A Phoney Holy War
Reflections on the Myth of Spiritual Revolution
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/imre.v19i1.30015Keywords:
implicit religion, Ideology-critique, Postmodernity, Secular Myth, Spiritual Revolution, SubjectivizationAbstract
This article provides an ideology-critique of the just-so story of “the spiritual turn,” aiming at the ahistorical and mythopoeic illusions of this contemporary fable as embedded in the fashionable nostrum, “the spiritual revolution.” This faux dramatic expression purports to describe a “turn” away from the external authority of “religion” in favour of self-chosen “spirituality” as the locus of faith commitment in the late modern world. Nine fundamental fallacies are identified with this contemporary secular myth. The “revolutionary” separation of “religiosity” and “spirituality” is untenable as scientific judgement. A more nuanced and constructive intellectual framework for engaging with the radical coinherence of the religious and the spiritual, I suggest, is “implicit religion.”
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