The making of community is to me a fascinating and complicated element of any description of spirituality. Do contemporary American spiritual seekers enact spirituality by forming communities? I think one can make a convincing argument that the various new paradigm communities foster a contemporary American spirituality not unlike the Fillmores. Unitarian Universalists and liberal Mennonites qualify as spiritual seekers who are concerned with their communities and their relationships with the surrounding culture. In fact, I suspect that many of the members of more conventional religious groups would insist upon the very spiritual nature of their religious lives. Courtney Bender’s The New Metaphysicals (2010) demonstrates how even those seekers who most disavow institutional life do so on the premise of previous institutional conceptions and organizational structures.
The popular understanding of American spirituality is the claim that the authentic discovery of one’s relationship with the larger world is a project entirely undertaken by an autonomous individual who freely chooses any philosophy or practice that seems to fit their particular life journey. For many spiritual seekers—those religious “nones” who confuse sociological survey—community itself is anathema to authentic religious experience. One need only observe the continuing use of the extremely problematic concept of “brainwashing” in reference to religious communities with which a person disagrees to understand the extent to which Americans believe that authentic religious experience can only be had or adjudicated by an individual independent of social pressure or community ritual. Spirituality is a proxy for our vision of who we wish to be, and today autonomy seems to be the superior ambition. Yet even as this is so, communities do perpetuate themselves, on terms not merely religious but also spiritual.
Today, Unity churches might house Protestant-style Sunday services, complete with choirs and sermons, Buddhist meditation groups, self-help practices, youth groups, community service initiatives, singles’ nights, and ad hoc discussion groups on any number of spiritual topics, frequently all under the same roof and under the auspices of a trained and licensed Unity minister. A sophisticated web site allows individuals to explore Unity on their own, while also presenting opportunities for community interactions. For most Unity adherents, the spiritual life is one of seeking and exploration, but one done under the aegis of a community of faith.
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