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“Oh my, it’s GOD!” 

A common narrative today is that Americans are getting less religious, in the terms we easily identify as religious, but still “spiritual”. In a Huffington Post video Diana Butler Bass talks about her new book Grounded and talks about this “revolution”.

In this video she shares a person anecdote (early in the interview) of wandering into a historic Quaker meeting and having a strong experiential reaction to the building that puzzled her. Three years later in doing some genealogical research only to discover that her first ancestor on her mother’s side to come to America was wed in this meeting house.

Many evangelicals might call this “a God moment”. I wonder if someone from an Asian or African culture might associate an experience like this with their connection to their ancestors. Bass is a mainline Christian which places her in a decidedly secular frame that tends to dismiss such experience as random or superstitious.

When I listen to this new mainline fascination with spirituality part of me wonders where they have been. In the churches I frequent we’re awash in spirituality. God shows up all over the place. Bass here is kind of like former California Governor Bigler who named Lake Tahoe after himself after the European’s “discovered” it. You can just imagine the indigenous populations all around saying “you mean this lake we’ve been living by for hundreds of years? New to you maybe…” Continue reading →