Gobsmacked barely describes my first encounter with religious innovation. I was a young teen seeking a spiritual home, and the apt quotes on a church bulletin board made me feel seen. I also was curious to look inside: the Fourth Universalist Society in the City of New York was a stately Gothic structure that loomed as majestic in 1968 as it would have in 1268.
On a crisp Sunday morning, I passed through outsized wooden doors and stared down the nave. Long banners, tie-dyed in electric hues, swung from the ceiling. Beatles songs played and old people—to me, anyone over the age of 30—bobbed to the music. It was the counterculture’s heyday, and the church seemed to have swallowed the zeitgeist whole. I sat through a service curated to meet the current moment and decided I preferred my religion more old-timey.
During the intervening decades, I didn’t think much about religious innovation. But the post-millennium surge of cultural, political, and technological change made it impossible to ignore the institutional shifts upending daily life, including in my academic field and my private life. I was a historian of American religion who belonged to a post-denominational congregation. What adaptations was I experiencing at my shul and were these parallel to past shifts? Rather than read up on theoretical models, I opted for lived experience.
Innovation customarily refers to progress in science and technology, and connotes change for the better. It also can describe advances in the arts and education, but isn’t typically paired with religion, a domain associated with tradition and continuity. Yet, might that perspective owe more to coastal elites’ empirical skepticism than to observable reality? Cave drawings, 45,000 years old, instantiate a form of sense-making, reflecting the mysteries of the natural world. And, as that sense-making adapts to specific times and places, cultures and societies, it shifts. It innovates to remain relevant. Understanding how and why innovation occurs became my goal, and over the past two years I developed a course on American religious and spiritual innovation to test my ideas with students.
I hypothesized that from the early days of English colonial settlement to the present, Americans sought meaning, identity, and purpose within and beyond traditional religions. Therefore, the class would investigate the who, what, when, why and how of religious belief, behavior and belonging. I also surmised that these changes were impacted by developments outside of established religious institutions. To systematize the study for a 15-week semester, I chose five modalities that have entwined with American religion and spirituality: politics, familial systems, gender, emotion/affect, and technology. All good, I thought, but before beginning our investigation, the class needed to define spirituality and religion and to decide what constitutes innovation.
Defining spirituality is as challenging as agreeing on the meaning of religion, reminding me of Justice Potter Stewart’s “I know it when I see it” opinion about hardcore pornography. If pressed, I’d say that spirituality encompasses the search for meaning, purpose, and connection to something beyond oneself, such as nature, the universe, or the divine, or to something within oneself, such as an inner light. Spirituality is fundamental to the human experience, and religion is institutionalized spirituality. If we don’t have a sense of purpose, if we don’t have a sense of personal worth, and if we are not connected to anything outside ourselves, why get out of bed every morning?
Theologian Paul Tillich explicated a similar notion, calling it “ultimate concern” in several of his books, including Systematic Theology and Dynamics of Faith. And, although I would not, as Tillich does, identify the “true” ultimate concern as God, much less Jesus, I believe that some ultimate concerns are more effective than others at enabling human flourishing. Love, as an ultimate concern, is superior to money. World peace outranks a desire for power. And preserving the earth is more compelling than technological progress. Such judgments were sure to stir classroom debate.
Bottom line: spirituality is manifest in ultimate concerns, which we can discern through experience.
Innovation also needed to be problematized for the class. As noted above, it is typically defined as introducing new ideas, methods, products, or devices that create value, improve efficiency, or solve problems. From that perspective, one could argue that Buddhism was an innovation arising from Hinduism or that Christianity innovated Judaism. But what about teaching Zen meditation at a conservative, evangelical church? For many members, unfamiliar with Dharmic traditions, introducing Zen would surely count as an innovation. For others, it might even be a radical, groundbreaking intervention. But Zen is a 2,000-year-old practice: can we call it innovative if it is new to a different tradition?
Likewise, restorationist churches, from the Stone-Campbell movement of the nineteenth century to house churches today, seek a return to the purity and simplicity of New Testament gatherings. Is shedding the trappings of modern worship—such as musical instruments, creedal statements or ministerial garb—innovative? Can seeking to restore the past be called an innovation if ideas and practices, despite being 2,000 years old, are new in today’s context?
The students decided that religious innovation happens when external phenomena cause change, which could, depending on the circumstances, be disruptive or restorationist. Once again, we followed Justice Stewart, convinced that we would know it when we saw it.
Since the current paper cannot encompass all the examples of spiritual innovation that we studied, I have chosen to highlight one of the earliest and most significant American spiritual innovations: the development of the religious/spiritual marketplace. This, in turn, led to the democratization of religion, the ascension of female religious/spiritual leaders, and the development of new forms of religious community. Each of these innovations was mutually constitutive with contemporaneous social and cultural shifts, and it is unlikely that one would have occurred without the other. This statement may seem obvious to some readers, but my students were shocked to learn that religion is deeply implicated in society and social change, and that social and cultural change innovates religious/spiritual belief and practice.
We began the study of spiritual innovation with the Constitution (1787), the Bill of Rights (1789), and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786). The Virginia Statute disestablished the Church of England and pledged that members of all religions would be free to practice their faith. When Congress wrote the Bill of Rights, the Virginia Statute was among the inspirations for the First Amendment, which forbade Congress from establishing any religion or forbidding the free exercise thereof.
Other than in the First Amendment, the founders intentionally left God and religion out of the U.S. Constitution, with a brief exception banning “religious tests” for elected offices. Aware that religious warfare had ravaged European countries from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, they agreed that disestablishment would obviate the cause for such conflicts. The founders themselves were theologically diverse, ranging from devout Christians of various denominations to religious skeptics. Yet, despite these differences, they all affirmed religious liberty, the notion that belief was a matter of individual conscience not state control.
The founding fathers’ decision to keep religion out of government had long-ranging political consequences, many resonating today. But it also had spiritual/religious consequences. By putting all religions on an equal footing, it enabled the creation of a religious (and spiritual) marketplace in which citizens could join or even create a faith of their choosing—or follow no faith at all. Since religions now had to work for their membership, and for the sponsorship that had been intrinsic to European state-supported churches, they needed to market themselves. As a result, the American religious landscape developed a dynamism and drive that eluded its European counterparts. In today’s parlance, churches became brands and religious membership signaled not only personal theology but also distinctions in practice, belief, and even socioeconomic status. Those differences in the religious marketplace are still strong today.
Although the new republic was designed by and for white, male landowners, political developments of the early nineteenth century moved our governance closer to a democracy, which was mutually constitutive with a similar trajectory in American Protestantism. These Jacksonian currents, which privileged individual agency and autonomy, uplifted the “common man.” Politically, property requirements for voting were removed and the franchise extended to all white men. Religiously, the Second Great Awakening’s call for salvation through a personal commitment to Jesus overtook Calvinist belief in predestination. Men could not only pick their political leaders but also could effectuate their redemption.
Other nineteenth-century spiritual innovations had nothing to do with electoral politics. Without an established national church, newspapers became the arbiters of religious influence. While some publishers adopted a respectful stance to mainstream religious leaders; others saw that sensationalism sells. Many names, unfamiliar today, were ballyhooed in headlines about religious sex cults, communicating with the dead, and adulterous affairs. Among the results, and coinciding with the rise of secularism, was a diminution of public, religious authority and the concomitant rise of faith in science.
Around the same time, side effects of urbanization and industrialization empowered women’s work, frequently under religious aegis, outside the home. This dovetailed with the appearance of female pastors and prophets and, later in the century, women leading spiritual and religious denominations. New modes of transportation and communication made it possible to spread religious materials nationwide and to grow new traditions. Whether it is cars, radios, or the internet, technological innovations have had spiritual ramifications which, in turn, changed the tech’s impact on the secular world. Seeing how social and cultural shifts occurred in tandem with spiritual and religious innovations left no doubt in my students’ minds that religion and spirituality were more central to American history than they had ever imagined.
Are there other ways to think about spiritual innovation? Of course. Researchers from other disciplines will have their own perspectives on this emerging field. My contribution to ongoing research is to insist on the contextualization of innovation within specific eras and locations rather than treating it ahistorically or autonomously. We currently face one of the largest and potentially revolutionary spiritual innovations ever: the development of artificial intelligence and its trans-and-post humanism outcomes. If we wish to secure the continuity of human flourishing, we may need to draw on the lessons of the past to discern which ultimate concerns will best serve the future.