The Second Axial Age and the Incoherence of Meta-Religions
Individuals and communities engaged in projects to construct a novel religion (typically framed as a “meta” religion or a “religion that is not a religion) in order to energize humanity against the crises of meaning, ecology, pluralism, etc. are ultimately misguided.
These projects are often inspired by the civilizational transformations of the so-called Axial Age during which the great “World Religions” emerged and intend that their new meta-religion could serve a similar orienting role in our own transformative time while shedding the “baggage” of the existing religious paths.
While I think the framing of a second Axial Age is evocative and energizing, this approach attempts to simply do the same thing as the great religious figures of the past — it is a repetition rather than transformative inspiration and as such is ultimately ill-suited to the actual characteristics of our moment.
To be sure, our existing religious traditions have their problems, but to think that you could whip together a superior alternative is deeply hubristic. Here’s a few challenges such projects would need to overcome:
- Craft an orienting mythos with archetypal personages, wisdom parables, and ethical teachings in order that there may be orientation and common touchstones in the discourse of your spiritual community so that it may be coherent. This “scripture” needs to have an authentic holy quality to it which makes it intuitively compelling — it cannot be trite or passé.
- Weave together a collection of individual and communal practices which give the community a common experiential foundation and which lead to effects such as: spiritual insight, deepened ethical commitment, experiences of wonder and connection, individuation, etc.
- Articulate a compelling cosmology which provides a sense of significance, both as an individual agent and for the cosmos more generally.
- Ensure that your tradition is compelling for a wide variety of different dispositions, from people of simple piety to yearning mystics to deeply cerebral types.
- Somehow produce substantial coherence between all of the above so that there’s a sense of wholeness and holy to the tradition.
To be sure not every form of our legacy religions fulfill these requirements, but many of them do and if the point of such a project is to create something more compelling, less polarizing, and more universal than our existing traditions, then it at least must do all of this.
At best, such efforts terminate in adding another niche New Age spirituality to the overall field (or, if they remain significantly “meta”, then they stagnate as particularly cerebral and idiosyncratic spiritual orientations) while at worst they become deranged cults which cause great harm.
Ultimately, I don’t think there can be such a thing as a “meta-religion” — except as an orientation interior to one of the existing religions. Outside of such a context such efforts will either stay too removed from the actual content of a religion (sacred narratives, cosmological beliefs, spiritual practices) which bind (religio) a community together and thus fail to actually be a religion, or they do actually attempt to implement such content but in doing so end up being just one religion among others, and likely a far less substantial or compelling one. Our existing traditions themselves are the only genuinely hospitable contexts for such a concrete universal to flourish.
So, if societal-spiritual transformations of a second Axial Age are on our horizon, these will not manifest as the introduction of fundamentally new spiritual paths such as was the case in the first Axial Age. No, here we will see the transformation of our existing traditions in such ways that they become more truly universal and expansive, arriving at a new horizon of inclusive transcendence where all particular spiritual paths become more truly what they essentially are precisely through deeper relationality with the others.
This deeper universality will be inclusive of the spiritual journeying of people who remain unaffiliated with any single tradition — in fact it will be much more welcoming of diverse forms of engagement from people in such positions while simultaneously self-disclosing more effectively in ways which will naturally inspire deeper engagement on the part of spiritual independents.
On this new horizon, the transcendent opening of any one tradition radiates a positive impact through the whole, as it is a ecological, planetary field which grounds this new concrete universality.
Through this new mode of inter-religious relationality, each tradition becomes ever more deeply itself and in so doing, provides an ever-richer context for universal spiritual perspectives to emerge — perspectives nonetheless grounded in real particularity which fuel the dynamism and vitality so needed in our moment.
