Bender presents her book as beginning “with a set of questions about where (and in fact whether) spiritual identities, practices, and discourses are produced in similar ways to other religious identities, practices, and discourses.” (Bender, 3 [emphasis added]) The use of “other” here implies that spirituality is in the same category as religion. Spirituality thus is seen as religious, but separated in some way. Spirituality is commonly seen as “inner” or private, but spirituality is not necessarily experienced privately. Bender wants to connect the spiritual to the seemingly more communal “religious”, to draw spirituality out of the private, textual, inner sphere and into the performative, lived, religious sphere, albeit one which is made for and within secular spaces. I say that these spiritualities are made for and within secular spaces because they are designed, consciously or unconsciously, to be culturally and socially acceptable to the secular world. These spiritualities do not face the same sorts of discrimination historically experienced by religions such as Islam, Buddhism, or Judaism because they have evolved in tandem with the contemporary moment, a moment in which the secularization thesis, despite its falsehood, has had very real ideological effects. By disassociating themselves from the label of “religion”, people who claim to be “spiritual but not religious” free themselves from the discrimination faced by religious communities while still partaking in religious activities. Spiritual communities (to the extent that they even form cohesively under one “banner”) are united by their rejection of labels and yet they dabble in various clearly defined practices (yoga, reiki, mind healing, astrology) and recognize other groups and individuals with similar interests (Bender, 6). Through rejecting singular labels, the metaphysicals free themselves to continually reformulate what it is that they believe and who they are through their embodiment of a particular way of being. This is, in a way, what all religions do, although many do not get to benefit from the lack of a singular label used to paint them all with a broad stroke.
Above, I mentioned Bender’s desire to draw spirituality out of the purely textual sphere. A good example of this is her discussion of Professor Eugene Taylor’s lecture at a Swedenborgian Chapel. Bender mentions his extended critique of Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, and how Taylor focused “almost exclusively on internecine academic arguments about James’s intellectual influences and methods.” It was only much later that Bender realized “just how religious this talk was” and “how Taylor, himself a professor, had marshaled Menand and his book as new players in an unfolding epic familiar to many in the sanctuary.” (Bender, 14) Bender uses this as an opportunity to enter into a discussion of how it is not just “experiencers” of religion, but scholars as well who construct what religion itself is. A religious academic canon of textual disputes becomes marshaled into a cohesive discourse unfolding in real time. In the case of Professor Taylor’s lecture, this discourse is spoken into existence to a clergy that can partake in religious experience while still being afforded the privileges of the secular. “Metaphysical … traditions thrive within and through practices” (such as Professor Taylor’s lecture) “that spiritualize and secularize, embody and offer escape from embodiment.” (Bender, 5) In fact, metaphysicals “often stated that they chose to meet in churches because they were … doing the same thing as religious groups” (Bender, 34)
Harking back to the idea of Professor Taylor’s lecture as playing a role in speaking a religion into existence, there is this idea of “speaking as experiencing” (a section heading on page 70). In this section, Mike, a near death experiencer, warns that speaking about his experiences is “such a powerful act that it usually exhausts him completely.” Speaking in this case is exhausting because it is formative and once talked about or written it becomes something else. Interpretation of the experience through its translation into words adds to the experience and helps make it what it is. This can be contrasted with Bender’s idea of writing as being separate from experiencing in her discussion with Eric on writing down one’s dreams. Mike’s view of speaking as experience can be connected with Eric’s view of writing as experience. This experience can be a work in progress, continually reformulated and interpreted through multiple embodiments in both speech and writing, but ultimately Mike and Eric see the act of interpretation and the experience as the same.
What we mean when we refer to “spirituality” is similar to what we mean when we refer to “religion” in that both are dependent on social and historical context. Neither are new terms and as Bender painstakingly makes clear, “spirituality” has an entangled history going back to at least the 19th century of American religiosity. The different iterations of spirituality that Bender encounters can be said to be entangled in certain ideological ways with each other as far as maybe they agree that there are overarching principles in the universe or that there are questions which physics cannot answer. But ultimately it is not so much on a theoretical level that these spiritualities are entangled, but an experiential level. Bender herself, as an ethnographer, highlights the contextuality of the specific spirituality she is referring to as she is entangled in it herself. She is engaging primarily in sociology yet is focused on historical context and on experiences without quantifying them. Spirituality is entangled with history and society and tends to be talked about as “alternative to…” and defined in terms of the “religious” or the “secular” in order to be talked about at all. It is for this reason that, in trying to find some other way to speak about the spiritual, Bender focuses on experiences in the present moment, not the quantifiable causes or outcomes, but the actual lived, formative, experience as it is experienced and articulated. Still though, by nature of being recorded, these spiritualities are entangled with the imagination of academia, however the metaphysicals are aware of this. Just like any other religious practitioner, those who are “spiritual” or followers of “spirituality” construct what it means to be who they are through their own and other’s discourse. The possible only other difference being the ways in which the “spiritual” is necessarily defined in relation to the “religious” whereas religious peoples do not necessarily need to define themselves in terms of the “spiritual.” It is for this reason, this relational degree of separation between “spirituality” and “religion”, that spirituality can be understood as a secular religion, a religion with a quantifier.