Religion and spirituality are news today as never before. They attract attention so often that something must surely be going on. Perhaps traditional religion is waning and spirituality is waxing.

The author David Tacey in his book "The Spirituality Revolution" contends that a great change is in fact coming about. He thinks there is a truly spontaneous movement towards things spiritual and their healing power for society. He writes:

This is not an escapist or otherworldly movement, but a direct political and philosophical challenge to traditional notions of sacredness and the holy.

Something new is undoubtedly happening - but is it truly a spiritual revolution?

In their study of the English town of Kendal [1], Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead think that to qualify as a revolution the burgeoning spirituality movement should have at least overtaken traditional religion. They conclude that this is not the case:

... our findings show that even if a spiritual revolution is underway, it is taking place within a realm of activities which is in decline.

So whatever else we do, we must take claims for a spiritual revolution with a pinch of salt. What is happening is in the context of massive social, cultural, political, scientific, theological and philosophical change over the last 100 years or so.

Sister Bernadette Flanagan of the Milltown Institute perceives three groups involved in the growth of spirituality today. First, there are young people who remain in touch with the Church as an anchor in a stormy sea of change. Second, there are those who have dismantled previous certainties and now seek to live out their questions on the edge. Third are those who now have little or no connection with a religious tradition.

It is the second group which the Kendal study ignores. These people are developing their spirituality on the edges of traditional religion. The revolution might still be young - but the revolutionaries are clearly at work. As Sandra Schneiders writes:

The repudiation of institutional religion in favor of personal spirituality is, for many people, the repudiation of denominational belonging rather than of religion as such or of religious traditions in their entirety [2].

The focus here is on this group, who might be called "The New Believers" [3]. Spirituality for them is primarily about bringing the whole person into a relationship with God while at the same time having more questions than answers about traditional Christian teaching. It is also less to do with the funky things of New Age practices and more about finding a way into an ever deeper encounter with the divine.

The New Believers are not wicked apostates. It's just that their outlook and temperaments find traditional approaches oppressive, morally suspect and spiritually unattractive [4]. They see themselves as having embarked upon a journey of faith, growth and transformation.

The journey of the New Believers is into a wilderness through which each person must perforce make his or her own way. Mark Wallace writes:

Truth in religion begins with the willingness to travel the unmarked path plotted by the spirit in the heart of each person [5].

A facet of the spiritual life of the New Believer is the risk of criticism from those who haven't recognised that the meaning of the word "spirituality" has changed in popular usage and is unlikely to revert to its traditional points of reference. As David Hay wrote in the Roman Catholic periodical The Tablet:

The change amounts to a shrinkage of the meaning of the word "religion" and the expansion of the term "spirituality". Religion used to refer to the whole of the human encounter with the divine, but has shrivelled down do denote something like church-going.

If he's correct, then perhaps the Marxist contention that revolution succeeds when the language of the old order dies is to be given considerable credit.

But note that the death of the Church has been greatly exaggerated. At best the jury is out on the question of the Church's future as an institution. That, however, is not the main concern of New Believers. They focus instead on building a nourishing faith - a difficult task in itself, and made more testing by the tendency of traditional religion to defend its turf with the harshest of measures.

It is no longer sufficient for New Believers to live in a religious bubble, isolated from the tides of human life. As David Tacey says, those venturing on the new spiritual journey are

... only interested in a faith that has passed through the fire of atheism, the blaze of modernity and the critical scrutiny of psychoanalysis and science. What survives after all else has been burnt away ... is the only kind of faith that resonates with the spiritual needs of our extraordinary time.

The Church at this stage in its history preaches unconditional love - and yet closes its doors to a host of "unsuitable" people. It must perforce do this because its main concern is with nurturing a doctrinal purity born out of its conviction that it has access to final truth. It is therefore not surprising that people of genuine faith, commitment and integrity are ruthlessly silenced.

The fact is that more and more people are willing and able to leave the wasteland of traditional religion for the fertile edges of belief. Jeremy Young, for example, is one who proposes that

... we take our stand on uncertainty and on a return to the ancient theological insight that the forms of the Christian religion cannot contain or adequately express the mystery of God ... in essence the knowledge of God is experiential not conceptual [6].

Living at the edge of belief requires that New Believers may have to put aside inherited beliefs - or reconstruct them in the light of discerning reflection and experience.

This experience can be costly, unsettling and painful because it requires change at the very deepest levels of our being - which brings us back to the word "revolution". 

It turns out in the end that if a spiritual revolution is happening in our times, it is one which will come about primarily within ourselves.

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[1] The Spiritual Revolution, Blackwell, 2005
[2] In Spiritus, the Journal of the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality
[3] By Rachel Kohn
[4] Bishop Richard Harries in The Guardian newspaper
[5] Fragments of the Spirit
[6] The Cost of Certainty 

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