Freedom Without Belonging: The American Spiritual Predicament

I will often write or speak about how our spiritual DNA is radically shaped and intricately constructed by the fact that we live with an ongoing lack of cultural cohesion, whether at the level of the whole or in smaller clusters. Most of us lost so many of our traditions, idiomatic language, and identities when our various ancestors came to live in the “new world.” So much of it vanished for so many, especially for those who were violently displaced.

Genetically speaking, we’re also all muts—often exceedingly so—and it doesn’t make us cute like puppies. Instead, we have the kind of ongoing, subterranean anxiety about who we are. In short, and spiritually speaking, we are often a rudderless, fragile people who fill that void with rigid and highly committed religious structures.

Recently, however, this news became even worse for me. I came across political philosopher Francis Fukuyama’s Liberalism and Its Discontents (2022). First, in the title of the book, liberalism refers to:

the doctrine that first emerged in the second half of the seventeenth century that argued for the limitation of the powers of governments through law and ultimately constitutions, creating institutions protecting the rights of individuals living under their jurisdiction (p. 7).

In other words, we got rid of kings, queens, and sanctified monarchies in general (which sounds pretty good right about now), and began or attempted governing institutions not to protect those in power in the institutions but to ensure that all people have unqualified rights and receive equal treatment under the laws created by those very institutions. This is great for liberals (in the popular sense of the word), but for conservatives, it also means our governing institutions presumably get low grades for inspiring a common moral horizon.

In a breezy but balanced analysis, Fukuyama makes the argument that liberalism, no doubt, has not lived up to its ideals, and yet it’s the best system we’ve got. Historically speaking, we’ve only recently expanded protections to women, people of color, queer folks, and the disabled, while some of those protections are more recently being rescinded. What’s more, and lending credence to this idea that liberalism leaves us with fewer collective traditions, liberalism does not seem to prevent hyper-individualism on the far right but also identity politics on the left (though in the latter, Fukuyama is unconvincing that we have an equivalent problem, if I understand him correctly).

One of Fukuyama’s key recommendations for revitalized principles in a liberal democracy, for example, is for conservatives to hold off on reactionary authoritarianism and instead accept social change, such as increased diversity in our institutions of power, if not in society as a whole. This increasing diversity is an issue particularly in the US, but it’s evident globally as well.

Let’s say that, indeed, embracing diversity is the backbone of liberal democracy. Even with that ideal, it has a downside culturally. By pure definition, liberal democracies ask humans to dissociate governance from culture, to avoid creating governing institutions that embody it, and, in fact, liberal democracies are meant to untangle governing institutions from religion and cultural traditions; hence our own First Amendment, mandating the noninterference of government in the affairs of religion. Fukuyama writes:

Another discontent generated by liberal societies is their frequent inability to present a positive vision of national identity to their citizens. Liberal theory has great difficulties drawing clear boundaries around its own community, and explaining what is owed to people inside and outside that boundary. This is because the theory is built on top of a claim of universalism (129).

While Fukuyama writes about the political balance we global citizens struggle with between national boundaries and identities versus universal governance, for those of us seeking to understand our spiritual predicament in the US, we can also frame it in religious terms. That is, it’s hard for us to create and flourish with religious universalism—just ask American evangelicals, whose very identity is wrapped up in wanting everyone around the globe to join them. To be clear, by religious universalism, I don’t mean that everyone should celebrate the same traditions, but that when there are different traditions, they should be universally respected and all be afforded the same rights.

In my experience studying religion in the US, it seems we do everything in our power to avoid religious universalism. In fact, our dominant American Christian narrative is tightly intertwined with American political power, going back centuries; it’s hyper-focused, requires high commitment, and lacks critical self-awareness. Speaking psychologically, it is a compensation for our losses of tradition and our complicity with comfort.

Living daily in the critique of religion, I’ve come to the point where so much of what we’ve called religion must now be put aside, so that we can better see what religion is really meant to be, and that what’s left should be put in its proper place—as a component of life but not life itself.

The argument for community comes directly into play here, and it is perhaps the most inevitable question because there’s so much at stake in identifiable community in a world that lacks it. It’s the presumption that we need religion because it’s the only way to envision community. Those of us in the diverse faith deconstruction space have lost much of our community. But we’ve also begun to realize that maybe we needed it too much. Maybe our need for community was never that healthy to begin with, has now reached toxic levels, and has always had an element of brokenness.

With liberalism, with so much historical mixing of cultures, with the way one religion in particular was and is used as a cudgel for supremacy, it’s not hard to agree that we lack robust, colorful, textured, rich-tasting traditions in the US. This loss is our existential cultural legacy. It’s not just liberalism; it’s liberalism coupled with deep disconnection, even disassociation, and, most definitely, loneliness (even in crowds and even among friends).

What can be an answer? What I’ve experienced with the deconstruction movement (however you define it)—and with so many of the authors I’ve published or agented in my day job—is that they are all asking for something more basic: respect and fair treatment (a value you can find in probably every tradition).

We haven’t begun to understand what simple respect for all people really means or what it looks like on a collective scale. Someone might claim they are colorblind and not racist, but what they don’t realize is that they participate in historically shaped systems where people aren’t being treated according to individual personal claims of living by the Golden Rule. But can’t we stoke our sacred imaginations to create a story where diversity is celebrated, embraced, explored, and respected? What would that look like?

I see tangible evidence in the authors and their books that I work with. I see this in the work of an Indigenous thinker who seeks to connect us to the earth (speaking of something global and universal). I see it in the work of a transgender writer, connecting us to the gender we are given by our individual nature and not our society. I see it in a bereavement counselor’s book about grief that helps us pay attention to our emotions and not shut them down. I see it in women survivors of clergy sexual abuse and spiritual abuse who find that they can build new, thriving lives outside church systems. I see it in Black writers who’ve been openly, secretly, and maybe at times unconsciously preserving traditions right in front of us white folks, even when we don’t recognize it as such.

Fukuyama writes philosophically about politics, and one shouldn’t expect him to say as much about religion. But he does help us see that we face a strategic challenge in our claim to be a liberal democracy. He implicitly says: Come back and affirm the idea that we lost our traditions, and maybe recover them a little, but also seek to live in a more universal, more tolerable culture, even while it feels intolerable at times.

In the end, the question isn’t whether liberal democracy can survive, but whether we can survive it spiritually. We have built a political order that safeguards individual freedom, yet in the process, we have loosened so many threads that once bound us to story, place, and one another. The result is a nation that prizes liberty but trembles under the weight of isolation—a people free to choose, but unsure what to choose for. What remains is the necessary and challenging work of recovering reverence, of reimagining belonging not as uniformity but as the relational ethic of respect, and of allowing our freedom to be shaped by a shared moral imagination. We can discover and imagine this new human space. We don’t just have so much to repair, we have so much to envision anew.

(Photo by Chris F)