Spirituality in the new planetary culture

Rebuilding our shared metaphor of the universe

Photo by Billy Huynh on Unsplash

by Mike Meyer

We are on the edge of the new planetary spiritual culture. This is a frightening change for many reasons but the largest reason is that it is, perhaps, the largest paradigm shift in our immediate future. Just as many people are doing I have managed to avoid thinking about this directly while safely playing around the edges. The full extent of this is difficult to comprehend hence the aversion to facing it. It’s hard to say anything other than this now looms over us hidden by the range of immediate disasters with climate change the largest and problems of political reaction a close second.

Many people have been struggling with this growing spiritual transformation but, usually, in its traditional modern form of trying to figure out what’s wrong with people who cling tenaciously to ancient and outlandish religious systems. This is not a new topic with no answer but is now of less and less relevance.

In America, specifically, we face wildly distorted national subcultures after two centuries of politicization of an original historical anomaly. The original New England colonists in the early 1600s were exiles from the brutal disruption of the Protestant reformation. Two hundred years later in 1776 this was still a political hot button ingrained in significant segments of the American population. In the end it required near constitutional sovereignty to those religions elements in exchange for revolutionary support.

The founders of the American Experiment, as we all know, were very closely aligned to the European Enlightenment mostly dedicated to removal of religion from public life. The political reality in America was dealt with by institutionalizing religious ‘freedom’. This was done as freedom from religion while being presented as protection for religion to minimize political reaction.

That didn’t work out as planned. As the Western European world modernized the old formal political links to religion, so hated by the philosophes of the Enlightenment, ironically did more to allow religion to fade. In America after several decades of the expected conversion of religion to cultural artifact status the combination of slavery and emerging…