"Spiritual, not religious"

The youth (or, as Joe Pesci would put it, "the yutes") are, increasingly, "spiritual", not "religious."  Patrick Deneen suggests, though, that they might have it backwards:

Spirituality is another kind of reaction against “forms” – this time in the religious realm – but, as with these other kinds of “informalism,” exists in order to overthrow the strictures and limitations that “forms” demand. As Blow reports, one woman arrived at spiritual “peace” by taking a vacation to Costa Rica, where she was able to overcome the “moral strictures” of her youth. Spirituality becomes the means to liberation, even dissipation.

Tocqueville argued that democracy would need forms, though it would seek their evisceration. Forms are necessary especially because democracy needs to inculcate the capacity for self-government, and self-government is achieved through an habituation in self-discipline that the forms provide. In so many areas of life today, it is obvious that our problems derive from our incapacity for self-governance, in the formal discipline of self.

What we need today is not a generation that is “spiritual, not religious.” I would argue that what is needed is the studied capacity to be “religious, not spiritual.” Let’s make that the new buzz.

What Eugene McCarraher -- one of my favorite Catholic marxists! -- once wrote makes, to me, a lot of sense:

“I think of myself as religious but not spiritual. Partial to the sensuous, communal, and cerebral forms of ritual and text, I’ve always considered ‘spirituality’ too ethereal and invertebrate a way of being.”