Lessons of Rejection: Mea Culpa

Why am I writing about America's spiritual crisis? I'm hardly a credentialed theologian, or even a spiritualist. Still, an inquiring mind and life experience should count for something.

The American Spirit Essays #6

(Previous entry: The American Spiritual Platform )

Why Me?

This essay begins our exploration of the spiritual crisis poised to destroy America.  It is thus fair to open with an honest if self-effacing question: Why listen to me?  Why should anyone care what I have to say about faith?  After all, it’s not like I’m ordained, or a professor of religion, or a committed activist atheist.  Unlike what I presume will be a majority of my readers, I’m not even a Christian.  I’m just a guy—an American—raised in a traditional Modern Orthodox Jewish home and community who walked away from religious observance while still in his late teens.  How does that qualify me to write about topics like spiritual crises, America’s spiritual roots, or the new religion of Wokeism?

Perhaps it doesn’t.  Then again, I’m also a guy who always remained deeply connected to his Jewishness and a guy who never stopped trying to understand what faith was all about.  Perhaps what qualifies me to write this essay series is precisely that I made many poor decisions without ever foreclosing the possibility that I might be wrong.  Perhaps what qualifies me is that I’ve made, in my personal life, many of the errors that I see roiling the country—and certainly, many of the errors that dominate the thinking of my elite compatriots who share my urban, credentialed, affluent, professional orientation.  Perhaps this entire essay series is possible only because of my history of failure, openness, education, and rediscovery.  Perhaps my personal spiritual journey is of direct relevance to the critical issue of America’s national survival at this very important juncture.  This essay is thus an extended mea culpa. 

At one point, I had thought of styling this essay—and perhaps even the entire series—as an open letter to the leaders of America’s spiritual communities because I’m calling upon them to find new solutions.  That call, however, is only part of my message.  I’m also calling upon America’s non-spiritual (and even anti-spiritual) majority to follow along with the parts of my journey that took me from a proud member of their ranks to where I am today.

A Journey Begins

My journey began when, as a very intellectual young man, I decided that I did not need a spiritual life.  I was hardly alone in reaching that conclusion.  In fact, it is precisely that rejection of spirituality—writ large across the Western world but particularly acute in the U.S.—that is now poised to destroy individual freedom, human dignity, the age of reason, morality, common decency, free market economics, and basic societal functioning.

I have since come to recognize spirituality as a fundamental human need.  Denying it as such creates a vacuum that something must fill.  That something must arrive in a language and a message that speaks to the listener.  As a young intellectual, little of religious language spoke to me.  That’s unsurprising.  The world’s spiritual traditions arose in the pre-modern world, casting their messages in language that resonated with our pre-modern ancestors.  In modern language, that means that the world’s finest spiritual traditions—crafted and polished over the course of centuries to align their offerings with genuine human needs—suffer from marketing campaigns honed for an audience that no longer exists.  Few within their current target markets—we residents of the information age—ever look beyond the dated messaging to assess the quality of their finely-crafted artisanal products.  Unmet needs and a rejection of quality form a dangerous combination—a widespread opening for charlatans. 

My basic assertion is that much of the large-scale madness we see in today’s world—specifically the rapid widespread adoption of internally inconsistent beliefs running counter to empirical reality and impervious to factual refinement—is the work of those charlatans.  Modernity has found ways to meet spiritual needs without sounding spiritual—hence Wokeism.  The result is a slick, hollow, toxic product aligned with contemporary conceits and the needs of cognitive dissonance: A morally destructive set of beliefs, fully accessible to those who insist that they have no spiritual core, that nevertheless meets their spiritual needs.  This essay outlines the lessons I learned on the path from my youthful error to my current understanding.