I’m in Arizona right now, visiting my sister. It is, of course, hot. But there’s something to be said for sitting in the shade, drinking ice water, and feeling the power of a place that can’t really be tamed. And the desert is a good place to consider the meaning of spiritual awakening, as its aridity can be the source of the most surprising beauties: flowering succulents, flaming sunsets, singing dunes, and hidden springs.
While I’m here, I’ve been working on some of the essays for our upcoming July Special — Beyond Christianity After Religion (How My Mind Has Changed or Not). Believe it or not, I’d forgotten the book opens with a vignette about Saguaro High School in Scottsdale. I’m staying at a hotel less than two miles away from there!
If you are part of the paid community and planning to read or re-read Christianity After Religion, here’s the reading schedule:
Week of July 3: Introduction, Chapters 1-3
Week of July 10: Chapters 4-7 (This is the longest section. If you want to, you can skim 4 and 5, and emphasize 6 and 7).
Week of July 17: Chapter 8
Week of July 24: Chapter 9
If you are already a paid subscriber, you’ll receive the posts without any special sign-up.
If you aren’t a paid subscriber and want to participate, you have to upgrade here:
Here’s the story from Saguaro High School that opens Christianity After Religion — it sets the stage for both the book and the conversation we’ll be having in July. It also relates how I once found spiritual water in the desert.
* * * * *
Saguaro High School, Scottsdale, Arizona
1976
I opened my locker—it was as overstuffed and unorganized as usual —and out fell a copy of the New International Version of the Bible. The Word of God hit the sandaled feet of a girl with a locker near mine.
“You’re so religious,” my high school companion growled. “A Bible at school? Are you becoming a Mormon or something?”
“No,” I replied. “I’m not a Mormon.” I had recently joined a non-denominational church, however, a church that took the Bible both seriously and literally. I was only vaguely acquainted with scripture through childhood Sunday school. But my new church friends knew the Bible practically by heart. I was trying to make up for lost time by reading it at lunch.
“What sort of religion makes you bring a Bible to school? Are you a religious fanatic?”
“I’m not religious,” I responded. “I’ve got a relationship with God. I don’t really like religion. Religion keeps us away from Jesus. It is more a . . .” I was not sure how to put it. “It’s a spiritual thing.”
My answer did not register. She turned away, flipping her long Marcia Brady-like hair impertinently in my face, and walked off.
It would be at least another decade before I would hear someone say that they were “spiritual but not religious.” I was only trying to describe something that had happened to me, an experience that I had. A few months earlier, I started attending a new church, one where the pastor urged members to get born again. I was not entirely sure what that meant.
But I listened to friends testify to God’s presence in their lives saying that Jesus was their friend and that they felt the Holy Spirit in their hearts. Although I had grown up in a Methodist church, I had never heard anyone talk about God with such warmth or intimacy. So, one communion Sunday, as I ate Saltine crackers followed by Welch’s grape juice, I actually felt Jesus. He was there. He showed up again a few days later at youth group at a backyard pool party as we all sang, “I Wish We’d All Been Ready,” a popular song about the Rapture and the End Times. I do not know how to explain it, but God had touched my heart and I felt fresh and new, relieved that God was there. I figured this was what the pastor meant by getting “born again.” I told a friend and asked him, “What’s this religion called?” He laughed saying, “It isn’t a religion; it’s a relationship.”
At the time, I felt pretty special. That God had chosen me, or the small group of “us,” for this experience. What I did not know was that millions and millions of other people shared our story — of growing up in formal religions, finding that somehow chilly or distant, and of rediscovering God through a mystical experience. Many of those people would call it being “born again,” but others would speak of being “filled with the Holy Spirit,” or being “renewed” by God. They left traditional religion in search of new communities; they tried to reform their old churches by praying for the Spirit. They embraced all sorts of theologies, from fundamentalism to medieval Catholic mysticism, from Pentecostalism to making up their own doctrines. They got baptized — or re-baptized — in the Pacific Ocean, formed alternative communities, wrote new songs, and raised their arms in ecstatic prayer. And it was not only Christians. Many of my Jewish friends recount similar experiences of finding God anew in those days, as do those who grew up in agnostic or secular families. Millions reconnected with their Higher Power in recovery groups. For all of us, religion morphed from an external set of rules into a vibrant spiritual experience of God. Somehow, the word “religion” did not seem quite adequate to explain what had happened. For those of us who followed Jesus, we had stumbled into a world of Christianity after religion, a spiritual space beyond institutions, buildings, and organizations into a different sort of faith.
With hindsight, it is a little easier to understand perhaps. The 1970s were a time of profound social change, a re-arrangement of social relationships, a time of cultural upheaval and transformation. There were spiritual aspects to that change, as well as political and social ones. Institutions and practices that once composed what was “normal” in American life began a prolonged period of decline, a failure that happened in fits and starts and that continues even today. As the old ended, Americans began an extended experiment in reordering faith, family, community, and nation.
In 1962, only a couple years after I was born, pollsters found that 22% of Americans claimed to have had a “mystical experience” of God. In 1976, the year my Bible nearly broke my classmate’s toe, that number had risen to 31% of the population. Back in those days, we thought we were in the middle of a revival.
Apparently, however, the revival did not end. By 2009, 48% of Americans said that they have had a mystical encounter with the Divine. This was not merely some sort of revival, a short-lived emotional outburst of renewed faith. Instead, the numbers indicate that in the last thirty years, American faith has undergone a profound and extensive reorientation away from externalized religion toward internalized spiritual experience.
For two decades, journalists, historians, and theologians equated this change with a resurgence of conservative Christianity believing that America had just experienced a massive evangelical awakening, akin to the First Great Awakening in the 1740s or the Second Great Awakening in the early 1800s. In more recent years, however, something else has become clear. Not everyone who has experienced God afresh is an evangelical, fundamentalist, or Pentecostal. Indeed, they hail from many sorts of faiths and many are not even Christians. And, what is equally true, not everyone who first understood their experience of God in the context of evangelical churches stayed evangelical. Of my friends from high school youth group, only a very few remained on the evangelical path. Others — including myself — migrated back to the old churches we once deserted; some became Buddhists, Hindus, or Jews; more than a few inveterate seekers, agnostics, and atheists. . . The forty-eight percent is, if nothing else, a theological motley crew, diverse and pluralistic in their spirituality, as ineffable as the Divine him- or herself. But whatever differences between them, it appears that a good many of those people are traveling new paths of meaning, exploring new ways to live their lives, experiencing new senses of authenticity and wonder, and practicing new forms of community that address global concerns of human flourishing.
Fundamentalist preachers look at this situation and shake their heads, warning against the Devil appearing as an Angel of Light, decrying how easy it is to fall into heresy, and how the evil one roams about tempting God’s children. To them, the 1970s revival went on the skids — neither their converts’ lives nor their attempt to convert culture unfolded as planned. They are busily training new troops to correct the course and return America (and the rest of the Christian world) to old-time religion and God’s righteous path. They envision a global sawdust trail to convert the heathen masses and restore biblical inerrancy, social order, clerical authority, theological orthodoxy, sexual purity, free-market capitalism, and Protestant piety.
But there is another way of looking at things.
What if the 1970s were not simply an evangelical revival like those of old, but the first stirrings of a new spiritual awakening, a vast interreligious movement toward individual and cultural transformation? Have we lived the majority of our lives in the context of this awakening, struggling toward new understandings of God, how we should act ethically and politically, and who we are deep in our souls? What if the awakening is not exclusively a Christian affair, but rather that a certain form of Christianity is playing a significant role in forming the contours of a new kind of faith? Is America living in the wake of a revival gone awry or a spiritual awakening that is finally taking concrete — albeit unexpected — shape?
Since I’ve got saguaros on my mind, today’s midweek post is, not surprisingly, about cacti. The prickly pear photo is from my morning walk. (Did you know the sun comes up in Phoenix around 5AM in the early summer?) I love the color of this cactus!
Two cactus poems follow the picture — because cacti might well be, from my view, one of the most mystical plants on earth. They stand witness to survival and resilience, even as we human scurry for shade. The desert teaches. We can be its students.
INSPIRATION
sonora desert poem
by Lucille Clifton
the ones who live in the desert,
if you knew them
you would understand everything.
they see it all and
never judge any
just drink the water when
they get the chance.
if i could grow arms on my scars
like them,
if i could learn
the patience they know
i wouldn’t apologize for my thorns either
just stand in the desert
and witness
Saguaro
by Alison Deming
If it takes you a hundred years
to grow your first arm
for how long
do you feel the sensation
of craving something new?
this book has been on my shelf for a long while waiting to be read, perhaps now is the time. Loved what you wrote above... I seem to think I am a bit older than you, but we are near enough in age that I resonate with much of what you share about your lived experience. Appreciated your recent video as well. I'm glad you still like this book... and have lived to appreciate Marsden, a number of his books were on my reading lists as a college student, seminarian and reader of american church history. This book I don't remember as being one of them. At 76 and with health issues and needing to think about living in a more a more supportive environment, I have been downsizing my library. Lots of old classics have gone away, but you have reminded me why I kept so many of them for so long. Because many of them are still full of wisdom and insight... I miss having them around. They are like old friends, but what must be done, must be done. Everytime I look at your bookshelves and Trips on your videos I feel a bit of jealousy.
In 1974, as a college freshman, I met a group on campus, and began to attend their Pentecostal church, "The Barn." For someone with a pretty typical Congregational/Methodist/Presbyterian upbringing (timid in attendance, strong in morals and work ethic), I found this group to be warm and accepting. We sat in jeans (verboten in traditional churches), played guitars singing to Jesus, and supported each other with love. We prayed for the ability to speak in tongues. When I got tonsillitis in the spring, the preacher played on hands for healing. I was not healed, (I mean, I had had tonsillitis before. Been there, done that, just go to a doctor, and get the penicillin. To the preacher at The Barn, I did not heal because I did not believe enough.
My parents were horrified about all of this. Coming home that summer, I tried to find a similar Pentecostal church (not a one). I wrote to my church friends, I prayed. And when I returned to college the next year, I made a beeline for The Barn. I vividly remember standing in the back watching the preacher lay hands on a member and praying in the spirit. I realized, clearly, this was not The Way. I walked out and never returned. By the time I graduated college, none of the freshman class of "jesus freaks" were part of The Barn.
It took me at least 15 years to be able to walk back into a church and not reject every word I heard. I talked to people of faith I had met and trusted, and asked them where they went. I became friends with an orthodox Jewish family, and so appreciated their understanding of God, the concept of tikkun olam and mitzvah. I started attending an Episcopal church, and felt like I had, after wandering in a desert, come home. It was okay to ask questions. Sometimes there were no answers. But the Episcopal tent was big, loving, and accepting. I have meet many people of many faiths who are open to questions, willing to share experience and doubt, and accepting of where each of us are in their faith walk. I look back at my time at The Barn as a crucible of sorts. I kept the nugget of love and acceptance and try to exemplify it always.