The Books of My Life: Restless Souls

The heart and the motivating force of Leigh Eric Schmidt's Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality from Emerson to Oprah (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), is a critique of the critics of contemporary American spirituality. Schmidt, a professor in the Department of Religion at Princeton, takes the critics of American spirituality to task, whether critics of the academic apologetic and polemical sort like Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton in their Habits of the Heart (1985), the critics of the political punditry sort such as David Brooks in his Bobos in Paradise (2000), or "critics" of the we are OK if you want to be OK you need to be like us "orthodox" Christian sort such as James Herrick in his The Making of the New Spirituality (2003).

Schmidt argues that despite their ideological differences the apologetic and polemical critics of the new American spirituality share similar views on the "otherness" of the new American spirituality. The new American spirituality, they maintain, is new or novel (I would add that they share the notion that American spirituality is not quite "American") and that it has, since its rise in the wake of the culture wars of the mid and late 1960s, resulted in an increase in mass narcissism and world rejecting mysticism that is undermining American values, American duties, the American community, and American authority and, as a result, is hazardous to the continued survival of America.

Schmidt, in his wonderfully written and nicely researched book, however, shows that the "new" American spirituality isn't that new. Schmidt traces this liberal and radical American spirituality back to mid 19th century Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Walt Whitman, and through late 19th and 20th century spiritual seekers or wayfarers like Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Rounseville Alger, Quaker John Greenleaf Whittier, Felix Adler, Ralph Waldo Trine, Sarah Farmer, founder of the Greenacre spiritualist retreat and school, Max Ehrmann, Quaker Rufus Jones, Quaker Thomas Kelly, both of whom played prominent roles in the Quaker retreat and study centre Pendle Hill, Christopher Isherwood, Gerald Hurd, Huston Smith, Howard Thurman, and Oprah. Schmidt finds the historical roots of this not so new American spirituality with its emphases on mysticism, solitude, the unity of all peoples and religions, and, worldly benevolence, not only in Transcendentalism but also in the metaphysics movement, mental healing, the new thought movement, Vedanta Hinduism, Buddhism, Liberal Protestantism, Liberal Social Gospel Protestantism, Unitarianism, Quakerism, Swedenborgianism, Reform Judaism, the health reform movement, the World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893, and nineteenth century anti-Calvinism.

In his sympathetic, empathetic, and "going native" history of American spirituality Schmidt is willing to concede to the critics of American spirituality that American spirituality is a product of a modernity and postmodernity characterised by globalisation, increasing narcissisms, increasing individualism, and its fetishisation of the status quo, factors that gave rise in the American spirituality, as Schmidt notes, to the seeming contradictions of mystical disciplines for quieting self-realisation versus mystical world changing ideologies and paternalistic particularism versus somewhat paternalistic intellectual openness. He does not concede and he amply demonstrates that the new American spirituality led to quietest world rejection, however. As Schmidt notes, many American spiritualists were abolitionists, health reformers, peace activists, activists promoting women's rights, critics of colonialism, and critics of capitalism.  I would add, by the way, that White American Conservative Evangelicalism with its universalisation of modern American capitalism, modern American nationalism, and modern American WASP culture is as modern if not more modern than American spirituality. American White Conservative Evangelicalism is also, I would argue, far more dangerous to the survival of the US and the globe as a result of these fetishisations than American spirituality will ever be.

I highly recommend this wonderful book to anyone interested in culture studies, intellectual history, the history of spirituality, and the history of religion, particularly in the United States.