When someone tells me that they are “Not religious, but very spiritual,” I want to punch them in the face. Hard…

That is the best first line of a book I’ve heard in years – especially a book on religion or theology: “When someone tells me that they are ‘Not religious, but very spiritual,’ I want to punch them in the face… hard.”

It’s the opening line from the new book, Dispirited: How Contemporary Spirituality Makes Us Stupid, Selfish, and Unhappy, by author and teacher David Webster. The title caught my eye, as did this quick interview with the author at Religion Dispatches. A part of the faculty at the University of Gloucestershire where he teaches religion, philosophy, and ethics, Webster eventually argues for an atheistic existentialism (according to his promotional material), which is a theological non-starter for me. Nevertheless his critique is an important one.

I’ve written elsewhere that throwing out religion because a few bad people have abused it, is like banning baseball because of steroid abuse. It’s a great sound byte, but a terrible strategy for the reasons Webster suggests: an a-religious Christianity is an invitation to a dumbed-down Christian faith, self-absorbed navel-gazing, and ultimately a failed attempt to embody the good news of the Christian Gospel. I think we need more religion, not less, but it needs to be good religion. By good religion I’m really talking about healthy churches that are focused on faithfulness to the way and worship of Jesus. Good religion can do the opposite of what Webster’s book title suggests: it can make us smart, unselfish, and quite happy. I see it every day.

I can’t say that I recommend everyone read the book – I think existentialism is a dead end. However, I think the critique he makes of the “spiritual but not religious” phenomenon is spot on. Here’s a segment from the article.

That the idea of being “spiritual, but not religious” is, at the very least, problematic. As I suggest in the book, mind-body-spirit spirituality is in danger of making us stupid, selfish, and unhappy.

Stupid—because its open-ended, inclusive and non-judgemental attitude to truth-claims actually becomes an obstacle to the combative, argumentative process whereby we discern sense from nonsense. To treat all claims as equivalent, as valid perspectives on an unsayable ultimate reality, is not to really take any of them seriously. It promotes a shallow, surface approach, whereby the work of discrimination, of testing claims against each other, and our experience in the light of method, is cast aside in favour of a lazy, bargain-basement-postmodernist relativism.

Selfish—because the ‘inner-turn’ drives us away from concerns with the material; so much so that being preoccupied with worldly matters is somehow portrayed as tawdry or shallow. It’s no accident that we see the wealthy and celebrities drawn to this very capitalist form of religion: most of the world realizes that material concerns do matter. I don’t believe that we find ourselves and meaning via an inner journey. I’m not even sure I know what it means. While of course there is course for introspection and self-examination, this, I argue, has to be in a context of concrete social realities.

[Unhappy] Finally, I argue that the dissembling regarding death in most contemporary spirituality—the refusal to face it as the total absolute annihilation of the person and all about them—leaves it ill-equipped to help us truly engage with the existential reality of our own mortality and finitude. In much contemporary spirituality there is an insistence of survival (and a matching vagueness about its form) whenever death is discussed. I argue that any denial of death (and I look at the longevity movements briefly too) is an obstacle to a full, rich life, with emotional integrity. Death is the thing to be faced if we are to really live. Spirituality seems to me to be a consolation that refuses this challenge, rather seeking to hide in the only-half-believed reassurances of ‘spirit’, ‘energy’, previous lives, and ‘soul’.