such memories, they can overwhelm. So, vipassana is an effective introspective tool for the culture and the period of history in which psychotherapeutic insight into childhood trauma was not available.

3) Western monastic meditation (text-based, image-based, concept-based). This cornerstone of Christian consciousness is I would say, powerfully ambivalent. I would call it 80% escapist and encouraging the subject to live in an out-of-body state organized around the verbal-conceptual imagination. It lives in storyland. However, insofar as the central "story" of storyland is biblical, it has the opportunity to live in real-time history versus imagined history. So, the principal problem of Christianity is distinguishing between imagination and perception. It tends to wander off into ego-centric flights of fantasy. It's most dangerous heresy is Gnosticism, an actually schizophrenic escape into fantasy. It also produces a highly paradoxical social system: it is horrendously violent, supports a completely ego-centric and head-tripping patriarchal bureaucracy, but also produces a societal commitment to personal freedom and equality that is unique among human cultures.

Secular Mindfulness

In the fourth place I note a recent addition to the repertoire of choices that take off from the ante-chamber of mindfulness. It is derived not from a religious source, but from a scientific source. So, it is secular. We can call it therapeutic mindfulness. It is the culmination of centuries of trial and error. It is secularism's signal contribution to human spirituality.

This is a form of "meditation" that seeks to engage the painful content of the unconscious in order to heal it. Its success depends on understanding the somatic foundation of traumatic injury, and the ability of "inner body sensing" to re-organize somatic imprints left over from early injury. This technique actually seeks out the source of pain. It is Rumi's technique.

Note that each of these four techniques is a "path" that one can take from the common ante-chamber of "mindfulness" into the deeper layers of the unconscious.

The form of therapeutic mindfulness I practice is a part of the practice of "trauma work" of a school called Hakomi Integrative Somatics. One Hakomi practitioner gives the following explanation:

Mindfulness ... is attention to present experience. It is "simply noticing" what is so in your experience, without the addition of judging, analyzing or even understanding. It is different than "thinking about." In using mindfulness, we create opportunities which allow the unconscious a clear chance to express and be seen, heard and felt. We work with the interaction of belief and experience, of conscious and unconscious, of mind and body. We work to establish and enhance communication between parts of the whole. Acknowledging, accepting, allowing, being, responding. In therapy, strong emotions are sometimes felt and early memories come back with intensity and clarity. In mindfulness, these experiences can be examined and used to free us from the painful unconscious compulsion to repeat them again and again. 28

Staying In Your Body

We are all indebted to Ken Wilber for his investigations of spiritual growth, but there is one strain in his thinking that needs to be pointed out as a cautionary tale, and that is his tendency towards monism. Theological monism is an idea that only spirit is real; matter is not real, but illusory. The experience and practice that grounds monist theory is to be disconnected from one's body. The monist lives in his neo-cortex and has very tenuous connection with the limbic cortex and the brain stem. He is dissociated.

As we enter an age when more and more people are meditating, leaving one's body becomes a serious problem. Dissociation from bodily states is a permanent issue in the pursuit of interiority because of the body's rich capacity to store the painful results of traumatic child-rearing practices.

I first noticed Wilber's monism when I read his book No Boundary some years ago, and then I discovered an extensive discussion of the matter on the web page of Professor David C. Lane of Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, California.29

In a more recent work, The Marriage of Sense and Soul (NY, Random House, 1998), Wilber appears to have recanted his monism of earlier days, but his youthful excursions into dissociative practices is still a valuable lesson for anyone pursuing interiority.

In Wilber's earlier work he came under the influence of the neo-Hindu monist Franklin Jones, who is also known as Bubba Free John and Adi Da, and has authored books under both of those names. Jones was born in Jamaica, Long Island, New York in 1939 and showed an early predisposition for meditative disciplines. He studied in India under Swami Muktananda in 1968, and opened his own teaching establishment in Hollywood in 1972. His writings impressed many spiritual seekers of the time, including Wilber. At one point Wilber called Da Free John "the greatest spiritual master of all time", and his book The Dawn Horse Testament "the greatest spiritual tome of all time". He also said that John's The Paradox of Instruction "is, in its scope, its eloquence, its simplicity, and its ecstatic fund of transcendent insight, probably unparalleled in the entire field of spiritual literature."

But commentators also noted that Jones's personal practices were often bizarre and exploitative, and his teaching career has led him to reside presently on an island in the Pacific Ocean once owned by the actor Raymond Burr. It has been my experience that spiritual teachers who do get separated from their bodies inevitably become involved in bizarre social and interpersonal situations.

The basic problem is that the body is the storehouse of emotional pain, and when introspective devotees start spending considerable amounts of time meditating, they can experience extremely attractive and extremely remarkable out-of-body states. In the eleventh century in France, the Albigensians' ability not to experience pain when Simon de Montfort's troops burned them at the stake scared the Christian crusaders out of their wits and only made them more zealous in stamping out the heresy. The whole Gnostic strain in the history of Christianity is a continuation of this dissociative experience. On the emotional level it is dissociative, and on the intellectual level it is "monist". That is, it says that only spirit is real. Matter is some form of illusion. In terms of behavior, once one gets addicted to these out-of-body states, a pattern of narcissistic delusion inevitably follows. One critic of Wilber's indebtedness to Adi Da makes this comment:

My neurological research reveals that this so-called "very small minority" of individuals "ready" for "The Path" is constituted of persons who already have and/or self-induce neurological damage and neurological dysfunction -- or are neuropsychiatrically ill ab initio. Indeed, and once again, these so-called mystics, meditators, and spiritual "Masters" with the "big realizations" are suffering from various species of (i) brain damage, (ii) epilepsy, (iii) psychosis, (iv) schizophrenia, and (v) debilitating depersonalization disorder, or (vi) some combination of these five.
In my case, I was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy as a youth and years later delusively believed myself to be making "spiritual" and meditative "progress" when all my weird "mystical" experiences started (as a result of intensive and protracted meditation practice).
In the case of Bernadette Roberts (author of The Experience of No-Self), she talks about her own personal experiences of "bodilessness", profound "mystical unknowing" + experience of "Oneness" or "nonduality", "subtle energies", and a "dismantling of the continuum of time". Do such experiences constitute profound "mystical realizations" and "enlightenment"??? I say no!!! What her symptoms do actually indicate is a fairly complicated mix of profound neurological disorders, neurological damage, and neurological dysfunction -- a literal reversal, in many ways, of millions of years of the neurological evolutionary biology of the brain and nervous system. Specifically, and to wit, her experience(s) of: (i) "Bodilessness" results from total proprioceptive failure. (ii) "Mystical Unknowing" and the experience of "Oneness" or "nonduality" is little more than a convoluted mix of semantic aphasia + visual aphasia + auditory agnosia + optic agnosia + visual object agnosia. (iii) "Subtle Energies" are, in reality, nothing more than a combination of somatosensory seizures and partial complex seizures which have their roots in temporal lobe and limbic epilepsy and extreme cortex disinhibition. (iv) Her inability to experience time as having a continuum can be accounted for by a blend of time agnosia with a concomitant and serious impairment of memory vivacity. Highly similar states and conditions such as we have here in this third case are well known to medical and mental health practitioners who deal with amnesiacs, Alzheimer's sufferers, and so forth.
"Transfigurative" mystical experiences have their origin in neuro-epileptic disorders, various psychoses and species of schizophrenia, Near Death Experiences, brain damage that can result from, for instance, untreated Lyme's Disease, and so on. One would reasonably expect that the population of meditators and spiritual "masters" who are "authentically enlightened" and have had "transfigurative" mystical experiences would reflect the relative rarity of these conditions (i.e., neurological and/or neuropsychiatric conditions and disorders) in America and throughout the world.30

As a practical matter, we just need to make a note of all this. In any meditative practice there is a tendency to want to leave the body because the repressed pain of the unconscious is actually stored somatically. The correct strategy is to relax in the presence of pain and thus engage the unconscious, rather than continue to suppress it, as we noted above in our comment about Jelaluddin Rumi. There are many schools of spiritual learning that understand this and that always return to the body either informally or formally. The whole collection of psychotherapy schools that are working with trauma have developed "inner body sensation" as the core of their healing technique. These would include the work of Eugene Gendlin (his technique is called "focussing"), Peter Levine (See Waking the Tiger, 1997), the workshops of Emilie Conrad, and the Hakomi Integrative Somatics team of Boulder, Colorado.

There is in fact an important convergence today between "healing" modalities and "spiritual" disciplines. I think this is extremely warranted and the wave of the future. I note in Chapter 9 that a careful look at the history of Christianity shows clearly that religion is therapy. That is, the effort to experience the ultimate conditions of human existence necessitates developing techniques to work with the emotions, especially the unconscious emotions that are the result of traumatic child-rearing practices. The objective of religious "ministry" has after all always been to produce "loving" people, that is, emotionally mature persons who are capable of generosity and compassion. Behaviorally, the "bottom line" of religion has always been "therapeutic". And, when we get to the absolute core event of Christianity -- the resurrection of Jesus -- I think we find a remarkable wake-up call to full somatic awareness of the essence of the human condition. We live to a large extent inside space and time, but not entirely.

The fact that the Christianity of the Augustinian Arrangement (See Chap. 9) made its main investment in technologies that put people to sleep was merely an adaptation to the needs of the time. There is nothing in the central event of Christian "revelation" that requires falling asleep. I would suggest that quite the contrary is true. Once we get that, then I think the door is open to a fully non-sectarian discipline of human wholeness, beyond creed, beyond code, beyond cult, beyond identity. The human project as such.

Holiness is wholeness. Wholeness is holiness. Wholeness is all there is.

7.
THE SECULAR SPIRIT

As I use the term "secularism", it is about social structure, not personal beliefs. That is to say, secularism rejects the authority of churches, but it does not at all, necessarily, reject universal faith. So, there can be secular theists as well as secular humanists. There can even be secularists who think that Jesus of Nazareth is the incarnation of the second person of the blessed trinity while at the same time discarding all church affiliation and practice.

Given the dual character of religion, we should not be surprised that in history it has regularly been the vehicle for unthinkable violence. Until very recent times, in fact, religious fanaticism was commonplace in human affairs rather than exceptional. So, any religious fanaticism now remaining in the world is simply a cultural holdover. We would expect to find it in isolated social or geographic pockets where modern global institutions of education and commerce have not reached. In societies characterized by harsh child-rearing practices in support of a warrior culture, everyone is afraid of their unconscious. Hence Paul Valéry's comment, "If you want to go down into the self, you'd better go armed to the teeth."

One segment of conventional wisdom today says that secularism is some form of spiritual devolution, obtuseness or decline. But if we look at the actual history of secularism, I think we will find that it is a form of spiritual growth. This would be in support of Ken Wilber's position:

I agree with sociologists in general that the course of modern development is marked by increasing rationalization. What perhaps distinguishes my viewpoint from other spiritually sympathetic theorists is that I believe the trend of rationalization per se is necessary, desirable, appropriate, phase-specific and evolutionary. It is therefore perfectly religious in and by itself (no matter how apparently secular): an expression of increasingly advanced consciousness and articulated self-awareness that has as its final aim, and itself contributes to, the resurrection of Spirit-Geist.31

I propose that the essence of secularism is precisely this choice of conscience over religious authority as the vehicle to guide the quest for ultimate fulfillment.

It is clear that in the fourth century of the Christian era -- the time of St. Augustine of Hippo -- the consensual choice of western culture was for religious authority. As we shall show in the next few pages, it is equally clear that in the time of the Protestant Reformation, the choice was for individual conscience.

How did this happen? Clearly, in the thousand years between the two decisions, some growth in emotional maturity took place.

It is also worthwhile to note that in both cases it was the state that made the choice. In the time of Augustine, the bishop of Hippo had to persuade the emperor. In the time of Luther, it was necessary to do the same. This means that the state always represents the middle of the developmental curve of spirituality, not the churches. For even a monarchical state cannot rule for long without the consent of the governed. Furthermore, once we see the matter from this point of view, it is clear that churches are only one social institution having an impact on the spiritual growth of the human community. Anything that gives material security or information influences the spiritual make-up of society.

So, in the fourth century of the Christian era Western Europe chose the restrictive confines of religious authority to protect the ego and promote its growth. A thousand years later, faced with the continuing violence of religious consciousness, European society would dispense with those confines and allow the native human spirit to seek growth on its own natural resources. There came a take-off point when the self could no longer grow within the old protective confines. Society was driven by the central élan of the human spirit to explore the tracklessness of human existence more fully:

And indeed, gods must die that men may live and grow. Image-breaking is no less a part and parcel of human life and history than image-making; it is also no less part and parcel of man's religion, and no less essential to it. For the fixed image evokes the fixed stare, the fixed loyalty which may blind man's vision to the claims of further and wider loyalties, and so paralyze the human spirit and crush its inherent will to advance and to venture. The painful recognition of the clay feet of old idols is indispensable to human growth; it is also indispensable to the emergence of more appropriate figures for human awe, devotion and service. This is the inexorable law of growth both in the individual and the group.32

The Birth of Secularism

For centuries in Europe, through the hegemony of the Papacy over the emotional and cultural lives of the whole continent, "faith" had been the ultimate arbiter of reality. It was of course a sectarian faith, a stage-specific faith [See the stages chart, and the discussion in Chapter 8.], but as Robert Bellah notes, it had a noble and important evolutionary function. Rome's evolutionary task -- as the caretaker of one of the "historic religions" that appeared on this planet three to four thousand years ago -- was to preserve the "discovery of the self" that was still at its early stages, and thus "increase the freedom of personality and society relative to the environing conditions":

At each stage of religious evolution the freedom of personality and society has increased relative to the environing conditions. Freedom has increased because at each successive stage the relation of man to the conditions of his existence has been conceived as more complex, more open and more subject to change and development. The distinction between conditions that are really ultimate and those that are alterable becomes increasingly clear though never complete.
The historic religions discovered the self; the early modern religion found a doctrinal basis on which to accept the self in all its empirical ambiguity; modern religion is beginning to understand the laws of the self's own existence and so to help man take responsibility for his own fate.33

However, by the end of the fifteenth century, the rule of the Papacy in Europe was in the final stage of a parent-like arrangement between a clerical elite centered in Rome and an increasingly powerful middle class festering with unfulfilled and legitimate desires to control their own destinies. And so, when Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses on the cathedral door in Wittenberg in 1517, that was not some isolated event coming out of the blue, but just the spark that ignited a flame ready to burn in a climate of widespread discontent with Roman rule. It quickly became a cultural and political event that tore Europe in half.

Within twenty years Protestantism was the dominant religion in northern Germany, Scandinavia and the Low Lands, in the traditionally independent enclaves of Bohemia and several of the Swiss Cantons, and a powerful minority in France. Italy and Spain remained Roman Catholic. Issues of conscience became embroiled with politics and economics, and the use of military might came into play. Independence was the cause of the day, and physical violence was the instrument of choice. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V wanted to retain the commerce and wealth of the Netherlands. The burghers of Amsterdam and Ghent wanted to keep their own books. The royal families of the Habsburgs and the Bourbons eyed each other's power bases with lethal competitiveness, et cetera and et cetera.

All hell had broken loose and in the chaos that ensued, the spiritual leadership of Europe shifted quietly, momentously over from the church to the state. The shift was decisive and consensual. It was clear to the preponderance of the population at that time that "faith" was no longer a viable instrument of peace and justice. There was something about "faith" that was just too outrageously violent to govern the human condition.

The shift from a "one truth" culture in Europe to pluralism started with the Lutherans' Confession of Augsburg in 1530. The right to practice the new orthodoxy was gained in several regional Diets in the next two decades and finally agreed to by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. In that treaty, the Emperor agreed that religious practices would be those determined by local secular authorities (cuius regio, ejus religio). This was at the same time decentralization and secularization.

But the Peace of Augsburg applied only to the territories within the Holy Roman Empire. It did not apply to France or the Low Lands. There followed another hundred years of simmering local warfare, persecution and generally bad behavior that culminated in the large-scale hostilities of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). When the (Protestant) nationalist enthusiasts of Prague defenestrated the officials of Ferdinand II, the major military maneuvers began. They were long and tiring and expensive. Probably 300,000 people died violent or untimely deaths in Germany in the next thirty years. The collective psyche of the continent was suitably impressed. In the Treaty of Westphalia in 1848, they returned to the arrangements of Augsburg, reinforced and expanded them, and the modern nation-state was born, with ultimate control over public human behavior.

This was a transfer of spiritual control. Religion is now "private", not public. When you transfer the control of behavior from the court of faith to the court of reason, you are transferring spiritual control as well. For, as an extremely contemporary commentator observes: "The essence of churches continues to be 'the Word' -- the teachings, the beliefs and the discourse, and the behavior that arises from them."34

So, it was in this manner that the institution of "secularism" was born. Therefore, from 1648 on secularism is not some sort of competitive idea jousting with faith in the marketplace of meaning for control of the minds of men. It is rather the law of the land. You can publish tracts and produce television shows to your heart's content, but in modern Western society, you better not cross a certain line of respect for the freedom of others or you will find yourself in court, in jail, in "trouble." And by the way, when you are in this kind of trouble, you are out of the forward flow of history.

But the arrangement of Westphalia was not a finely tuned finished product. It was rather a pretty rough-cut piece of work, a kind of historical lurch forward prompted by massive disruption and pain, rather than a confident step forward fully thought-out and packaged. So, there was still much work to be done in sorting out the claims of faith and the claims of reason over the hearts and minds of men.

That sorting out still goes on, but it is the only game being played on the field. The field itself is secularist, and so are the referees and the rule book. It could not be any other way. If the human race is to come to spiritual maturity, it has to learn by doing. If one views the history of Western civilization for the past four centuries as the story of Reason discovering its limitations, I think many things fall into place.

The Limits of Sectarian Faith

We have noted that the paradox of sectarian religion is that it is both inquisitive and repressive with respect to human interiority. It seeks emotional/spiritual depth and is terrified of it. Insofar as it is repressive, sectarian faith will always have the two-fold problem of a tendency towards violence and lack of self-awareness. The tendency towards violence comes from the repressed anger left over from childhood. This anger also shows up as various forms of extreme boundary-setting between the in-group and out-groups: techniques of intolerance, shunning and self-separation.

The lack of self-awareness comes from the fact that the unconscious is, unfortunately, unconscious. Religious orthodoxy is a defense mechanism. It helps suppress unconscious fear and anger. But of course it would not be a useful defense mechanism if it did not successfully suppress. So, people with positions of religious orthodoxy inevitably have things going on inside themselves that they cannot see.

Thus, even though religionists speak of God and grace and altruism, the judicious observer knows they cannot be trusted because they are not aware of their own unconscious fears and anger. The way this plays out on the stage of politics and social governance is that even though their language is bathed in transcendent innocence -- in fact because their language is so adorned -- they have a deep and abiding commitment to the social deployment of a central feature of their psyches, the control mechanisms of the super-ego. Their political stances tend to be rigid, and when they get political power, they do not manage freedom well.

There has recently been a renewed interest in the writings of the early twentieth century Catholic jurist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt saw in the Catholic Church a structural model for a connection between internal spiritual life and external social life. He thought that this was a better model for conducting human affairs than what he saw as the Protestant model of religion as separated from public life, Protestant "inwardness." However, even though he liked the Catholic Church as a structural model because it connected inwardness with social behavior, he was equally clear that he did not like it as a de facto ruler. When the Catholic thinker Josef Pieper once asked him why he never spoke of the bonum commune, Schmitt responded, "Anyone who speaks of the bonum commune is intent on deception." And in his work entitled Political Theology he says, "Everyone agrees that when antagonisms appear within a state, every party wants the general good -- therein resides after all the bellum omnium contra omnes."35

Furthermore, "religious" thinkers such as Pieper never get this. They always seem to be completely convinced of their own innocence and good will, which is why Pieper could ask Schmitt that question. But what Schmitt is saying is that sectarian religion always has hidden agendas, and it would be fatal for the state to forget that.

So the secularist judgment of religion on the social and political level is that it is simply too controlling, too rigid, too unaware of self and therefore too prone to violence to be trusted to govern society. The secularist judgment of religion on the individual level is that it is too controlling and rigid psychodynamically to permit emotional (i.e., spiritual) growth. The pragmatic political judgment is grounded in the intuitive personal judgment. A few decades without warfare were enough to stabilize the political arrangement, but it took a widely distributed positive self-regard to make the arrangement stable over centuries.

The Limits of Reason

If the problem of sectarian religion is that it shuts down the unconscious too much and trusts the ego too little, the problem of the rule of reason was, when it first came on the scene, that it was naïve about the power of the unconscious and trusted the ego too much. But now that we have come about four hundred years along under the regime of reason, we are older and wiser.

The choice to end the rule of sectarian faith was originally a pragmatic political judgment made by the native good will and intelligence of hereditary princes, in this case the Habsburgs Charles V and Ferdinand III (at Augsburg and Westphalia respectively). No "religious genius" here; just native human pragmatism.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the shift in political principle in Europe was identified as the imperium rationis by Thomas Hobbes, and the realm of an objective reason "beyond theology" by Hegel. The 1700s were a kind of honeymoon of reason for Europe. The American colonies were being developed. Voyages of discovery were circling the globe. Science was making great discoveries. Perhaps the darker energies of the European unconscious were being siphoned off in the extra-punitive exercises of colonialism rather than internal violence. But all of these activities gave rise to a self-conscious congratulatory episode called "the Enlightenment". Its confidence in the power of reason to solve all problems turns out to have been naïve, of course, but that does not make the shift any less necessary historically.

During the past four centuries, rationalists and theologians have had great fun speaking ill of one another. Clearly many secularists had authoritarian religious parents whose rejection they never overcame, and theologians had the same kind of parents, with whom they then identified. And there seemed to be general agreement that "reason" is non-religious or even "anti-religious." Thus the term "secular humanism" arose as one of those polemical buzzwords that has no analytic depth, and therefore has no significant meaning beyond its evocation of repressed emotions.

But if we keep the bigger picture in focus, we only have to note that now, four hundred years into the process, we now know that the choice of freedom from sectarian faith was seriously risky. In making this comment we should also note that at this point in the discussion we are at the heart of the matter. For the question inside the comment is: how do human beings grow spiritually? The answer is: by engaging more and more of the unconscious. For holiness is wholeness. That is to say, wholeness is holiness. Wholeness is all there is.

This is the statement of a theist who sees the completion of the human spirit in the ineffable communion with the ground of all our being. When you are "whole", you get everything, including the temporariness of time, the ebb and flow of history, the necessity of staying involved in the dialog of civilization, the historical reality of Jesus, etc., etc., etc.

There is always risk in making the choice for growth. There is the possibility of substantial pain in taking on an unconscious filled with the repressed emotions left there by harsh child-rearing practices. There is also the possibility of corrosive narcissism in the escape from overbearing parental authority. And so, as one leaves the safety of the controls provided by traditional religion, one is faced with the task of designing new tools to manage the unconscious. It turns out that this is not easy. There are many mistakes to be made along the way. However, there is also no choice. The whole process is driven by the central spiritual drive of the human organism.

So, the history of secularism is a history of seeking, of mistakes, and I would argue, of ultimate success. I would make the argument that the history of the last four hundred years, since the break-up of the Augustinian Arrangement [See Chapter 9,], is a testament to the frailty, yes, but also the ultimate validity of the native human spirit. If we track the efforts to promote freedom and equality during that time, I think we will find that it was pragmatic secularists rather than religionists who doggedly, inventively and successfully pursued their establishment in human life.

Nones and Others

The secularists are the "Nones" or "Others" that show up in recent surveys of religious affiliation. It appears to be a reasonable estimate that the "Nones" and "Others" in America have grown from about 3 percent of the population of the U.S.A. in 1955 to about 13 percent in 1995. As the National Opinion Research Center says:

During this same period the proportion without any religious affiliation has also been rising. While the net trend has been upwards at about .0014-.0027 per annum, it has not been a simple, monotonic increase and has varied by house. The number without religion appears to have dipped from the late forties to the late fifties before increasing until the mid 1970s. From then to the present the proportion None has apparently remained constant. Signs of a large and growing segment of token religionists or of the unchurched are limited.

Overall these indicators provide at best mixed support for the secularization hypothesis. The secularizing changes have been 1) small in magnitude, 2) intermittent in time, and 3) restrictive in scope. However, whenever there has been change, it has been in the secular direction. 36

Percentagewise and in actual numbers this is a significant increase. If we add to it the numbers of those who have experimented with alternative religious practices or who continuously experiment with them while still identifying socially with their traditional affiliation, then we have a group of Americans that is culturally very significant. It would not be too extreme to say that the "Nones" and "Others" in American society no longer represent some socially marginal group of oddballs, but are in fact a "major" religious grouping. And, this is something quite new in industrial society: a major, indigenous, growing religious grouping not from any traditional western religious tradition.

But, if we have some idea of their numbers, we still do not know much about their beliefs or practices. The survey researchers sometimes seem to assume that they are "atheists" or "non-religious". But there is a very good case to argue that some of them at least are engaged in forms of authentic and well-grounded spiritual practice that are simply not customary in any of the traditional religious groups in American history. It would therefore be a good idea to have some empirical testing of hypotheses about the "Nones" and "Others", hypotheses that are open to quantifying the stages of spiritual development beyond the parental dependencies of Stage Four. But that is beyond our resources in this writing.

It is also beyond my resources to write a spiritual history of the regime of reason. To do that would require examining the causes of the major spiritual successes and failures of the past 400 years. These would be failures such as colonialism, slavery, the Holocaust, Hiroshima-Nagasaki, and successes such as the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address, the end of Apartheid, the International Red Cross and Amnesty International, to name but a few.

But I do have the resources to offer just one small "case study" of the learning curve of reason. It is part of a piece I wrote years ago in a contemplative period of my life. It will cover the period from the end of World War I to the end of World War Two. A similar description covering any other century of the last four would, I am sure, lead to a similar understanding of how the regime of "reason"-- by resourcefully engaging the forces of the human unconscious -- acts as the vehicle for the spiritual growth of the human race.

A Learning Experience in the Regime of Reason

At the end of World War I, the Allies designed their treaty with Germany to end the war during four months of meetings in Paris (January-April, 1919). They signed it in the famous Palace of Versailles in June. The terms were the result of the interplay among the three Allied heads of state: David Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau, and Woodrow Wilson. These men all brought strong feelings to the process.

John Maynard Keynes called the treaty "The Carthaginian Peace", because it was so harsh towards Germany. Keynes left the Paris Conference in dark despair at its outcome, and went home to write a book that came out the following December. He called it The Economic Consequences of the Peace, and it was a bestseller in Europe and America. In the book he predicted that the treaty would give rise to the darkest demagoguery in Germany:

Economic privation proceeds by easy stages, and so long as men suffer it patiently the outside world cares little. Physical efficiency and resistance to disease slowly diminish, but life proceeds somehow, until the limit of human endurance is reached at last and counsels of despair and madness stir the sufferers from the lethargy which precedes the crisis. Then man shakes himself and the bonds of custom are loosed. The power of ideas is sovereign, and he listens to whatever instruction of hope, illusion, or revenge is carried to him on the air.37

History seems to say that he was wrong on the exact mechanism of disaster, but correct about the final outcome. Economic privation alone did not do the damage, but economics plus the political intentions: revenge, the imputation of guilt, the public blame and shame. German financiers evaded most reparations payments, but German consciousness did not evade the psychic consequences.

The violent polarity coming out of World War I set up the emotional framework for World War II and the Holocaust. (And just as an aside, Versailles was not the work of godless communism, but of God-fearing Christianity.)

Some people learned from it. The political leaders who ended World War II -- people like Eisenhower, Marshall, Dulles, Harriman -- had been present in Paris in 1919. In 1945 they resolved the German hostility. But the polarized structure of experience shifted to a new global field.

When the fighting ended in 1918, Britain was in bad shape.

The country was indeed at this time swept by a sudden, vehement cry for revenge. ... The war had brought suffering of a scale and intensity which the harshest pessimist could not have prophesied, and for which Britain, after a century of peace and progress, was, psychologically speaking, peculiarly unprepared. The interminable casualty lists, the row upon row of beardless faces in the "Roll of Honour", the rattle through a thousand letter-boxes of the same War Office telegram -- all this produced a stunned sense of disbelief at the annihilation of so much youth and promise. When, with the peace, people began to come to terms with what had happened, it was not to be expected that they would rise overnight to the serenity of saints or sages. Even if they wished to forget, the press would not let them. As a Cambridge newspaper put it, "Somebody has got to be hanged."38

The Armistice of Nov. 11, 1918 ended actual fighting. None of it had taken place on German soil, and the country was never occupied. Lloyd George was the most skilful maneuverer of the three leaders who met in Paris, and he brought the feelings of his country with him.

Historian Lentin observes:

It was borne in upon me that the essence of what happened at Paris ...... was -- despite the by-play of time and chance -- "acts or omissions thoroughly expressive of the doer" in the words of A.C. Bradley (Shakespearean Tragedy, 1904), "characteristic deeds"; and that "the centre of the tragedy, therefore, may be said with equal truth to lie in action issuing from character, or in character issuing from action."39

The negotiations were labyrinthine exchanges of layers and layers of feeling, conducted under severe pressures of time. Only six months transpired between the armistice and the treaty's signing. Here is the scenario:

January, 1918: Woodrow Wilson proclaims before the U.S. Congress the morally high-sounding "14 Points" as the basis for the coming peace.

October, 1918: The German government sues unilaterally to Wilson (by-passing the British and the French) for an armistice.

November 4, 1918: British, French and U.S. representatives sign a pre-Armistice agreement with the Germans. Drafted by U.S. Secretary of State Lansing, it is referred to as "the Lansing note". On monetary reparations, it stipulates that "compensation will be paid by Germany for all damage done to the civilian population of the Allies by land, by sea and from the air."

November 11, 1918: The Armistice is signed.

November 12, 1918: Lloyd George addresses a pre-election gathering in London, where he says: "There will be vigorous attempts to hector and bully and stimulate, to induce and cajole the Government to here and there depart from the strict principles of right, in order to satisfy some base and some sordid, and if I may say squalid, principles of either revenge or avarice. We must [he concluded to loud applause] relentlessly set our faces against that; and if we go to the country, it will be the business of every candidate to have regard to that."

November 13, 1918: Prime Minister William Hughes of Australia and press baron Lord Northcliffe of London start to raise a hue and cry about getting large war indemnities from Germany.

November 26, 1918: Lloyd George forms the Indemnity Committee as a special sub-committee of the British cabinet to recommend a policy on the matter. He makes Hughes its Chairman, includes two notoriously narrow-minded bankers (Herbert Gibbs and Lord Cunliffe), and leaves off the British treasury's chief economist, John Maynard Keynes.

November 28, 1918: After a few hours of its very first meeting the Indemnity Committee produces the sum of 24 billion pounds as the amount to be sought from Germany, a figure 12 times higher than the estimate by the British treasury. Gibbs' and Cunfliffe's reason for the sum is on record: British trade would be "completely ruined by American competition" unless the burden is shifted onto the Germans. As Cunliffe put it, "It is rather a choice of who is to be ruined, we or they. On the whole, I think we had better ruin them." No economic analysis is offered. Hughes says, "Everything is practicable to the man who has the strength to enforce his views, and we have that strength."

December 11, 1918: Lloyd George goes along with the 24 billion figure. In his re-election campaign he starts to sound the theme, "We have a right to demand the whole cost of the war from Germany."

January, 1919: In Paris, Wilson and the American delegation flatly oppose the war indemnity as illegal breaching of the Lansing note.
January-March 1919: The British, French and American leaders and delegations argue, bicker and intrigue back and forth over the various terms of the Armistice. Woodrow Wilson gets worn down.

March 30: Lloyd George gets Jan Christian Smuts, the highly respected leader of South Africa, to write a legal brief interpreting the Lansing note to George's liking. Smuts turns Wilson around.

April 3: Woodrow Wilson becomes bedridden with physical and emotional exhaustion.

April 5: The "war-guilt clause" is added to the treaty draft. George Clemenceau erases Wilson's opposition to it by offering French support for the League of Nations, an institution Clemenceau despises and that Wilson ardently believes in.

May 7: The draft is submitted to the Germans.

May 7-June 16, 1919: Back in England, faced with the actual language of the draft, public opinion and Lloyd George shift away from support for the treaty's harshness. But Clemenceau is unyielding, and Wilson, having compromised himself, now digs in also.

June 16: Faced with the German answer to the draft, all the Allies self-justify.
June 28: The Treaty of Versailles is signed, with the war-guilt clause and an extremely large indemnity provision whose exact sum is to be established by an ongoing commission.

December, 1919: John Maynard Keynes publishes The Economic Consequences of the Peace. The book is an immediate and immense publishing success in England and the U.S.A. and on the continent. It eloquently vilifies the Treaty of Versailles, becomes a factor in the election of 1920, and crystallizes the guilt-feelings of the British for many years to come.
1936: The British give away the Sudetenland to Hitler at Munich, perceived by historians as the final attempt at expiation of guilt by the British for their part in the treaty of Versailles. Historian Lentin chooses "character" as the key element. But there is also Zeitgeist. Politicians can channel the feelings of the people. They cannot create them. There is always a "spirit of the times". This is some tide of emotion that politicians do not control.

In 1919, England had experienced a lot of death. France had had three generations of war with Germany, and the desire to possess the industrial resources on the Franco-German border. Germany felt a sense of conspiracy between France and England over colonial expansion.

There was also widespread ignorance of anything resembling modern economics. Keynes did not publish The General Theory until 1932, and even top bankers had primitive ideas about the world economy. Their business sense bordered on the mentality of street gangs. When it came time to actually pay reparations, Germany rather easily evaded them with inflated currency, bonds, debentures and other modern fiscal instruments that completely thwarted a process which had been absurd in its conception from the start. All that was left of it by 1932 was the original high insult.

Then there were the perennial populist stirrings: "... that native, xenophobic and thoroughly honest toryism" whose "ideas of reparation were crude to the point of fantasy" and who simply "felt in common justice that Germany should pay for her misdeeds and be rendered harmless to repeat them." But after Zeitgeist has its say, then the character of politicians does enter in.

Woodrow Wilson is regarded as the "tragic hero" of the piece. But, following the structure of Greek tragedy, he contributed his fatal flaw. His high-sounding principles of the 14 Points were in no way connected to the practical realities of power politics. He did not in fact know how to use his power. He had the only sure supply of food for Europe, its largest intact standing army, and a treasury with money in the bank. He opposed England's desire for indemnity, but never thought to issue better terms for the 4 billion she owed to U.S. banks. When his idealistic wishes were confronted by the realities of his and Europe's real political passions, his "principles" collapsed into a wisp of smoke, leaving a disillusioned professor to sail home to political eclipse.

George Clemenceau was the nineteenth century soldier. His world was in fact a jungle. Might makes right and winner takes all. The purpose of war is to destroy the enemy.

David Lloyd George was the Gamesman. Lentin says of him that it was not so much that the end justified the means but that the means justified the means. He loved the play, and he loved to get his way. When he sensed the swell of popular passions, he thought not for a moment to oppose them, to moderate them, to bend them in some nobler direction. He just rode them as far as they would go, and then forgot. In a war he was an energetic and ingenious commander. But in decisions of history where ethics really mattered, he was entirely out of his depth.

As for the diplomats, they almost universally left the Paris of 1919 chastened and discouraged. John Maynard Keynes wrote his famous book. John Foster Dulles, who headed Wilson's staff (his uncle was Secretary Lansing), went on to other things. But their inputs as economists, as lawyers, as historians, as technicians of all sorts, were never really used at Paris, except to rationalize the illogic and absurdity of the feelings of the politicians.

Some participants knew this. "We are going into these negotiations with our mouths full of fine phrases and our brains seething with dark thoughts." (Edwin Montagu to Balfour, 20 Dec 1918.) But they were powerless to stop the marriage of Zeitgeist and the personalities of politicians. It would have taken "the serenity of saints or sages" to untrack the dark, unconscious forces that move people and politicians in a time of crisis, and such was not available in 1919.

In 1947, the Allies were back in Paris faced with a very different Europe. Fifty million people had died in the previous ten years. The economy of Europe was in total ruin. Old European hostilities still persisted, and so monetary reparations were claimed. But the devastation was so complete, and ideas of economics had so far advanced, that getting the defeated countries to pay the victors never emerged as a serious proposition. Germany was completely occupied. Its war-time political leaders were either dead or in prison. America was not in any mood to let Europeans call the shots. While conscious of the need to let their allies preserve their dignity, American leaders were quite willing to in fact impose a re-structuring of Europe on them.

Another difference between 1947 and 1919 is that while the diplomats were mere underlings the first time, the second time around they were practically the whole show. The Second World War had been so impressively deadly that politicians recognized that recovery demanded intensely practical inputs. Truman knew this. The men who had run the war were given the job of administering the peace. Douglas MacArthur took Japan. Lucius Clay was in charge in Germany. The American Secretary of State was Gen. George C. Marshall. Marshall had been an aide-de-campe to Gen. John J. Pershing in Paris in 1919. In the State Department under Marshall, technicians the likes of their forebears Keynes and Dulles played a crucial part. Names that were then or later famous had important roles: George Marshall, Dean Acheson, Averill Harriman, James Forrestal, Clark Clifford, W. W. Rostow. The essence of the process in 1947, as distinct from the essence at Versailles, was in the teams of technicians who staffed the State Department.

One of these was a particularly interesting figure.

In the winter of 1946, the Treasury Department sent a cable to the American embassy in Moscow asking whether they could explain why the Russians were refusing to join the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The boss was away that day, and responsibility for answering the cable fell to an obscure junior staffer, 41-year-old George Frost Kennan. He had been thinking about this matter for about twenty years, so he was ready. He had grown up in Wisconsin, but had gone to college at Princeton. In 1946 he was already a veteran of twenty years in Eastern Europe. He knew and loved the Russian language, and had a mature and subtle view of Russian policy. One historian says of him:

The only difficulty with Kennan's view was that it lacked a certain excitement. Calm, reasoned, evenhanded, expressed in superbly balanced, exquisitely honed, pellucid prose, his view was destined to ensure its author's continued obscurity as a valued junior Foreign Service officer who would never be invited into the innermost councils of state. His advice might be good, but it was not useful. It did not provide the rationale for dynamic political expansion; it did not offer a framework and rationalization for terrific economic expansion; it did not place America at the head of a great moral crusade. It was an admirable view, but it did not have any zip.40

But in his memoirs Kennan recalls that he knew that this was `it.' "They had asked for it." he wrote; "Now, by God, they would have it: the whole truth." He sat down and penned an 8,000-word reply: "The political personality of Soviet power as we know it today is the product of ideology and circumstances. . ." It is now a document known in the history of diplomacy as simply The Moscow Cable.

The original inquiry was from Treasury, but Kennan gave a copy to the Naval Attach in Moscow, who sent it to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, who in turn ran off several hundred copies and made it required reading in his department. Within two months Kennan was at work for Forrestal, and shortly after that, for George C. Marshall at State. When Marshall returned from his meeting with Stalin in Moscow, he put Kennan in charge of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff. He told him to develop a Russian strategy with the terse advice, "Avoid trivia." Kennan did so, and the wheels went into motion. The rest, as they say, is history.

George Kennan's view of Soviet Communism was somber, but it was not simplistic. It was rooted in a deep appreciation of the causes of Russian insecurity. He viewed the Russian leadership, not as potential objects of a holy war, but as explainable if dangerous human beings. He saw them as men whose history and culture gave them a traditional and "instinctive" sense of insecurity and self-doubt. He saw their dogmatic Marxism as a device whose lofty altruism supported their fear of the rest of the world, enabled them to justify a dictatorship "without which they did not know how to rule", and the cruelties and sacrifices they felt were needed to make progress. He noted their belief that no permanent modus vivendi was possible with America or capitalism, and that they would use systematic tactics of social subversion to oppose that form of political economy. And Kennan also knew that the Russian leadership had something in common with the West: a belief that the world is governed by the will to power. Clemenceau would have understood.

At the end of the Moscow cable, Kennan says:

The issue of Soviet-American relations is in essence a test of the over-all worth of the United States as a nation among nations. To avoid destruction it need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation. Surely, there was never a fairer test of national quality than this. ... the thoughtful observer will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin's challenge to American society.

The cable was extended and refined by the State Department in 1947. Its orientation became national policy. A central feature of the position was that the restoration of economic vigor, an end to national enmities in Europe, and the recovery of Germany were all integral and essential requirements to contain the spread of Communism. Kennan understood that capitalism and communism were not just military systems, but comprehensive social philosophies. If capitalism was to win, it would do so by giving people what they wanted: prosperity, opportunity, peace, freedom.

Politically, Truman and Marshall and Acheson recognized that the fiscal conservatism and isolationism of Congress, the mid-west press, and the American people would be a problem. In 1947, the politicians sided with their diplomats to bend the tide of popular sentiment into channels the technicians wanted. The Zeitgeist was different than before. The suffering of World War Two so far outstripped the pain of World War One that the main stream of popular passion was channeled into deep sobriety. There was no vehement outcry for revenge. There was just the comprehensive, cold, and clear demand to set things right again, with justice and with vision.

Immediately after the war, things did not go well in Europe. Communist insurgents were strong in places such as Greece and Turkey. The British did not have the resources to continue their traditional support there. American money was needed. Truman and Acheson took in hand the problem, and succeeded in selling "the Truman doctrine": Truman to Congress in an address to a Joint Session on March 12, 1947, Acheson to the press. The preliminary price tag was a mere 400 million dollars.

The price tag was peanuts. What was all the fuss? The fuss was that "the Truman Doctrine" was the first coupling of America's "national security" with the threat of Communism. It was the first public announcement of the division of the world into two opposing camps. Although the outlines of the situation were clear to the politicians, there was much uncertainty as to the details, and the details were everything. George Kennan was able to supply those details.

In May of 1947, Truman had Dean Acheson intone the outlines of the Marshall Plan in a speech in Cleveland, Mississippi. It was America in contest with the Russians for the future of the world. This would cost money, but it was worth it. The speech was hardly noticed in the Press. Then, with special briefings to foreign diplomats and key journalists, Marshall unveiled the new American policy for Europe in full solemnity at the Harvard Commencement, June 5, 1947. The U.S. would put up the money, and her Allies would formulate the plan to use it.

In July the representatives of sixteen Allied countries met in Paris. For two months they negotiated. Some progress was made, but old hostilities still persisted. Late in August Kennan went to Paris. In September, behind the scenes, Marshall played hardball and laid down the law on priorities and cooperation. The Allies fell into line.

Late in September, the Russians assembled the European Communist parties at a country estate in Poland. There was to be no compromise with capitalism. Czechoslovakia tried to sit on the fence. They asked for grain from America. But it would not be given to socialists. The Czech government collapsed in the spring of 1948 and the country's Communist Party took over. Jan Masaryk committed suicide, or was murdered. The division of Europe was complete.

When the Truman administration tried to sell the Marshall Plan to Congress with its 5 billion dollar annual cost, they found that "European cooperation" was awfully abstract, and boring, on the Hill. Building an integrated European market for American goods also lacked fire. The words that were really electrifying were "Communist threat". It would appear that Russian politicians were not the only ones easily moved by fear.

There seems to have been a difference between the people and the politicians. Historian Mee reports that in a 1948 public opinion survey, 56 percent of Americans thought that the Marshall Plan was best considered an act of charity, and only 8 percent thought it would "curb communism". "... Americans were by and large still an astonishingly generous people: they were, in fact, prepared to support the Marshall Plan, and to support it for largely humanitarian reasons."41

But politicians and the press were not content with this. They thought that the Zeitgeist was naïve. They wanted tougher realism. Fear and patriotism were the ticket. So publicity campaigns around the themes of patriotism and anti-communism were mounted.

Kennan's complex and subtle understanding of Russian insecurity was simplified into its crassest behavioral implications. The word "containment" came to stand for all of it in popular political debate, and the reason for the Marshall Plan boiled down to the threat of Communism. At this time too, the House Unamerican Activities Committee was holding its hearings. The fall of the Czech government in the spring of 1948 coincided with Congressional deliberations on the Marshall Plan appropriations. When Kennan responded to the anger and surprise over the Czech debacle by observing that it was only the logical outcome of Russia's consolidation of its sphere of influence, his voice was removed again from the center of power. Once more he had no zip. He returned to the status of outsider. His day in the limelight had been short, but it had had an indelible effect on history.

The Cold War continued for forty years, and finally in 1986 Kennan's design won out. But that is another chapter in the story of reason at work.

As for this chapter -- the one that goes from 1919 to 1947 -- the moral of the story is that this is what reason has to deal with in the spiritual growth of the human race. The task of history and the task of personal spiritual growth are one and the same: engagement with the human unconscious.

The Prognosis for Secularism

There is an image in Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End of a race of extraterrestrial beings who look like gargoyles but have vastly superior technology to anything humans have mastered. They are "sent" to earth to referee the end of humanity's childhood. Once they demonstrate the impossibility of challenging their technology, they simply stand around and allow humans to grow. It is an image of marvelous insight and charm. It looks like Americans of the twenty-first century along with their secular associates in the other advanced industrialized countries have the assignment to function like those gargoyles.

Is Richard John Neuhaus the Author of Just Another Popish Plot?

Richard John Neuhaus -- the author of The Naked Public Square and the journal First Things -- intrigues me because he obviously represents a force of history. But I cannot readily identify just which force that is. Sometimes he seems to be just a fundamentalist who has read a lot of books:

Groups such as the Moral Majority kicked a tripwire alerting us to a pervasive contradiction in our culture and politics. We insist that we are a democratic society yet we have in recent decades systematically excluded from policy consideration the operative values of the American people, values that are overwhelmingly grounded in religious beliefs.42

He is certainly at pains rhetorically to distance himself from the authoritarianism and sectarianism of the fundamentalists. Yet at bottom, all of his distancing rhetoric in regard to the religious Right may come down to elaborate rationalization. Neuhaus dislikes the public relations style of the fundamentalists, but structurally he is exactly like them. He has a form of inwardness that he wants to make prescriptive for society as a whole. This is the essence of Popery.

Hegel identified "the distinctly Protestant principle" as "holding fast to interiority as such, rejecting and regarding as impertinent and lifeless, externality and authority." Paul Tillich agrees: "Protestantism by its very nature demands a secular reality ... Protestant secularism is a necessary element of Protestant realization." [Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era (U Chi Press 1948, 213-214) In this Protestant inwardness, which began the "disenchantment" Max Weber identified with modernity, and which is realized in Hobbes's imperium rationis of the modern state, all religions are private (inward) matters beyond reason and any claim to make a religion public is "the kingdom of darkness", "Popery".43

Now it is no secret of course that Neuhaus recently made a move from Lutheran to Roman affiliation, and so this slipping into Popery would not be something completely contrary to the direction of his spiritual journey.

When he says that "only a transcendent, religious vision can turn this society from certain disaster and toward the fulfillment of its destiny"44 most serious people would agree, if only you are using the term "religious" in a non-sectarian sense. Perhaps a better word for it would be "spiritual". But the practical question immediately arises as to where in the real world does one find this vision? It would seem that we have only two choices for the source of this clothing of the naked public square. One of them is sectarian religion and the other is the native authenticity of the human spirit, or more simply, conscience.

Neuhaus of course prefers sectarian religion. (And this in turn must mean his sectarian religion. Aye, there's the rub...)

Some would cast out the devil of sectarian religion and thus put the public square in proper secular order. Having cast out the one devil they unavoidably invite the entrance of seven devils worse than the first. (Communism in Russia, Nazis in Germany...)45

When religion in any traditional or recognizable form is excluded from the public square ... the vacuum will be filled by ersatz religion, by religion bootlegged into public space under other names.

So, he does not trust the native human spirit at all. Unaided by sectarian faith, it is only capable of producing "seven devils worse than the first" and "ersatz religion." He also claims a distinguished lineage for his point of view:

Autonomy alone, thought as unqualified fulfillment of self, is a new oppression. Religious geniuses such as Paul, Augustine and Luther viewed such autonomy as the oppression of the imperial self, the source and shape of our alienation from God. Beyond autonomy is the free acknowledgement of that by which we are bound. We are bound to be free. We are bound to be free in the sense of being called or destined to freedom. But our freedom is only actualized in the free acceptance of that which authoritatively claims our assent and obedience.46

I explain in Chapter 9 why there are good grounds for disagreeing with Paul, Augustine and Luther in regard to the value of the human self. They were all creatures of their particular times. Moreover, since the time of Paul and Augustine there has been huge cultural change. We have so much more information now. And in Luther's time it was discovered that oppression actually came much more from "authoritative tradition" than from trust of "the imperial self."

And so it comes as no surprise that although Neuhaus can quote twentieth century sources prodigiously, when it comes to the deepest foundation of his point of view, he is unerringly drawn to a fifth century Pope:

Of the possible traditions of moral legitimation in Western history, only the biblical tradition is democratically supportable in this society. The biblical story is about the coming of the kingdom. Within that story both church and state are provisional actors. But because it is the bearer of the story, the role of the church is "the more weighty" as Pope Gelasius and John Adams would agree.47

(Just in passing I would offer the rejoinder that the biblical tradition is more about the experience of the ineffable than some triumphal "coming of the kingdom", and that in either case, today the Internet, among other communications mediums, is as much the bearer of the story as the church.)

So, it is perfectly clear that the historical force that Neuhaus represents is good old fashioned sectarianism, in a kind of contemporary Popish form. His erudition is merely a showman's trick. It is necessary to wave away all that smoke and mirrors in order to come to the heart of the matter. I think it's good to have this kind of clarity when it comes to identifying the forces that are operating in the open public square.

Having said that, I experience some relief, because I know this society has long since passed the point when it is going to return to the establishment of religion. There is simply too much history of the limitations of sectarian faith and too much recognition of the success of secularism to go back.

But just to complete the analysis, let us look once again at the three principal deficiencies of sectarian faith as the guardian of the public square. They all stem from its function as a psychological defense mechanism.

The first is that sectarians do not know themselves. They protest their innocence and good will, but they do not in their heart of hearts trust freedom. They do not in their hearts trust conscience. They do not in their hearts trust self. Whenever -- and this means on all occasions -- they get political power, they repress.

The second is that beyond childhood, the emotional repressiveness of sectarian faith is, ironically, a powerful obstacle to spiritual growth. The Augustinian Arrangement [See Chap. 9.] may have worked for Europe for a thousand years, but that was for a society in the very early stages of building up an information base that could support a widely self-conscious population.

The third is that all spiritually serious people understand that the trust of the native human spirit is a risky proposition which can bring serious pain, and will constantly demand of us to deepen our understanding of ourselves. In this it is much less comforting than sectarian certitudes.

From this line of thought a few observations follow.

Sectarians will always have this problem of mistaking the openness of the public square for nakedness. This is because their sectarian faiths are more defensive against the unruly forces of the id than the defenses offered by the U.S. Constitution. Without their own particular defenses, they feel naked to their own repressions.

Thus in this polity, sectarians are welcome to be active in the open public square, but they are not offered the opportunity to clothe it.

The trust of the human spirit represented by the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights is, in some messy and uneven sense, successful. In history, since the Protestant Reformation, there has been learning. Learning is still going on. This trust is the only way to keep the process of history from being closed. The human psyche must remain open to the contents of the unconscious in order to grow. If you do try to repress it, then unfinished psychic business leaps out of the abyss and the "power of darkness" has its hour upon the stage.

And so our set of laws and institutions tolerates even foolish gnostics: "Like gnostics of all centuries including our own, the devotees of Heaven's Gate twisted snatches of Christian faith into a doctrine of contempt for life and for the body, the latter being no more than a "physical container" that is to be discarded on the way to the "Level Above Human."48

Yes, we understand that, Father Neuhaus, and we accept their deaths as the price of freedom: "A case can be made that, in their rejection of authoritative tradition, in their fascination with novel spiritualities and high-tech expertise, and in the assertion of a right to control their lives and deaths, the suicides of Heaven's Gate exemplify the "mainstream faith" of the Times' editorial page."49 Well, that works for me.

But we also do not pass judgment on them, as you appear to do:

"Experts on cult behavior," says the editorial in the New York Times," will help us understand "the underlying pathology that led such seemingly bright and articulate people to a tragic misjudgment." Misjudgment is an interesting term in this connection. Oops, forget the bit about suicide.50

We persist in seeking nuanced insight into the complexities of human motivation. Does anybody have a problem with that?

PART THE SECOND:
THE BIG PICTURE

[INSERT TWO-PAGE STAGES CHART 3 - STAGES HERE]

8.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF SPIRITUAL LIFE: THEORY

Developmental theories of individual human consciousness are relatively recent arrivals in scientific literature. Even the past 25 years have produced significant advances. This body of work simply adds precision to something that we all know intuitively: that the personality structure of human beings develops in stages that are quite distinct from one another. We all know without the help of college courses that the mental abilities of a six-month old infant are very different from those of a seven-year-old child, and that those in turn are different from the capacities of 21-year-old young adult. The only thing developmental psychology has done is get very detailed and precise about the kinds of abilities that are distinctive to the various stages, and when those stages normally occur. [SIDE BAR - FOLLOWING PAGE -Highlights of Developmental Psychology]

This body of information is now mature enough to provide us with an understanding of how factors of personal development are involved in historical and institutional processes. Cultural analysis is the tool for this study. Anthropologists have known for some time that cultures are distinguished from one another by their child rearing practices. Developmental psychology understands that child-rearing practices influence subsequent personality dynamics.

The relationship between culture and personal process works like this: A group falls into certain practices to support living in a particular ecological niche. It is a Darwinian process of randomized natural selection that is not particularly conscious.

Developmental Psychology

The original architecture for developmental stages was laid out by Jean Piaget's studies of cognitive development over a period of forty years from the nineteen thirties to the seventies. See The Essential Piaget (NY, Basic Books) 1977. Erik Erikson added a broader psychological framework in Childhood and Society in 1950 and Identity and the Life-Cycle in 1959. Abraham Maslow described the stages of motivational development in Toward a Psychology of Being in 1968. Lawrence Kohlberg developed his theory of stages of moral development in the sixties and seventies. Carol Gilligan refined and revised Kohlberg's stage-theory as it applies to women in A Different Voice in 1982.

In Transformations of Consciousness (Boston, Shambhala, 1986), Ken Wilber inserts earlier work into a larger framework, and includes Eastern thought. He calls this "full spectrum psychology." He also devotes extensive discussion to various schools of psychoanalytic thought of the period from the nineteen sixties to the eighties. He includes the works of Margaret Mahler, Otto Kernberg, D. W. Winnicott, Hans Kohut and others. This work extensively revised the definition of the early stages of child development proposed by earlier research and provides a definitive foundation for thinking about stages of spiritual development. Wilber's book provides a brief yet thorough summary of this scientific material.

These child-rearing practices are embedded in the unconscious as well as the conscious part of the psyches of the members of the group. They are even embedded in the body. They have to be embedded there in order to run automatically and reliably enough to serve the group under conditions of extreme stress.

Some groups make choice A and fail to survive. Other groups make choice B and succeed in surviving. Choice B becomes the cultural paradigm. Then the group's technology changes, its ecological niche changes, and the cultural paradigm endangers the group's survival. So a process of change ensues. If the adaptation is successful, the group lives on. If the adaptation is too slow or otherwise inappropriate, the group dies off. And so we get cultural traditions that have extremely complex sets of resources to balance stability and change.

However, since cultural practices are written so deeply in the human psyche, the traditions that carry them do not change easily or quickly, and change is always marked by strong emotions, violent emotions in fact.

Furthermore, in groups whose cultures represent earlier developmental stages -- bronze-age tribes for example, such as, say, the Mongols of Genghis Khan or the Iroquois of North America -- the response to a shift in ecological niche is generally univocal, all-or-nothing. Either the whole tribe adapts and survives, or the whole tribe fails to adapt and they all die together, except for a small remnant.

But in groups whose cultures represent later stages of conscious development -- such as the population of Europe in the fifteenth century -- the response to a shift in ecological niche takes the form of a social movement, as discussed in sociology. "Social movement theory" says that cultural innovation starts at the "periphery" of society, and moves by stages to the "center". So, the group that needs to adapt is viewed as extremely fragmented and diverse. Within formerly solidary groups, sub-groups form who represent different strategies for handling the shift. And so cultural relationships become intertwined with geographic, economic, political and social relationships.

But the cultural issues are always the "deepest." On the one hand you cannot resolve a cultural dispute with an economic response. On the other hand, it is often difficult for the participants to distinguish between the cultural and the economic components of the conflict.

Therefore it is not surprising that in human history, one of the principal instruments for "negotiating" cultural paradigm shifts is warfare. In fact, until very recently, warfare was universally accepted as the principal means to resolve cultural conflict. It was the heart of realpolitik. It was probably only when "the Moscow cable" of George Frost Kennan fell into the hands of Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal in 1946 that the principal paradigm for resolving cultural conflict in the world shifted from "hot" war to Cold War. For it was in that cable from the U.S. embassy in the Soviet capital that Kennan coined the term "containment" and laid out its rationale and the implementation procedures for the Cold War.

Exiles, Managers and Firefighters

I propose this as a working hypothesis: the laws which govern cultural conflict -- either conflict between cultures themselves or conflicts between the parts of one over-arching cultural system -- are not only physical laws or even economic laws but also include psychodynamic laws. At this point in history such wars are no longer about resources such as food or even wealth, but about egos and identities, that sense of warfare that goes on inside the human psyche over the survival of what we have come to call "the self."

Researchers/practitioners such as Richard C. Schwartz (Internal Family Systems Therapy, New York, The Guilford Press, 1995) are beginning to unravel those laws, and the intervention strategies that foster the growth of the innate seat of human consciousness, which has qualities such as "compassion, perspective, curiosity, acceptance and confidence." It is when this seat of consciousness is underdeveloped that the parts of the psyche are locked in a fragile, rigid, explosive system of blind functionaries such as exiles, managers and firefighters.
The general approach to intervention in such volatile systems is to find the self, give language to the self, support the self. In cases where defensive and violent parts are in almost complete control of the system, the very first step may be the hardest one. However, it is still the key. Once the self is identified, then the conversation with it is the crucial intervention in the rigid, polarized system.

So, cultures and periods of history have their developmental tasks and developmental techniques. And societies have their developmental majorities and minorities. Some minorities are "behind" the central tendency ("reactionaries" and sects), and some minorities are "ahead" of the middle of the curve ("prophets" and artists). And there is a constant interchange among the various developmental groups. This whole process has its standard roles and relationships that we now know are very much like the parts of the psyche that engage one another in therapy. In fact, there is a school of psychotherapy now in which the description of the parts of the self that operate in personal growth is equally applicable to the parts of society that operate in cultural "growth". I refer to the Internal Family Systems model for psychotherapy developed by Richard Schwartz of the Family Institute at Northwestern University. [SIDE BAR - FACING PAGE - Exiles, Managers, Firefighters]

Alice Miller's work also shows the interrelation between the personal and the historical, as when she describes how questions generated by her work in the clinic were answered by a study of nineteenth century German child rearing manuals.

To describe a set of developmental stages that apply to personal and historical processes I will use the work of Robert Bellah and Ken Wilber. [See the stages chart ] The sociologist Bellah wrote an article in 1964 that presciently sketched an outline of the historical evolution of religion starting with the practices of the Australian aborigines which are about 40,000 years old. In the 1980s Wilber summarized the large body of clinical research that makes up the field of developmental psychology with the description of a series of stages that harmonize very well with Bellah's work.

Ken Wilber

Wilber's main contribution is his summary of the work of others. When speaking of the first six stages of personality development, he is not breaking any new ground, but simply summarizing the work of numerous other well-known researchers.51 When speaking of the last three stages of consciousness development, he is seriously indebted to the neo-Hindu monist Franklin Jones, also known as Bubba Free John, and is therefore in much more uncertain territory. But we only need seven of his stages to understand the changes in American religion up to now.

As we look closely at the stage-specific capacities of personal development, it will not take long to notice how strikingly they apply to history. We will see that issues and processes that were considered socially and culturally normal in, say, the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, are considered so far from normal today that they simply could not happen. This is a developmental process.

Let us take just two famous examples. First, the trial and burning at the stake of Joan of Arc in the early fifteenth century simply could not happen anywhere on this planet today. In the first place you would have to go deep into the backwoods of the most backward part of the most primitive society on earth to find a group of people who might even consider such an action. Secondly, even if you could find a group demented enough to consider it, there is no way that you could publicly assemble the respected religious and civil leadership of a major nation-state to participate in it.

Secondly, the idea of holding an impassioned theological debate in a prison, and then hanging, drawing and quartering the "loser" is not an action even the Taliban or the most conservative Ayatollahs of Qom would engage in today. And yet that was exactly the fate of the Jesuit Edmund Campion in 1581 in England.

Now in their day, both of these public events were still considered business as usual by most of the population and their worldly and spiritual leaders. Clearly, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there were cultural psychodramas being worked out that we no longer have to deal with. Not simply we as individuals, but our culture has passed "beyond" those "barbarisms". We are at least in this limited sense, more advanced than our forebears.

In Wilber's detailed summary of personality development research, we can find processes and issues that apply with striking clarity to "the decline of the middle" of American religiousness at the end of the twentieth century.

The overall process has a uniform dynamic. It is based on the fact that the human organism has to develop its various distinct capacities in a certain order. For example, first there has to be a physical substratum: organs and tissue and biochemical components. Then there have to be sensory functions that are seated in "the reptilian brain" (the brain stem and other components sometimes referred to as "the reptilian complex"). Then there have to be emotional functions seated in the center of the brain sometimes referred to as "the limbic cortex". Only when these capacities are mature can the functions of the neo-cortex develop fully (thinking and speaking and organizing one's environment). And only when the neo-cortex functions are complete, and completely integrated with the limbic and reptilian functions, does fully-developed spiritual awareness occur. (See the Side Bar on the Tri-une Brain,)

Now, this is an order of operations specified by biology. It cannot be circumvented, either in the individual or in society. So, history sequences the way personal growth does. Was it Darwin who said that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny? Or maybe it was the other way around. Either way the history of culture and the history of an individual human being have a shared sequence.

Stage One

The first stage of consciousness begins of course in the womb -- at conception -- and lasts until approximately six months after birth. In this stage the self-system is working on basic physical and sensoriperceptual structures. It is not yet a sensing-perceiving "center" of experience. One the one hand it is not fully differentiated from its external surround, and secondly it is not differentiated internally into an "I" and an "other".

If disturbances occur in this basic physical process -- such as biochemical toxicity for example -- all subsequent stages will be affected. Severe autism is one of the results of defects in the development of this stage.

Stage Two

In the second stage, from about the age of 6 months to the age of 18 months, the self is working on sensory boundaries. It must learn a fundamental differentiation in its sensory data between images that are produced by itself, and images that are produced by external objects. In this stage the difference between the information coming from inside of me and that coming from outside of me is not perfectly clear. One of the principle supportive activities of parents in this stage of learning is mirroring, of which "baby talk" is simply an auditory example. By using facial expressions to successfully reflect back to the infant his/her totally self-involved experiences of seven basic emotional states, the parent gradually clarifies the distinction between self and other.

If disturbances occur in this stage of development, what the psychologists call "borderline" personality disorders arise in which the self has a tendency to alternate between excessive dependence on the other ("merger") and excessive withdrawal from the other. The self has a basic boundary problem.

Stage Three

In stage three -- which lasts from about the age of 18 months to the age of about 3 years -- the self-system is working on differentiating its representational mind from its body-imagination functions (sensory images, needs for food and physical pleasure, etc.). Systematic video-camera observation of infants has recently shown that there is "an explosion of language" around the age of 18 months, as the infant moves from the display of the first seven facial expressions to the first awareness of words as discrete tools. Language is the primary vehicle for advancing to full use of the neo-cortex.

In this stage the self is also working on its central interpersonal relationships, internally and externally. A three-part differentiation emerges internally between "impulse" (id), suppression of impulse (superego), and voluntary origin of action (ego). And at this stage child-rearing practices such as nursing and weaning and toilet-training start to have a powerful influence on development.

Disturbances at this stage of life lay the foundations of feelings such as anxiety, obsession and guilt for the adults of a particular society. Guilt, for example -- a frequent subject in any discussion of religion -- is an unresolved conflict between the suppression of impulse function (superego) and the executive function (ego).

Stage Four

Stage four occupies members of advanced industrial societies from the ages of 7 to 14 years, and its principle task is to learn the rules and roles of social interaction. The learning tasks of this stage are much more cognitive than those of earlier stages. Skills of thinking and language are now critical for avoiding pain and experiencing acceptance. It is extremely important to be able to "say the right thing." Abraham Maslow says that this is the stage of the importance of belongingness. Lawrence Kohlberg refers to it as the age of conventional morality, when the important thing is to know the rules. It is the stage of the desire to fit in, to have one's proper place in the group.

Stage Five

In stage five there emerges in human consciousness a new dimension of experience, the internally reflexive thought process -- individual conscience and consciousness. The self-system is working on the Cogito ergo sum of Descartes (1596-1650), who did his major philosophical writing about a hundred years after Martin Luther's break with Rome in 1517. In this stage of development, if one is faced with a parental authority that does not recognize the emerging self-system as an autonomous "other", conflicts can arise that are perceived as life-or-death issues to the emergent self-system. It must grow.

Internally, the principal disturbance is "identity crisis" -- is the self-reflexive structure strong enough to break free of the rule/role mind and stand on its own principles? Is it strong enough to see beyond the dictates of the rule/role mind and integrate them into the higher synthesis of a self-reflexive, self-respecting structure? That is, can it re-write the rules?

Stage Six

In stage six, internal awareness goes even deeper. The self-system acquires the insight into Being and starts to work on integrating it. If stage five is Descartes, stage six is Martin Heidegger. This is the discovery that personal life is a brief spark in a vast universe. Such a discovery makes an assault on the self-centeredness of earlier stages, and integrating exchanges of information must be made. In stage six there is still considerable tension between the sense of individual selfhood and the sense of the ineffable other. Disturbances at this stage are existential confusion and depression, the "fear and trembling" of Kierkegaard.

Stages Seven, Eight and Nine

In stages seven, eight and nine the self-system continues to work on integrating individual self-hood and its ground in Being. It does this by means of sustained introspection. "Sustained introspection" is the activity we call meditation. Historically this activity has almost always taken place in monasteries, but now that more numerous ordinary members of society, not living in monasteries, are doing it, the developments of stages seven, eight and nine are being experienced more widely than ever before.

These are the stages of "postmodernism". Having become accustomed to the existential discoveries that Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre wrote about but which everyone has the capacity to experience, the subject engages in a sustained commentary on the limits of "reason".

There may in fact be only one real stage of this capacity for contemplation. Wilber's neo-Hindu monism might be incorrect on that point. But whatever the divisions within this stage of human development, it is clear that a contemplative, introspective capacity does exist, and that human beings move into it just as they move into all the other stages, when the organism is ready. It is not possible not to become contemplative. There is an "organic" drive to completion in humans that dictates this. At the earlier stages of development, we can clearly see the biological nature of this developmental drive. As we move into the later stages, the drive starts to become more spiritual than biological. But in all of the information we have so far about all of the stages of human development, there is a biological substrate.

Transition Between Stages -- Individual "Mana"

The question naturally arises as to what moves the individual person from one stage to another. The answer in general is that there are two mechanisms. One is biochemical and physical change. The other is social interaction.

With regard to biochemistry and anatomy, we know for example that the physiology of the human brain and head is not complete at birth. There is further growth of the cranium to take place, and numerous refinements of the physiology of the brain itself of which the completion of the pons that connects the two hemispheres of the neo-cortex is just one example. There is continuous change of biology that deeply influences self-concept up to the early twenties. Of primary importance of course are the simple change in size that continues until the early twenties and the maturation of sexual organs and endocrinology in the adolescent years.

With regard to social interaction, there are stage-specific activities all along the way. One is the mirroring that parents do for the child between birth and the age of eighteen months. Detailed understanding of this activity had to wait for the development of the video camera in the 1980s, which made systematic observation of the phenomenon possible. The existence of mirroring can serve as a model for the constant activity of the individual in seeking his or her own development and the irreplaceable necessity of interaction to complete the process.

And so at later stages the qualities of social interaction will profoundly influence outcomes. If a young child grows up in a tri-lingual society, he or she will have the natural command of three mother tongues. Young adults who have grown up in socially isolated communities will know the customs of only one culture and find the customs of other cultures extremely disorienting. And harsh or traumatic child-rearing practices will produce adults who have repressed patterns of extra-punitive anger that can surface as completely insensitive violence on those occasions when the customs of society permit (or require) it. This is how societies produce successful warrior classes.

And so the factors that nourish development can be called "food" of various kinds. Ken Wilber observes:

The human being has drives that express the need for various environments: physical needs (food, water, air, shelter), emotional needs (feeling, touch-contact, sex), mental-egoic needs (interpersonal communication, reflexive self-esteem, meaning), spiritual needs (God-communion, depth), and so on. It is as if there were levels of "food" or "mana": physical food, emotional food, mental food, spiritual food. Growth and development are simply the process of adapting to, and learning to digest, subtler and subtler levels of food, with each stage of growth marked by a phase-specific adaptation to a particular type of food. 52

Transition Between Stages -- Social "Mana"

Now if on the one hand the individual has the capacity to ingest various levels of "mana", we must also make the observation that societies have various levels of capacity to provide them. Consider mental food for example. Consider the history of science. The process by which we get from Aristotle to quantum mechanics covers a period of about 2,500 years and consists of an extremely complex array of social and cultural as well as intellectual inputs. Each step in the progress of science required social "mana", and this nourishing arrangement of social institutions needed to grow gradually and by stages. Before there could be Galileo, there had to be lenses, and before there were lenses there had to be glass, and so forth.

The idea of social mana is implicit in the discussion of economic development. The distinction between fully mature economies and "developing" economies was made about forty years ago. Economists noted that there had to be "infrastructures" to support certain end results. There was a whole array of social components required to bring an economy to "the take-off point": laws, educational institutions, communications technology, popular expectations, etc.

So, the notion of social mana is a routine one, and as we move from a consideration of Wilber's stages of individual development to Bellah's stages of social development, we are also moving from the task of understanding the food needs of individuals to the mana needs of societies. There are social infrastructures that support the consciousness of the next stage. And, it seems to be the case that just as the individual organism progresses naturally from one stage to the next when it is "ready", so a society or a culture will proceed naturally from one stage of religion to the next when it is ready. That is, when the social "mana" required for the change becomes fully available. Before there could be Martin Luther, there had to be a middle class. Before there could be a middle class, there had to be a certain level of commerce. And on the other hand, when there was a certain level of commerce, there would be a middle class, and when there was a middle class -- educated, economically self-sufficient and in control of their own material destiny -- there would be, inevitably, a Martin Luther.

The Question of "Perspectivism"

In applying Wilber's stages to the history of religions, we will also want to pay particular attention to the question of religious tolerance/intolerance. We might frame the question this way: What are the developmental forces that support the emotional capacity to accept the beliefs of others as valid, and the consequent social policy of granting them freedom of assembly and expression? Conversely, what are the developmental forces that create an emotional incapacity to accept the beliefs of others, that is, make them personally threatening? This incapacity of course lies at the root of religious violence. Wilber calls this capacity "perspectivism":

Perspectivism is simply the capacity to take the role of others, to cognitively project oneself into a mental perspective and viewpoint other than one's own. Psychologists from Werner to Piaget have demonstrated how and why increasing perspectivism, or conversely, decreasing egocentrism, is a primary indicator of developmental evolution. Mythic membership is marked by an intermediate degree of perspectivism: greater than magic, which has almost none, but not as developed as rational-reflexive, which is the first major structure to display easy and continuous perspectivism. Mythic membership is aware of others, and can begin to take the role of others, but because it is something of a learner's stage in perspectivism, it tends to become trapped in those roles, defined by those roles, bound to them. It is thus captured by a conformist, conventional, or traditional attitude: the culture's codes are its codes, the society's norms are its norms, what they want is what I want. 53

But we have to note that here Wilber is only talking about the subject of Piaget's research, and that is cognitive perspectivism. This ability allows the subject to understand that someone else is in point of simple fact looking at the elephant from a different vantage point, but it does not allow him to empathize with that view. It is only cognitive. There is no telling what emotional response this knowledge will result in: wonder? confusion? joy? fear? anger?

But in studying religion, we are more interested in emotional perspectivism. This is the ability to empathetically project oneself into feelings other than one's own. This allows the subject not to be personally threatened by religious beliefs that he has cognitvely ascertained are different from his or her own. From the history of religion it is clear that emotional perspectivism is a much later development than cognitive perspectivism. Certainly the warring religious groups around the time of the Protestant Reformation understood perfectly well that other religionists had different beliefs than they did. This did not confuse them cognitively. But it did disturb them emotionally.

I think the key to emotional perspectivism is to have a degree of existential interiority that creates a sense of self that is independent of verbal self-statements. One has to know "who one is" without reference to a creed. Some existential interiority is needed to modify a traditional creed. It takes a sense of independent self to modify the rules of the parents. But as long as any creed is needed for the sense of personal identity, ego-survival will also be linked to such verbal statements. Ego-survival is of course always a "life-or-death" situation, and so credal dependence will be a source of religious intolerance.

Bellah's Five Stages of Religious Evolution

In 1964 the sociologist Robert Bellah published a seminal article in Harvard University's usually purely quantitative professional journal, The American Sociological Review entitled "Religious Evolution". In that article he outlined a theory of religious development which fits very nicely with Ken Wilber's summary of personal developmental psychology. Bellah proposes five stages for the process.

The overall dynamic is a change in the degree of freedom of personality and society in relation to the environing conditions. In order to see this process, we have to have data from all the time we have access to. That would be about 40,000 years. The oldest religion in the world still being practiced today is that of the Australian aboriginals, and their culture is about 40,000 years old. If we compare this religion to the other religions we find around the world, we see fundamental changes in structure over time. Bellah puts it this way:

At each stage of religious evolution the freedom of personality and society has increased relative to the environing conditions. Freedom has increased because at each successive stage the relation of man to the conditions of his existence has been conceived as more complex, more open and more subject to change and development. The distinction between conditions that are really ultimate and those that are alterable becomes increasingly clear though never complete.54

1. Primitive Religion

Bellah's first stage is Primitive religion, found only among the aboriginals of Australia. In it the human ego is scarcely separated from the world of "the Dreaming". There is only one religion for all humans, ritual is by participation in the Dreaming, and the Dreaming is always present. This is a Stage Two self-system in Wilber's system. Apparently by their isolation on the sub-continent, the inhabitants of Australia never really experienced a shift in their ecological niche until Captain Cook visited their shores in 1759.

2. Archaic Religion

The second stage, Archaic religion, started about 10,000 years ago. It includes the many tribal religions of Africa, Asia, the Pacific islands and the Americas. These religions have gods, and special religious organizations have become more clearly separated out. These operate at a Stage Three level of organization of the self. Wilber refers to them as magical, shamanic religions. They are still very intertwined with nature and have remarkable knowledge and harmony with it. Their use of language is still largely concrete. Their religious language centers on stories of deities that are projections of the forces of nature, forces in society (Victor Turner) and the internal forces of the id, ego and superego.

3. Historic Religion

But in the third stage, Historic religion, which started around 2,000 B.C. and appears to coincide with the invention of writing, the human ego is identified as a very clear actor in the universe. Gods, specialist religious organizations, and religious hierarchies are fully developed. This stage marks the beginning of theology (actual thinking about the ultimate conditions of human existence). The great religious traditions of the modern world -- Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism -- are all Historic religions.

The historic religions have esoteric and exoteric components. The esoteric components leap ahead of the historical pace of consciousness development and explore Stages Five, Six and Seven. They are pursued by extremely small, very isolated minorities. The "popular" form, which engages the vast majority of the population, works on the tasks of Stage Four, the maturation of the rule-role mind. There is an uneasy relationship in the historic religions between their esoteric and exoteric components. The officials of these religions must negotiate this relationship. As the custodians of social order, they feel responsible for maintaining the rule-role mind, and although they may accept the validity of the esoteric component, they also do not fully trust it. Dostoevsky portrayed this relationship brilliantly in The Brothers Karamazov in his chapter entitled "Christ and the Grand Inquisitor."

The esoteric component of Historic Religion is expressed in mysticism and philosophical speculation. In Christianity this would be the Greek "Fathers" and the mystics described in the works of Evelyn Underhill. In China we seem to have an almost wholly exoteric system with a small nod to the mystical in Confucianism, and an almost wholly mystical system with a small nod to practices of everyday life in Daoism. Hindu esotericism is in the Upanishads and an exoteric form in the Ramayana of Tulsi Das. The Mahabharata tries to cover both areas, and the Bhagavad Gita is a central piece in that bridging. Nobody knows what the Vedas mean. The best guess I have seen is that they are instructions for a ritual horse sacrifice in which the parts of the horse stand for aspects of the internal functioning of the self-system. If so, they would be the work of brilliant Stage Two consciousness. In Buddhism we have various monastic treatises on the esoteric side and rituals, rosaries and prayer-wheels on the exoteric side.

But the popular forms of these religions are all Stage Three-Four systems. They handle religious narrative mythically, and compose elaborate rules for behavior. Their task is to give the ego a more sophisticated set of tools to control the id on the one hand and negotiate with the super-ego on the other. In individual consciousness, if all goes well, it seems to take us about seven years to complete Stage Four. In historical process in Western Europe it seems to have taken our forebears the eleven hundred years from Augustine to Luther to do it. Bellah says:

The historic religions discovered the self; early modern religion found a doctrinal basis on which to accept the self in all its empirical ambiguity; modern religion is beginning to understand the laws of the self's own existence and so to help man take responsibility for his own fate.55

We might paraphrase and expand this comment as follows: The historic religions -- which have only been around for a few thousand years out of the hundreds of thousand of years that homo sapiens has been on this planet -- made a momentous if basic achievement in human history. They discovered the ego. Before the historic religions, individuals were not clearly distinguished out from the group and from nature. There was no "independent thinking" going on that could generate technologies such as writing. It was the historic religions that began to express this. They distinguished the ego out from the stream of experience, both sensory experience from without and the pulsations of the unconscious from within.

But it was still a weak and uncertain ego. From about 2000 BC until the Protestant Reformation, the individual ego of most human beings could not get along without a permanent parent And those who tried to throw off the institutionalized permanent parent of the church or the state were declared heretics and removed from society. During this period of history, advanced knowledge about the inner world was esoteric if it existed at all, and knowledge about the outer world was primitive. Most people were easily overwhelmed by the energy of repressed pain, and so they developed practices to control the unconscious, and a class of specialists to control the practices. The practices were trance-inducing rituals and the officials were the clergy. The evolutionary purpose of the institutions they invented was to control human experience and thus nurture the growth of the ego. After centuries of this regime, enough people had strong enough egos to enter a new phase.

4. Early Modern Religion

Stage four is called Early Modern religion. Bellah says that it is essentially Protestantism, but I think his view of the matter needs to be expanded somewhat. If the purpose of religion is to engage the ultimate conditions of man's existence, then Early Modern religion has to be all of the meaning-giving activity that grew up in the wake of Luther's break with Rome.

These would then include not only the formally religious wing, the Protestant churches, but also a wing that was organizationally outside of Christianity, but with the same developmental intent. This would be the humanists, the secularists. Wilber makes this point when he says:

I agree with sociologists in general that the course of modern development is marked by increasing rationalization. What perhaps distinguishes my viewpoint from other spiritually sympathetic theorists is that I believe the trend of rationalization per se is necessary, desirable, appropriate, phase-specific and evolutionary. It is therefore perfectly religious in and by itself (no matter how apparently secular): an expression of increasingly advanced consciousness and articulated self-awareness that has as its final aim, and itself contributes to, the resurrection of Spirit-Geist.56

The competition between rationalism and religion for the past five hundred years is a fascinating phenomenon that we will discuss more fully in the next chapter.

Bellah's felicitous phrase is that Early Modern religion "accepts the self in all its empirical ambiguity." If we ask in what does "empirical ambiguity" consist, then an answer naturally forms itself out of the researches of western psychological science. The Swiss psychiatrist Alice Miller makes an observation that is relevant here:

Splitting of the human being into two parts, one that is good, meek, conforming and obedient and the other that is diametrically opposite is perhaps as old as the human race, and one could simply say that it is part of "human nature". Yet it has been my experience that when people have had the opportunity to seek and live out their true self in analysis, this split disappears of itself. They perceive both sides, the conforming as well as the so-called obscene, as two extremes of the false self, which they now no longer need.57

Of course, psychoanalysis is only one of many introspective disciplines that address the empirical ambiguities of the human psyche. So, Miller's comment simply illustrates the point that modern western psychological science has explored extensively and continues to explore this territory, and the nature of the ambiguity Bellah refers to is precisely the subject of that science. (We shall discuss this matter more extensively in the following chapter.)

So, Early Modern Religion expresses a self that is more mature than the previous stage, but it is still a kind of in-between stage, an adolescence. It significantly modifies its dependence on institutionalized parental authority figures. (I think the authority figures of Protestantism are the fathers of early teen-agers, whereas the authority figures of Roman Catholicism are the mother and father of three-years-olds.) But although it modifies parental dependence, it does not get rid of it. It tends to exchange a Pope in Rome for a Pope at home.

It popularizes (makes exoteric) the work of Stage Five of personal consciousness development. Within a hundred years it produces René Descartes, modern empirical science and the Enlightenment. Thinking is breaking out all over the place. Rational perspectivism starts to become seriously competitive in society with the appearance of this form of religion. There are actually voices that support religious diversity and freedom. But social life is still very mixed on this issue. There is still a lot of intolerance and coercion.

On the institutional level, there is a momentous "side effect" of the Reformation. By ending the control of the Pope over information sources in Europe (universities, publishing, preaching), and providing cultural support for the idea of spiritual self-determination, the Reformation irreversibly changed the very fabric of the meaning-giving institutions of western society. It opened the way for secular spirituality and the free marketplace of meaning.

5. Modern Religion

In the fifth stage, Modern religion, the ego has an even more mature and autonomous control of the process of religious symbolization. Now no longer a rebellious adolescent, it is a self-reliant spiritual seeker. Modern Religion allows for Stage Six "experiments". Nones, Others, Rosicrucians, Theosophists, sects, and cults all seek engagement with existence. In terms of Stages, the experiments of Modern Religion are all over the map. They regress, they fantasize, they go catatonic. Or they grow and advance.

But the central self-structure of society itself is the mature, healthy ego of Stage Six. This ego-structure has an open relationship with the unconscious. It is not automatically threatened when its content comes to the surface. (On the individual level this may be due to good fortune in childhood or to natural introspective talent. On the social level I think it is due to the ready availability of massive amounts of useful information.) Therefore it produces a culture that is flexible enough to allow all of them. This produces shocks to the social system, as when a group decides to emigrate to the Haile Bop comet by means of cyanide, but not enough shock to retreat from the trust of freedom.

Unshakable trust of freedom of conscience is in fact the hallmark of Stage Six religion. This value-judgment is rooted in the introspective intuition that the further growth of the psyche must occur precisely by engaging the content of the unconscious.

This freedom is different from the economic, political and behavioral freedom of Stage Five. The Stage Five belief in freedom would be expressed in a principle such as, "No taxation without representation." The Declaration of Independence begins to flirt with Stage Six freedom when it mentions "the pursuit of happiness" as one of the inalienable rights that all men are endowed with by their Creator. However, it is likely that the authors of the Declaration had economic and political behavior in mind as the instruments of the pursuit of happiness rather than introspective activities.

Bellah is aware of the importance of freedom in Early Modern religion and at the same time implies that it is not a part of institutional Christianity:

However much the development of Western Christianity may have led up to and in a sense created the modern religious situation, it just as obviously is no longer in control of it. Not only has any obligation of doctrinal orthodoxy been abandoned by the leading edge of modern culture, but every fixed position has become open to question in the process of making sense out of the human situation. This involves a profounder commitment to the process I have been calling religious symbolization than ever before. 58

6. Postmodern Religion

A sixth stage of religious development is not included in Bellah's system, because he wrote about all of this over thirty years ago, and that is precisely the period of time when Postmodern Religion arose.

In brief, postmodernity is that type of thought that rebels against any totalizing understanding of reality. It rejects various attempts to "stop the show", "freeze the flux", and "release the truth-police." It seeks to put an end to the manipulable domination of instrumental reason. It dissents from the Enlightenment's concern with methodology and its neglect of historicity. Heidegger and Wittgenstein constitute the dual-headed Zeus from whom postmodernity springs.59

Postmodern religion is expressed by those individuals who pursue a spirituality of openness to existence that is not tied down to creeds that are too specific or to groups that are too well organized. It pursues objectives such as freedom, physical health and material sufficiency -- all of which are conceptualized as instrumentalities in the service of the spiritually growing self that has within it the means of its own completion. It may seek out therapy or a spiritual guide, but it does not join churches. It is a Stage Seven arrangement.

9.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF SPIRITUAL LIFE: HISTORY

There was history long before Herodotus started writing about it. It has always been with us. Recorded history begins when we can recall the past, but long before our ancestors had the cultural resources to write the past down and thus begin the art of history, they still retained their pasts in the tissues of their brains and their bodies.

1. The Kurgans

There are two main sources of Western culture: the Greeks and the Hebrews. They still work in dialectical tension with each other. Therefore it is important to note that before the Greeks there were the Kurgans, and before the Kurgans there were the Old Europeans. In fact the Dorians (the "Greeks" of Homer and Aeschylus et al.) were Kurgans who had learned how to write.

In The Chalice and the Blade -- Our History, Our Future (Harper & Row. San Francisco, 1987.) Riane Eisler made an argument that is now familiar and no longer controversial: Old European culture in the Neolithic Age -- starting around 8000 BCE -- had a highly developed agricultural organization, female goddess figures, social planning and non-warlike economies. It was much more peaceful and comfortable than its successor cultures. Old European culture was matrilineal, but not matriarchal. It was a "partnership culture".

But these cultures were wiped out by the repeated incursions of steppe pastorals, the Kurgans, that took place over a period of about fifteen hundred years. These were concentrated in three major waves [p. 44]:

Wave No. 1 -- 4300-4200 B.C.E.
Wave No. 2 -- 3400-3200 B.C.E.
Wave No. 3 -- 3000-2800 B.C.E.

The last surviving example of Old European culture was on Crete. The archeology of the great palace at Knossos gives more information than we have in any other example of it. Cretan Old European culture held out longer of course because of the island's inaccessibility. The end of the Old European Minoan culture of Crete takes place during the Mycenaean Period : 1450 B.C.E.- 1000 B.C.E. The Dorians burned down the great palace at Knossos in the eleventh century B.C.E.

Two salient characteristics of the Kurgan cultures were the centrality of violence in their economies and their pre-occupation with death. They were also of course patriarchal, highly stratified, practiced slavery, and subjugated women. The Old Europeans did not appear to make a very big deal about death, but the extremely elaborate funerary practices of the Kurgans -- especially for their chiefs -- expended great energy in trying to "overcome" death.

Eisler compares the "values" of these two cultural groups, and finds the Old European group "superior". While this may be true in some retrospective and abstract sense, it is not true ecologically. The "morally" lower culture ecologically replaced the morally higher culture. Eisler does not appear to grasp the crucially important fact that the violent neolithic and bronze age cultures of the steppe were merely human survival mechanisms, just as the Old European cultures were. Only they were created in a different ecological niche.

It was not that the Kurgans decided to be violent because they were "bad" and went out of their way to annihilate the peoples living a thousand miles west of them. It was that these groups survived in the wilds of the steppe by engaging in certain child-rearing practices that promoted hostility, violence, insensitivity and lonliness. Those who engaged in these practices survived. Those who did not, did not. Then, once having set up a social system that lived by the sword, they proceeded to continue their quest for survival. And of course, when they overran the Old Europeans, the Old Europeans influenced them.

Eisler of course points out over and over again that the Old European cultures worshipped the goddess and the "female" forces of nature. But the question is, from where we stand now, do we believe that ultimate human reality is either male or female? Do we now "worship a goddess", or does Eisler propose that we would be more advanced if we did worship a goddess?

I don't think so. I think Eisler does grasp that ultimate human reality is neither male nor female, and it is in connecting with that reality that spiritual advancement occurs. Somehow the descendants of Kurgans became able to do that. We might even ask whether it was in fact possible for the peaceful, comfortable Old European cultures ever to come to the discovery of the neither-male-nor-female source of human existence? (It is of course a question that cannot be answered empirically.) Granted that they seemed to have a certain serenity about death, was that a lack of consciousness or a largeness of consciousness? I don't think we know.

But the central question is, in spite of the terrible practices of the Kurgan cultures and their obvious inferiority to Old European cultures in regard to certain human values, they are the only ancestors we have. It is their cultural traditions that we have to work with. I think we have to conclude that there was in the Kurgan culture the seed of something "higher." This is the dialectical view: this violent, lonely, insensitive psyche of the Kurgans produced its own antithesis. It did after all produce the Acropolis, Heraclitus, Sappho, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. They all had their limitations, of course, but they did rise to considerable heights of human achievement. We are still indebted to them.

The tribal, warrior cultures of the steppe pastorals continued to populate Europe until the migrations stopped in about the eleventh century. Franks, Angles, Saxons, Germans, Normans, Goths, et al., ended up settling in those portions of the continent that have become the modern nation-states of the twentieth century. They brought with them their child rearing practices. We do not of course have anthropological data going back two thousand years on the details of those practices, but we do have data on the results and on one modern phase of them. The results are continuous warfare and bloodshed throughout the whole period, and the one modern phase is the German child-rearing manuals of the early twentieth century discussed by the Swiss psychiatrist Alice Miller.

2. The Hebrews

The contribution of the people of the Bible to Western culture is a subject about which whole libraries have been written and I have no intention of trying to review that literature now. I just want to make three points for the present.

First, the Hebrew contribution is elemental, profound, ineradicable. It is also non-Kurgan. We find it in such Western peculiarities as linear time (not cyclic), one life (not reincarnation), and body-spirit integration.

Second, the intuition of the transcendence of the human condition is a Hebrew contribution that is still pitted in dialectical tension over against the Kurgan obsession with death. This is also the intuition that grounds the proposition that "all humans are created equal".

Third, the Jesus part of the Hebrew legacy is obviously of crucial importance. I will discuss it more formally after we have had a chance to soak ourselves in the developmental reality of Christian culture. To that subject we now turn. It is the story of what I like to call "the Augustinian Arrangement."

3. The Early Christians

The early Christians started their community life with a strong sense of psychic discontinuity with their previous religious-emotional state. Something about their encounter with Jesus put them into an altered state of consciousness vis-à-vis the state of consciousness they had experienced before they became Christians.

In the letters attributed to Paul of Tarsus, there is repeated reference to this experience. He is continually contrasting the condition of Christians before their conversion with their condition after conversion, and by extension, the condition of Christians versus the condition of non-Christians. Here are a few citations:

Rom. 3:9-12. What then? Are we better than they? Not at all; for we have already charged that both Jews and Greeks are all under sin; as it is written, " There is none righteous, not even one; There is none who understands, There is none who seeks for God; All have turned aside, together they have become useless; There is none who does good, There is not even one."

Rom. 8:7, ... the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so.

Cor. 2:14: But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised.

Eph. 2:1-3: And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.

2 Cor. 4:4 ... The god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving, that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

In a passage that is probably the best known of all, in Romans 7, Paul ruminates on his own compulsions. The name he gives to the ego is "my true self" and the name he gives to the unconscious is "sin": "When I act against my will, then it is not my true self doing it, but sin which lives in me." That is, the ego and the unconscious are pre-scientifically labeled and a war between them is identified in which the ego is the weaker of the two protagonists. Carl Rogers could have done wonders for Paul.

But Elaine Pagels notes that in this earliest stage of Christianity the weakness of the natural self was remedied by becoming a Christian. Baptism transformed converts from their former state as "children of necessity and ignorance ... to become children of choice and knowledge," washed clean of sin, illuminated, and "by our deeds too found to be good citizens and keepers of the commandments." 60 The result was a view of the Christian psyche as spiritually competent:

Gregory of Nyssa concludes that "the soul immediately shows its royal and exalted character, far removed as it is from the lowliness of private station, in that it owns no master, and is self-governed, ruled autocratically by its own will." Besides dominion over the earth and animals, this gift of sovereignty conveys the quality of moral freedom: "Preeminent among all is the fact that we are free from any necessity, and not in bondage to any power, but have decision in our own power as we please; for virtue is a voluntary thing, subject to no dominion. Whatever is the result of compulsion and force cannot be virtue."61

But this personal integrity was not a characteristic of human nature as such. It was the result of conversion to Christianity. It was also a self-concept held by small, closely-knit and persecuted minority. Everybody who was a Christian in these early days came to the group very highly motivated.

4. The Augustinian Arrangement

When the social status of Christianity changed from being a small persecuted minority to an approved majority, this created a demographic foundation for a shift in the Christian sense of self. By the early fifth century, when Augustine was in his prime as a theologian, Christianity had been the established religion in the Roman Empire for a hundred years. There were forms of Christianity such as the Gnostics and the Antinomians whose belief-systems and practices clearly expressed different self-concepts than that of the majority of Christians. There were many nominal Christians whose behavior was not exemplary. Bishops were beginning to identify with those in charge of public order and noticing that baptism and church membership did not make men reliably virtuous.

Consequently a powerful political concern for mechanisms of social control started to arise within Christianity. Elaine Pagels gives a detailed account of the outcome of those concerns in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. In Adam, Eve and the Serpent she pays particular attention to how the debate between Augustine and the Pelagians contributed to their resolution.

Now, whereas Pagels' book is a brilliant historical ethnography of the period, as a specimen of that kind of scholarship, it simply presents the events on their own terms. Therefore we can now include it as a component of our knowledge-base, use it as a platform, and step back from it to analyze those events on our terms. For we know a lot more about human nature than either Augustine or Julian of Eclanum did. We know more about history, more about time itself, and in particular we know more about the human psyche.

All religious systems have three main instrumentalities with which to support the self-structure of a particular stage of development. These are (1) right-brain and mid-brain oriented symbolic practices, including religious ritual, (2) left-brain oriented theory, i.e., theology, and (3) external, social mechanisms of behavioral control. The form of these instrumentalities in the Augustinian Arrangement included (1) the ritual of the Eucharist and the symbolism of the all-powerful parent (Our Holy Mother the Church and Our Holy Father the Pope), (2) a theory of spiritual reality that divided the world into two distinct parts: "nature" on the one hand and "grace" on the other, and (3) a behavior enforcing bureaucracy centered on the papacy and local bishops.

The Mass is Prozac

From the very first days of Christianity its members gathered regularly in the meal commemorating the Last Supper mentioned in all four gospels. In very early texts it was referred to as the "agapé". In the middle ages it came to be called the Eucharist. In contemporary Catholicism it is known as the Mass, and among Protestants as the communion service. It is in fact one of the most brilliant pieces of social engineering the world has ever seen, but it is also thoroughly developmental in structure, and the product of a stage-specific misunderstanding of the food-references of Jesus in the gospel narratives.

After the Edict of Constantine in 313, this ritual rapidly became the central gathering for Christians. The building of Romanesque churches all over Europe started in the eighth century, followed by the great Gothic cathedrals. In the middle ages the monstrance was adapted from tribal practices, and the circular bread, the "host", was placed in it because the masses of people needed something to fix their eyes on. The Eucharist became a Christian mandala. (A Jungian would note that the circle is a symbol of the ego, the boundary of consciousness vis-à-vis the sea of the unconscious.)

Attending Mass in the cathedrals was a powerful trance-induction technology. The modern expression "hocus-pocus" in fact comes from the Mass. It is what the words of the consecration of the host --"Hoc est enim corpus meum." -- must have sounded like from the nave of those immense, vaulted structures. Kneeling with the hands folded in front of the chest is a fetal or infantile bodily posture. Communion was received with eyes closed, head tilted back, mouth open, tongue out. What organ of nurture might you expect to receive in that position? The sounds of organ music and Gregorian chant, the shape of the space enclosed by gothic arches, the quality of light through stained-glass windows, the smells of beeswax and incense, the effect of periods of silence while kneeling with eyes closed, are all capable of being reminiscent of the womb. And so the Mass constitutes a regressive hypnotic state that recaptures the third trimester of fetal experience.

Exposure to this experience began in early childhood, and by the time a person reached the age of seven or so, the cues for entering the womb-and-infancy state of consciousness were so well learned that people began to go under long before they actually enter the building and experience the performance of the ceremony. All they would have to do is think about what they are about to do, and they would begin to go under. The process merely deepens as they go through the activity known as "going to church."

So, the purpose of the Mass is to produce a certain state of consciousness, that is, a certain state of emotions. During the centuries of its use, it provided an artificially-induced trance-state to support an ego structure struggling with the repressed fears and pain of traumatic child-rearing practices. And it worked. People grew. It was a pedagogical device of immense benefit in building up the ego structures that carry the personality and the social group beyond the immersion in nature of shamanistic tribal magic, into a wider mental and social world.

In the middle of the fifteenth century (1440), Christianity settled on a theory that explained the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. It was the theory of transubstantiation. That theory uses Aristotle's notions of substance and accidents. It says that the "substance" of Jesus is present "under the accidents" of bread and wine. But there is a very simple logical problem. It is that "being present" is an "accident" in the Aristotelian logic on which the theory is based. So, the "substance" of Jesus without its own accidents still lacks its own whereness. It can't be said to be "there."

But logic was never the main point. It was always rhetoric, that is to say, emotions. That is, "transubstantiation" is one of those cases of theological doublethink that are omnipresent in the history of Christian thought, as it tried to put back together a self that it had sundered in its distinction between nature and grace. Transubstantiation was one of those brilliantly clever moves of the mind that a traumatized psyche uses to support an emotionally necessary choice. The choice in this case was to experience the deeply regressive state that all "presence of god" rituals induce.

These rituals mobilize those endogenous opioids that trauma researchers talk about. By tranquilizing the parts of the psyche that hold the pain -- thought-processes and belief-systems -- they enable the parts of the psyche that can release the pain -- the somatic senses that reside in the brain stem and the associated parts of "the reptilian brain" -- to do their job. The result is existential relief, growth, a more integrated and healthy psyche. The Mass was medieval Prozac: a top-of-the-line serotonin re-uptake inhibitor.

We noted in the previous chapter Ken Wilber's observation about "mana":

The human being has drives that express the need for those various environments: physical needs (food, water, air, shelter), emotional needs (feeling, touch-contact, sex), mental-egoic needs (interpersonal communication, reflexive self-esteem, meaning), spiritual needs (God-communion, depth), and so on. It is as if there were levels of "food" or "mana"-- physical food, emotional food, mental food, spiritual food. Growth and development are simply the process of adapting to, and learning to digest, subtler and subtler levels of food, with each stage of growth marked by a phase-specific adaptation to a particular type of food.62

Now, if this in fact the case, and if Jesus of Nazareth was indeed a spiritual person of the caliber we suspect him to be, then he would certainly have understood that. Therefore when he is recorded as saying that "My flesh is food indeed ... my blood is drink indeed ..." he would have simply been referring to the fact that he was bodily present in history, in the flesh, and indicating that this presence is important to remember.

This would have been an extremely important message for his followers. For they like all other humans would be seriously tempted to leave their bodies once they started to discover the out-of-body states the psyche is capable of when it starts to pursue advanced introspective disciplines. Out-of-body experiences were at the heart of the Albigensian sect and the reason why it terrified the King of France into sending Simon de Montfort south to eliminate it by genocide. They appear to be at the heart of the gnostic quest for enlightenment, and the neo-Hindu monism of Bubba Free John. The Hindu notion of "bliss" -- which has gained a certain currency in "new age" spiritual circles -- also seems to be a name for a dissociative, out-of-body state.

So the question of whether spiritual growth will stay in the body or try to leave it behind is basic and not academic. Everywhere in spiritual disciplines today, the choice is being experimented with. Therefore the food allusions of Jesus in his instructions about the Eucharist are simply a very powerful position-taking about which way the path of health really goes. It is as if Jesus was saying, "O.k., when I am gone, you are going to start wondering if I was ever really here. So, this bread is my body, this wine is my blood. I want you to keep eating it and drinking it as long as you need to be reminded to stay somatic in your spirituality. Whatever happens to you when you meditate, always return to the body, for it too is eternal, in a manner you cannot possibly understand with your neo-cortexes."

The Christian community never mistook the food metaphor of the Last Supper as a reference to the physical level of relational exchange. They never thought of the Eucharist as magical cannibalism. But they did use the food metaphor to mobilize those endogenous opioids (endorphins) the body possesses to help heal the psyche of the effects of traumatic child-rearing methods. This is what the belief in "the real presence" of Jesus in the Eucharist and the theory of transubstantiation did, brilliantly, for Christians at a certain stage of personality development.

The Theology of the Split Self

Pagels notes that the idealistic and politically unskilled John Chrysostom in Constantinople handled the issue of self-structure much differently than his contemporary Augustine in the West. His writings show that he remained convinced that being a Christian grants a certain degree of spiritual excellence and self-control, but that he was also aware that Christians in fact frequently did not live up to their calling. It turns out that Chrysostom may have been a little bit idealistic about the dynamics of the self. He was called to be Archbishop of Constantinople in 397 because of his renowned oratorical skills. But he had no "political skills" and so in six years he managed to alienate all factions of the ruling elite, was deposed, and died in exile in the year 403.

It remained for Augustine to enunciate the concept of human nature that would become the template for Christian consciousness right into the twentieth century. (Although Augustine's theology of the split self did not inform state policy after the Reformation, it was supported fully by both Luther and Calvin and has remained enshrined in Christian thought up to today.) Augustine significantly altered the spin put on the self-psychology of the earlier Christians. Whereas they thought that the grace of baptism did repair a defective human nature, Augustine found reality to be otherwise. Pagels says:

What Augustine says in simplest terms is this: human beings cannot be trusted to govern themselves because our very nature -- indeed all of nature -- has become corrupt as the result of Adam's sin.63

Whereas Chrysostom had defined his own role as that of advisor, not ruler, Augustine sees the bishop as ruling "in God's place." One of Augustine's favorite images for church leaders is that of the physician ministering to those who have been baptized but, like himself, are still sick, each one infected with the same ineradicable disease contracted through original sin.64

Before the Augustinian Arrangement could be firmly set in place, it had to dispose of an intellectual challenge posed by an obvious alternative: the integrated self in which ego and unconscious are a seamless whole. This was the position put forward by Pelagius, and defended by his follower Julian of Eclanum. Augustine debated Pelagius for ten years, and got him declared a heretic. He debated Julian for fifteen years and died in the year 430, before the matter was resolved. Christianity eventually took his side officially in the Council of Orange in 529.

In this contest the view of human nature as universally depraved gained the clear victory. On a personal level this is the weak ego position. The theoretical view had to be rooted in personal experience. On the one hand the ego is overwhelmed by dangerous and corrupt bodily and unconscious impulses (the id). On the other hand, it is also filled with guilt, that is, dominated by the super-ego. Pagels asks the question, "Why would anyone choose to feel guilty?"

On the personal level the answer is that only a modern ego could even ask Pagels' question. Augustine and those he spoke for did not experience guilt as a "choice." It was a given. That is how a lesser-developed ego handles the split-off elements of the self that lie in the unconscious. It is simply subject to them. It must defend. We must not be thrown off by Augustine's intellectual brilliance. Emotionally he was not a maturely-developed person.

On the social level, the answer is persuasively given by Pagels. It is essentially the "social control" or the "law and order" issue. Now that Christianity was in charge of running the Roman Empire, it had to be a good cop.

The reason why the views of Paul and Augustine won the debate in the fifth century was that their ego-structures represented the central tendency of the culture of the time. The vast majority of Europeans recognized them as speaking for all. They approved a theory of a divided self because they had an everyday experience of a divided self. (It was not the fully "divided self" of R. D. Laing's studies of schizophrenia, but still a self with enough schizoid tendency to justify a sense of internal parts at war with one another.) Pelagius was "ahead of his time", extremely ahead of his time.

So, Christianity set up a regime of ritual, bureaucracy and a theory of universal guilt to control the dark forces of the unconscious and further strengthen the ego. In this regime, what we now call the ego was called "grace", and what we now call the repressed elements of the unconscious was called "nature" and "sin."

Bureaucracy

The ritual and theological components of the Augustinian Arrangement were supported by the unique bureaucratic achievement of the Papacy. In the New Testament and the writings of early Christian opinion-makers the Christian community appears as a close-knit collectivity that was interactively involved in defining its own world-view. But the subsequent centuries did not continue this activity. Those times had a very weak infrastructure for the interactive distribution of information. Literacy was not widely distributed. The written word was extremely limited in availability. All books had to be hand-written and therefore were to be found only in monasteries and the households of the wealthiest and most powerful classes of society. The scope of trade and commerce was limited. Tribal migrations continued to disrupt peaceful living until Charlemagne pacified the Eurasian frontier in the eighth and ninth centuries.

And so there grew up in western Europe a form of religious polity based on the mass distribution of pre-packaged bits of information about the core beliefs of Christianity. The regular performance of the Eucharist, often in buildings of stupefying grandeur, with its regular doling out of passages from the Bible, was the emotional lifeline that bound the population to its religion. In addition to ritual, there were also rules. The whole relationship of the clergy to the laity was modeled on a rather crassly paternalistic concept of a ruling elite with a passive, ignorant following. There was virtually no middle class.

By the time of Martin Luther, the selling of indulgences was a widely-practiced expression of this relationship. Indulgences were promises from the religious authorities that mythical punishments after death in a place with clocks on the walls, called Purgatory, would be reduced by specific amounts of time (e.g., seven years and seven quarantines). They were obtainable for performing certain pious acts such as saying Hail Marys, or for the payment of small sums of money. In the absence of any widely established and consensual revenue collecting mechanisms for the Papacy, selling indulgences was a very popular papal fund-raiser. They were promoted like modern ad campaigns. They worked so well that they were deemed good collateral for extremely large loans to Popes.

In the time of Luther, Pope Leo the Tenth mounted an indulgence selling program to finance the construction of St. Peter's basilica in Rome. It was marketed aggressively, and was in fact the occasion for Luther's posting of his Ninety-Five Theses in Wittenberg that marked the beginning of the end of the Augustinian Arrangement.

The End of the Augustinian Arrangement

The Augustinian Arrangement continued for over a thousand years uninterrupted. I was going to say "unchallenged", but that would not be correct. It was actually challenged frequently. Heresies were always cropping up, and always having to be put down, with the military force of the state if necessary. But until Martin Luther's objection to indulgences in 1517, none of the challenges was successful. But Luther's was, because the regime of the previous thousand years had finally done its job, the social conditions were present, and the strength of the average ego in Europe was ready for a change in religious practices. The continent was ready for greater independence in meaning-giving.

The Protestant Reformation changed all three pieces of the Augustinian Arrangement, but each one differently. Its most important and irreversible impact was on the Roman bureaucracy. That civil authority was essentially dismantled. No longer would there be centralized control over spiritual thought in Europe. Centralized control was replaced by local control. In ritual and religious imagery, it modified the parent-child relationship between clergy and laity, but did not remove it. And in theology, rather than replacing the theory of a split self, it actually strengthened it.

On the macro-political level the Reformation immediately restricted the power of the Papacy. The secular princes of northern Germany quickly moved to Luther's support and the right to practice the new orthodoxy of Protestantism was soon recognized by the politically pragmatic Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. (He needed all the help he could get in fighting the Turks.) These arrangements continued their natural growth until they were finally confirmed by the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. This was "the first international agreement which was based formally on a pluralistic view." 65 Even the resolutely Catholic sentiments of the Holy Roman Emperor were no match for the dictates of political pragmatism. The Pope was deemed much too intransigent to be asked to attend the Diet of Augsburg, or any of the numerous other political negotiations that were made in Europe during the next 100 years. It is undoubtedly this conflict between political pragmatism and religious rigidity that transformed the whole concept of public wisdom in Europe and institutionalized the regime that is now known as "secularism." While Popes and bishops and religious zealots of all stripes were busy expostulating and condemning, "politicians" were beginning to enforce the judgment that religious problems are not likely to be resolved by force.

On the micro-religious level Luther also changed the governance of the psyche.

In ritual, the passively consumed Mass was modified in various ways. Jaroslav Pelikan notes that Martin Luther's central innovation in liturgy and worship was his "recovery of the role of the sermon in the service."66 Luther said that "the principal purpose of any worship service is the teaching and preaching of the word of God." By this he meant an exposition of the meaning of the Bible. And so in fact the sermon replaced Communion as the central element in Protestant ritual. The Roman Catholic Mass of the time required no activity of the worshipper, and there was even a formal theological position that justified passivity. It was the theory that the fundamental efficacy of the ritual in "giving grace" operated "ex opere operato", that is, by virtue of the work being performed, independently of the spiritual condition of the performer (the priest). So, the shift in ritual performance was from a rite that regressed its members to very early childhood, even pre-birth, to a less formal, more interpersonal production that regressed its participants to a much later age of childhood, probably the ages of about seven to fourteen. Although the womb-like architecture of the cathedrals was forsaken for plainer structures (especially for the Calvinists), the use of interior spatial arrangements and music still achieved a state of trance.

In church polity, some democratic practices were introduced, such as the rights of local congregations to choose their pastors. Lutherans and Calvinists still retained the parent-child relationship between the clergy and the laity, but they allowed the parent to get personally closer to his dependents and allowed the dependents a more advanced degree of autonomy.

So, in both polity and ritual, Protestantism did clearly move forward in ego development, as Bellah notes, to accept more of its "empirical ambiguity."

That ambiguity showed up most forcefully in Protestant theology. The psychodynamics are fascinating. It was as if history is the human race in therapy. When Protestants discontinued using the hypnotic techniques of ritual that suppressed the unconscious wounds of child-rearing for Catholics, more of the effects of traumatic child-rearing practices could surface. They showed up as stark descriptions of the worthlessness of the ego. While this Protestant theology looks ever so much like a step backwards in the development of consciousness, it is in therapeutic terms a step forward. It represents the surfacing of repressed materials. As long as the sense of worthlessness of the self is suppressed, it cannot be worked with. But once it is out in the open, it is subject to the process of conscious reflection and change.

The Split Self of Protestant Theology

Luther and Calvin were in substantial agreement on the structure of the self. Human nature is in a "fallen" state due to original sin, and so no one can do anything to gain "salvation" by their own efforts.

[I note as an aside, that in all the discussions of "salvation" the word for this state of well-being after death was the Latin word salus, which is also the word for health. It would appear that at this time in history, there was not a very well articulated concept of physical or emotional health such as we have today. However, if one were to translate Latin passages that contain the word salus by using the word "health" instead of the word "salvation", one would clearly see that the theological opinions about an after-death state of well-being were projections of before-death experiences.]

To obtain salvation, there must be an intervention of God from outside the self -- this is a "supernatural" force -- and the name given to this extrinsic intervention is "grace". One topic under which this theory of a divided self was discussed was that of the freedom of the will. Both Protestant and Catholic theologians devoted literally hundreds of books and thousands of discussions and debates to the relationship between Divine grace and human free will, but like "all the king's horses and all the king's men" they could never put back together again the divided self they accepted as their basic premise.

In Catholicism the discussion about free will went on for well over a hundred years. One phase of it was a ninety-year debate between Dominicans and Jesuits who taught theology in Rome that was ended by Papal Decree in 1630. (He told them not to call each other heretics.) It was called the debate over "Efficacious Grace." Another part of it continued in France into the early 1700s and involved the Jesuits, the Jansenists, the mathematician-theologian Blaise Pascal and the convent of Port Royal in Paris. No consensus ever resulted from these exercises.

Martin Luther devoted a major piece of writing to the subject. The Bondage of the Will was his response to the opinions of Erasmus. Luther's translator notes:

To put it very succinctly, Erasmus thinks essentially along traditional Scholastic lines, while Luther does not. In spite of his well known distaste for Scholastic subtleties, Erasmus presupposes the metaphysical dualism of "nature" and "super nature" on which all Scholastic thinking rests, and in terms of which the relation between man and God, human nature and divine grace, is construed. Luther, on the other hand, takes much more serious a quite different dualism, namely, that of God and the devil.67

Psychodynamically, Calvinism's dualism was the same as Luther's. The Canon of Dort, written in 1618, accurately reflects it. It contains five theological points:
1. that fallen man was totally unable to save himself (Total Depravity)
2. that God's electing purpose was not conditioned by anything in man (Unconditional Election)
3. that Christ's atoning death was sufficient to save all men, but efficient only for the elect (Limited Atonement)
4. that the gift of faith, sovereignly given by God's Holy Spirit, cannot be resisted by the elect (Irresistible Grace)
5. that those who are regenerated and justified will persevere in the faith (Perseverance of the saints)

These 5 points give rise to the acronym "TULIP" as a symbol of Calvinist orthodoxy.

Thus all Protestant theology was agreed on a theory of the human condition that divided it into two parts. One part was under the control of the ego and not capable of attaining the fullness of health. The other part was capable of attaining this full "health" (i.e., salvation) but it came from a source outside the self. This theory had to be grounded in experience. This means two experiences. One is the natural experience of self as tempted by unconscious impulses, and the other is an altered state of consciousness experienced as free from forbidden impulses.

The Arminian Codicil

In the first hundred years of Protestantism there was one modification of this vision that would have fateful consequences for the later development of Christianity. It was the appearance of Arminianism.

James Arminius was a late sixteenth century Dutch cleric who started out as a perfectly orthodox Calvinist. He became an ordained pastor in Amsterdam in 1588. Since he was considered a very bright young talent, he was asked to rebut the heresies of another Calvinist in a public debate. In the course of preparing for the debate, he came to doubt the doctrine of unconditional predestination and to ascribe to man a certain degree of freedom in relation to the activity of grace.

The key difference between Arminius and the Calvinists was in regard to the second point of "TULIP": unconditional election. For the orthodox Calvinists, man is in the condition of total depravity, and so can do nothing for his own salvation. What happens is that God, for his own good reasons, sovereignly chooses which individuals he will save. "Unconditional" in this context means that there are no conditions that humans have to meet, including faith. Faith is the gift of God, and cannot be generated by man because it is a good work.

For the Arminians, divine election was "conditional". God's election of people to salvation is conditioned upon their faith response to the gospel. Arminians rejected the claim that faith is a work, since faith merely receives the gift that God offers. Those who trust Christ are predestined to be glorified in Christ. Both predestination and election are based on God's foreknowledge of our decision to trust Christ.

After Arminius' death, his followers set forth their views in 1610 in five articles called Arminian Articles of Remonstrance, which gave them the name 'Remonstrants'. The articles taught as follows:

1. God has decreed to save through Jesus Christ those of the fallen and sinful race who through the grace of the Holy Spirit believe in him, but leaves in sin the incorrigible and unbelieving.
2. Christ died for all men (not just for the elect), but no one except the believer has remission of sin.
3. Man can neither of himself nor of his free will do anything truly good until he is born again of God, in Christ, through the Holy Spirit.
4. All good deeds or movements in the regenerate must be ascribed to the grace of God but his grace is not irresistible.
5. Those who are incorporated into Christ by a true faith have power given them through the assisting grace of the Holy Spirit to persevere in the faith. But it is possible for a believer to fall from grace.

Now, this might seem like a very small difference to the untrained eye, but there lies concealed in the miniscule divergence in point number two a very small window for the entry of the healthy ego onto the religious scene.

The dispute soon became involved in politics. The Netherlands were divided between the supporters of "states rights", which included the wealthier merchant class (to which most Remonstrants belonged; there is that middle class again) and the national party (to which most Calvinists belonged). The National Party wished a national synod to decide the controversy. The states-rights party held that each province could decide its own religious affairs and resisted the proposal. By a coup d'etat the states-rights party was overthrown, its political leader was beheaded and the renowned scholar Hugo Grotius was condemned to life imprisonment, from which he later escaped.

Arminianism was unanimously rejected and condemned by the Synod of Dort and the Arminians were treated rather badly by our standards today. For refusing to subscribe to the Canon, some 200 ministers were deprived of their positions and eighty were banished from the country. Those who continued to minister were sentenced to life in prison. A period of persecution followed until 1632. At that time the state extended toleration to the group. It took until 1795 for the Remonstrants to be recognized in Holland as a legitimate church body.

A Calvinist historian notes: "As a theological system Arminianism tries to mediate between the supralapsarianism of Beza, who taught that God willed the fall of man in order to accomplish his decrees, and the Pelagian view, which denied original sin, regarding grace as unnecessary for salvation. Arminianism asserts a logical contradiction: on the one hand it affirms predestination and grace, while on the other hand denying it or gutting it of any real significance by asserting that it is conditional upon man's free will."68

But as we have noted, this "logical contradiction" is actually Orwellian doublethink. The Arminians were faced with a "total depravity" view that had the parental authority of consensual culture, and was supported by the physical force of the state. They thus circumvented it (unconsciously) by an ingenious semantic maneuver. In other words, they talked their way around it. It was a brilliant survival tactic. The orthodox Calvinists really wanted to kill them for this, but fortunately, a developmentally more advanced secularist state intervened. The key psychological point is that the Arminians "got" the ego. They had what contemporary psychotherapy calls "positive self-regard".

Wesleyan Experience

About a hundred years after the Arminians opened the door to positive self-regard, John Wesley turned it into a significant social movement. He placed a positive evaluation on a distinctive experience that has become archetypal for mainline Protestantism. Whereas the "high church" denominations still use a trance-induction technique very similar to Roman Catholicism's Mass, the "low-church" tradition achieves its experience of faith by the direct suggestion of a charismatic preacher. The following passages from two contemporary historians explain this:

On May 24, 1738, after he had been at Saint Paul's Cathedral and heard an anthem on the evangelical, "Pauline" 130th Psalm, John Wesley attended a [Moravian Brethren] meeting place on Aldersgate Street in London and felt his heart "strangely warmed." But not just that. He started the Methodist Societies to foster in others the warmed heart and the kind of Christian life which is its fitting outflow.

At a time when England was suffering from a dearth of experiential faith, when religion in this sense was often a laughing matter, John Wesley became the most strategic catalyst in effecting a revival of religion which transformed culture in basic ways and gained wide respect for experiential Christian faith.

One special aspect of Wesley's emphasis on religious experience was his teaching on the witness of the Spirit. In a sermon on this subject, and otherwise, he stresses this matter. He taught that there is a direct witness, in which the Holy Spirit inwardly assures of our acceptance with God in justification and of our entire sanctification; and that, also, and later, indirectly, the Holy Spirit witnesses to us of such matters by reminding that, in our lives, the fruits of justification or of entire sanctification are evident.

John M. Moore says, "John Wesley received an experience that night [at Aldersgate] that made him the greatest moral, social, and religious force of his century. That is the testimony of the historians.... Aldersgate Street led out into the fields where men lived, and he took the road and never grew weary of it."69

John Locke's theory of knowledge formed the intellectual grounding of the Wesleyan movement, lending to it the conviction that true knowledge came from sense perception along with reason. Thus the senses and the intellectual components of the process together make real knowledge possible. "Locke's rational empiricism (i.e., his epistemology of sense perception attended by induction and deduction) directly informs the religious 'epistemology' whereby Wesley claimed the saving faith he felt was his." ...... Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats owe something of their theory, and much of their practice, to the relation between John Wesley and John Locke. This mix, then, is English Romantic method".70

The Four Major Cultural Actors of the West

The socio-political result of all this historical development was the formation in post-Reformation Europe of four major cultural actors that started a complex fugue of emotional development involving Stages Four, Five and Six that still continues today.

One is the Arminian Protestants, with their positive self-regard and their confidence in the ego. Their validation of everyday emotional experience would lead them more and more into a comfortable alignment with science and law and the other instruments of secular culture. Arminian thinking would in fact win over as a practical matter many of those whose traditions began in the serious self-doubt of Luther and Calvin.

Second are the paradoxical Roman Catholics, fully engaged with reason on the one hand, and fully committed to a deeply hypnotic ritual and deeply childlike dependence on religious authority on the other. In America they would start out as non-intellectual and even anti-intellectual poorly educated workers, but, calling on resources that go back two thousand years, they would gradually work their way into a complex dialog with culture.

Third are the conservative Protestants. For distinctive historical and economic reasons they would continue to live out the negative self-image and the war with secular culture of the original Protestant innovators. They would maintain the conflict between reason and positive self-regard on the one hand and the theology of Total Depravity on the other. They would remain in a Stage Three-Four arrangement. Their religious imagery would retain a highly mythical dimension. They would continue to practice the highly emotional ritualism characteristic of weak egos.

Fourth are the Stage Five/Six secularists: the rationalists, the deists, the pragmatists. Their numbers have always seemed to be relatively small in Western society, and yet they have also always retained the role of a ruling elite. They would continue to show confidence in the self and the human mind. Subsequent events would show that the Enlightenment's confidence in the intellect alone to guide the destinies of the human race was naïve. The Stage Five cultivation of reason that started in the early sixteenth century would pass through a Stage Six dark night of the soul in the mid-twentieth century. This is commonplace in the encounter with existence. It often brings the dark night of the soul before it becomes comfortable communion.

But we must emphasize that all four of these cultural actors are "spiritual forces", including the secularists. Just because they do not trust ecclesiastical authorities or the language of religion does not mean their concerns are not spiritual. In order to understand what their concerns actually are, we must look at the whole body of thought and action attributable to them, as we began to do in Chapter 7.

PART THE THIRD:
CHRISTIANITY IN AMERICA

10.
THE MAINLINE PROTESTANT CHURCHES

Using the imagery of three segments of American religiousness -- a non-affiliated "left", a moderate-liberal "center", and a conservative "right"," -- the sixties brought a massive re-alignment of their numbers and cultural position in American society. Broadly speaking it was a "decline of the middle."

In the political and cultural alignments before the sixties, the churches of higher socioeconomic groups tended to find themselves in competition with churches of lower socioeconomic status. Thus northern Baptists, Presbyterians, Episcopals and Congregationalists were churches with leadership status in American society, and Methodists, Catholics and Southern Baptists were churches aligned with more populist social forces. But in the sixties the class alignment of churches became less important than their cultural alignment.

One student of religious involvement in American politics put it this way: "The new cultural politics in 1992 differs from past alignments in kind rather than degree. The historic conflict between coalitions of rival religious traditions is being replaced by a new division between more-religious and less-religious people across those traditions." This leads to a cultural and political division in America between "the religious right and the secular left."71

The three segments of American religion are descendents of cultural forces created in the sixteenth century. (See Chapter 9) Each one has its central developmental task and concern, and the movement of people among them represents the movement of persons in a free marketplace of meaning.

The "middle" is made up of the mainline Protestants and those complicated Catholics. Both of these groups have accepted the spiritual necessity of full engagement with reason, but they both have also hedged their bets and given themselves a psychic out in a religious experience they call "faith." Thus, their relationship to reason and secular culture is ambiguous and ambivalent. They perceive their experiences of "faith" as a wisdom that is higher than reason and in continual tension with it in the lives of individuals and social institutions. But the middle is apparently comfortable with this tension. It finds its very identity in the role of negotiating between these two principles. So, it is not at war with culture; it is in vaguely unresolved tension with it.

The conservatives/fundamentalists/evangelicals are still that weak-ego, negative self-regard, defensive Stage Three-Four exercise: They are literal in their linguistic practices, mechanistic in their rules, and rigid in their roles. They are not introspective and they do not meditate. They are in denial about the existence of their unconscious, and so it is always sneaking up on them and causing trouble (e.g., Jim Bakker, and Jimmy Swaggert).

The Nones and Others are the ones that we know the least about. They are of course the "secularist" explorers of Stage Six, but then we still do not know very much about this exercise. That makes them a very mixed bag, but it is a distinct disservice to think of them merely as atheists or irreligious.

In a period of history that is already working on Stages Six and Seven, we would expect Stage Six to be the emergent demographic, Stage Five to be the most unstable, with a firm, defensive and truculent Stage Three-Four minority bringing up the rear.

The overall numbers support this view. There was an increase in the Nones-Others, an increase in the social presence of conservatives, and a decrease in "the middle". This is not a simple "secularization" model, but a more complicated, more interesting "decline of the middle" model. The old pattern of religious affiliation in America, before the sixties, was a massive middle sector with a leadership role, a small group of conservatives, and a still smaller fringe of Nones and Others. Now the pattern is one of three major groupings with a weak middle and increasing mutual hostility between seculars and conservatives.

Now obviously I do not think that this "secular left" is necessarily less religious at all. The "Nones" may have a high degree of spiritual interest and competence that is simply not served by traditional religious organizations. I also agree with NORC that the actual numbers of conservatives or fundamentalists in America probably has not increased very much. But they are much better organized than in the past, more self-aware, more powerful in the cultural arena. They were always there. It's just that now they are a force to be reckoned with.

Not all social scientists agree that the sixties were a watershed of change. There seem to be four schools of thought about the matter: stability extremists, stability moderates, change extremists and change moderates.

Stability Extremists

The stability extremists say, "Well, nothing major happened. It was limited. It was an episodic event with no long-term results." This would be the position of the priest-sociologist Andrew Greeley.

On the one hand, Greeley is correct in pointing out that religious beliefs in the United States do appear to be constant during this whole period of time. Beliefs in God, an afterlife, heaven and hell and the like do not change much. But that in itself only raises interesting questions about the relationship between religious beliefs on the one hand and church membership on the other. But stability of reported beliefs does not automatically mean stability of church membership and attendance.

Greeley grumbles about social scientists who have "a vested interest in the decline of religion."

Those who themselves are not religious -- frequently having broken with the religious affiliations and practices of their childhood -- find, in what seems to them to be the decline of religious commitment and devotion, proof that their own decision was the correct one, a mere anticipation of where everyone else is headed.72

That of course would be me. This is an interesting ad hominem argument, and it cuts both ways. There might also be those who have a vested interest in the stability of religion because they have not broken with the religious affiliations and practices of their childhood because of childish fears which they cannot overcome.

Greeley resorts to smoke and mirrors to defend stability. He notes that the percentage of members of Protestant churches who attend church regularly has remained pretty constant for seventy years at a level of about 37 percent. And he also notes that there was indeed a drop in weekly attendance by Catholics of about 16 percent between 1968 and 1975 (from 63 percent to 47 percent). (We might add to this the observation of Roof & McKinney in 1987 that the drop in Catholic weekly attendance was from 74 percent in 1958 to 51 percent in 1982, a 23 percent decline.)

Then he concludes with his stability message by saying that "The 'religious change' of the late 1960s was a Catholic change, and it is over. The two lines representing Catholic and Protestant attendance continue to march across the page, separated by 10 percentage points now (37 percent versus 47 percent) instead of 25, but still persistent."73

He fails to note in this comment that the liberal Protestants on his "page" are losing membership steadily and so their "stable" 37 percent attendance figure represents steadily decreasing numbers of actual people, and that on the Catholic side the historical difference up to the 1950s was between a 37 percent Protestant attendance rate and a 74 percent Catholic rate, a difference of 37 rather than 25 percentage points.

Greeley derives spurious support for his stability model in another comment: "With the exception of the dramatic Catholic change between 1968 and 1975 (an episodic event), patterns of American Church attendance are remarkably stable, straight lines with only one deviation, and that ended by 1975. Secularization that is not."74

Now I submit that it is disingenuous for a person of Greeley's statistical sophistication to call a 16 percent drop in church attendance in six years "an episodic event", when the drop is not reversed in the immediately ensuing period of time. That is like calling the amputation of an arm "an episodic event." It is true that the surgery lasted only a few hours, but the effects were permanent. And the same must be said for the comment that the deviation "ended in 1975." Again, the analogy with amputation is apt. Indeed, the process of decreasing stopped, but the rate remained forever lower.

And that, mon vieux, I am afraid, is secularization.

Thus it seems much more accurate to summarize Greeley's data by saying that the religious change of the 1960s was indeed both a Protestant and a Catholic change and that one of the permanent results is that Catholic church attendance rates now look much more like Protestant rates than they ever did in the first sixty years of the twentieth century. Greeley actually understands this at some points in his discussion. He says that the story of the 1960s is "of American Catholics going through their own quiet revolution of deciding to remain Catholic on their own terms." But overall, he is at pains to make the numbers prove stability.

We might speculate on the reasons for Andrew Greeley's bias toward religious stability in the American scene. Surely it has something to do with the war within himself between the part of him that remained religiously stable (his persistence in the Catholic priesthood) and the part of him that was exposed to massive evidence of religious change.

But pace Greeley, an extreme stability model does not fit the numbers, and the decline of the middle model does.

Stability Moderates

Professional pollsters and survey researchers with no close ties to churches make up the moderate stability school. One leading member of this group is the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago. These highly-respected bean-counters refuse to be distracted from their methodological rigor by any alarmist or ideological Chicken Littles running around blathering about change. This perspective actually seems very healthy and deserves a full hearing. But on the other hand it should be noted that in their attention to methodological niceties the NORC researchers do sometimes seem to be out of touch with the acute observations of those who are actually experiencing change. And so NORC represents one useful pole in the discussion, not the final truth.

The conclusion of a recent piece of work of theirs deserves to be cited in full. (All italics have been added by me.)75

Basic religious change has been glacial; slow, steady, and ultimately massive. The proportion Protestant has been declining throughout this century at about .003 per annum since WWII. Jews, who gained ground early in the century, have also been declining since the 1940s at about .0006 per annum. Catholics have been gaining ground throughout the century at about .0010-.0015 per annum. Others (most Orthodox and non-Judeo-Christian religions) have shown no clear increase, but appear to be gaining adherents over the last decade at least (Table 34). As a result of these changes, the ratio of Protestants to Catholics has fallen from over 4.1:1 around the turn of the century to about 2.7:1 today. During this same period the proportion without any religious affiliation has also been rising. While the net trend has been upwards at about .0014-.0027 per annum, it has not been a simple, monotonic increase and has varied by house. The number without religion appears to have dipped from the late forties to the late fifties before increasing until the mid 1970s. From then to the present the proportion None has apparently remained constant. Signs of a large and growing segment of token religionists or of the unchurched are limited. Church membership shows little change and church attendance among Protestants has remained stable for the last 30 years. Among Catholics, however, significant declines in mass attendance occurred as well as smaller slides in congregational membership.

Overall these indicators provide at best mixed support for the secularization hypothesis (Hammond, 1985; Hadden, 1987; Wuthnow, 1976). The secularizing changes have been 1) small in magnitude, 2) intermittent in time, and 3) restrictive in scope. However, whenever there has been change, it has been in the secular direction. This same complex pattern in general also holds for attitudinal and belief measures (Smith, 1990c).

A second much ballyhooed change has been the growth of Fundamentalist churches and more recently the rise of the New Religious Right. Despite the impressive evidence from church membership statistics, it does not appear that Fundamentalists have appreciably changed their share of the population either across generations or in recent years. This also is basically substantiated by attitudinal trends (Smith, 1990c). What has occurred in recent years is the politicization of the Fundamentalists into a powerful, organized force.

The typically downplayed changes in major religions and the exaggerated changes in Nones and Fundamentalists have resulted from a complex balancing of natural increase, net migration, and religious mobility. Religions have grown from a varying mixture of these factors and practically no faith has ranked either high or low on all three factors. More often than not, the demographic factors of births and deaths, and immigration and emigration rather than the winning or losing of souls, account for most church growth or decline. Religious mobility is an important process, but with the exception of gains for the Nones, its net impact has been moderate and slow acting.

Like other long-term structural changes (such as the shift to the Sun Belt, the decline in the manufacturing sector, or the aging of the population) religious redistribution has slowly, but surely changed the social profile of America. While changes to the right (rising Fundamentalism) and to the left (rising atheism) [sic] have both been accented in popular and scholarly works, the biggest changes have been occurring in the middle as the relative share of Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and now apparently Others has shifted over the last half century. In particular, the decline of mainline Protestant denominations in general and of United Methodists in particular, has been draining the moderate middle, while Catholics have replenished the depleted center.

Let us add the following notes to this summary of the moderate stability view:

1. Overall it is conceded that the changes are "massive".
2. The main change is "in the middle" and the main part of that is the change in the proportion of Protestants to Catholics. Now there are relatively fewer Protestants than there were forty years ago.
3. The "Other-None" category has also grown significantly. Although the signs for a "large and growing segment of token religionists or the unchurched" are deemed to be "limited", evidence of religious mobility in this direction does indeed exist, and it is more than "moderate and slow acting."
4. With regard to the growth of Conservative and Fundamentalist Protestants, NORC clearly does not believe "the evidence from church membership statistics" and does consider its own religious preference data to be more reflective of reality.

Given the methodological conservatism of NORC's data handling standards, it is probably not a good idea to totally disbelieve the membership statistics of the Conservatives and Fundamentalists. Granted that a substantial part of their "growth" is in media skills and political/financial mobilization, they might also be counting better and attracting more active participation from their natural demographic base instead of just lying. In any case, an increase in mobilization is socially just as significant as an increase in numbers, and so for the sake of the analysis we shall pursue, it is valid to conclude that the "much ballyhooed" growth of the fundamentalists is a genuine social fact.

One more little sociological quibble needs to be addressed here. In 1994 three sociologists in Ohio published a study of church attendance by going to churches on Sunday and observing the number of people actually attending church and then comparing these head-counts with the figures that the results of standard survey reports would predict. (The standard survey technique is to ask individuals a battery of questions over the phone.)

The Ohio study concluded that actual church attendance is only 52 to 59 percent of what standard surveys report. If this study is correct, it would mean that weekly attendance at Church for Protestants is more on the order of 19 to 22 percent of church membership, and for Catholics it is 24 to 27 percent.76

When this study came out, Andrew Greeley publicly branded it as "a sloppy piece of work", and there was considerable controversy among sociologists. But soon enough the staff of NORC got very professional about the matter and tested their own survey instruments.77 Their conclusion was that there are indeed "telescoping" and "social desirability" influences on standard telephone surveys. That is, respondents do sometimes telescope the time-frame of the question and report an attendance that was more than a week ago as an attendance in the last seven days. And respondents are influenced in their answers by what they perceive to be the "social desirability" of more frequent vs. less frequent church attendance. They also might count watching a religious service on television as "attending church."

Therefore, the NORC researchers concluded that some revision of the standard survey instruments is called for, and that the actual level of overreporting of previous instruments was a ratio of about .75 rather than the .52 to .59 of the Ohio study. This would make actual weekly attendance levels for Protestants and Catholics today 28 percent and 36 percent respectively.

This does not significantly alter the overall picture of change in American religion over the past forty years. It only means that all along fewer people were going to church than the polls were showing, and that right now on any given Sunday, probably about 20 percent of Americans are at church, rather than the 40 percent that was assumed for so many years.

To summarize the numerical side of the changes we are talking about, we can use this schematic table, in which the percentages are not claimed to be absolutely accurate, but rather symbolic of magnitudes and directions.

Percent of US Population

1955 1965 1975 1985 1995

1. Catholics (non-Hispanic)
(Hispanic) 20
5 20
6 20
6 17.5
6.5 16
8

2. Jews 5 4 3 2 1.5

3.Mainline Protestants
Episcopal Church
Presbyterians
United Church of Christ
Methodists
Disciples
Northern Baptists
Evangelical Luth. Church
Reformed 47 45 38 37 37

4. Conservative Protestants
Assemblies of God
7th Day Adventists
Churches of Christ
Church of God
Church of the Nazarene
Mo-Wis Synod Lutherans
Mormons
Southern Baptists
Independent Fundamentalist
Pentecostal, Holiness groups 22 22 22 25 25

6. Seculars and Others 3 4 10 11 13.5

(And we might add parenthetically that all these changes occurred in a period of time (1960-1990) when the overall population of the United States increased by 40 percent .)

Change Extremists

Theologically more conservative commentators, whether they are social scientists or clergy, emphasize discontinuity and change. They write "panic" books with titles like The Empty Church: The Suicide of Liberal Christianity (by Episcopalian Thomas C. Reeves, New York, The Free Press, 1996). It is evident that the changes they are experiencing both personally and socially (i.e., in the decline of their particular church affiliation) are indeed extreme and real.

A close look at their language shows that they are actually conservative in their personal theologies but somehow caught by historical circumstances in a denomination whose theology is much more liberal than their personal beliefs. They are invested in a fundamental suspicion of the self, a defensive stance against secular culture, and a cultivation of exclusivist in-group associations.

A crypto-conservative alarm was sounded within the mainline denominations at the end of the 1960s. It was then that talk began about "the plight of the liberal churches". In 1972 Dean M. Kelley published a book called Why Conservative Churches Are Growing that provided a perspective that has continued to influence the discussion right up to the present day. Kelley divided churches into three categories:

1. "The most exclusivist and anti-ecumenical" churches: Black Muslims, Jehovah's Witnesses. Evangelicals and Pentecostals, Orthodox Jews, Churches of Christ, Mormons, Seventh-Day Adventists, Church of God, Christian Scientists.
2. Larger churches that were less exclusivist but still clearly defined enough to provide a distinctive identity for their members: Southern Baptists, Missouri Synod Lutherans, American Lutheran Church, Roman Catholic Church, Conservative Jews, Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox.
3. "Mainstream" churches: Presbyterians, Reformed Church in America, Episcopal Church, American Baptists, United Methodist Church, United Church of Christ, Reform Jews, Ethical Culture Society, Unitarian-Universalists.

Kelley went on to say: "Other things being equal, bodies low on the list will tend to diminish in numbers while those high on the list will tend to increase." Social scientists and church officials examined Kelley's hypothesis with great care. The data seemed to support it.

A widely respected benchmark study by Hoge and Roozen published in 1979 had this to say:

Since 1966 total Protestant and Catholic membership has remained relatively unchanged, but, in light of population growth during this period, it has actually declined as a percentage of the adult U.S. population. More significantly, at least ten of the largest (and theologically more liberal) denominations have had membership losses in every year after 1966. Since most of these denominations had grown without interruption from colonial times, their declines reverse a trend of two centuries.78

Commenting in 1987 on Kelley's hypothesis, Roof and McKinney say:

Careful analysis of membership trends shows that the churches hardest hit were those highest in socioeconomic status, those stressing individualism and pluralism in belief, and those most affirming of American culture...... For the most part Kelley's interpretation holds. ...his scheme is descriptively accurate. The large ecumenical bodies most comfortably allied with the culture were losing members.79

The period of the late sixties and the seventies witnessed a religious defection of unprecedented proportions that represented more than the usual turning away of the young in the adolescent and early adult years. Both the numbers and the scope of spiritual experimentation involved point to nothing less than a revolt against the established faiths."80

Still in 1996 the alarm continues. Reeves can say, "Since the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, the mainline churches have been in a serious and unprecedented numerical decline, losing between a fifth and a third of their membership."81 And further: "As is quite well known, the mainline churches have been shrinking dramatically during the last three decades and appear to be confused and helpless at a time when a nation is crying out for inspiration and guidance."82

Behind the Kelley Hypothesis: Crypto-conservatism

These commentators have affiliations that are considered mainline, but they think entirely like conservatives. Writing in 1996, Dean Hoge gave a description of the term "mainline" that I believe points to the key elements of the situation.

At first the term mainline was used to distinguish the established faiths from the esoteric cults, and later from the more militant evangelical and fundamentalist groups. The term applied to those churches immersed in the culture and only vaguely identifiable in terms of their own features, versus churches that retained their distance from the culture by encouraging distinctive life-styles and beliefs.

The mainline churches tend to demand relatively little of their members, so the costs of belonging are less than in the stricter churches. Far fewer mainliners than evangelicals describe themselves to researchers as "strong" members of their churches. Members of mainline churches are also likely to have more ties and group memberships outside their churches and to feel more competing loyalties. They are sometimes culturally sensitive persons with experiences in more than one cultural group or nation. Their faith is sometimes tentative and tolerant because they appreciate other religions besides their own. Some seem to have no faith at all. They are secular people who participate in churches for the benefits to them and their families, and they happily contribute to churches to support the good things churches do. [Emphasis added.] 83

The extremely prolific Princeton sociologist, Robert Wuthnow, appears to be one of these crypto-conservatives. The following are some of his comments. [Emphasis added.]84

The essence of churches continues to be "the Word" -- the teachings, the beliefs and the discourse, and the behavior that arises from them. (p. viii)

It is up to the clergy to define the purpose of the church...through preaching, teaching, counselling and administration and all these are influenced by the mental maps that the clergy carry with them.

The prevalent theology is more one of solace than prophetic vision... (p. 6)

Challenge the middle class to lead unconventional lives of dedication, service and sacrifice ... to live differently from their neighbors. (p. 239)

Flabby times, flabby lives...soft... Versus social responsibility...discipline...repentance. (p. 240)

No mention is made in sermons of greed or overconsumption or exploitation. (p. 241)

Dean R. Hoge and colleagues comment that:

In the five denominations we studied, we found that people who are firm believers in the Bible and who desire to commit their whole lives to Christ tend to have literal interpretations of scripture and a consciousness that their Christian way of life sets them apart from the mainstream culture. For the most part, these people are evangelicals.85

...a foremost factor in giving is evangelical or conservative theology... (p. 162)

...high-growth churches increase members' commitment and participation by forbidding or criticizing alternative activities that might compete with that commitment. In these churches members are told what is required of them to be in good standing. (p. 169) [emphasis added]

If evangelical Christians are the high givers within most of the denominations, how can their numbers be increased? Or how might the kind of commitment they possess be extended more widely throughout churches? (p. 169)

While these social scientists on the one hand clearly sympathize with the worldview of the evangelicals, they also describe that worldview with telling social scientific accuracy:

Our experiences have taught us that the members of different denominations actually live in different worlds and are shaped by distinct assumptions and experiences. This is shown by the different ways denominational members talk about their own faith and church life, and it is shown by the ignorance they have about other denominations. ...... We have been impressed repeatedly by how encapsulated church members are in their own religious worlds. For people in every congregation, their own congregation, and especially their friends in the congregation fashion their understanding of religious reality. Anyone disbelieving this statement can put it to a test: Ask people in any denomination about the theology and practices of other denominations. You will see how little they know. (p. 161)

Thomas Reeves weighs in with a predictable conservative solution to the problem of mainline decline: "there must be a greater emphasis on doctrinal orthodoxy and an openness to the spiritual power promised in Scripture and amply described by saints throughout church history."86

He is also candid about the underlying psychology that supports this view:

For the Christian, the self is the problem; pride must be combated with repentance, humility, trust in God. Centuries earlier, Thomas a Kempis had written in The Imitation of Christ, "Be assured of this, that you must live a dying life. And the more completely a man dies to self, the more he begins to live to God." The modern Christian mystic Evelyn Underhill once quoted Meister Eckhart, "Where I left myself, I found God; where I found myself, I lost God", and added, "our eyes are not in focus for His Reality, until they are out of focus for our own petty concerns." That was exactly the faith the Enlightenment prophets came to destroy.87

So, I think it is clear that the change extremists are theologically conservative individuals who find themselves isolated in more liberal denominations. Standing as they do on the margins of the psycho-dynamic boundary between those who have enough ego-maturity to "engage the complexities of culture" and those who need the more defensive ego-structures of conservative religion, they are indeed caught in an uncomfortable situation.

Change Moderates

Change moderates are those who say that the underlying position of mainstream Protestant churches in the 1990s is substantially different from their position in the 1950s and they are not alarmed or panicked by that change. They rather see it as the result of an evolutionary force that needs to be understood.

I think of myself as a change moderate, and this book as a statement of that position. Certainly my own religious world did change dramatically in the sixties. In 1966 I left the Catholic priesthood, the Jesuits and the Church. That would tend to make me a change extremist, but then I learned sociology. So, now I think that there was indeed in the sixties a major re-alignment of the social and cultural forces represented by organized religion. But it did not affect everyone in the same way, and its impact on society as a whole is much more slow-acting than its impact on particular individuals or particular organizations. But the fascinating topic is the relationship between the perception by individuals and particular groups that the shifts are momentous, and the data that show them to be massive slow-moving in cultural and historical process.

There is a school of change moderates in the mainline denominations. Their views are well represented by a book such as Vital Signs: The Promise of Mainstream Protestantism, by three Presbyterian scholars. They say:

One of the most significant vital signs in mainstream Protestantism, one that is often overlooked, is its theological rejection of fragmentation in the modern world. In their reluctance to give up the quest to see the world as God has intended it to be, mainstream Protestants continue to express an eloquent Christian truth: the world was created good and has been redeemed in Jesus Christ. By refusing to withdraw from the world or compartmentalize religious faith, they engage in the complexities of culture with the conviction that God's love and redemption in Jesus Christ will transform both them and the creation itself. This theological impulse has been central to mainstream Protestants' Christian identity and it is a distinctive resource for their proclamation of the gospel in the next century.88

The challenge is to forge a compelling theological vision and sufficiently flexible organizational structures... After decades of being attacked for their vices and even their existence, mainstream Protestant denominations still retain enormous material and religious resources for living out the gospel in the twenty-first century.89

This certainly is a vigorous identity statement, and it is factually correct in the assessment of social position. The mainstream Protestant denominations do indeed still retain enormous material and religious resources. It is noteworthy also that this statement also rejects the schizoid conception of the self and of the world as torn between warring elements. There is a dialectical tension between good and evil in this vision, but not one that sunders the integrity of the whole. Creation is "good" and yet it still needs to be "redeemed". The complexities of culture must be "engaged" in order to be "transformed".

This sounds very much like a Stage Five consciousness just beginning to enter the open-endedness of Stage Six. Reason is just coming to grips with the vastness of the unconscious. The main clue is in the use of the buzzword "gospel". When the crunch comes to make the central point, they fall back on the unanalyzed buzzword.

The function of the buzzword is to invoke "the language of religion." The function of "the language of religion" is to induce the regressive-repressive trance of the Augustinian Arrangement. Thus, the identity statement of the mainstream describes a moderate degree of engagement with the unconscious, slightly sedated. It goes deep enough for the developmental task of the eighteenth century, but not deep enough for the developmental task of today.

The Prognosis for the Mainline Denominations

The numbers indicate that there is a very slow leakage from the mainline denominations to the "Nones" and "Others." (The leakage is also from Roman Catholicism, as we shall see in Chapter Eleven.) This leakage is not sudden, nor some mad rush, but has the steady, glacial pace of a true cultural process.

The issue at the heart of this leakage is how deep into the unconscious does the central religious experience of these systems take the believer? The "hypothesis" is that it does not go deep enough to satisfy the larger capacity for introspection in the population that these religious organizations serve. The ever-moving cultural process that underlies religious consciousness has outstripped the technology of these churches.

If we remember that our basic argument is that the purpose of religion is to provide the experience of the really ultimate conditions of human existence, and that on the way to that interior experience, religious technology encounters all the content of the unconscious, then we will understand the situation of the mainline Protestant denominations.

Their central religious technology is the Wesleyan "warmth" of Aldersgate. Although this experience started out as a distinctively working-class phenomenon for the less educated elements of English society, it appears to have migrated upward in socioeconomic status in the two hundred and fifty years since 1738. Clinically speaking, it appears to be a moderately regressive trance state induced by a combination of biblical text, a certain kind of music and charismatic preaching in a group setting. Historically speaking, this trance induction apparatus appears to have been exactly right for its time, and its time seems to have continued comfortably until the nineteen-sixties. Then came that sudden little increase in introspective confidence, the availability of the introspective techniques of Eastern religions and improvements in psychotherapeutic method.

So, this form of religion is now in direct competition with other introspective technologies, and has more in common with them than it may recognize. The "nones and others" are experimenting with those technologies, as is secular culture itself. And so, if the mainline churches persist in their dependence on an eighteenth-century religious trance induction apparatus, they will keep losing ground to the nones and others. However, if they succeed in going deeper and discover a more powerful expression of the Jesus tradition in relation to introspective completeness, they may even grow once again. But their form will change. Their form will change so much that they might even become almost invisible. Sort of like the work of Carl Rogers is invisible. It is so thoroughly absorbed by the psychotherapy profession that hardly anyone talks about it any more.

Therefore I think the formula of Coalter et al. is fundamentally correct: that the mainline denominations will continue to exist if they adopt "a flexible enough organization" and discover their "compelling theological vision." The form of that flexible organization is probably determined by the content of the "compelling theological vision."

That vision, I would argue, is simply going deeper: less trance, more wakefulness, a recovery of the somatic, a recovery of the Resurrection of Jesus, as I discuss in Chapter Seven.

11.
THOSE CATHOLICS!

In "the decline of the middle" model, the 1960s changed both Catholicism and Protestantism, but in significantly different ways. It is relatively simple to distinguish in Protestantism between the "liberal" tendencies of Stage Five and the Stage Three-Four characteristics of conservatives. However, in Catholicism in the nineteen-sixties both groups were contained within the same organizational structure. Thus, when the sixties hit, its liberal and conservative branches were more difficult to distinguish by traditional survey research methods.

As we note in the discussion of the Augustinian Arrangement (see Chapter 9), religion typically uses three instrumentalities to support the self-structure of a particular stage: Right-brain devices of symbol and ritual, left-brain theory, and external, social instruments of behavioral control.

In the nineteen-sixties, teaching authority and attendance at Mass were the parts of Roman Catholicism that lost the most support. These two aspects of its approach to spirituality are most seriously in conflict with the learning edge of spirituality in advanced industrial society. As individuals become more confident in their own ability to access and evaluate information, they become less tolerant of parentally-styled information sources. As people become more competent in managing the unconscious components of their psyches, they become less interested in deep trance-induction rituals, and more interested in wakeful encounters with the deeper parts of the self.

Here is a schematic diagram of the instruments in use today by Roman Catholicism and the two wings of Protestantism:

Religion's Self-Structure Support Instruments

Roman

Catholicism

Conservative Protestantism

Liberal

Protestantism

SYMBOLISM:
A. Parent Imagery

B. Trance induction technique (ritual)
All powerful parent of a 3-year-old
Regresses subjects to the third trimester of fetal experience
Less powerful parent of a 12-year-old
Regresses subjects to age 7
Persuasive parent of a 21-year-old
Regresses subjects to age 15

THEORY:
Split-Self Theology
Abstract, convoluted. Keys: grace vs. nature, natural order vs. supernatural order Dramatic, emotional, personalized forces. Resignation and personalized forces

SOCIAL CONTROL:
Teaching Authority

Law Enforcement
Centralized, bureaucratic
History of lethal exercise, Impersonal bureaucratic
Localized, personal

History of lethal exercise, personal, familial
Persuasive

No lethal history

I think that all three forms of contemporary Christianity ran into one and the same cultural phenomenon: a very small but still seismic (i.e., deep, massive, at the level of culture itself) shift in the culturally-supported sense of personal autonomy. This could also be called a major shift in introspective confidence (and a minor shift in introspective competence). This shift was carried demographically by the coming-of-age of a generation of Americans who grew up in a period of unprecedented material prosperity and information availability. The baby-boomers are more comfortable than any previous generation with looking into themselves.

++++++++++

I am not technically a baby-boomer. That is, I was not born between 1946 and 1956. I was in fact born in 1933. But then I spent 15 years in suspended emotional growth in the Jesuits, and when I returned to normal social life in 1966 I found myself in graduate school with the baby-boomers as peers and the activities associated with their coming of age in full swing.

So, I am personally a statistic in the transformation of Catholicism that has taken place in the last forty years. Born into an Irish Catholic family in Chicago in the nineteen-thirties, I am now ex-Catholic, ex-priest, and ex-Jesuit. I was one of the first of the 7,000 American Catholic priests who resigned their positions in the years between 1966 and 1973. I am also married and divorced, and my children are not baptized. I do not go to church at all any more, but I do meditate, and not only read the Bible but study it assiduously. I also study the texts of other religions. A couple of my favorites are the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu and the writings of the Tibetan Buddhist Chogyam Trungpa. The more I study these texts the more I find a strong convergence among all of them, with each one making a distinctive contribution to a complete understanding of the human condition.

So, I am a "None-other", a member of the "secular" and "atheist" left, one of the newly "less religious" citizens of our fair land. (Duh! Really!)

One of the deleterious side-effects of the rise of fundamentalism and its widespread airing as Sunday morning televangelism is that this has trivialized the Bible for many intelligent and serious spiritual seekers. (I might add parenthetically that, believer in the validity of dialectics that I am, I sincerely welcome the rise in fundamentalism and deeply cherish all of its deleterious side effects. They are nothing more than the movement of antithesis in the sequence of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. They are a normal social process that both tests and strengthens this society's commitment to rationality, freedom and democracy as the foundations of our institutional life.)

But I would respectfully submit that people who are smart enough not to be fundamentalists should also be smart enough to know that the fundamentalist Bible is not the document in its full potential. That document is the record of a unique spiritual experience of a period of history about two thousand years long that stands as the foundation of Western civilization, and distinguishes it from the other great civilizations of the world today. In spite of the very, very serious problems of western civilization, it is still the leading candidate at this time for a basis of global order. So, there is much to be gained from a spacious and intelligent grasp of the Bible. If you were to place it on a table next to the Tao Te Ching and the Bhagavad Gita, you would be in the presence of three world-class spiritual texts, not just two. It is an indispensable tool for mature spirituality.

My history and present practices have brought me to a worldview with a "contributory theology" as one of its core components. I.e., all religions represent the same seeking, and all have distinctive contributions to make. The contribution of Christianity has to do with what the resurrection of Jesus reveals about the exact nature of death and the relation between our human condition in time and space and our condition outside of time and space. Suzuki Roshi sums this up: "Because you think you have body or mind, you have very lonely feelings. But when you realize that everything is just a flashing into the vast universe, then you become very strong, and your existence becomes very meaningful."90

Other spiritual persons across time and from different cultures have also reflected on this matter and made very useful observations about it. But I think the life of Jesus contributes an element of precision to the topic that is indispensable for spiritual maturity. But of course, this contribution can be accessed without membership in any Christian organization, and in fact, I think it is most effectively accessed today without such membership.

The reason I am saying all this as an introduction to the discussion of changes in Catholicism is that I want to take to heart Andrew Greeley's complaint about personal bias. So, I am letting my history be known, to give the reader ample information to judge the extent to which it may have colored my interpretation of the data. For I certainly have broken with the religious affiliations and practices of my childhood, and it feels wonderful.

Membership Change in Catholicism

On the surface it appears as if the membership changes in Catholicism are quite different from those in mainline Protestantism. But, if you note the role of Hispanics in the demographics of Catholicism, the changes are remarkably similar.

Chapter 9 characterizes Roman Catholicism as a Stage Four organization, and although that may have been true in the time of Augustine, the institution is now clearly more complex than that. On the one hand it has always had its esoteric component -- the mystics -- that its officials have subjected to constant surveillance. On the other hand, its stage-maintenance technology is truly a work of cultural genius.

If Catholicism were a simple Stage Four institution, we would expect it to hold on to its members much better than a clearly Stage Five organization such as the United Methodists. Stage Four personalities are still rather rigid in their identities and are not experimenting with introspection. A first look at the numbers seems to support the Stage Four quality of Catholicism. Membership numbers went down dramatically for liberal Protestantism but for American Catholicism they went up. The NORC report cited in Chapter One takes note of this fact: "The decline of the mainline Protestant denominations in general and of United Methodists in particular has been draining the moderate middle, while Catholics have replenished the depleted center."

(As an aside I would note what fascinating language this is from the technicians of NORC. It is as if some war is going on. If I may paraphrase: "Whew! That was a close one! We almost had our moderate middle completely drained, but then the Catholics came along and "replenished" the fading United Methodists to keep that center strong." It is a military metaphor of battlefields and battle lines drawn across them between the comfort of stability on the one hand and the cold cruel threatening winds of chaos on the other.)

However, there is a serious problem with these numbers. The Catholic growth is all Hispanic. The traditional ethnic bases of Catholicism -- the Irish, Italians, Poles, Germans and other European groups -- are suffering the same fate as the United Methodists. If that is so, then even on a gross statistical level, Catholics are not exactly replenishing the United Methodists, and so maybe twentieth-century Catholicism includes increasingly Stage Five-Six European ethnics as well as Stage Four Hispanics.

In regard to Hispanic Catholics, here are some numbers from The Secretariate for Hispanic Affairs of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops:

The 1996 Official Catholic Directory lists the U.S. Catholic population at over 60 million. This means that Catholics are 22 percent of the total U.S. population of 268,784,851. The nation's Hispanic population (not including Puerto Rico) totaled 27 million in 1994. According to the Catholic Almanac, 80% of U.S. Hispanics are Catholic.
[Note: Eighty percent of 27 million is 21.6 million. So, of the 60 million Catholics in 1996, about 22 million are Hispanic, or about 37%, and about 38 million are non-Hispanic.]

The Secretariate again:

Current U.S. Census figures reveal a Hispanic growth rate that is five times that of non-Hispanics. While the non-Hispanic population showed a growth rate of 8 percent since 1980, Hispanics demonstrate a growth rate of 39 percent. Approximately 50 percent of Hispanics are under the age of 26 years. Of this number, approximately 20 percent are under five years of age. Only four percent of Hispanics are over the age of 65 years.
[Note: So, about 2 million of those Catholics who are replenishing the United Methodists are Hispanic niños and niñas.]

As for Catholic growth since 1980, at a 39% rate, it would take about 16 million Hispanics in 1980 to arrive at 22 million in 1996. And that means that there are 6 million new Hispanics among the 60 million U. S. Catholics today. The U.S. population in 1980 was about 227 million and although estimates vary, a mid-range figure for Catholics is 24%, or about 54 million. If there were about 54 million U.S. Catholics in 1980, there would have been 16 million Hispanic and 38 million non-Hispanic. In 1996 there were about 60 million Catholics, 22 million Hispanic Catholics and still about 38 million non-Hispanics. That is an increase of 6 million Hispanic Catholics and no increase in the number of non-Hispanic Catholics. (Even if the overall numbers are slightly different, the different growth rates of Hispanic and non-Hispanic Americans means that the increase in Catholics in recent years is at least largely, and possibly entirely, a Hispanic phenomenon. This is the "Hispanicization" of American Catholicism.)

So, breaking out the Hispanic portion from the overall Catholic membership changes the stability picture even for Catholicism. The overall numbers mean significant shrinkage in the European ethnic bases of the Church, precisely that segment of the population that is its traditional base in the U.S., is economically better off, more educated, and more representative of the main stream of American cultural trends -- consistent with the decline of the middle that has affected Protestantism.

The Vocations Crisis

A second distinctive element of change in Catholicism is the remarkable decrease in the numbers of priests and nuns in the past 30 years. Mainline Protestant ministers are losing their congregations, but Catholic congregations are losing their priests and nuns. The basic numbers for Catholic priests are as follows:

The number of priests in the United States rose steadily throughout the twentieth century to 1966. Then it leveled off and began to decline. At its peak, that number was about 60,000. In the eight years between 1966 and 1973 slightly more than a thousand Catholic priests resigned per year. This is a total of about 7,000 priests leaving the ministry in that time-period. Certainly one powerful influence on that exodus was the Second Vatican Council (1962-1966) and some quiet administrative decisions made by Pope John XXIII. That Pope instructed the Vatican Curia to radically liberalize the procedures for giving ex-priests permission to marry. It is said that in the thousand years before 1960, only four such permissions had been given. (One was to Fra Filippo Lippi whose model for his exquisite paintings of the Madonna and Child was his mistress.) Not only was there open discussion of celibacy at the council, but some famous theologians who were advising the bishops there left the priesthood and married in the glare of the unusual publicity that the council was receiving in the international press.

The exodus of 1966-1973 was certainly a shock to the Catholic Church but it was still only 15% of the clergy. Eighty-five percent still remained. However, in the years that followed a consistent trend emerged. While fewer priests are leaving the ministry (about 100 a year), fewer young men are being ordained, and so the priest population is steadily declining and also growing older. By the year 2000, projections say, there will be half the number of priests in the U.S. that there were in 1966, and the number will still be going down. The trends are similar in all of the advanced industrial societies of the world. They are only different in societies with emerging economies, such as sub-Saharan Africa.
Below are comparative statistics for the past 30+ years. Information is from The Official Catholic Directory, the Vatican's Statistical Yearbook of the Church, or CARA records. In 1996, the best available data on current average ages was: diocesan priests 58, men religious 61, women religious 69. Twenty-four percent of diocesan priests were over 70, the average retirement age. Forty-five percent of permanent deacons were over 60. FN91

Diocesan priests
Religious priests
Total priests
Priestly Ordinations
Graduate-level seminarians

Permanent deacons
Religious brothers
Religious sisters
Total Parishes W/O resident priest
Total Catholics
Percent of U. S., population
1965
35,925
22,207
58,132
994
8,325

0
12,271
179,954
17,637
46.6 m
24% 1975
36,005
22,904
58,090
771
5,279

898
8,625
135,225
18,515
48.7 m
23% 1985
35,052
22,265
57,317
533
4,063

7,838
7,544
115,386
19,244
52.3 m
23% 1995
32,834
16,717
49,551
522
3,172

11,452
6,578
92,107
19,723
60.2 m
23% 1997
31,977
16,120
48,097
521
3,292

11,788
6,293
87,644
19,677
61.2 m
23%

So, there is the distinct possibility that the Catholic priesthood is actually headed for extinction. Stage theory would suggest that this is expected, and not mainly because of celibacy. A more important reason for the disappearance of the traditional Roman concept of clergy would be the declining need for the trance of the Mass as a support for introspective inquiry. Under the premise of increased autonomy and increased comfort with introspective examination, there would be less need for religious trance, and more need for schooling in the techniques of wakeful introspection, as in psychotherapy and meditation.

This means that the age of the Eucharist is over. The Mass is an obsolescent piece of spiritual technology. While not yet completely out of use, it is limited more and more to populations that are low on measures of social and economic independence. Around the world, the people who go to Mass are increasingly the poor and less well educated populations, groups that do not have economic self-sufficiency.

Theologically, this is not a surprising development. The idea of the divine presence in the Bible (shekinah) is clearly developmental. First there was the Ark of the Covenant, which housed the stone tablets of Moses' experience on Mount Sinai and the manna of the desert wanderings. Then Solomon built the first temple and put the Ark in the central chamber: the Holy of Holies. The temple was destroyed and re-built in the sixth century B.C.E. The Holy of Holies was still a place of privileged spiritual experience at the time of Jesus, as recorded in the story of Zachariah's vision concerning the birth of John the Baptist recorded at the beginning of the Gospel of Luke.

But the temple was finally destroyed by the legions of Titus in 70 A.D. and although there still are extremist elements that want to rebuild it, that form of the presence of God is not an integral part of mainstream Christianity or Judaism today. In the Biblical theology of time, which regards it as a learning process, the Holy of Holies had a function that was purely pedagogical. What was being learned by means of this pedagogy was the true nature of the presence of God, in which it shifts from a burning bush, to stone tablets, to a room in a temple and finally to "the fleshy tablets of the heart."

And the Eucharist, it would appear, is another step in this pedagogical process. We note in Chapter 9 how the medieval theory of transubstantiation functioned as a rhetorical support for the experience of the presence of God that the Eucharist conveyed at that time. This was merely the continuation of the pedagogy of physical location that had been expressed by the temple and the Holy of Holies at an earlier age.

The temple was taken away by military geopolitical forces. The Eucharist is being removed by social, economic and psychological forces.

Moreover, the central conception of the priestly role in Catholicism is to make the sacramental trance-induction techniques such as the Mass. Whatever else a Catholic priest might do -- administer property, teach, function as counselor -- his central function is to "administer" the sacraments. If the need for that hypnotic ritual stabilization of a traumatized personality structure is outgrown, the need for the Catholic priesthood also disappears. Stages Six and Seven do not need trance-masters. In fact, they need just the opposite: the support of wakeful introspection. The shift from Stage Four to Stage Seven is a shift from "the order of Melchizedech" to the "order" of Carl Rogers.

It is interesting to speculate on just how few priests there have to be before the Catholic church re-thinks the priesthood as an institution. One likely scenario is that the pope after this one, or possibly the one after that, faced with an acute shortage of clergy, will allow for some form of married priesthood. That would probably stave off a critical shortage for twenty-five years or so. But such a shift would itself bring radical change to Catholic culture, and be a further strain on its structural integrity.

However, if the problem with the priesthood is an issue of spiritual development affecting the need for the sacraments themselves as a spiritual resource, then the next twenty-five years will bring not just a reduction in the numbers of clergy, but an equal reduction in the use of their services. Weekly attendance at Mass has dropped from 75 percent of Catholics in 1955 to about 35 percent today. The whole function of sacraments in the spiritual health of Roman Catholics appears to be shifting massively. Developmental theory would see this as a symptom of increasing spiritual maturity.

In this situation I am reminded of the small body of literature on the state of political culture in the Eastern Bloc countries of Europe during the last years of the Cold War. The managed economies of Soviet Communism were working less and less. The sense of reality in the general population was confronted more and more by the commitment to irreality of an entrenched bureaucracy. While the leadership had firm control of the apparatus of the state it had completely lost control over the quality of life. The result was an eerie, bizarre public culture filled with duplicity, denial and depression, a growing sector of organized crime, only marginally relieved by a steady production of popular gallows humor.

In order for this situation to change, some remarkably sane personality had to work his way up through that bureaucracy, get control of it, and impose reality orientation. It is a very interesting fact that Soviet Communism was able to produce such an individual in the person of Mikhail Gorbachev. When his announcement of glasnost and perestroika was published, the simmering suppressed reality orientation of the population of eastern Europe leaped into political form instantaneously.

Then in a flurry of reform and reaction, we had the historic psychodrama of Moscow in 1991, with the "nine grey men" on the podium, in front of the television cameras, trying to put the genie of spiritual growth back in the bottle of the super-ego. It took tanks and Boris Yeltsin to remove them from the stage of history.

As I survey the voices within the Catholic Church today in regard to the shortage of priests, I see a parallel with the end of the Eastern bloc. There appears to be a ruling/administrative apparatus more and more isolated from its population base in advanced industrial society. On the one hand you have the pope and the bishops adhering steadfastly to a traditional party line. On the other hand you have a reality-oriented population in advanced industrial society experimenting with every new instrument of spiritual growth offered by an increasingly competent general culture. There are many competent meditation teachers out there these days.

This of course cannot go on for very long. All of Soviet Communism only lasted for seventy years. The end-game of the Cold War (from the death of Brezhnev to the announcement of glasnost) lasted only four (1982-1986). Certainly under the leadership of Pope John Paul II, this kind of radical reality orientation is not going to occur. In a rich historical irony, he might very well be Catholicism's Brezhnev.

That is to say, Leonid Brezhnev was general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for eighteen years, from 1964 until his death in 1982. He presided over the twilight of the Soviet system. It was a period of time during which the basic incompatibility of that system with the fundamental laws of economic and political life was becoming more and more obvious to everyone living within it. But during the time of his leadership the system was held in place by a generation of elderly bureaucrats most of whom had come to power by not rocking the boat during Stalin's great purges of the nineteen-thirties. He was succeeded by two of his colleagues who were in their late seventies and died within a year after taking office, and then by the much younger Mikhail Gorbachev, who almost immediately declared that it was time for reality-orientation.

I think the Roman Catholic Church probably has as much spiritual resilience as Soviet Communism, and so at some point its leadership will also declare that it is time for reality-orientation. Some one is going to come along and say glasnost and perestroika in Latin. But my guess also is that the Catholic Church is going to get one more Pope committed to Stage Four before the great lurch forward, around the year 2010. I might not be around for that event, but it will be interesting in any case.

The Loss of Authority

The third aspect of change in Catholicism that is different from Protestantism is the shift in the authority relationship between the clergy and the laity. Protestantism re-structured its authority relations over 400 years ago and made them more flexible. Catholics of the mid-twentieth century found themselves still in the middle ages. This is a very interesting anachronism, a very interesting dilemma for the institution. But its resolution is in full swing. An anachronistic ideology is no match for the forces of cultural change. History will sweep aside ideology like a peremptory hand across a chess board.

Those who still call themselves Catholics now do so in a remarkably different way than their parents did and in fact differently than all Catholics did for the first sixty years of this century. In a word, although Catholicism has not lost its members, it has lost its (Stage Four) authority.

On his web site, Andrew Greeley recently made the following comment:

Measures of the average in this paper show that the serious problem facing American Catholicism is that the alienation of the body of the Catholic population from their leadership has increased over the past two decades. The laity as a body are less likely to take seriously what the Pope or the bishops say. Moreover this alienation has affected the laity in such a way that they move in the direction of the "Left" as a group and with no increase in polarization. The hard line "Right" is increasingly a smaller minority no matter how loudly it shouts. This is not a matter of personal opinion, but of statistical fact.92

In an earlier work, Greeley cited the papal teaching on birth control as an example of why Catholic teaching authority has diminished. He noted that the remarkable decrease in Catholic church attendance occurred in the six years after the publication of the encyclical Humanae Vitae on birth control. While this is certainly correct, it is not complete. Humanae Vitae was just the last straw. Deference to a parental Roman magisterium has been on the wane for broader cultural reasons. It seems that everybody in the world except the Roman Catholic hierarchy knows that in a nutshell, science has won the information contest.

And since hierarchical authority has always been of the essence of Stage Four Roman Catholicism, this loss amounts to a fundamental shift in the social -- and spiritual -- identity of the institution. The Roman Catholic Church has now been Protestantized from within. It has a Stage Four leadership and a Stage Five, Six, Seven membership. In many cases Catholicism has become a simple social identity, as being Jewish is for many Jews, and this does not show up on the religious preference polls. Roof & McKinney observe, "A new, broader kind of Roman Catholicism is emerging in the US. It is more educated, more diverse in religious interpretations, its people at ease in differing with official positions, yet loyal to the church, confident and devout."93

I don't think Roof and McKinney have any actual data to support their claim that Catholics are still "loyal, confident, and devout." I think they are just being nice. One reality of the present situation is that there is about a fifty-fifty split among Catholics between "traditional" and "progressive" patterns of belief. Neither of these two groups is particularly comfortable with the presence of the other under the same roof. Nor are their belief-systems particularly compatible. They seem to be held together by loyalty to parents that half of them no longer obey. I don't think many Catholics use the church's theology very much, but they do seem to like the trance-inducing ritual and the aura of parental approval. But they also have lots of alternatives, and many have tried them. It is entirely likely, given the overall dynamics of the situation, that they are very nearly out the door, much as young adult children who are still devoted to parents who cannot change, but they can no longer live with.

The Prognosis for Rome

Developmentally, the big problem for Roman Catholicism is that, as an international organization, it serves population bases at different stages of self-awareness. The question is how does it serve all stages?

In order to address the shift going on in the spiritual needs of well-educated and economically secure members of advanced industrial society, the institution is faced with the task of revising its very identity or it will dismantle in the coming years much in the same way as the Soviet Union dismantled after the proclamations of perestroika and glasnost of Mikhail Gorbachev.

There is a model for this kind of identity change in the business world. In the past twenty-five years numerous large corporations have changed their identities. This comes about through changes in "mission statement" and shows up to the general public in those unobtrusive but extremely powerful changes of name and changes of logo. On the level of mission statement one example is AT&T's recognition about twenty years ago that it is not a telephone company, but an information company. On the level of name, there is the change from "U.S.Steel" to USX. In fact, you see a lot of "X"s cropping up in the names of corporations, as they recognize the nature of their business as having more to do with information and less to do with material goods. On the level of logos there is the transition from "Colonel Sander's Kentucky Fried Chicken" to "KFC."

The Roman Catholic Church is a human organization. History has influenced its customer base and its product. In the past it has always claimed to have a special depth of understanding of the human condition. If it does indeed have that depth, then it will go deeper into its own present circumstance and revise its identity.

As for the dismantling, it has already begun. The decline in Church attendance, the decreasing numbers of clergy, and the gap between the laity and the hierarchy are de facto steps in the coming apart of an organization. The only question is, how will the events continue to unfold? Will some bishops start to support the experiments of their laity and ignore the policies of the Pope? This is not the most probable outcome, because in the Catholic Church as in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or any other large bureaucracy, this level of functionary is recruited more for loyalty to the organization than for loyalty to the dictates of personal introspection. They also owe their place in society to the social standing of that organization. Therefore, in any tension between personal conscience and organizational conformity that might arise in a situation of cultural change, bishops, on the whole, would be expected to take the side of the organization. So, a much more likely scenario is the Gorbachev process: one particular bishop gets pulled out of the rank-and-file of mid-level bureaucracy and is given the reins of power. Thus latent, personal perceptions are given more support, and a Pope behaves like John XXIII. He uses his office to expresses reality-orientation rather than tradition and re-directs the institution as a whole.

12.
EVANGELICAL INSURGENCY

First let us look at the numbers. The overall trend is that this segment of American religion has a natural demographic base created by the poor distribution of wealth, including social and cultural resources such as education and jobs. The size of this demographic base as a percentage of the American population has remained rather stable or possibly shrunk slightly in the past 25 years. But the resources of its leadership group to mobilize this base have greatly increased in the time-period. So, the rapid growth of the visibility of conservative religion is the mobilization of an acutely under-mobilized demographic base. Here is NORC's summary of the situation:

First, the phenomenon basically represents the mobilization and effective organization of a constituency that was traditionally apolitical, not the growth of that constituency (Marsden, 1990; Shupe and Stacey, 1983). Second, the size and growth of the political movement itself has been exaggerated. Fundamentalists traditionally have been less likely to vote than non-fundamentalists. While this differential has decreased recently, as of the mid-1980s fundamentalists were still less likely to vote than non-fundamentalists (Kellstedt and Noll, 1990). In addition, despite the election of born-again Carter and the presidential campaign of Robertson, fundamentalists apparently remain underrepresented in national office. In the 102nd Congress only about 15% of the members belong to fundamentalist denominations, while 41% belong to mainline Protestant denominations, 3% to other non-fundamentalist Protestant denominations, 26.5% are Roman Catholics, 8% are Jews, and the rest are unspecified Protestants and others. In addition, the Moral Majority and similar fundamentalist political groups had limited memberships, low popularity ratings, and did not represent a growing segment of the population. For example, when people were asked to chose groups "you feel particularly close to--people who are most like you in their ideas and interests and feelings about things," fundamentalist political groups finished last in 1980, 1984, and 1988.94

The NORC analysis continues:

If fundamentalism as a theology and fundamentalist churches as organizations have not been appreciably increasing their hold on the minds and memberships of the American people, then why is there a widespread belief in the revival and advance of fundamentalism?
Most prominently it was the differences in growth rates of certain fundamentalist and mainline denominations, especially as reported in Kelley's book that first established that fundamentalism was on the rise. This conclusion was then seen as validated by the expansion of the electronic church and the televangelists and the political impact of the New Christian Right in general and Moral Majority in particular. The notion of a fundamentalist revival has been widely accepted by many scholars, the mass media, and the general public (Table 18). If we look at such phenomena as political mobilization, media access, and religious programming on television, there are signs of notable changes that some might characterize as a revival.
But the common idea that more Americans are adopting fundamentalist beliefs and joining fundamentalist churches is not well supported by the available evidence. As we have seen, the church membership figures present a limited and probably biased view of changes in religious affiliation and theological orientations. The electronic church has been a major development in contemporary religion, but does not necessarily either reflect or cause a growth of fundamentalism. Similarly, the political mobilization, while an important development in and of itself, has both been exaggerated and has wrongly been interpreted to imply changes in the size and popularity of fundamentalism among the public.
In particular the advance of fundamentalism was exaggerated by the mass media. As prominent observers of recent religious change have noted: "Evangelicals emerged in the mid-seventies, because the media had largely ignored them before that time (Gallup and Castelli, 1989, p. 92)." In line with the media discovery hypothesis, coverage of fundamentalism rose sharply from the mid-1970s to a peak in 1981-82. Interest was then relatively low until the 1987 scandals.
The idea of a fundamentalist revival in recent decades needs a reevaluation. Despite the image created by church statistics, the fundamentalists have not been rapidly increasing their share of the general population. They may have modestly increased their popular appeal, but even these gains are uncertain. Likewise, fundamentalist beliefs have not advanced. Belief in Bible inerrancy has clearly declined over the last 40 years, while proselytizing and having had a born-again experience have shown no clear trend over the last 10 years. Fundamentalism is an important, enduring part of the American religious experience, but it attracts no more of the public than it has for decades.95

One other point to be made about the church statistics is that although some of the increases are genuinely huge, the starting points were extremely small. For example the Assemblies of God increased about three-fold between 1965 and 1990, but they started with a membership of about 600,000. So in 1990 their membership was about two million. This makes them a little smaller than the Episcopal Church (whose numbers decreased nearly 60 percent in the same time-period). The Church of God in Christ increased about twelve-fold in the time-period. They started from a base of about 425,000 and had a membership of about five and a half million in 1990. This makes them about the same size as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The Southern Bapist Convention increased about 40 percent during the time-period, going from about eleven million to about fifteen million, which makes them about one-fourth as numerous as Catholics.

All of these increases are indeed dramatic, and surely give a sense of distinct success to the leadership and members of those groups. It certainly must prove to them that they "are doing something right." But even lumped all together, these groups plus the others included in the conservative wing of American religion still only amount to a quarter of the American population at most, and they are also regionally and demographically sharply defined.

Furthermore, although these groups have experienced great success in mobilizing their natural demographic base, this does not automatically translate into success on the national scene. For that to happen, the regime of secularism needs to lose its way in the struggle between mindfulness and narcissism that resides at its core.

The War With Culture

One historian makes the following note about the origin of Fundamentalism:

At the end of the 19th century, a theological controversy began to develop around the Biblical Scholars at Andover Seminary. Andover Seminary was established in 1808 and was the first theological school in New England. It was established by Calvinists to propagate and defend their theological concerns. In 1881, a major change took place in the faculty. This new faculty began to apply modern critical methods of literary study to the Biblical text. This activity brought a reaction from constituents who were concerned to preserve the authority of Scripture. The ensuing debate hardened into two distinct positions. The professors and their supporters were identified as Liberals and the critics were called Fundamentalists. The Fundamentalists gained that designation because of the five fundamentals that they claimed were a test for Christian orthodoxy:

1. The Verbal Inspiration of the Scriptures: The Bible is the exact word of God and is, therefore, without error.
2. The Virgin Birth of Christ: Jesus did not have a biological father.
3. The Substitutionary Atonement: Jesus received the wrath of God for human sin.
4. The Bodily Resurrection of Jesus: The resurrected Jesus had a physical body.
5. The Premillenial Second Coming of Christ: The second coming of Christ will usher in the millennial age.

The rapid spread of this controversy is most noticeable in the rural communities of New England, upstate New York, and the upper Mississippi Valley. Perhaps due to the catastrophic collapse of humanistic expectations in the death and destruction of the World War I and to rural economic frustrations, there developed a general pessimism about humanity and a specific distrust of the social order in these rural regions. Consequently, not only were the Fundamentalist principles embraced, they were held tightly with a passion to protect the faith from the evil world.96

Thus, negative self-image is the core of conservative Christianity. These people feel personally and socially powerless, they doubt their own native ability to do good, and they are angry at the forces of the world that have made them feel this way.

Other evangelical sources confirm and expand the evidence of negative self-image:

For the Christian, the self is the problem; pride must be combated with repentance, humility, trust in God. Centuries earlier, Thomas a Kempis had written in The Imitation of Christ, "Be assured of this, that you must live a dying life. And the more completely a man dies to self, the more he begins to live to God." The modern Christian mystic Evelyn Underhill once quoted Meister Eckhart, "Where I left myself, I found God; where I found myself, I lost God", and added, "our eyes are not in focus for His Reality, until they are out of focus for our own petty concerns." That was exactly the faith the Enlightenment prophets came to destroy.97

Here is another version of the same outlook:

In the early part of the fifth century these two types of religious thought came into direct conflict in a remarkably clear contrast as embodied in two fifth-century theologians, Augustine and Pelagius. Augustine pointed men to God as the source of all true spiritual wisdom and strength, while Pelagius threw men back on themselves and said that they were able in their own strength to do all that God commanded, otherwise God would not command it. We believe that Arminianism represents a compromise between these two systems, but that while in its more evangelical form, as in early Wesleyanism, it approaches the religion of faith, it nevertheless does contain serious elements of error.

We are living in a day in which practically all of the historic churches are being attacked from within by unbelief. Many of them have already succumbed. And almost invariably the line of descent has been from Calvinism to Arminianism, from Arminianism to Liberalism, and then to Unitarianism. And the history of Liberalism and Unitarianism shows that they deteriorate into a social gospel that is too weak to sustain itself. We are convinced that the future of Christianity is bound up with that system of theology historically called "Calvinism." Where the God centered principles of Calvinism have been abandoned, there has been a strong tendency downward into the depths of man centered naturalism or secularism. Some have declared - rightly, we believe - that there is no consistent stopping place between Calvinism and atheism.98

Evangelical Insurgency

In a time when social and cultural change -- driven by an unprecedented growth rate in the availability of information -- is proceeding at a pace that is faster and on a larger scale than ever before in human history, "conservative revival" can indeed become evangelical insurgency, and under certain circumstances, evangelical insurgency can accede to state power.

It is becoming less and less possible to isolate those who are left out of improving economic and social conditions, and they have more and more personal change impinging on the boundaries of their closed-system pyschodynamics. The sense of powerlessness of traditional religionists has two dimensions. One is social disprivilege. Besides being shamed and whacked around as toddlers in their domestic situation, these are people whose economic, social and educational status makes them feel rejected and looked down upon by society as a whole.

But more central to their anxiety is a factor that is purely personal: the voices in their heads that tell them they are bad. To the extent that traditional religionists perceive themselves in a situation of forcible personal change, they can become truculent, even violent. Thus the worldwide movement of Islamic jihadism and the evangelical insurgency in the United States are two branches of one and the same historical phenomenon.

In the repressed anger and self-doubt that they bring to social and political process, these movements are both scary phenomena. But now that they have completely surfaced, the real learning begins, on both sides. ("If what we change does not change us / we are playing with blocks.") Since this encounter is about the validity of reason and the validity of the human self, there is no way traditional religion can win this argument.

In the Middle East we have seen on a country-by-country basis, especially in a place such as Iran, that the political and economic strength of secular culture can be undermined by the narcissism of secular leadership and by larger social forces. In some circumstances the political hegemony of secularism can be lost. Then, when the conservative revolutions triumph, history has to go back thirty or forty years (or perhaps eight centuries, to eleventh century Qom), and re-do the process of cultural evolution that became undone in the failure of a particular secularist regime.

So, we must never completely rule out a conservative recovery of power in any society. Hopefully, in America the secular wisdom of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln has soaked deeply enough into our social and political fabric to continue to enable us to avoid the dominance of old repressions and mythologies.

Now that technology has made traditional religionists full participants in the national and international dialog, the laws of history suggest that these ones, who do not believe in evolution, will evolve.

END NOTES

1Millard, Skeets, "Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism: an interview with Rinpoche, a most unlikely entry in the great guru sweepstakes", The Chicago Reader, Friday, February 15, 1974, p.1.
2Miller's works are: The Drama of the Gifted Child (Harper Colophon Books, 1981); For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Childhood and the Roots of Violence (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984); Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984).
3 Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child, 6 .
4 Miller, For Your Own Good, 5.
5 Ibid., 91.
6 Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware, 31.
7 Ibid., 192-193.
8 Michael Balint, The Basic Fault: Therapeutic Aspects of Regression. (London, Tavistock, 1968), 16
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., 21.
11 Ibid., 22.
12 John Fowles, The Aristos (Boston, Little, Brown, 1964), 47.
13 Ibid., 30-37.
14 Trauma and Recovery, by Judith Lewis Herman, M.D. (NY, Basic Books, 1992.)
15 Peter A. Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (Berkeley, California, North Atlantic Books, 1997), p. 228
16 Dean R. Hoge, Charles E. Zech, Patrick H. McNamara, and Michael J. Donahue, Money Matters: Personal Giving in American Churches (Louisville, Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), p. 161.
17 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu (NY Fontana Books, 1963), 77.
18 Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, p.102.
19 Wilber, Transformations of Consciousness, 146.
20 Ibid., 56.
21 Ibid.
22 Millard, loc. cit.
23 Open Secret, Versions of Rumi translated by John Moyne and Coleman Barks (Putney, VT, Threshold Books, 1984.), 27.
24 Ibid.
25 Robert N. Bellah, Habits of the Heart (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1985), 295.
26 Carl Rogers, A Way of Being (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1980), 38.
27 Carl Rogers and Barry Stevens, Person to Person (Moab Utah, Real People Press, 1967), 90-97.
28 http://www.azstarnet.com/~lehrman/mind.htm
29 An Open Letter to Ken Wilber, by Clay Stinson. Publisher: The Neural Surfer. Publication date: August 1997.(www.weber.ucsd.edu/~dlane).
30 Ibid.
31 Wilber, A Sociable God, 76.
32 God and the Unconscious, by Victor White, O.P. (Chicago, Regnery, 1953.), 1-2.
33 "Religious Evolution," by Robert N. Bellah, American Sociological Review 1964, p. 374.
34 Wuthnow 1997, op. cit., viii.
35 Gary L. Ulmen, "Catholicism as a Paradigm of the Political?", Telos 109 (Fall 1996), 120-121.
36 Counting Flocks and Lost Sheep: Trends in Religious Preference Since World War II by Tom W. Smith. National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago. GSS Social Change Report No. 26. February 1988, Revised January 1991.
37 Keynes, John Maynard, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, (New York, Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920.), 250-251.
38A. Lentin, Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson and the Guilt of Germany (Leicester University Press, 1984), 25-26.
39 Ibid.
40 Charles Mee, The Marshall Plan, 83.
41 Ibid., 241.
42 Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids MI, 1984), 37.
43 Gary Ulmen, loc cit, 114.
44 Neuhaus, op cit, 79.
45 Ibid., 80.
46 Ibid., 17-18.
47 Ibid., 175-176.
48 Neuhaus, First Things (June 1997).
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.
51 Transformations of Consciousness: Conventional and Contemplative Perspectives on Development, by Ken Wilber, Jack Engler and Daniel P. Brown. (Boston, Shambhala Press, 1986).
52 A Sociable God: A Brief Introduction to a Transcendental Sociology, by Ken Wilber. (NY, McGraw-Hill, 1983), 37.
53Ibid, 77.
54Bellah, Robert N., "Religious Evolution," American Sociological Review 1964, p. 374.
55 Ibid.
56 A Sociable God, 76.
57 Thou Shalt Not Be Aware, 31.
58 Bellah, op. cit., 372.
59 Thomas Guarino, "Postmodernity and Five Fundamental Theological Issues," Theological Studies 57 (1996) 654-655.
60 Adam, Eve and The Serpent, by Elaine Pagels. (New York, Vintage Books, 1989), 116.
61 Ibid., 98.
62 Wilber, A Sociable God, 37.
63 Pagels, op. cit., 145.
64 Ibid., 117.
65 John M. Todd, Reformation (London, Darton Longman & Todd, 1971),
66 Jaroslav Pelikan, Obedient Rebels (NY Harper and Row 1964), 94.
67 The Library of Christian Classics, Vol XVII. (Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1969), 14.
68 Grace Valley Christian Center Homepage Last updated: January 30, 1997. (www.gracevalley.org)
69 Grinder, J. Kenneth, "The Nature of Wesleyan Theology", Wesleyan Theological Journal 17, no. 2 (Fall 1982): 43-57.
70 The Cultural Influence of Methodism, by Herbert Schlossberg, Fieldstead Institute.
71 Lyman A. Kellstedt, John C. Green, James L. Guth and Corwin E. Smidt, "It's the Culture, Stupid! 1992 and Our Political Future", First Things 42 (April 1994), 28.
72 Andrew M. Greeley, Religious Change in America, (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1989), 3.
73 Ibid., 46.
74 Ibid., 56.
75 Counting Flocks and Lost Sheep: Trends in Religious Preference Since World War II by Tom W. Smith. National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago. GSS Social Change Report No. 26. February 1988, Revised January 1991.
76 Hadaway, C. Kirk, Marler, Penny Long and Chaves, Mark, "What the Polls Don't Show: A Closer Look at U.S. Church Attendance," American Sociological Review 58 (December 1993), 741-752.
77 Measuring Church Attendance by Tom W. Smith. NORC, The University of Chicago. GSS Methodological Report No. 88. December 1996. Revised January 1997.
78 Dean R. Hoge and David A. Roozen, Understanding Church Growth and Decline: 1950-1978, (New York, The Pilgrim Press, 1979), 22-23.
79 Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1987), 20.
80 Ibid., 18.
81 Reeves, The Empty Church, 12.
82 Ibid., 9.
83 Money Matters: Personal Giving in American Churches, by Dean R. Hoge, Charles E. Zech, Patrick H. McNamara, and Michael J. Donahue (Louisville, Westminster John Knox Press),1996), 169-170.
84 Robert Wuthnow, The Crisis in the Churches: Spiritual Malaise, Fiscal Woe (NY, Oxford, 1997)
85 Hoge et al., Money Matters, 168.
86 Reeves, op. cit., 169.
87 Ibid., 71.
88 Vital Signs: The Promise of Mainstream Protestantism by Milton J. Coalter, John M. Mulder and Louis B. Weeks. (Grand Rapids MI, Eerdmans, 1996), 18.
89 Ibid., 101.
90 Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, 102.
91 Secretariat for Vocations and Priestly Formation, National Conference of Catholic Bishops/United States Catholic Conference, January 14, 1998 (www.nccbuscc.org)
92 www.greeley.com
93 Roof and McKinney, op cit., 95.
94 "Are Conservative Churches Growing?" by Tom W. Smith. NORC University of Chicago GSS Social Change Report No. 32 January, 1991, p 8.
95 Ibid., 12.
96 Edwin E. Crawford, Fundamentalism and the Church of the Nazarene (www.wesley.nnc.edu/crawford.txt).
97 Reeves, op cit., 71.
98 Loranine Boettner, The Reformed Faith (www.associates.com)

Religion's Self-Structure Support Instruments
	Roman Catholicism	Conservative Protestantism	Liberal Protestantism
SYMBOLISM: A. Parent Imagery B. Trance induction technique (ritual)	All powerful parent of a 3-year-old Regresses subjects to the third trimester of fetal experience	Less powerful parent of a 12-year-old Regresses subjects to age 7	Persuasive parent of a 21-year-old Regresses subjects to age 15
THEORY: Split-Self Theology	Abstract, convoluted. Keys: grace vs. nature, natural order vs. supernatural order	Dramatic, emotional, personalized forces.	Resignation and personalized forces
SOCIAL CONTROL: Teaching Authority Law Enforcement	Centralized, bureaucratic History of lethal exercise, Impersonal bureaucratic	Localized, personal History of lethal exercise, personal, familial	Persuasive No lethal history

	Percent of US Population
	1955	1965	1975	1985	1995
1. Catholics (non-Hispanic) (Hispanic)	20 5	20 6	20 6	17.5 6.5	16 8
2. Jews	5	4	3	2	1.5
3.Mainline Protestants Episcopal Church Presbyterians United Church of Christ Methodists Disciples Northern Baptists Evangelical Luth. Church Reformed	47	45	38	37	37
4. Conservative Protestants Assemblies of God 7th Day Adventists Churches of Christ Church of God Church of the Nazarene Mo-Wis Synod Lutherans Mormons Southern Baptists Independent Fundamentalist Pentecostal, Holiness groups	22	22	22	25	25
6. Seculars and Others	3	4	10	11	13.5