Lessons of Rejection: Through the Looking Glass

The best way to appreciate traditional religion is to live with those who've rejected it and set out upon their own search for meaning.

The American Spirit Essays #1

(continued from last week’s Mea Culpa)

A Man of My Times

My youthful abandonment of spirituality—to which I confessed in last week’s essay—made me little more than a young man of my times.  According to a recent poll, a large and growing segment of America now describes its religion as “none.”  A far larger segment of the country claims a traditional religious affiliation but demonstrates little beyond a rather nominal connection.  For the overwhelming majority of Americans—and Westerners—alive today, spirituality is a dead letter.  That segment shows a significant overlap with our urban, credentialed, affluent, professional elite class—a class to which I have always belonged.  That overlap is hardly coincidental.  For many of them—for many of us—it’s a point of pride.

In perhaps another sign of our times, I also spent a couple of years immersed in San Francisco’s alternative community scene.  I was struck at how much these communities had in common with the very traditional religious communities of my youth—and other religious communities of which I’d since become aware.  It was as if all these seekers had rebelled against the absurdities they’d found in traditional religions, left them behind, then re-created them in some perverse, mirror-image, form.

It began, as you might expect, with “secret handshakes” and jargon known widely among the initiates but unknown to the world at large.  I learned of famous thinkers and writers whose fame had never before reached me—but were indeed sufficiently prominent to have written dozens of books and to command hefty five-figure speakers fees.  Incredulous community members would look at me quizzically and ask “Wait! You mean you never heard of…?” using precisely the tone I’d known from yeshiva students stunned that most of the world has never heard of history’s most prominent Torah commentaries.

Rituals and community-building exercises abounded.  The same people who derided speaking in tongues and snake handling loved ecstatic dancing in the moonlight.  Those who derided the foolish belief in the rapture committed vast energies to their own apocalyptic belief in global warming.  Regularly scheduled orgies subject to clear rules for admission and participation brought the community together as surely as a Shabbat service or a Sunday mass.  Pilgrimages to the “Playa” of Burning Man (or for the less devout, selected music festivals) were an annual rite.  At the Playa itself, carefully laid out maps placed an ornately designed wooden “man” and “temple” at the center of everyone’s adoration.  On the last two evenings, the pilgrims would gather to burn first the temple, then the man, in ritualistic ceremonies that would have been recognizable millennia ago.