Genuine spirituality in fiction, part 2
Denatured/secular spirituality and the notion of "spiritual but not religious"
In Genuine spirituality in fiction, Part 1 (which I edited a little since it first went out via email, by the way) we saw how different lists of fiction titles on sources like Goodreads are rather generous with what qualifies as “spiritual.” Although some works do inspire readers in some manner, even if it’s not explicitly stated, toward God or a greater reality of some kind, many don’t seem to have anything to do with what would normally be associated with the spiritual. Such classifications arise, I believe, from the notions of “secular spirituality” and “spiritual but not religious,” the latter being a way in which a good number of people today identify themselves.
In part 2 here we’ll dig into these notions further because although I can understand their appeal, they do present a few problems or challenges that then spill over into expressions of spirituality and spiritual realism in fiction. Most notably, in their rejection of the “religious” they can easily reject a lot of what is yet genuinely spiritual, and instead of aiding people in a sincere spiritual search they can become obstacles. That is, although they might satisfy a sociological desire to avoid being identified with either dogmatic religionists or abject materialists, they aren’t likely to satisfy the inner yearnings of the heart and soul either.
Definitions of “spiritual”
What does “spiritual” even mean? According to the references built into Microsoft Office (and Bing search, which is what Office uses), “spiritual” has two definitions:
“Relating to religion or religious beliefs,” for which some synonyms are religious, sacred, divine, holy, nonsecular, churchly, and ecclesiastic.
“Relating to or affecting the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things.” For this meaning, some of the synonyms are nonmaterial, intangible, otherworldly, ethereal, mystic, psychic, psychological, and metaphysical.
Other dictionaries have variations on these ideas, but these definitions are suitable for our discussion, most notably because they include one meaning that falls outside the traditional sense of the word and one that I don’t find in my printed dictionary.
Now, the first definition clearly reflects the traditional understanding, the one that equates “spiritual” with “religious.” I think this usage is pretty clear, although it’s necessary here to think of “religion” in its most universal sense rather than in terms of a particular faith, denomination, sect, church, and so on.
The second definition, too, when it speaks of the “soul” and gives synonyms like nonmaterial, mystic, and metaphysical, suggests the understanding that “spiritual” refers to things that transcend our normal, material, and sensual world. This must again be taken in a universal, nonsectarian sense, as I think we can agree, for example, that it’s “spiritual” to speak of God or a greater reality in an overarching sense that’s inclusive of Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Sikhs, and people of many faiths who share that fundamental belief. (Even Buddhists, who are properly described as nontheistic rather than atheistic, speak of the Buddha awakening to the Ultimate Reality.) The idea, too, of an eternal, nonmaterial soul that exists separate from the body, as also common among many faiths, is also a “spiritual” concept in this sense of the word. And we can say that attitudes, beliefs, and practices that inspire or uplift one in the direction or experience of these concepts is also spiritual.
So far, so good. These definitions align with how I’ve generally understood “spiritual” over the course of my adult life. So how, then, do books that have nothing to do with these matters, like the two we looked at in Part 1, find their way onto lists of “spiritual fiction”?
Psychological “spirit” and “secular spirituality”
The answer relates, I believe, in the idea of the psychological “human spirit” that’s slipped into the second definition above, a spirit that equates to psychological or emotional qualities like passion and moral conscience. The crowd at a sporting event, for example, shows “spirit” when people hoot and holler for their team. Similarly, “Spirit Week” events, as practiced in public high schools and corporations, are designed for building a sense of shared identity.1 The French have the term espirit de corps to refer, quoting britannica.com, to “feelings of loyalty, enthusiasm, and devotion to a group among people who are members of the group” as originally used within the 18th-century French military. Similarly, when someone performs a selfless act out of community duty or moral obligation, regardless of any religious sensibilities involved, we say that they demonstrate “spirit.” And we think of people (even horses) who embody determination, fortitude, and perhaps even a sense of daring and adventuresomeness as “spirited.”
Because these qualities, feelings, or experiences are nonmaterial, and do carry a degree of upliftment that’s not strictly emotional, they can lean toward something we might call spiritual. I think people know that there’s something important there. Yet they don’t want to be pulled into religious associations, for reasons we’ll talk about in the next section. Consequently, this sense of spirituality has to be constrained to finding meaning not in transcendence of, but within, the material world and human psychology—that is, in the secular. The community of one’s fellow humans—family, neighborhood, city, the earth, etc.—becomes the only “greater reality” of concern beyond oneself, leaving no place for God and an eternal soul. Social responsibility to that community even becomes a kind of substitute religion, complete with heaping fear and guilt upon others—with an intensity that rivals many fundamentalist preachers—to get them “involved” in various causes.
“Spiritual but not religious” becomes a denatured spirituality
This purely secular spirituality, which really isn’t any different from secular humanism, has also evolved, I think, out of a sincere desire for people to identify themselves as moral, ethical, and “good” persons without religious associations, without the God thing and the soul thing and especially without the church thing. Many atheists, agnostics, and secular humanists sincerely want to help others and improve the world—like I said, it becomes a substitute religion. Many non-religious people also “believe,” we might say, in Plato’s transcendentals of Goodness, Beauty, and Truth, which is to say that they believe these things to have real value in human existence.
But secular people are often abhorred with, and thus rebel against, what they see as the injustices and abuses of religion, both current and historical. Take, for example, the Christian doctrinal interpretation that theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer criticized as “cheap grace,”2 which says what you do and how you live your life doesn’t matter in the least because salvation is achieved solely by God’s grace through belief in Jesus Christ. A Catholic commentator, in a separate criticism of the idea, put it this way: “Christians can sin as much as they want—they will get away with it. Others, for the same sins, go to hell.”3 The same interpretation suggests, too, that the most notorious gangster who has led a life of crime and debauchery can earn a place in heaven with a deathbed confession, but all “non-believers,” no matter how good, moral, or even saintly they are by any other measures, are doomed to eternal damnation, thrown in the abyss with the most callous, selfish, and amoral characters that have ever walked the earth.4
It shouldn’t come as any surprise that many people recoil in disgust from what they see as a gross injustice and consequently push anything that even hints of religion as far away as possible (especially if they’ve been hurt by institutional religion in some way). In doing so, though, they must also differentiate themselves from the truly callous, selfish, and amoral sorts. The identity of “spiritual but not religious” thus lays claim to a suitable middle ground.
The problem, though, is that in rejecting dogmatism and the abuses of religion, people tend to wholesale reject the notions of God and the soul as well, cutting off an essential part of genuine spirituality. The result is what Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham, in their book, Experiencing Spirituality: Finding Meaning Through Storytelling, refer to as a “denatured” spirituality:
All who seriously examine the matter agree that [genuine] spirituality is surely more than “not-religion.” Spirituality, they all seem to say in one way or another, in some way involves an experience of beyond—it “beyonds” us. All observers agree that genuine spirituality begins by looking outside the self, beyond the subjective. If religion is founded, as Robert Bellah suggests in his monumental study Religion in Human Evolution, in "awareness of an alternate reality," then spirituality involves a consciousness of contact with that alternate reality.
Genuine spirituality, in other words—which is to my mind essential for spiritual realism in fiction—involves something that goes beyond ego, beyond the secular, and beyond the psychological “human spirit.” Whether you prefer to call that greater reality God or not, it remains necessary to the fundamental nature of spirituality.
But the “not-religion” mindset of secular spirituality, in rejecting the God thing and the soul thing, gives more and more emphasis to the secular part. The genuinely spiritual then gets diluted to the point where what’s left is little more than materialism in disguise.5
(Addendum: see also the following post as Wright’s book speaks clearly to genuine spirituality that’s not denatured but not sectarian.)
Secular spirituality in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower
An example of this kind of secular spirituality is presented in Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower. The novel wrestles with issues of survival in a dystopian 21st-century America (the 2020s, in fact) that’s rapidly decaying due to environmental neglect, corporate greed, and a growing chasm of wealth distribution. Within this context, the protagonist, Lauren, the daughter of a preacher, is driven by an inward compulsion to found a new religion and belief system called Earthseed. As the blurb on the back cover of the edition I read says, "…what begins as a fight for survival leads to something more: a startling vision of human destiny…and the birth of a new faith."
It’s this religious aspect, along with various quotes from Lauren’s notes that eventually becomes the Earthseed scripture, that suggests something of a spiritual flavor for the novel. But—it’s a secular spirituality only.6 “God,” according to Earthseed, “is change,” being "one thing we could not stop no matter how hard we tried" as Butler explains in a Q&A at the back of the book I read.
Parable of the Sower also says that humans “shape” this God. To quote a passage:
God is Change, and in the end, God prevails. But there's hope in understanding the nature of God—not punishing or jealous but infinitely malleable. There's comfort in realizing that everyone and everything yields to God. There's power in knowing that God can be focused, diverted, shaped by anyone at all. … God will shape us all every day of our lives. Best to understand that and return the effort: Shape God. (219)
This God, then, defined as that which human beings cannot control, is a strictly human creation, and an unconscious one at that, leaving no sense any of transcendent or conscious reality beyond the human and the material. Earthseed too, then, is a purely psychological, which is to say, purely secular, “religion.” To quote another passage:
God is neither good nor evil, neither loving nor hating. God is power. God is change. (245)7
The other aspect of this faith, and the reason why it’s called Earthseed, is that “startling vision of human destiny” promised on the back cover. That destiny, which to be honest doesn’t seem particularly startling 40 years later, is for humans to leave the earth and populate other planets. As one passage of Lauren’s nascent scripture states:
We are all God seed, but no more or less so than any other aspect of the universe. Godseed is all there is—all that Changes. Earthseed is all that spreads Earthlife to new earths. The universe is Godseed. Only we are Earthseed. And the Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars. (77)
This fundamental sentiment isn’t surprising. Parable of the Sower was published only a few years after the collapse in 1991 of the Soviet Union, meaning that Butler must have started it when the Cold War was alive and well and we feared that humankind would nuke itself out of existence. Many people thus felt an urgency to start human colonies off the planet to ensure the survival of the species.
Such aspirations themselves certainly have a sense of expansiveness around them and so touch a core part of our spiritual sensitivities. And for that reason there is a saving grace: when pursued with sincerity, secular spirituality does ultimately lead to genuine spirituality…as we’ll explore in Part 3.
Until then, let me know your thoughts!
See, for example, https://mommateen.com/what-is-spirit-week/ and https://snacknation.com/blog/spirit-week-ideas-for-work/. I also think of the “Spirit of ‘76” slogan that refers to the patriotic sentiment engendered by the American Revolution of 1776. The slogan was also widely used during America’s bicentennial celebrations when I was a child.
See the opening chapter, “Costly Grace,” in his book, The Cost of Discipleship.
Father William G. Most, “Martin Luther’s Obituary for Lutheranism,” https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/luthers-obituary-for-lutheranism, accessed 20 June 2024. Perhaps that’s why my own father once told me that he was a Christian (a Lutheran, specifically) because it was “the most convenient.”
In the theology represented in Dante’s Inferno, the “guiltless damned” (like “virtuous pagans,” the Old Testament prophets, and unbaptized infants) and at least are afforded eternity in Limbo, the rather cozy uppermost layer of Hell.
This is at least true in the United States and likely other Western countries. In East Asia, however, although many don’t consider religion all that important, they still believe in nonmaterial realities. See The Religiously Unaffiliated Rise in East Asia on Neil Howe’s Demography Unplugged Substack.
In commenting on the novel’s model of spirituality, I’m not implying anything else about any of its other merits. Parable of the Sower was nominated by New York Times readers in 2021, for example, for the best science fiction book of the last 125 years, perhaps reflecting people’s hunger for a spirituality that’s not bound by traditional dogmas. Butler herself, an African-American woman, was and is celebrated for her courage and tenacity to hold her own in the white male-dominated world of 1970s/80s science fiction. Though she passed away in 2005, Butler remains a leading voice in the literary space of Afrofuturism, “a subculture, genre and aesthetic that explores speculative futures through the lens of the African diaspora – the displacement of Africans and their descendants worldwide and African culture,” as noted in the opinion piece Past, present, and future of Afrofuturism. She was also featured in the June 2022 issue of Smithsonian Magazine.
This strikes me as the kind of God that the character of Voldemort and his Death Easters in Harry Potter could believe in. In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Professor Quirrell, who is possessed by Voldemort, says, “There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it.” (Chapter 17) Voldemort delivers this line directly in the movie version.