Ideas - Why modern spirituality is actually a form of religion

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

Traditional religious institutions have been in decline since the '60s. As congregations dwindle, more Canadians are identifying as 'spiritual.' Sociologist Galen Watts traces the history of the modern spiritual movement and asks what we have gained — and lost — as it has become the dominant religious tradition of our time.We'd love to hear from you! Complete our listener survey here.

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Can you ever hear me? Is this, is the mic on? Testing, testing. There we are. So I'm going to stand here. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. So what I want to do over the next 45 to 50 minutes is tell a story about Canadians in the 21st century and the modern world. Specifically the world, as we know it, you know, in the wake of the 1960s. In the fall of 2024, sociology professor Galen Watts gave a talk in Waterloo, Ontario, called The Spiritual Turn and the Challenge of Solidarity.

And I want to tell the story of our world today by focusing on religion. The talk was hosted by St. Jerome's, a Catholic school nestled within the University of Waterloo. Because I think we can think about religion as a kind of microcosm of what's been taking place in the wider society. It tells us something about our situation and about ourselves. But Galen Watts wasn't there to talk about Catholicism or any other organized religion, for that matter. The religion of the heart in its various forms

is often disseminated today via popular films, television, video games, and music. And talk of spirituality, personal growth, and self-development has become a staple of therapeutic daytime talk shows. like those of Dr. Phil or Oprah Winfrey. You won't find the religion of the heart in any conventional church. But according to Watts, in today's world, it's pretty much unavoidable. Yoga studios, meditation groups, silent retreats, 12-step meetings, aromatherapy and acupuncture clinics. The church as an institution has been in decline for decades.

But as the pews empty out, spirituality, is on the rise. Wellness workshops and life coaching seminars, the body, mind, spirit sections, and bookstores, along with the countless newspaper articles, magazines, and social media pages that discuss spirituality. It really is hard to escape it, certainly on social media. I'm bombarded daily with post after post proselytizing

about some version of the religion of the heart. Anybody's been in an indigo recently, have probably noticed the rise of this sort of spiritual but not religious book, Right? Some estimates suggest that as high as 40% of Canadians now identify in this way. In his lecture, and in excerpts from his book of the same name, Watts argues that while they may not know it, those who identify as spiritual but not religious are the torchbearers for a long-standing tradition, one that helped build modern society, but now threatens to alienate us from it. I'll let Gailen Watts take it from here

So I've said then that I want to focus on religion Now it probably isn't a surprise to most of us here that one of the dominant stories in the religious sphere has been one of institutional decline So across what sociologists like to call the three bees Believing belonging and behavior We have seen marked decline right Canadians identify less as religious than they used to

They attend religious services less than they used to. Now, that isn't to say that all churches are empty, and there are, of course, some forms of Christianity that have been doing okay, that have been even flourishing in some cases. But I think really, when we think about religion, one way of thinking about it is that given the historic role of Christianity in countries like Canada, it has really been a story not just of the decline of institutional religion, but really of the institutional churches, that that is a dominant story in Canadian life over the past. 50 years. But I think that there has been something else happening that's worthy of our attention.

So increasingly, Canadians think of themselves as spiritual but not religious. They're embracing spirituality. And we see this happening in quite large numbers. Some estimates suggest that as high as 40% of Canadians now identify in this way. And we're seeing similar kinds of trends happen in the U.S. A recent survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute reports that about one in five Americans identifies as spiritual but not religious, and while the number in Western Europe may be smaller, it's still substantial. Now, if it was just the way that Canadians identified, that wouldn't be all that important. But of course, we've seen other changes taking place on the ground. We've seen ancient Eastern practices like Buddhist meditation become extremely mainstream.

celebrities are now trumpeting its benefits. Similarly with yoga, these spiritual practices have increasingly gone mainstream. So these have been happening at the same time. You've had the decline of the institutional churches, and yet you've also had this shift, this rise in people identifying as spiritual and all of these spiritual practices, right? And so naturally, you know, sociologists have been wondering, well, how do we make sense of this? And when I started engaging with this, what sociologists were saying, saying is that, look, we've talked to people who are spiritual but not religious, and they give

us 1,000 different definitions, right? There are as many definitions of spirituality as there are people. The consensus in the academic literature was that we have no idea what's going on here. This is completely incoherent, right? There is no kind of shared set of ideas or beliefs from one person to the next. Moreover, if you look at people who are spiritual but not religious, they pick and mixed. They bring together things that are seemingly incoherent. They mix some mindfulness meditation with some Reiki, with some astrology, with some self-help. None of this makes any sense, right? There's no underlying coherence or logic to this. Any activity, event, or experience can potentially be interpreted as spiritual in nature.

For those I spoke to, exercising, listening to music, or hiking can be considered spiritual. as what matters foremost is whether they experience a connection to a force greater than themselves, be it God or the universe, and whether or not it helps them to grow personally, heal, or realize their true self. This was the consensus 10 years ago, and I'll say that much of my work over the past decade has been trying to make the argument that that's wrong. I've tried to make the argument that actually when you hear talk of spirituality, what we need to see is, is that there is under this actually a very old religious tradition. And often the people who are spiritual but not religious don't know that they themselves belong to this tradition.

That's the sort of paradox. It's a tradition that people don't actually know exists, but it is one. The fact that individuals who self-identify as spiritual don't all agree about what this term means is not evidence that they don't collectively subscribe to a shared cultural structure, but rather evinces the fact that they do, one that prizes subjective experience and self-realization over and above labels of self-identification. Indeed, what has made the religion of the heart so difficult for social scientists to study is that its adherence

deny adhering to it. In romantic fashion, they prefer instead to view themselves as nomadic traditionalist seekers in touch with a universal spiritual core that cannot be captured by language. I should say that this is an argument that I'm not making just willy-nilly. So one very important source for me have been these historians of religion who have over the years been trying to bring attention to this tradition that exists but is for many different reasons been kind of marginalized in the official histories of the West. And the argument is that this tradition goes as far back as early Christian, Christianity, but really you don't see it make a splash, you might say, until round about the 18th century.

And I call this tradition the religion of the heart. The religion of the heart is not a wholly novel term. Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the religion of the heart to capture his preferred form of religion. Theologian Ted Campbell uses the religion of the heart to categorize a number of religious movements which emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries. And sociologist Linda Woodhead has used the term to describe the religiosity of Princess Diana, for whom, quote, it was not the institutions which were important, but individual human beings and their feelings. So I think that, as I said, this is a tradition that is as old as Christianity and arguably comes out of a certain kind of mystical

strand within Christianity. And you can see it in some ways, you know, parts of it bubbling up in early Methodism, pietism, Quakerism. But where you really see it kind of blossom first is in the 18th century in the Romantic movement.

The romantics from Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, they were deifying the natural world. They saw the natural world as a sort of source

of the divine, and they prized the values of authenticity and self-expression. Talk about the romantics. That's what we think of. The romantics came of age during a period of tremendous upheaval. Industrialization, urbanization, and economic turbulence were dramatically transforming the nature of social life.

They looked out at their budding industrial societies and shuddered, experiencing nothing short of world weariness, the sense that everything they valued, authenticity, individuality, sensuality, self-expression, eroticism, and the imagination, were being stunted and degraded as a result of modern industrialism. This tradition gets picked up in other ways by other movements. A very important movement here was transcendentalism.

What I think of is the most important movement that nobody's ever heard of. A very important spokesperson of transcendentalism was the poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. For Emerson, the authentic spiritual life, is one of unrelenting self-expression and self-discovery, and an untiring quest for the ineffable, a view we find equally championed

in the work of Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau. For these American spokesmen of the religion of the heart, rituals, liturgies, and norms must always come second to that which matters most, spontaneous, direct, unmediated spiritual insight into reality. Now, you see this tradition also bubble up in other movements of the 19th century? new thought is another very important one. This is a precursor to positive psychology and also

prosperity theology, for better or worse. And a little bit more esoteric was another movement, Theosophy. One of the sort of pioneers of Theosophy was this Russian mystic, Eleanor Blavatsky, who was one of the first to articulate what Aldous Huxley would later call the perennial philosophy, the idea that at the core of all religious traditions is a single source, that we're all heading up the same mountain to the same summit. Much of what goes by New Age can be traced back to transcendentalism, theosophy, and spiritualism. New Ages channeled the romantic aversion to all forms of reductionism

and celebrated feelings and intuition above all else. Now, I've been telling you that these different movements are sort of different iterations of this underlying tradition, right, that goes a long, long way back. And so I'm sure you're wondering, well, what exactly is this tradition? How do we go about identifying it? So this is a religious tradition. And so naturally, as a religion, there is going to be some conception of ontology. In other words, an account of what's the nature of God? What's the nature of divine reality? And here, for the religion of the heart, God is going to be understood as a kind of omnipresent force that is imminent in the world, that is accessible to human beings, not radically transcendent.

Among the spiritual but not religious, spiritual or God moments stand for those times when everything in life seems to align, as if unfolding according to a divine or cosmic plan. These experiences of absolute joy, of self-transcendence, of synchronicity, contained within them, if not proof, than at least the possibility of a greater force in the world. I should say that people who adhere to the religion of the heart disagree a lot on the labels. The term God may not be used by everyone. For others, it might be cosmic energy.

For others, it might be the universe, right? But whatever we call it, it is considered imminent. It is very much in this world, not something that is fundamentally otherworldly of the kind that, say, the Calvinists worshipped. This God, this divine, is accessible to human beings, and it permeates the material world. It shows up in our lives. And crucially, the reason for this is because we can experience it, right? We are able to experience the divine.

For the spiritual but not religious, spirituality is signaled in moments of quiet contemplation or unexpected bliss, be it while in meditation, climbing a mountain, or dancing at a rave. The classical sociologist Max Weber argued that what defines a religion is that it gives account of the existence of suffering. It gives us, in other words, a theodicy. And the religion of the heart does this, of course, tells us that suffering exists because it is redemptive. It plays a redemptive purpose in our lives. It is redemptive because it helps us to become who we are meant to be. We have to go through. the hardships in our lives.

Otherwise, we would not realize our true selves, right? So suffering in our lives plays this very important role, right? It is what allows us to redeem ourselves, allows us to realize who we are meant to be. Moreover, we find a soteriology, another big, fancy word, an account of salvation. How is it that we're saved? The religion of the heart says we are saved,

and what we need to dedicate our lives to is achieving authentic selfhood, to realize ourselves, that we fundamentally are on a quest to become who we truly are. We are trying to actualize our potential and we're trying to realize our true selves. That's why we're here, right? And we have to go through suffering and hardship and difficulties to do that. What ultimate end does suffering serve? Simply put, self-realization.

That is, suffering is necessary to actualize one's potential and realize one's true self. Deepak Chopra writes, Each of us is here to discover our higher self or our spiritual self. Wayne Dyer directs people to locate their sacred self. And Joel Osteen counsels be an original, not a copycat. I did interviews with Canadians who identify a spiritual but not religious and I did field work at a number of different places including a charismatic Christian church.

And through all of this I came to sort of see these underlying similarities. So in terms of ontology, how it is that God or the divine is understood. So these are some examples from my interviews with Canadians. So some of them say that God is inside and outside of me, right? God is imminent in the world. All things are connected. Spirituality is like being aware of one's spirit and its connection to all things, capturing this shift towards an imminent conception of the divine.

While my informants might vary in the weight they give to reason or abstract principles and doctrines in other spheres of life. Nothing trumps direct personal experience when it comes to their spirituality. For instance, one interviewee asserted, for me, it's your own truth. While another stated, I found it was more encouraging to find the truth within myself. Now, as I said, you can access it, right? And so that means that it is primarily through experience that you come to know this divine, that you come to know this cosmic force.

and this contrasts with say two other ways of coming to know right one might be through doctrine you know what's true because you read it in a sacred text because it says so right or the other might be reason you know because you have reflected right you've used methods of science or rational reflection to come to it here it is experience right you know because you felt it. And moreover, the more intense, the more flow-like, the more effervescent the experience, the more meaningful and authoritative it is. That is how you know God or the divine. These experiences are interpreted as evidence for the existence of something more, and it's these moments that encourage the adherent to pursue their spiritual interests,

to read more, to talk to others about these experiences, to delve deeper into their spiritual journey. The basic idea is that individuals must look within, specifically to their intuitions and feelings, in order to discern what is true and good. In short, the individual serves as their own source of guidance. There are sacred values here at play, and the crucial ones for the religion of the heart are individual freedom,

that how can you realize your true self if you're not free, right, if people or laws or institutions are constraining you, forcing you to be something that you're not, forcing you to stay where you are, to not go where your heart leads you, right? And of course, personal authenticity is an imperative, and so you need to be free to pursue your quest for authenticity. It would be a horrible society that didn't allow people to be who they truly are. And so it's for this reason I've come to think that spiritual but not religious people reject what they call religion, right? It's in the moniker that I'm spiritual but not religious. And I've asked people, well, what do you mean when you say I'm not religious? What is the religion that you're rejecting? And it's basically this,

that religion is judgmental, it is oppressive, it's conformist, and it stifles me from being who I really am. In other words, I don't want it because it makes me unfree and it stops me from being authentic. We may not know exactly what we are, but we certainly know what we're not, that being, religious. The story of liberal modernity, as habitually recounted by both proponents and detractors alike, is intimately bound to. up with a grand narrative of religious decline. So these are the sacred values of contemporary spirituality.

And I've told you so far that this tradition is very old and it has deep roots in the West. But of course it was quite marginal, right? Even throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, it was really confined to a bunch of quacks. But that changes in the 20th century. And I want to suggest that it's really because of three movements, but we would call in sociology carrier movement. movements that come to sort of pick this up and popularize it. The first is the New Age movement.

Now I often think there's sort of a great paradox about the New Age movement because nobody calls themselves New Age today. It is very uncool. And yet, in a sense, you know, the New Age was premised on this prophecy, right? That at some point we would realize a new age and everyone would sort of live according to New Age values. Well, on some level the prophecy came true. But we just don't recognize it.

That in many respects, ideas that were championed in the New Age movement have become our common sense, our cultural common sense. And they're not confined to fringes or quacks. The New Age and the counterculture more generally took aim at the tradition of biblical religion, for they perceived it as the chief bulwark of moral traditionalism. They rejected the Christian doctrine of human depravity, in favor of a romantic conception of human benevolence.

Additionally, New Ages challenged the Calvinist notion of a distant and holy transcendent God, instead championing an imminent conception of the divine, often equated with nature. Now, the New Age was not the only movement to carry forward the religion of the heart. There was another. The New Age movement was really a kind of grassroots civil society development.

But alongside it was a more academic movement, which really happened in universities, and particularly on the West Coast, which is probably not surprising. Two very important figures in this. The first, Abraham Maslov, very important human potential thinker, humanistic psychologists. Most of us probably know Maslow, to the extent that we do, because he popularized our famous hierarchy of needs. So let's think about that, right? He says that we have, all humans have a hierarchy of needs, right?

Once our baser needs for safety and security are met, will we go up to climb to the next higher needs? What is the very highest need? Self-actualization. That is the purpose of being human. That's the very highest quest that we could do. The other was Carl Rogers, very important public intellectual and psychotherapist,

well known for popularizing something called client-centered therapy. If you want to understand why therapy is so common and the kinds of therapeutic concepts that we now use, go back to Rogers, read him. So in his very famous book on becoming a person, he writes the following, experiences for me the highest authority, neither the Bible nor the prophets, neither Freud nor research, neither the revelations of God nor man can take precedence over my own direct experience. That's the religion of the heart, pure and simple. The works of Maslov and Rogers have together played a formative role

in shaping what we might call secular variants of the religion of the heart. Owing to their legacies, it became both acceptable and commonplace to hear the term spirituality used without reference to traditional religion and to equate it with the task of self-realization. But alongside the New Age and the Human Potential Movement was a third movement. And this is going to seem a little bit strange for some of you, I suspect. And that's the charismatic Christian movement, which occurred in almost the same time. And anybody who's been to an evangelical or charismatic Christian church will probably know that it has a distinctive worship style.

It's all about having this visceral experience of the Holy Spirit. And what U.S. citizens seem to want from these new religiosities is intense spiritual. experience. So charismatic Christianity has carried forward the religion of the heart in a Christian guard. And it's succeeded. It's done really well. And the reason for that is not a coincidence because the problem is that we've tended to look at religion as though things are happening in a vacuum. But that's a mistake, right? Religion is equally affected by what's going on in the rest of society, which is not to say that, you know, it's just a kind of passive actor getting affected by the rest, it also has an effect in return. But this is, to use another academic term,

it's a kind of dialectical relationship, right? They're feeding off each other. And so we need to think then about what happened in their wider society over this time. By most accounts, religious institutions have been on the decline in Canada and abroad since the 1960s. But as you're about to hear, Canadian sociologist Galen Watts tells a different story. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. For small business owners, there's strength in numbers. Chambers Plan Employee Benefits brings together 32,000 businesses across Canada in a pooled benefits plan designed to help keep premiums manageable. Get flexible group benefits like health, dental, disability, travel coverage, and more with built-in supports like expert business guidance and mental health resources.

Benefit together with Chambers Plan. Learn more at hellochambers.ca. This program is brought to you in part by Specsavers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot, squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eyes. exams are so important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.cavers.caps.cavers.cairists, prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers. If we expand our definition of religion to include unchurched forms, we see that the

1960s were a period of tremendous religious ferment. Galen Watts calls this unchurched faith, the religion of the heart. Instead of seeking a congregation, its adherents turned their attention inward, focusing on self-help and personal authenticity. Watts contends that the emergence of this new religion in a decade of dramatic social and political change is no mere coincidence. counterculturalists and 1960s activists argued that abstract rules and regulations stifle individuality and alienate the head from the heart.

In the second part of his lecture, Watts traces the social consequences of this spiritual inward turn from the fractious 1960s to the polarized present. So what I want to do is tell a story. that voids as much as possible what I'll call the kind of one-dimensional character of a lot of the stories that you hear today about the world. And as I see it, there's really kind of two genres of story. On one hand, the story that we hear is a story of triumph, right, of increasing prosperity, increasing freedom and equality, especially for minority groups. women, LGBTQ folk, ethnic and religious minorities, it is a story fundamentally of progress. Now, you hear on the other side the opposite story, a story of decline, a story of stagnation, of the fraying of social bonds, of eroding communities and commitments.

This is really a story of despair. And I want to suggest that on their own, both of these stories are wrong. but that they contain partial truths. And so the story I want to tell, in some sense, is going to try and hold both of these truths together. Because if we can do that, I think we'll have a much better sense of where we are and a much better chance of moving forward.

Well, first, we have to think about what Michael Ignatiof calls the rights revolutions. The very important movements for civil rights, for gender equality, for gay rights, ethnic and religious diversity rights and the crucial thing I want to suggest is that in these different ways these movements all championed the same sacred values of individual freedom and personal authenticity

and as we'll see it's actually not surprising then that you'll see these interlinks between these political moral movements and the spiritual movements be it New Age, charismatic Christian or the human potential movement. Consider, for instance, second way of feminism, one of the most important rights revolutions

of the 20th century, women fighting for freedom, for equality, the right to be able to work, to get paid equally, right, to not be discriminated against. Now, if we go back to one of the most important texts of this movement, Betty Friedan's The Feminine mystique, one of the things that Ferdin argues is that the problem with patriarchy is that it fundamentally undermines women's ability to realize their true self-actualize. It undermines their ability to pursue who they really are.

The women's liberation movement relied on the very same conception of freedom that lies at the core of the religion of the heart. The notion that freedom means freedom to be oneself as one feels oneself to be. By claiming the personal is political, second-wave feminists challenged the traditionalist assumption that women's place is in the home, and shone alight on the various injustices manifested in the private sphere. And in their quest for personal authenticity, they also sought to topple the systemic barriers that prevented women from achieving equal concern and respect in the public sphere. And not surprisingly, you know, the famous activist, Gloria Steinem, would later leave religion and in recently moved towards a more spiritual orientation.

Any religion in which God looks suspiciously like the ruling class is very different from spirituality that honors the godliness in each of us, she writes. And this has been a very important trend. Many feminists left the churches and adopted a more spiritual but not religious orientation. This has continued on, right? You see the late black feminist Bell Hooks doing something similar. As the legal order was remade to reflect a romantic, liberal, social imaginary, feminine ideals were similarly recrafted,

and while young women increasingly rejected the traditionalist conceptions of piety championed in the churches, they simultaneously searched elsewhere for a viable religious alternative. Think also now of the gay liberation movements, the gay rights revolutions of this period, where the fundamental message for many gay people, activist was accept us for who we are. Let us be our true selves. Let us love the people that we love, right? It was a message of authenticity. Why force us to repress what is truly us? And we've

seen also a similar move within the LGBT community to embrace a more spiritual but not religious orientation, precisely because of these underlying shared values, these shared orientations. Feminists and gay activists sought and continue to seek public recognition of their identities, aspiring not only to a legal system, but also a public culture that offers their true selves equal respect and concern. Think also of another very important movement of the late 20th century, the rise of modern environmentalism. Now, one of the things about the environmental movement was that it challenged the view that many modern capitalists, societies have of the natural world, which is that it's just dead matter to be extracted for our own purposes.

That for many environmentalists, that was the wrong way to think about the natural world. The natural world was, in some sense, alive. It had a certain kind of energy and life to it that needed to be protected and even revered. So the historian Doug Rossinau has written that what really happened was there was a kind of revival of that Emersonian ideal of a harmony between humans and the rest of nature and a belief in a spirit life that connected all things. There was a profoundly spiritual dimension to modern environmentalism.

And so not surprisingly, you've seen the rise and spread of many kind of mixes of spirituality and environmentalism. The two quite easily go together. Many environmentalists saw their cause in romantic terms, as premised upon the need for human,

to reconnect with nature in order to realize their true selves. For example, Norwegian philosopher Arnes, the pioneer of the deep ecology movement, rooted his ecological movement in the quest for self-realization. Now lastly, and a little bit more relevant just to our home, Canada, multiculturalism. Canada embraced multiculturalism as an official policy in the 70s, And one of the experts on multiculturalism, my doctoral supervisor, Will Kimlika, has made the argument that we need to understand the shift towards multiculturalism as a process of liberalization and democratization. that fundamentally, actually, the move towards affirming people, allowing them to celebrate their home cultures,

has actually been about allowing them to be more free, to recognize them, to allow them to be their authentic selves. Beginning in the 1960s, cultural and religious transformations helped produce reforms that enabled historical, historically excluded identities to be recognized and respected to unprecedented degrees. These reforms were animated by a romantic liberal ethos that treats individual liberty, understood as authentic self-expression, as a sacred value. Conferences, communes, retreats, research centers, not to mention best-selling books and magazines,

much of the religious activity subsequent to the 1960s has taken place outside of the churches, and this was ultimately the result of the counter-called. successful transformation of the private sphere. Here we can bring back those two stories I talked about at the beginning, because I want to suggest that the spiritual turn has brought immense progress. It has made our world more free, free particularly for minorities and women. We have a charter of rights, let's not forget this happened over this period,

but it's also more free in the sense that people feel more comfortable in their skin, right? People can love who they love. People can marry who they marry, or they cannot marry at all. People have choice that they can pursue. They're not constrained. And we also have a world where, you know, women, the other half, can actually have positions of authority and recognition, public recognition in our society, right? These in my view are all achievements worth celebrating. This is a story. of progress, right? But at the same time, over the exact same period, oh I should also say, you know, one of the things I think that's wonderful about Canada in the 21st century is, you know, we have intermarriage, interfaith marriage, interracial marriage, that increasingly our children are going to be every different color. That's a wonderful thing, something we should be proud of. But at the same time, we We have to face the facts, because over that exact same period, we have also seen this.

We have seen increased inequality. The haves and the have-nots are increasingly separated. We also increasingly live in echo chambers of our own making. We are in our own political bubbles. We see an epidemic of loneliness and mental illness, particularly among young people. feelings of despair, of alienation, of meaninglessness. And not surprisingly then, we've seen a decline in social trust. People don't think that other people have good motives.

And a decrease in public life, of active engagement in public life. People don't join things anymore. They stay at home. And not surprisingly with all of this, we have institutional sclerosis. and decline. A feeling like all of the institutions in our society just aren't working. There's just something wrong with them.

Political scientist Robert Putnam has charted a consistent decline in social capital, the social ties that bind us together over the 20th century. In light of the allegedly growing penchant for privileging feelings over facts, emotion over reason, and the heart over the head. Many today fear that romantic liberal modernity is overrun by irrationality and subjectivism,

often in the form of conspiracy theories, which threaten the authority of science and reason while undermining civil discourse. All of this has happened over the exact same period. So how do we make sense of this? Now I cannot claim to have a panacea, and I certainly can't claim to have a master key. But I will say, you know, one of the most important influences for me has been the French sociologist Emil Durkheim. Though it's all too often forgotten, Durkheim came of age during a period not unlike today. The Industrial Revolution was a time of immense cultural and social change, creating massive rifts in society and spurring great social unrest.

During his lifetime, liberalism in France received sustained assaults from both the conservative Catholic right and the socialist left. A committed left liberal, Durkheim sought to fend off these attacks. Part of this is that Durkheim was able to hold this view about the modern world in his head, that on one level it promises more freedom and diversity and equality, but it always threatens to go too far because it can undermine the basis of solidarity and cohesion. Durkheim was sensitive to the risks associated with individualism and unfettered capitalism, spending much of his career studying what he saw as the central pathologies of liberal

modernity. Atomy, meaning a lack of social integration, and egoism, meaning a lack of moral regulation. Polarization is really the result of our unwillingness to engage with, with the other. The person who we don't like, who makes us uncomfortable, we're not even willing to try. We don't trust people and we don't want to spend time with each other. We feel less connected, and so we feel lonely.

And because of all this, we have so little sense of how much we're in this together. And so we don't think it's worth it to put the time in to engage in public life. We say, well, everybody's out for themselves, So maybe I should be too. And then naturally, we take our institutions for granted, and they decline. And we wonder why.

A world without overarching moral traditions may from Michel Foucault embody absolute freedom. But from a Dirkheimian perspective, it's much more likely to mean chronic anxiety, moral disorientation, and anami. Now, what does all of this have to do with spirituality? Well, I want to go back again. I think that we can learn something very important about the wider society by thinking about religion. And so I want to try and think through these challenges and the lack of solidarity and look at spirituality as a kind of microcosm of this wider societal problem. So let me try and explain.

I've already said that for those who are spiritual, what matters most is experience. We come to know truth through our feelings, our emotions, our intuitions. The reason I decided to go with the religion of the heart as a term is because I heard over and over again in interviews that the crucial thing you need to do is you need to follow your heart. That is a sacred kind of slogan for us. And in many respects, I agree. And I'll probably tell my kids that. So I don't think of it as in itself a bad thing.

We should follow our heart, right? We should seek to be authentic to ourselves. But the problem is if that's all we do, we can end up following our heart into an enclosed self-segregated space where we only spend time with people who agree with us, with people who make us feel comfortable, who affirm our feelings and intuitions. is what happens if you go too far and you just only listen to follow your heart.

Among adherence of the religion of the heart, the true self is conceived as pre-social and therefore not constituted by society. Accordingly, one must pave one's own way and be who one truly is in spite of established norms and conventions. And to the extent that one is taking on external roles or trying to live up to expectations

to arrive from society, one is not being authentic to oneself. Our culture, as we've seen, is expressive, right? We're interested in authenticity and self-realization. And on some level, because of that, we prize nonconformity. We raise up the artists who say, F, the system. We revere those people who go the opposite way

from everyone else, the iconoclasts, right? They are the people we idolize. And at the same time, of course, because of this, we tend to see society and its institutions as sources of alienation. Things are going to stifle us. Things that are going to force me to be something I'm not. Things that are going to constrain me. But the problem I worry about is that increasingly in many people's minds, and I would say particularly young people's minds, there's this sort of zero-sum understanding of freedom and authenticity and then community and society on the other, as though the more of one means the less of the other. You can only

be free and authentic if you have a weak and corroding society and community, and you can only have a robust community and society if you have little freedom and little authenticity. I worry that that's become a taken for granted view. We pit the these two against each other. And I fear that what's at the base of this is a kind of an ideal of radical freedom. I don't want anything to tie me down. But of course, the flip side of that radical freedom is loneliness. I don't have anything tying me down. I have no obligations. I don't even know what to do. I have nothing to live for. And that is the danger that to shed all ties can be a liberating thing, but it can also be a profoundly alienating thing.

We lose sight of the fact that what we celebrate as authentic to ourselves owes as much to society as that which we seek to overcome. And in overlooking our social and institutional debts, we, along with the things that we value, are left increasingly vulnerable. I think the perfect kind of embodiment of this is Bernie. man, the ultimate kind of spiritual but not religious event. People gather in the desert, it's in Nevada, for a week and they create these giant structures, take a lot of ecstasy, and then burn it all down and then never see each other again, right? Super, super intense, extremely emotionally thrilling, I think. But I think what it says is that there's a kind

of restlessness. We don't want to be tied down. We're afraid of getting trapped. We're afraid of settling. That is what this pursuit of freedom of authenticity is often manifesting in us. And I want to say that the problem is that it's really difficult to create collective projects that last where people are not willing to commit time. Nothing will endure if people aren't willing to give their time and energy. What do we do? I don't claim to have all the answers. But my, the way that I come at this is I think we need to start by rethinking the way that we think about the relationship between freedom and authenticity on one hand and community and society on the other. I think, and I see this particularly among young people, you know, my

students, I think that we have it wrong. Millennials are to a striking extent carrying forward the cultural legacy of their parents, the countercultural baby boomers. Ideals and norms that were once considered radical or fringe in the heyday of the counterculture are largely taken for granted by today's young adults. This explains why, for instance, millennials are more socially progressive than any generation in history, and it also illuminates why spirituality is more popular among the young. Nevertheless, it remains a peculiar feature of post-1960s liberal democracies that they tend to

produce subjects who by virtue of their self-conception fail to acknowledge their cultural, social, and institutional debts. So let's think about experience. The thing about experience, I would argue, that it's actually those who lack community, those who are not rooted in a deep community, that are the most likely to be manipulated by others. So that it's one thing to trust your experience, but if you are not rooted in a community, you are very likely to be manipulated by a kind of charlatan because they're everywhere today. And so I would argue that community actually serves a very useful check on our experience. It doesn't mean we can't trust our intuitions, but it means that we

have a place where we can go to be held accountable, to check those intuitions or those feelings that we have. That being rooted in community helps that. It doesn't stifle it. Now, I am not going to tell you not to pursue authenticity. I will tell my kids this, and I do it myself, right? I think it's a really important thing. We should try and be our true selves. But I think that we have to give up the idea that we do that without other people. That fundamentally, actually, it is only through the support and love of other people building us up that we can actually realize our potential. And this is for one, because who we are is actually a product of the communities that raised us. And so it's actually.

through community, in my view, that we realize our highest potential. We're so accustomed to viewing ourselves as having broken free of the chains of the past that we fail to see the myriad ways that we remain dependent on it. Of course, the self-understanding is often inspired by good intentions, a means of challenging oppressive historical legacies and cultural forms. But the tragic irony is that in failing to acknowledge our social and institutional debts, we may in the end stifle our ability to realize our ideals. We do live in a world of more choice than ever, but in my view, it is the people who have a strong sense of the community who are able to

navigate that endless choice wisely, because you need to have a strong sense of who you are if you're going to be able to navigate this world of endless choice. If you don't know who you are, you're just going to get passed along with every, you know, changing trend. So it is being rooted in a community that allows you to navigate the world. And moreover, you don't accomplish anything worthwhile. This could be a marriage, a job, a woodworking project, unless you actually commit to it. If you sit on the sideline, nothing valuable comes out. And this is true, obviously, of our institutions as well, right? That if we don't give our time, if we don't give ourselves, our institutions will decay. Simple as that. As Dirkheim makes clear, whether we

realize it or not, the degree to which we feel motivated to live up to our ideals depends considerably upon our active and repeated participation in the collective rituals and institutions that give them life. Our true selves are our social selves, and these require regular renewing through ritual in the communities that we belong to. Be they our families, our voluntary associations, our occupations, and indeed our national societies. If we have failed to live up to our own ideals, this may be because we misunderstand what makes this achievement possible.

So two takeaways then. I have tried to suggest that it's a mistake, and this might be kind of provocative, but it's a mistake to think of authenticity and conformity, conformity as opposites. I want to make the argument that actually, on some level, you cannot have real authenticity without some kind of conformity, which is to say every genuine innovation,

whether it's musical or academic or athletic, is the result of individuals conforming to some existing tradition in a way that feels authentic. So I didn't just make up how to give a talk. I learned how to do it from the people before me. And I do it in a way that feels authentic to me, but I can guarantee you 99% of this is not original, right? We are not unique.

We are learning from the people who come before us, and we basically live out them, what they're models that they set for us, right? And we forget that. We fool ourselves if we think otherwise. I think we need to realize that freedom and community and solidarity are also not at odds, that you need one to have the other.

That on some profound level, right, our basic freedoms, the things that we want to be able to pursue authenticity, rely on a healthy community, rely on healthy institutions, right? We all feel the problems of an unhealthy community, an unhealthy set of institutions, right? We all suffer. And so we all have to feel the responsibility to build those institutions back up, to give of our time, to commit. Because real freedom requires solidarity. It's not at odds with it. I've probably gone over my time, but that's it. Thanks.

Maybe overtime, but a message perfectly timed. You've been listening to a lecture titled, The Spiritual Turn and the Problem of Solidarity by Galen Watts, a professor of sociology at the University of Waterloo. The talk was delivered in the fall of 2024 on the campus of St. Jerome's University. You also heard excerpts from Watts' book titled The Spiritual Turn,

the Religion of the Heart and the Making of Romantic Liberal Modernity. This episode was produced by Annie Bender. Our website is cbc.ca.ca. Ideas, and you can find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. Technical production, Emily Kiervezio and Sam McNulty. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer Nikola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyed.

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