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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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There has always been an air of mystery around closed or initiatory traditions. In the modern day, we know very little about what went on in ancient Greek mystery cults like the Eleusinian mysteries.

And yet, today, if I want to know everything there is to know about the Freemason's, Scientology, or Gardnerian Wicca, I'm a few short internet searches away from it. The mantras of Transcendental Meditation, which normally set a practitioner back ~$1000, can be found on various websites, and the basic technique has been distilled and shared as Benson's Relaxation Response and free apps like 1GiantMind. There is no mystery about what goes on inside a Mormon temple.

By and large, modernity has melted away any barriers for the curious to find out everything about a tradition.

Traditionally, kaballah wasn't studied until the age of 40 and the vedas are only supposed to be read by people with a guru to directly instruct them. But despite this, I can get a book on kaballah or the vedas on Audible for $12.99.

There used to be gatekeeping around many of these traditions, and many people actually respected it.

The Catholics had the doctrine of apostolic succession, limiting who could legitimately be said to be a priest, and had the ability to excommunicate someone if they didn't like what they were teaching. Within Hinduism there's a tradition of guru parampara or lineage, where the authority of a teaching is based on an unbroken lineage of gurus passing down proper understanding generation after generation.

In traditional Buddhism, the concept of the sangha or community of practitioners is given high importance, and in many Hindu sects there is an emphasis on satsang or spiritual community.

However, liquid modernity has melted all of this gate-keeping away, and though one can find disgruntled traditionalists on /r/Hinduism, or essays like this one complaining about "Protestant Buddhism" in the West, most Western practitioners are either secular or belong to the jury-rigged bricolage that is New Age, without any care about the actual traditions themselves. Sometimes this is justified by writers like the Dalai Lama claiming that he doesn't want readers to become Buddhists, but to become better Christians, Jews, Secular Humanists, etc.

I think a lot of this is a consequence of modern communication technology. In 1979, B.K.S. Iyengar published "Light on Yoga", full of pictures and instruction on yoga, and you suddenly didn't need a guru to learn the Hindu practice of hatha yoga. Today, you can find a thousand white women in yoga pants guiding you through yoga asanas on Youtube. There are yoga classes for pregnant women in Tel Aviv. Pandora's box has been opened, and there's no way to go back to the way things were before.

Harvard divinity scholars Casper ter Kuile and Angie Thurston coined the term "unbundling", to refer to "a mixture of practices from vastly different religious and devotional traditions, and divorced from institutional and doctrinal contexts." In some respects this has been going on for a long time. There is a long history of syncretism leading to things like Greco-Buddhist art or mixes like Santeria, Caodaiism or the Bahai Faith.

That same Harvard divinity scholar Casper ter Kuile also had the idea of applying the Christian devotional reading practice of Lectio Divina to the Harry Potter books, which lead to things like the Stations of the Horcruxes a fandomized version of the Catholic spiritual practice of the Stations of the Cross.

I recently found myself "protestantizing" or "unbundling" Hinduism, and then reflecting on why exactly I was doing that. I've attended a few ISKCON (better known as the "Hare Krishna movement") kirtans in the past few weeks, and have greatly enjoyed the experience of chanting in a group setting - I've gotten similar experiences being in a mosh pit at a rock concert, or doing a tourist-y full moon ceremony in Bali, but this seemed like something free and accessible on a week-to-week basis that filled a lot of the same niche. But I also started reading the ISKCON books I was picking up in the temple, and was left cold. I was in high school when New Atheism started getting big in the early 2000's, and it definitely shapes a lot of my thinking. I'm not a very "spiritual" person, and have never really been a seeker. (I was in Bali not as an aspiring yogi, but to do a two week Indonesian language immersion course.)

I don't agree with most of ISKCON's beliefs. I don't believe in God, and certainly don't believe that Krishna is anything more than a literary figure. I don't believe in any kind of afterlife, let alone reincarnation. ISKCON's strange mix of monolatry/henotheism, and perennialist "chant 'Yahweh' or 'Allah' if you're uncomfortable with 'Krishna'" approach has always seemed a little silly to me, and their socially conservative rules surrounding sexuality and substance use are a bad fit for my own more liberal/libertarian impulses.

But I believe that is the crux of the problem. After getting my free vegetarian lunch, I just sat by myself or with my partner and ate it, not talking to any of the other people there. I wasn't there for satsang/community, and I wasn't there to make friends or start becoming a true devotee. I was just there for warm fuzzy feelings, because they had a reliable package for eliciting a psychological state I otherwise have trouble achieving. The Hare Krishna's may be against intoxicating substances, but for a brain like mine they have a powerfully ecstatic intoxicant at the core of their practice, and I wanted to be warmed by it without getting burnt.

In some ways, the Hare Krishna's aren't a closed tradition at all. They welcome all comers and they're practically begging people to read "The Bhagavad Gita As It Is" and their many other books and scripture. But they also have a path that they're hoping people will take, involving two levels of formal initiation, and stricter rules that come with it - including chanting the Hare Krishna mantra 1728 times a day, sexual abstinence outside marriage, sattvic vegetarianism and no taking of intoxicants. Reading through "A Beginner's Guide To Krishna Consciousness", I realized that underneath their "exotic" Eastern exterior, ISKCON has all of the features I dislike in religion.

I got the sense that they're really trying to do the evangelical Christian approach of finding broken people whose lives are in enough of a shambles that they'll take any source of meaning and structure offered to get out of the Hell they've made their life into, whether that be abusive relationships, drugs or disconnection, sloth and ennui. And at a very basic level, I don't need their community or practices to add meaning to my life. I have an active social life, many friends, and a loving partner.

But I still found myself researching if there were any secular forms of kirtan that I could reliably tap into. I think this is the double-edged sword when one can't simply unbundle a sacred practice. Imagine if instead of requiring a formal confirmation, anyone could just partake in Catholic communion. There would probably be a lot of "spiritual" tourists who just want to see what this whole "eating Lord Jesus thing" is about.

I'm definitely a spiritual tourist, even if I'm not a particularly spiritual person. I've tried practicing Roman paganism, even though I believe none of it. I've tried praying the rosary, even though I was raised Protestant. I made "pilgrimages" to Catholic spiritual sites within the last year. It's not exactly like there's a god-shaped hole in me, but I see spirituality as an experience that many people have that is completely lacking in my own life, and I'm curious to experience it. I've never felt connected to God, never really felt connected to prayer, never felt like God was trying to tell me something or had a plan for me. It's superficial, but I've sometimes envied devout Christians the way I envy superfans on Tumblr. Like, sure there's a lot of weird restrictions their devotion creates, but I wish I cared as much about God or Star Wars as these people seem to.

I'm an eternal dilettante in the realm of religion and spirituality, and I suspect that much of what is occurring with me is characteristic of other "unbundlers" or what Tara Isabella Burton calls the "spiritually remixed." When you grow up in an atmosphere where all the information about a practice is freely available, when many of the practices have already slowly secularized and been unbundled from religion, it is very easy to become a tourist going here and there, and never matching the achievements of a true pilgrim who sets out for a specific destination and knows where they're going.

Harvard divinity scholars Casper ter Kuile and Angie Thurston

Stop right there, when the words "Harvard" and "divinity scholars" (or nowadays, even "divinity scholars" alone) are in the same sentence, I know what I'm going to read next. "But isn't it all, when you come to think of it, just one big unified pulsing blob of human ingenuity, pulsing pulsing, throbbing throbbing, and twirling gently ever upwards, twirly twirly?"

Of course these types are syncretists, they don't believe in anything but they like some exotic ornamentation to hang on their walls.

There would probably be a lot of "spiritual" tourists who just want to see what this whole "eating Lord Jesus thing" is about.

That was part of what the entire P.Z. Myers host desecration thing was about, and if you missed out on that, lucky lucky you. If you want to read up on the casus belli and what our friend made out of it, you can probably find it online, but it's too depressing for me because I do have reverence for the Eucharist and do believe that entire transubstantiation thing.

Isn't that a mite uncharitable?

I don't know what syncretic cringe Kuile and Thurston have posted in their other work. But in this quote they're just observing a tendency to treat practices like a buffet. No claims that doing so is right, morally or logically. No smug humanism.

Normally, I'd say claiming someone "doesn't believe in anything" is an inflammatory claim demanding evidence. But I suspect looking for such evidence will 1) raise your blood pressure and 2) devolve into gut judgments about sincerity. I don't think that buys us anything.

I don't think it is. Look at what the divinity student quoted is doing; he's not studying divinity, he's doing Ye Olde Post-Modernist Deconstruction. They're not interested in theology as theology but as something they can mix in with mujerism, BIPOC rights, queering society, all the rest of the band.

Like the OP - he didn't want community so he sat on his own eating the lunch. But you can't get the warm fuzzies without community, and the reason the chanting etc. works is because it's done in community under a shared set of belief and values. Like the other characters in the Little Red Hen story who want the bread without putting in the work, if the Hare Krishna adopted his approach you'd have a bunch of individuals sloping in at different times to aimlessly hum off-tune as each did their own little song. That wouldn't give OP what he wanted and what he visited for in order to get.

I’m saying I don’t think he tipped that hand in his quote. You or I can say “gosh these folks sure are trying to uncouple their cake and eat it too,” and that doesn’t make us postmodernists.

I hate trying to defend this guy, because I looked up his current projects and they’re more or less caricatures of what you‘re talking about. I’m reasonably confident that he does, in fact, want syncretic vibes-based spirituality without religion. But as far as this conversation was going he was making a reasonable observation! There are a bunch of folks into decoupling; he’s one of them!

So I find your diatribe about despising his attitude to be a little out of place. The religious equivalent of Man Always Gets Little Rush Out Of Telling People John Lennon Beat Wife. Thanks, that’s nice, but can we stick to comparing albums?