It may no longer be enough for health care professionals interested in spirituality to inquire into a person's religion. There is a new brand of spirituality in the American culture, a brand paradoxically dubbed "secular spirituality." "Secular" has long referred to the exclusion of spirit, while "spirituality" connoted little interest in matters secular. But today the two words have come together to point to a distinctive feature of the American spiritual landscape.
Secular spiritualities consist of spiritual beliefs and practices that people do not link to traditional religions by bonds of community, history, or doctrine. Twelve-step programs are a good example. In composing the original 12 Steps, Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, posited a restorative relationship to God as "a Power greater than ourselves." Yet he was equally adamant in keeping Alcoholics Anonymous independent of any specific religious denomination.
Uprooting
Secular spiritualities are not incompatible with the beliefs and practices of religious traditions. Practitioners of secular spirituality often uproot traditional religious elements from their historical and cultural contexts and use them in a "stripped down" way. The practice of Hatha Yoga in the West is a case in point. The "eight limbs of yoga" that Pantanjali describes in the Yoga sutras (including body postures, breathing practices, and meditation techniques) presuppose basic Indian religious ideas such as the law of universal causality (karma) and the illusory quality of changing things (Maya). In most yoga centers, these metaphysical doctrines are given only cursory attention, and in health club yoga classes they are usually missing completely. The practice is engaged in, but the underlying religious belief system is neglected.
Secular spiritualities are seldom expressed in theological or metaphysical language. There is little talk of the activity of the Holy Spirit. Neither is there extensive pondering of the relationship between visible and invisible realms. For the most part, secular spiritualities employ descriptive, phenomenological language, such as an unscientific psychological vocabulary.
This language tries to express and evoke a spiritual consciousness. In general, this spiritual consciousness is aware of the cosmos as a whole and of the self as the true and ultimately transcendent reality. As these realizations deepen, the person is invited into a movement toward growth and wholeness.
Eclectic and Pragmatic
Since secular spiritualities are not under the constraints of theological orthodoxy or the requirement of philosophical consistency, they are often eclectic. For example, ecological activists often see their work as a vocation and attribute spiritual meaning to it. They draw this meaning from many different sources. They might invoke Edward Wilson's notion of "biophilia" as a deep need of the human spirit to be related to every living thing. They might also draw on the Gaia hypothesis of biologists such as J.E. Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. These, together with Native American and ancient Chinese conceptions of nature, combine to recommend a spiritual attitude and lifestyle that reveres nature. Whatever will instill this attitude is employed, even if the various items are not historically related or philosophically compatible.
Pragmatism drives this eclecticism. Whatever works is espoused. If yoga works, do it. If petitionary prayer is helpful, do that too. One type of spiritual healing may complement a second; one may work best for one type of malady while another may promote healing in a different way. A thousand flowers grow.
Health Care Considerations
This openness to new and various spiritual techniques of healing does attune people to the experimental methodology of biomedical research and its statistical mode of inference. A more critical perspective sees this openness as evidence of endemic American consumerism. People compulsively search for a "best buy" or a "quick fix" for the maladies of body and spirit and do so unconstrained by theological or scientific strictures.
The positive features of secular spiritualities should be nurtured in health care. Emphasis should be placed on areas where scientific practice and contemporary spirituality converge. For instance, some scientists now realize the placebo effect brings about real physiological benefits. At the same time, spiritual adherents of "faith healing" are reevaluating how it comes about. It need not occur as a miraculous divine intervention but by means of the support of an attentive faith community. Both the scientific and spiritual approaches have come to correlating insights. A pragmatic and incremental spiritual sensibility can complement innovative scientific perspectives.
On the other hand, consumerist impulses should be resisted. HMOs and other health care providers should be encouraged to offer only spiritually related treatments that have some demonstrated health benefits. An uncritical promotion of treatments that satisfy a public appetite for alternative remedies (that are also inexpensive) may be good business in the short run. However, in the long run this policy may undermine the case for a spiritual role in healing.
Secular spiritualities are a distinctively contemporary form of spiritual sensitivity. They show both the promise and danger of bringing together notions of physical and mental health with spiritual well-being and transformation.
Peter Van Ness, Ph.D., formerly associated with the Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University, is currently studying epidemiology and biostatistics at the Yale Medical School.
